Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
Real-time historian of the late cyber capitalist era @TechCrunch. Tweets about infosec, surveillance by day. 🍕, ⚽️, 🎸, 🎮 by night.
☎️ Signal: +1 917 257 1382
Past lives: VICE Motherboard, Mashable, WIRED.
- We're still going through the hundreds of pages of transcripts and exhibits from the WhatsApp v. NSO trial. The update today has new details about NSO's finances. Based on those, the spyware maker argued that it wouldn't be "able to pay anything" in damages. Instead they have to pay $167 million.
- Might go back to fiction while I write my book, to get some inspiration from something that's not another non-fiction book about surveillance or startups.
- Hopefully for them they have a good cybersecurity team.
- Reminder that there have been cases where governments gift phones or tablets to people they want to spy on. It's a thing, and apparently, it must be working if they do it.
- Even leaving aside the corruption, the "gift" of a presidential plane to Trump — for personal use! — by a foreign government is an astounding and potentially catastrophic security risk for the United States. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/corruption...
- NEW: Last week, WhatsApp won a huge court battle against spyware maker NSO, which now has to pay $167,000,000 in damages to the tech giant. As part of the lawsuit and trial, a lot of details have come out about NSO and the cyberattack underpinning the lawsuit.
- NEW: FBI and Dutch police seized and shut down a botnet made of hacked routers. U.S. authorities also indicted three Russians and a Kazakhstan national for hacking the devices, running the botnet, and selling access to it as a service. techcrunch.com/2025/05/09/f...
