Month: September 2023

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For state-sponsored hacking operations, unpatched vulnerabilities are valuable ammunition. Intelligence agencies and militaries seize on hackable bugs when they're revealed—exploiting them to carry out their campaigns of espionage or cyberwar—or spend millions to dig up new ones or to buy them in secret from the hacker gray market.

But for the past two years, China has added another approach to obtaining information about those vulnerabilities: a law that simply demands that any network technology business operating in the country hand it over. When tech companies learn of a hackable flaw in their products, they’re now required to tell a Chinese government agency—which, in some cases, then shares that information with China's state-sponsored hackers, according to a new investigation. And some evidence suggests foreign firms with China-based operations are complying with the law, indirectly giving Chinese authorities hints about potential new ways to hack their own customers.

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When Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, a fairly ordinary tech company was transformed into a most unusual private corporation. Many strange things have happened at the Musk-owned social network, but this article will focus on just one puzzling aspect of Musk's leadership: His apparent refusal to pay bills.

Over two dozen lawsuits alleged that Twitter—which rebranded itself as "X" in late July—refused to pay money owed to vendors who started providing services to the company before Musk bought it. In fact, suing X seems to be the most effective method of collecting on unpaid invoices. This article will provide a summary of each lawsuit and an update on each case's status.

X agreed to settle some of the allegations, allowing some vendors to recoup at least part of what they were owed. Settlement talks are proceeding in other cases, and at least one went to arbitration. But X has taken a hard stance in fighting some unpaid-bill lawsuits, and several could head to jury trials.