The Transatlantic Cable Podcast #280

The final episode of the year brings some pretty big stories for the Transatlantic Cable team. Kicking off this week, discussion starts with a troubling story about democracies and spyware – in particular, how others are leveraging the malicious software to try to subvert democratic countries. Moving from that, the team look at the big news of the week, with word that Twitter users have voted to remove Elon Musk as CEO of the troubled social network. However, even if he is removed as owner, he’ll still have overall sway of what goes on the network.  

From there, discussion moves to security vulnerabilities in BrickLink – Lego’s official second-hand and vintage marketplace for LEGO bricks. According to Bleeping Computer, a vulnerability could have, “allowed an attacker to take over members' accounts, access and steal personally identifiable information (PII) stored on the platform, or even gain access to internal production data and compromise internal servers.” Thankfully, the flaws have since been fixed.

To wrap up, the team discuss a recent story about Epic Games – which has recently been fined $520 million (yes, half a BILLION dollars) for privacy violations, and what the FTC calls “dark patterns,” in order to “trick millions of gamers into making unintentional purchases.”

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• Spyware's threat to democracies
• Twitter users voted Elon Musk out. But CEO or not, he’ll still call the shots
• LEGO BrickLink bugs let hackers hijack accounts, breach servers
• Epic Games to pay $520 million for privacy violations, dark patterns