Daily Archives: May 25, 2025

Regeneron to Acquire all 23andMe genetic data for $256m

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23andMe Holding Co. (“23andMe” or the “Company”) (OTC: MEHCQ), a leading human genetics and biotechnology company, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement for the sale of 23andMe to Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (“Regeneron”) (NASDAQ: REGN), a leading U.S.-based, NASDAQ-listed biotechnology company that invents, develops and commercializes life-transforming medicines for people with serious diseases. The agreement includes Regeneron’s commitment to comply with the Company’s privacy policies and applicable law, process all customer personal data in accordance with the consents, privacy policies and statements, terms of service, and notices currently in effect and have security controls in place designed to protect such data.

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Under the terms of the agreement, Regeneron will acquire substantially all of the assets of the Company, including the Personal Genome Service (PGS), Total Health and Research Services business lines, for a purchase price of $256 million. The agreement does not include the purchase of the Company’s Lemonaid Health subsidiary, which the Company plans to wind down in an orderly manner, subject to and in accordance with the agreement.

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Source: Regeneron, A Leading U.S. Biotechnology Company, to Acquire

Authors Are Accidentally Leaving AI Prompts In their Novels

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Fans reading through the romance novel Darkhollow Academy: Year 2 got a nasty surprise last week in chapter 3. In the middle of steamy scene between the book’s heroine and the dragon prince Ash there’s this: “I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree’s style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements:”

It appeared as if author, Lena McDonald, had used an AI to help write the book, asked it to imitate the style of another author, and left behind evidence they’d done so in the final work.

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Source: Authors Are Accidentally Leaving AI Prompts In their Novels

Oops!

Boeing Strikes Deal with DOJ to Avoid Criminal Charges Over 737 Max Crashes

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Boeing and the Department of Justice have reached an “agreement in principle” that will keep the airplane manufacturer from facing criminal charges for allegedly misleading regulators about safety features on its 737 Max plane before two separate crashes that killed 346 people. The tentative deal, according to a court filing, will see Boeing pay out $1.1 billion in penalties and safety investments, as well as set aside an additional $444 million for the families of victims involved in the crashes.

Boeing’s payments will include $487.2 million paid as a criminal monetary penalty and $455 million to “strengthen the Company’s compliance, safety, and quality programs.” The company will also promise to “improve the effectiveness of its anti-fraud compliance and ethics program” to hopefully avoid the whole allegedly lying to the government thing. The DOJ is also requiring Boeing’s Board of Directors to meet with the families of victims to “hear directly from them about the impact of the Company’s conduct, as well as the Company’s compliance, safety, and quality programs.”

While the settlement will result in more money being made available to the surviving families of the victims, the resolution is not what some of the relatives were looking for. Paul Cassell, an attorney for some of the families, issued a statement earlier this week when word of the agreement started circulating: “Although the DOJ proposed a fine and financial restitution to the victims’ families, the families that I represent contend that it is more important for Boeing to be held accountable to the flying public.”

The families have objected to the potential of a plea deal for some time. When the DOJ first worked toward finalizing an agreement last year, Cassell said Boeing was getting “sweetheart” treatment. Mark Lindquist, another lawyer who represents victim families, said at the time that the deal “fails to acknowledge that the charged crime of Conspiracy to Defraud caused the death of 346 people. This is a sore spot for victim families who want accountability and acknowledgment.”

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The case against Boeing stemmed from the company’s alleged attempts to conceal potential safety concerns with its 737 Max aircraft during the Federal Aviation Administration’s certification process. The company is accused of failing to disclose that its software system could turn the plane’s nose down without pilot input based on sensor data. Faulty readings from that sensor caused two separate flights to go nose down, and pilots were unable to override it and gain control, ultimately resulting in the planes crashing.

Boeing already reached one settlement with the Department of Justice over the 737 Max crashes, agreeing to pay $2.5 billion to avoid prosecution, but it violated the terms of that settlement, which opened it back up to potential charges.

Source: Boeing Strikes Deal with DOJ to Avoid Criminal Charges Over 737 Max Crashes

New Orleans police secretly used facial recognition on over 200 live camera feeds

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New Orleans’ police force secretly used constant facial recognition to seek out suspects for two years. An investigation by The Washington Post discovered that the city’s police department was using facial recognition technology on a privately owned camera network to continually look for suspects. This application seems to violate a city ordinance passed in 2022 that required facial recognition only be used by the NOLA police to search for specific suspects of violent crimes and then to provide details about the scans’ use to the city council. However, WaPo found that officers did not reveal their reliance on the technology in the paperwork for several arrests where facial recognition was used, and none of those cases were included in mandatory city council reports.

“This is the facial recognition technology nightmare scenario that we have been worried about,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, an ACLU deputy director. “This is the government giving itself the power to track anyone — for that matter, everyone — as we go about our lives walking around in public.” Wessler added that the is the first known case in a major US city where police used AI-powered automated facial recognition to identify people in live camera feeds for the purpose of making immediate arrests.

Police use and misuse of surveillance technology has been thoroughly documented over the years. Although several US cities and states have placed restrictions on how law enforcement can use facial recognition, those limits won’t do anything to protect privacy if they’re routinely ignored by officers.

