It has not been a good week for Google or Facebook. The week started with Google announcing[1] it was finally putting the sorry social media network Google + out of its misery—not because it had lost the social wars to Facebook, but because it had exposed the data of 500,000 of its users, and Google hadn't disclosed it. And the week ended with Facebook explaining how 30 million[2] of its users got hacked.
If you have a Facebook account, you can follow our[3] instructions here to safely find out if you were and how bad it was. Both the Google and Facebook breaches are a great example of the conundrum facing companies who get hacked: What’s the right way to disclose a privacy breach? Lily Hay Newman explains how lawmakers[4] are trying to answer that question.
Bad cybersecurity news wasn’t confined to Silicon Valley. The Government Accountability Office issued a blistering report[5] on the cybersecurity of the Department of Defense’s military weapons systems. The report issued a horrifying conclusion: “DoD likely has an entire generation of systems that were designed and built without adequately considering cybersecurity.” And we took a look at some clever cryptomining malware[6] that goes ahead and installs a real Adobe Flash update for you.
Then Garrett Graff has the inside story[7] of how the United States used a Chinese spy to force the nation of China to quit stealing US trade secrets. It’s an amazing tale, and read.
And there's more! As always, we’ve rounded up all the news we didn’t break or cover in depth this week. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.