drspod

God, I can't stand this finance-bro vocabulary infiltrating people's normal speech.

paywall

What’s their margin? Are they profitable?

There aren’t any, thats the point I’m making. Petitions produce sample bias that excludes the opinions of people who don’t want their legal name and home address printed on a document that might get passed around God-knows-where.

Christine Lemmer-Webber made an excellent blog post ~6 months ago titled How Decentralized is Bluesky really?

Give that a read.

LLM's produce fan-fiction of reality.

Imagine not being American and having to read about the American soap opera in your technology community and everywhere else.

Don't get high on your own supply.

This forbes blog is about this article:

https://cybernews.com/security/billions-credentials-exposed-infostealers-data-leak/

The only silver lining here is that all of the datasets were exposed only briefly: long enough for researchers to uncover them, but not long enough to find who was controlling vast amounts of data. Most of the datasets were temporarily accessible through unsecured Elasticsearch or object storage instances.

So there isn't really an explanation other than "somebody collected these somehow and left the data unsecured."

The attack vector for infostealer malware is usually social engineering, getting unwary users to download infected trojanized software via phishing and malvertising etc.

If you follow security news, you will see articles about infostealer malware campaigns all the time.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/18/minecraft_mod_malware/

https://thehackernews.com/2025/06/malicious-pypi-package-masquerades-as.html

https://thehackernews.com/2025/06/rust-based-myth-stealer-malware-spread.html

https://thehackernews.com/2025/05/eddiestealer-malware-uses-clickfix.html

This article is about credentials that are stolen directly from users' devices that are compromised with malware. So they will be that user's passwords for whatever services they were using while infected with the malware. This is why the dumps contain passwords for just about every online service that exists.

This isn't an actual database breach of the major providers.

I wouldn't rely on software running on the (potentially infected) system, since all malware these days will attempt to turn off or evade antivirus tools.

If you believe your device is compromised then you should wipe it and reinstall the OS. You should also delete any executable files on external media (secondary drives etc.) that may have been infected (eg. any setup.exe programs or portable exes), or at the very least verify the cryptographic hashes of those files if possible.

If you want to know if your credentials appear in a breach then search on Have I Been Pwned?. If it says your password appeared in an "infostealer dump" then you know that it was stolen directly from your device and you need to wipe it. If it was just the website that was breached then it wasn't you personally that was hacked and you should just change your password.