Hello,
Anil Dash wrote a lovely piece on installing apps on a Commodore 64 this week. I had a ZX Spectrum 128k, where installing anything meant twenty minutes of tape hiss, a prayer, and a volume knob set entirely by feel. It was still more reliable than most vendor update processes. https://anildash.com/2026/10/08/install-an-app-commodore-64/
Closing every branch
ConnectWise has switched off its SaaS backup and management services while it investigates a security issue. That is not incident response. That is a bank shutting every branch because someone copied a teller’s badge. Customers are now free to enjoy the security of having nothing available at all.
Four months in the stacks
One compromised credential gave someone four months of undetected access to the records of 5.7 million California students. ETS noticed in September, took the file transfer site offline, and is offering two years of free credit monitoring. It is a library where a book goes missing in June and the librarian finds out in October, then offers everyone a bookmark.
https://www.securityweek.com/one-compromised-login-exposed-millions-of-california-students-records/
Fetch credit cards, then kettle on
The 2016 Uber attackers ran out of time with 100,000 working credentials sitting on their spreadsheet. Today’s aspiring villain types “fetch credit cards” into an AI agent and goes off to make a cup of tea.
https://www.defendersinitiative.com/p/the-script-kiddy-bar-has-been-lowered
The upstream supplier
The most valuable member of this identity theft crew never touched a bank account. He was a medical records contractor for the US Army, which made him the supplier. The man in the Philippines was just the sales team. Awful, obviously, but you have to admire an org chart that efficient.
Philippines-based American pleads guilty to running expansive fraud scheme targeting US servicemembers
Least privilege, but for other people
Zuckerberg can sell Meta shares to cover a tax bill and still keep control of the board. It is Monopoly: sell the hotels, keep running the game. The rest of us are told to revoke admin access, while the banker needs your permission to revoke his.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cky83vwnyglno?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss
That’s your lot. If you have a better loading screen memory than mine, reply to this email and tell me. Or find me on Bluesky, where I am equally unreliable but with fewer cassette tapes.
Cheers, Javvad