John Z Black
Brunswick, ME • (207) 245-1010 • contact@johnzblack.com
Mostly security stuff...
Make sure you check out my main blog at https://gnerdsec.com/blog
Kaplan and Mazda Both Disclosed Breaches This Week. Both Happened Months Ago.
Kaplan's breach exposed SSNs for 173,000+ people in October 2025. Victims found out in March 2026. Mazda disclosed a December breach the same week. Both timelines are legal. That's the problem.
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Operation Synergia III: 45,000 Malicious IPs Down, 94 Arrested, 72 Countries In
Interpol's Operation Synergia III ran six months across 72 countries, sinkholed 45,000 malicious IPs, and made 94 arrests. International cybercrime enforcement is getting better at this.
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The FBI Is Buying Your Location Data. No Warrant Required.
FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed the FBI purchases bulk location data from commercial brokers with no warrant. The agency had previously said it stopped. It didn't.
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Two Tools Published This Week Just Broke Chrome's Encryption and Bypassed Your MFA
VoidStealer cracked Chrome's Application-Bound Encryption via a debugger trick, while Astaroth defeats SMS, TOTP, and push MFA in real time -- and the only method that survives both is FIDO2.
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The Week the Infrastructure Fought Back (and Lost)
The week of March 16-22 hit management planes, identity infrastructure, and security tooling itself -- and North Korea kept hiring.
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Proton Mail Helped the FBI Identify an Anonymous Protestor. Here's What That Actually Means.
Proton Mail's encryption worked fine -- it was metadata that gave the anonymous Stop Cop City protestor away, and most users still don't understand the difference.
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