| Chinese and Iranian Hackers Have Returned |
 | | Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, discussing Chinese hacking during a news conference at the Justice Department in December. Nicholas Kamm/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images | |
| Each week, technology reporters and columnists from The New York Times review the week's news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. |
| Hello, dear readers! I'm Nicole Perlroth, cybersecurity reporter here at The Times. I'm afraid the week's news isn't all unicorns and rainbows. |
| This should come as a shock to no one, but President Trump's confrontational diplomacy has energized state hackers in Iran and China. They are targeting companies and government agencies in the United States with renewed gusto, after a multiyear lull. The rebound in activity comes on top of the continuing threat from Russians, who have already started hacking European civil society groups before elections there in May. |
| We should consider this a preview of 2020. |
| With the United States pulling out of the nuclear deal with Iran, Iranian hackers are hitting American banks, businesses and federal agencies with cyberattacks. They've significantly stepped up their game: harder to track down and more effective. |
| We're no longer talking so-called denial-of-service attacks that make websites hiccup. They're exploiting weaknesses in the internet's backbone to steal web traffic as it passes between government agencies, banks and businesses that manage their back-end infrastructure. |
| The attacks rattled Homeland Security officials, who triggered an emergency alert during the government shutdown last month. Security researchers say that the attacks have not relented and that they're hitting American targets with an unnerving success rate. |
| The news out of China is even more troubling. Mr. Trump's trade confrontations with Beijing have energized state hackers in Beijing, who have renewed attacks on American businesses, especially in high-tech and defense companies. |
| Chinese industrial espionage notably dropped after President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping of China reached a 2015 deal to cease cybertheft of trade secrets. Now, the gloves are off. |
| Miriam Wugmeister, a cybersecurity specialist at the law firm Morrison Foerster, told me that Fortune 500 companies were being hit at a "shockingly high" rate |
| It's rare that victims step forward — state laws require companies to disclose breaches only if personal data is compromised — but T-Mobile, Boeing and General Electric Aviation are among the companies in the crossfire. |
| If that's not worrying you, consider my colleague Sui-Lee Wee's blockbuster report Thursday on China's campaign to build a DNA database, in part to track and suppress the minority Uighur population. Beijing could not have pulled this off without a big helping hand from equipment made by Thermo Fisher, a Massachusetts company, and genetic material provided by a prominent Yale University researcher. |
| In other news: |
| ■ Lyft is racing to beat Uber to an initial public offering, my colleagues Mike Isaac and Kate Conger reported. Lyft is hoping to debut on the Nasdaq at a $20 billion to $25 billion valuation before it's overshadowed by its bigger ride-hailing competitor, Uber, which bankers initially pegged at a $120 billion valuation. |
| ■ Google is losing advertisers after a YouTuber posted video showing the prevalence of pedophiles who comment on videos of children doing regular activities like gymnastics or stretching. My colleagues Dai Wakabayashi and Sapna Maheshwari reported that major brands like Nestlé and Epic Games have pulled advertising after users flagged their ads on children's videos targeted by pedophiles. |
| YouTube and other big tech companies are already under fire for failing to aggressively police their platforms. Last month, YouTube said it had tweaked its algorithm to stop recommending conspiracy theories to users. This past week, my colleague Kevin Roose wrote a terrific piece outlining one of the central challenges for the company: Some of YouTube's biggest stars (and ad magnets) push conspiracies. |
| Google is hardly the only company struggling with misinformation. This month, The Guardian discovered that YouTube's recommendation algorithms and Facebook's search results were still steering viewers from fact-based medical information to anti-vaccine misinformation. All this as the Pacific Northwest is still reeling from an emergency measles outbreak. |
| ■ Karl Lagerfeld, the fashion icon, died in Paris on Tuesday. True to form, no obituary had an accurate read on his age, though The Times noted he was "generally thought to be 85." |
| A tech newsletter this depressing would not be complete without my favorite Lagerfeld quote: "Sweatpants are a sign of defeat. You lost control of your life, so you bought some sweatpants." (Thank God Karl Lagerfeld never set foot in Silicon Valley.) |
| Nicole Perlroth writes about cybersecurity in the Times's San Francisco bureau. Follow her here on Twitter: @nicoleperlroth. |
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