Read the full story on the New Orleans PD’s surveillance program at The Washington Post.

Source: New Orleans police secretly used facial recognition on over 200 live camera feeds

Drug-treated mosquite nets eliminate parasites (such as marlaria) in mosquitoes

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Researchers have identified a type of chemical compound that, when applied to insecticide-treated bed nets, appears to kill the malaria-causing parasite in mosquitoes.

Published in the journal Nature, the multi-site collaborative study represents a breakthrough for a disease that continues to claim more than half a million lives worldwide every year.

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ELQ drugs refer to a class of experimental antimalarial drugs known as endochin-like quinolones.

“It was a very clever and novel idea by Dr. Catteruccia and her colleagues to incorporate anti-malarial drugs into bed nets and then to see if the mosquitoes would land on the nets and take up the drug,” Riscoe said. “The idea is the drug kills the parasites that cause instead of the mosquitoes, and our data shows this works.”

Risco said further research is necessary to determine whether the best strategy in the field is to incorporate the antimalarial ELQs together with insecticides in the fibers that are woven into bed nets or simply to use them alone to blunt disease transmission.

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“Insecticide resistance is now extremely common in the mosquitoes that transmit malaria, which jeopardizes many of our most effective control tools,” said Alexandra Probst, M.Pharm, lead author of the study and a Ph.D. candidate in Catteruccia’s lab at Harvard.

“By targeting malaria-causing parasites directly in the mosquito, rather than the mosquito itself, we can circumvent this challenge and continue to reduce the spread of malaria.”

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More information: Alexandra S. Probst et al, In vivo screen of Plasmodium targets for mosquito-based malaria control, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09039-2

Source: Targeting malaria at the source: Drug-treated nets eliminate parasites in resistant mosquitoes

Someone Found Over 180 Million User Records for all kinds of platforms in an Unprotected Online Database

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If you use the internet, you’ve probably had at least some personal information go missing. It’s just the nature of the web. But this latest discovery, as reported by Wired, is something different.

Security researcher Jeremiah Fowler found a public online database housing over 180 million records (184,162,718 to be exact) which amounted to more than 47GB of data. There were no indications about who owned the data or who placed it there, which Fowler says is atypical for these types of online databases. Fowler saw emails, usernames, passwords, and URLs linking to the sites where those credentials belonged. These accounts included major platforms like Microsoft, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Roblox, Apple, Discord, Nintendo, Spotify, Twitter, WordPress, Yahoo, and Amazon, as well as bank and financial accounts, health companies, and government accounts from at least 29 countries. That includes the U.S., Australia, Canada, China, India, Israel, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, and the UK.

Fowler sent a responsible disclosure notice to the hosting provider of the database, World Host Group. Fowler was able to detect signs that the credentials here were stolen with infostealer malware, which bad actors use to harvest sensitive information from a variety of platforms—think web browsers, email services, and chat apps.

Following Fowler’s notice, World Host Group restricted the database from public access. The provider told Wired that the database was operated by a customer, a “fraudulent user” who uploaded illegal information to the server.

In order to ensure these credentials were real, and not just a bunch of bogus data, Fowler actually contacted some of the email addresses he found in the database. He got some bites, and those users were able to confirm the records that he found associated with their emails.

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Source: Someone Found Over 180 Million User Records in an Unprotected Online Database

UK Legal Aid Agency attack involved ‘significant’ data theft

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A “significant amount of personal data” belonging to legal aid applicants dating back to 2010 in the UK was stolen by cybercriminals, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) confirmed today.

The announcement follows the initial news from May 6 of an attack on the UK’s Legal Aid Agency (LAA), an MoJ-sponsored organization that allows legal aid workers to record their hours and bill the the government accordingly. The aid is means tested, granted to people on low incomes and with limited savings.

The attack itself was detected on April 23 but investigators found on May 16 that the damage was “more extensive than originally understood and that the group behind it had accessed a large amount of information relating to legal aid applicants.”

Affected data goes back to 2010 and could include applicants’ contact details, home addresses, dates of birth, national ID numbers, criminal histories, employment statuses, and financial data such as contribution amounts, debts, and payments.

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The MoJ didn’t specify the number of people believed to be affected, but publicly available data [PDF] shows the number of legal aid claims made in the last reporting year – April 2023 to March 2024 – stood at 388,888, of which 96 percent were granted. This also represented a 7 percent increase in applications compared to the previous reporting year.

It should also be noted that each application may involve more than one individual.

The PA news agency reported that 2.1 million data points were stolen, although the MoJ has not officially corroborated this.

Other data published by the MoJ shows that over £2 billion ($2.7 billion) was spent on legal aid between April 2023 and March 2024.

All members of the public who applied for legal aid between 2010 and 2025 were advised to be extra vigilant about suspicious activity such as unknown calls and messages, and advised to change their passwords.

Max Vetter, VP of cyber at Immersive, who also spent years at the Metropolitan Police and taught at the GCHQ summer school, said that due to its sensitivity, the data could be used to extort not only the LAA but also the affected individuals.

[…]

Source: Legal Aid Agency attack involved ‘significant’ data theft • The Register

And this is why you clean your data regularly.