Fraud directive, Google inquiry and $25 billion Meta order round out report
The creators of PHP disclosed a critical security issue on Wednesday in technology that powers as much as 70% of the world’s websites. The Wall Street Journal reported that the issue could be leveraged by hackers to take control of any system running the software. Such control would allow an attacker to steal information or launch a cyberattack on anyone visiting a hacked website.
Volker Dusch, a security engineer with the nonprofit foundation that manages the PHP project, called it the most severe security issue PHP has faced in more than a decade. He likened it to Heartbleed, a similarly widespread vulnerability that forced a global race to protect hundreds of thousands of servers more than a decade ago.
The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff’s salute of Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “humanitarian” shocked Ukraine and its supporters but did not surprise close watchers of his handling of the Russia file. The report said the praise, heard around the world, was not a departure for Witkoff. It noted that President Trump has sought warmer relations with Putin in an effort to defuse the conflict between Moscow and Kyiv and develop economic ties with Russia.
Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania called for an investigation into Elon Musk after The Wall Street Journal reported that the SpaceX chief restricted Ukraine’s access to the company’s satellite-based Starlink network. Fitzpatrick said, “We got to call the witnesses, got to bring them in, put them under oath and get to the bottom of it because this is a very, very serious matter.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration wants to expand its antifraud push by pursuing tax charges on illicit gains, but the effort risks running up against the administration’s own budget cuts. The report described Colin McDonald as the Justice Department’s new fraud czar and head of its national fraud-enforcement division. McDonald said this month that he wanted prosecutors to weigh adding tax counts in every single case they pursue. He said gains from fraud should be reported as income and that failing to do so could lead to additional charges.
Legal experts said the directive could help prosecutors advance the antifraud effort and collect some of the money lost to tax fraud each year. A recent GAO estimate said the potential annual loss could be as high as $304 billion. The experts said prosecutors would struggle to carry out the policy because of recent funding cuts and the complexity of such cases.
A bipartisan duo of U.S. senators was seeking answers from Google following The Wall Street Journal’s investigation into the impact of the tech giant’s AI tools on schoolchildren. Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) sent a letter to Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai Wednesday morning, seeking information about what Google knows about its AI products’ impact on children’s mental health and educational development. The bipartisan senators’ inquiry followed The Wall Street Journal’s investigation into the impact of Google’s AI tools on schoolchildren.
A New Mexico judge ordered Meta Platforms to pay $25 billion to the state on Wednesday, according to The Wall Street Journal, weeks after a jury found the social-media company had misled users about its data-privacy practices. New Mexico called the award one of the largest verdicts in U.S. history.
The jury found Meta liable last month under New Mexico’s unfair-practices law. It determined that the company had deceived users about data privacy, its efforts to fight hate speech and misinformation, and its handling of a third-party app tied to the 2018 Cambridge Analytica data breach. In that breach, a consulting firm harvested data from tens of millions of Facebook users without their consent, according to The Wall Street Journal.