Before Equifax changed its name in 1976 — in the midst of a Congressional investigation and a national scandal — it was the Retail Credit Company, founded in Atlanta in 1899.

Two hackers supplied Motherboard with 130,000 account details hacked from Retina-X and FlexiSpy, who market covert surveillance tools to jealous spouses and nervous parents — tools that are intended to be covertly installed on their laptops and mobile devices in order to tap into their keystrokes, mics, calls, stored photos and other capabilities.

Belurusian leader Alexander Lukashenko calls himself "Europe's last dictator": he's a thug who steals elections and sends opposition politicians to forced labor camps, the kind of guy who can get away with arresting a one-armed man for clapping — but when he imposed a "social parasite tax" on unemployed people in the recession-devastated country, it proved too much.

NSO is an Israel cyberarms dealer, which buys or researches vulnerabilities in software and then weaponizes them; claiming that these cyberweapons will only be used by democratic governments and their police forces to attacks serious criminals and terrorists — a claim repeated by its competitors, such as Italy's Hacking Team and Gamma Group.

Opponents of Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa — himself a prolific and shrewd social media campaigner — have had their social media accounts hacked and used to dump embarrassing transcripts purporting to show their party in disarray and romantic scandals in their personal lives.

Bernard Barbier presided over DGSE, France's answer to NSA, during the agency's period of fast growth, spending €500M and adding 800 new staffers; in a recent speech to a French engineering university Ecole Centrale Paris, Barbier spilled a ton of secrets, apparently without authorisation.

Earlier this month, Wikileaks published a database of six years' of email from AKP, Turkey's ruling party — but as outside experts have plumbed that database, all they can find is archives from public mailing lists, old spam, and some sensitive personal information from private citizens.

Netsweeper sells "internet filtering technology" — a tool that spies on users' internet traffic and censors some of what they see — that is used by governments to control their populations, including the government of Yemen, which uses it to block its citizens' access to material critical of its policies.

Insecure desktop operating systems (and even server/CMS vulnerabilities) has led to the creation of enormous, powerful botnets comprised of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of machines — and thanks to the law of supply and demand, it's remarkably cheap and easy to rent time on a botnet and blast any site of your choosing off the Internet.

The UK police and security services have frequently touted the necessity of "equipment interference" techniques — cyberweapons used to infect suspects' computers — in their investigations, but they have refused to release any information about their use in response to 40 Freedom of Information requests from Motherboard.

The nonprofit foundation that oversees development on Tor, the anonymity and privacy tool, has launched its first ever major cash fundraiser, seeking support for its crucial work.

My new Locus column is What If People Were Sensors, Not Things to be Sensed?

"We were in Avid Life Media a long time to understand and get everything,” Impact Team said.

The Washington Post editorial board lost its mind and called on the National Academy of Sciences to examine "the conflict" over whether crypto backdoors can be made safe: the problem is, there's no conflict.

"Hacking Team" is a badly-named security contractor that helps governments spy on activists and journalists. It got hacked, badly, and more than 400GB of its data is now public.

Widely shared online, the stolen data includes a list of the countries that have bought Hacking Team's main surveillance tool, Da Vinci, and emails suggesting intelligence agencies use it to spy on activists and journalists.

First Look Media was founded to report on sensitive, adversarial stories about the world's spy agencies. Imagine being the sysadmin in charge of ensuring that the spies being busted in the site's articles didn't hack the site itself.

Kaspersky Labs (Russia) and Citizen Lab (University of Toronto) have independently published details of phone-hacking tools sold to police departments worldwide by the Italian firm Hacking Team (here's Kaspersky's report and Citizen Lab's). The tools can be used to attack Android, Ios, Windows Mobile and Blackberry devices, with the most sophisticated attacks reserved for Android and Ios. — Read the rest

The Chaos Computer Club's biometric hacking team has announced a successful attack on Apple's Iphone biometric fingerprint lock, using a variation on the traditional fingerprint-cloning technique. CCC's Starbug summarizes: "As we have said now for more than years, fingerprints should not be used to secure anything. — Read the rest