All posts tagged: databases

Ex-Con Hacker Twins Fired – Proceed To Wipe Out 96 Government Databases In Minutes

Ex-Con Hacker Twins Fired – Proceed To Wipe Out 96 Government Databases In Minutes

Published by Jenni Sidey

Note to employers: When you discover your twin brother employees are ex-cons who did time for hacking into the US State Department, and go to fire them, make sure you fully disable their access.  February 2025, twin brothers Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter turned a routine job termination into one of the most brazen insider sabotage incidents in recent U.S. government history. Just minutes after being fired from Opexus – a Washington, D.C.-area contractor that provides critical case-management software to more than 45 federal agencies – the brothers allegedly launched a rapid digital assault that deleted approximately 96 government databases containing sensitive FOIA records, investigative files, and taxpayer data. Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter What made the case especially shocking was the brothers’ prior history: both had served prison time for hacking federal systems a decade earlier.  A Decade-Old Criminal Record The Akhter brothers, both 34 and from Alexandria, Virginia, had a criminal past that Opexus completely missed – which, given what they do, is not great. In 2015, while working as contractors, they pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire …

Thousands of Vibe-Coded Apps Expose Corporate and Personal Data on the Open Web

Thousands of Vibe-Coded Apps Expose Corporate and Personal Data on the Open Web

Published by skeptic

As AI increasingly takes over the work of modern programmers, the cybersecurity world has warned that automated coding tools are sure to introduce a new bounty of hackable bugs into software. When those same vibe-coding tools invite anyone to create applications hosted on the web with a click, however, it turns out the security implications go beyond bugs to a total absence of any security—even, sometimes, for highly sensitive corporate and personal data. Security researcher Dor Zvi and his team at the cybersecurity firm he cofounded, RedAccess, analyzed thousands of vibe-coded web applications created using the AI software development tools Lovable, Replit, Base44, and Netlify and found more than 5,000 of them that had virtually no security or authentication of any kind. Many of these web apps allowed anyone who merely finds their web URL to access the apps and their data. Others had only trivial barriers to that access, such as requiring that a visitor sign in with any email address. Around 40 percent of the apps exposed sensitive data, Zvi says, including medical …

He Built the Definitive Epstein Database—and It Consumed His Life

He Built the Definitive Epstein Database—and It Consumed His Life

Published by skeptic

The Epstein Library on the Justice Department’s website is a model of disorganization. In early December, Keller was clicking through the tens of thousands of pages of documents in the library and feeling “frustrated disbelief” at the chaos—files that could be hundreds of pages long, text that was sometimes blurry or sideways, a wire transfer with no context, an email chain with half the names blacked out, a flight log with only initials. “It’s disorienting,” he says. “You’re reading fragments of something enormous and trying to figure out which fragments matter and how they connect.” One night, he spent about four hours trying to trace a single person’s name across some 30 documents in the archive. “I just stopped and thought, I am doing by hand what a database could do in milliseconds,” he says. As a builder of database infrastructure at a midsize company, he knew exactly what to do next. “I opened a code editor and started building. By 3 am I had a basic search prototype working against a few hundred documents,” …

Google PM open-sources Always On Memory Agent, ditching vector databases for LLM-driven persistent memory

Google PM open-sources Always On Memory Agent, ditching vector databases for LLM-driven persistent memory

Published by skeptic

Google senior AI product manager Shubham Saboo has turned one of the thorniest problems in agent design into an open-source engineering exercise: persistent memory. This week, he published an open-source “Always On Memory Agent” on the official Google Cloud Platform Github page under a permissive MIT License, allowing for commercial usage. It was built with Google’s Agent Development Kit, or ADK introduced last Spring in 2025, and Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, a low-cost model Google introduced on March 3, 2026 as its fastest and most cost-efficient Gemini 3 series model. The project serves as a practical reference implementation for something many AI teams want but few have productionized cleanly: an agent system that can ingest information continuously, consolidate it in the background, and retrieve it later without relying on a conventional vector database. For enterprise developers, the release matters less as a product launch than as a signal about where agent infrastructure is headed. The repo packages a view of long-running autonomy that is increasingly attractive for support systems, research assistants, internal copilots and workflow automation. …

A Vast Trove of Exposed Social Security Numbers May Put Millions at Risk of Identity Theft

A Vast Trove of Exposed Social Security Numbers May Put Millions at Risk of Identity Theft

Published by skeptic

After years spent finding and investigating data breaches, Greg Pollock admits that when he comes across yet another exposed database full of passwords and Social Security numbers, “I come to it with some fatigue.” But Pollock, director of research at the cybersecurity company UpGuard, says he and his colleagues found an exposed, publicly accessible database online in January that appeared to contain a trove of Americans’ sensitive personal data so massive that his weariness lifted and they sprang to action to validate the finding. The UpGuard researchers point out that not all of the records represent unique, valid information, but the raw totals they found in the January exposure included roughly 3 billion email addresses and passwords as well as about 2.7 billion records that included Social Security numbers. It was unclear who had set up the database, but it seemed to contain personal details that may have been cobbled together from multiple historic data breaches—including, perhaps, the trove from the 2024 breach of the background-checking service National Public Data. It is common for data …

Snowflake, Databricks challenger ClickHouse hits B valuation

Snowflake, Databricks challenger ClickHouse hits $15B valuation

Published by skeptic

Database provider ClickHouse secured $400 million at a $15 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported, representing about a 2.5x increase from its $6.35 billion valuation last May. The round was led by Dragoneer Investment Group, the startup said, with participation from investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, GIC, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. ClickHouse, which spun out from Russian search giant Yandex in 2021, develops database software designed to process the massive datasets required by AI agents. The company competes with Snowflake and Databricks. The company also announced the acquisition of Langfuse, a startup that helps developers track and evaluate the performance of their AI agents. Langfuse competes directly with LangSmith, LangChain’s observability platform. ClickHouse database is open sourced, and it makes money by selling managed cloud services, which saw annual recurring revenue (ARR) grow by more than 250% year-over-year, it said. The company’s customers include Meta, Tesla, Capital One, Lovable, Decagon, and Polymarket. Source link