Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

Senior Reporter, Cybersecurity, TechCrunch

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai is a Senior Writer at TechCrunch, where he covers hacking, cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy. You can contact Lorenzo securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, on Keybase/Telegram @lorenzofb, or via email at lorenzo@techcrunch.com.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

Latest from Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

U.S. cell carrier Patriot Mobile experienced a data breach that included subscribers’ personal information, including full names, email addresses, home ZIP codes and account PINs, TechCrunch has learned. Patriot Mobile,…

Conservative cell carrier Patriot Mobile hit by data breach

A Texas-based company that provides health insurance and benefit plans disclosed a data breach affecting almost 2.5 million people, some of whom had their Social Security number stolen. WebTPA said…

Healthcare company WebTPA discloses breach affecting 2.5 million people

A top European privacy watchdog is investigating following the recent breaches of Dell customers’ personal information, TechCrunch has learned.  Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) deputy commissioner Graham Doyle confirmed to…

Ireland privacy watchdog confirms Dell data breach investigation

The FBI along with a coalition of international law enforcement agencies seized the notorious cybercrime forum BreachForums on Wednesday.  For years, BreachForums has been a popular English-language forum for hackers…

FBI seizes hacking forum BreachForums — again

The person who claimed to have stolen the physical addresses of 49 million Dell customers appears to have taken more data from a different Dell portal, TechCrunch has learned. The…

Threat actor scraped Dell support tickets, including customer phone numbers

The person who claims to have 49 million Dell customer records told TechCrunch that he brute-forced an online company portal and scraped customer data, including physical addresses, directly from Dell’s…

Threat actor says he scraped 49M Dell customer addresses before the company found out

Technology giant Dell notified customers on Thursday that it experienced a data breach involving customers’ names and physical addresses. In an email seen by TechCrunch and shared by several people…

Dell discloses data breach of customers’ physical addresses

As part of an investigation into people involved in the pro-independence movement in Catalonia, the Spanish police obtained information from the encrypted services Wire and Proton, which helped the authorities…

Encrypted services Apple, Proton and Wire helped Spanish police identify activist

Five takeaways from the indictment of Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev, the hacker who U.S. and U.K. authorities accuse of being the mastermind of the LockBit ransomware gang.

What we learned from the indictment of LockBit’s mastermind

The identity of the leader of one of the most infamous ransomware groups in history has finally been revealed. On Tuesday, a coalition of law enforcement led by the U.K.’s…

US, UK police identify and charge Russian leader of LockBit ransomware gang

An international coalition of police agencies have resurrected the dark web site of the notorious LockBit ransomware gang, which they had seized earlier this year, teasing new revelations about the…

Police resurrect LockBit’s site and troll the ransomware gang

Two months after hackers broke into Change Healthcare systems stealing and then encrypting company data, it’s still unclear how many Americans were impacted by the cyberattack. Last month, Andrew Witty,…

UnitedHealthcare CEO says ‘maybe a third’ of US citizens were affected by recent hack

UnitedHealth Group Chief Executive Officer Andrew Witty told senators on Wednesday that the company has now enabled multi-factor authentication on all the company’s systems exposed to the internet in response…

UnitedHealth CEO tells Senate all systems now have multi-factor authentication after hack

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission said on Monday that it is fining the four U.S. major wireless carriers around $200 million in total for “illegally” sharing and selling customers’ real-time…

US fines telcos $200M for sharing customer location data without consent

Two veteran security experts are launching a startup that aims to help other makers of cybersecurity products to up their game in protecting Apple devices. Their startup is called DoubleYou,…

Ex-NSA hacker and ex-Apple researcher launch startup to protect Apple devices

Last month, a hacker wreaked havoc during an esports tournament of the popular shooter game Apex Legends, hacking two well-known streamers mid-game to make it look like they were using…

Apex Legends hacker says game developers patched exploit used on streamers

A crypto wallet maker claimed this week that hackers may be targeting people with an iMessage “zero-day” exploit — but all signs point to an exaggerated threat, if not a…

A crypto wallet maker’s warning about an iMessage bug sounds like a false alarm

Shakeeb Ahmed, a cybersecurity engineer convicted of stealing around $12 million in crypto, was sentenced on Friday to three years in prison. In a press release, the U.S. Attorney for…

Security engineer jailed for 3 years for $12M crypto hacks

Featured Article

How Ukraine’s cyber police fights back against Russia’s hackers

On February 24, 2022, Russian forces invaded Ukraine. Since then, life in the country has changed for everyone. For the Ukrainian forces who had to defend their country, for the regular citizens who had to withstand invading forces and constant shelling, and for the Cyberpolice of Ukraine, which had to…

How Ukraine’s cyber police fights back against Russia’s hackers

Ransomware gangs are increasingly calling up victim organizations to extort and intimidate rank-and-file employees.

Ransomware gang’s new extortion trick? Calling the front desk

U.S. consulting firm Greylock McKinnon Associates (GMA) disclosed a data breach in which hackers stole as many as 341,650 Social Security numbers. The data breach was disclosed on Friday on…

Hackers stole 340,000 Social Security numbers from government consulting firm

Featured Article

Price of zero-day exploits rises as companies harden products against hackers

Tools that allow government hackers to break into iPhones and Android phones, popular software like the Chrome and Safari browsers, and chat apps like WhatsApp and iMessage, are now worth millions of dollars — and their price has multiplied in the last few years as these products get harder to…

Price of zero-day exploits rises as companies harden products against hackers

Video game giant Activision is investigating a hacking campaign that’s targeting players with the goal of stealing their credentials, TechCrunch has learned. At this point, the hackers’ specific goals —…

Activision investigating password-stealing malware targeting game players

In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers. The goal was to understand users’ behavior…

Facebook snooped on users’ Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal

Featured Article

Investors’ pledge to fight spyware undercut by past investments in US malware maker

On Monday, the Biden administration announced that six new countries had joined an international coalition to fight the proliferation of commercial spyware, sold by companies such as NSO Group or Intellexa. Now, some investors have announced that they too are committed to fighting spyware. But at least one of those…

Investors’ pledge to fight spyware undercut by past investments in US malware maker

On Sunday, the world of video games was shaken by a hacking and cheating scandal. During a competitive esports tournament of Apex Legends, a free-to-play shooter video game played by…

Apex Legends hacker said he hacked tournament games ‘for fun’

The Pokémon Company said it detected hacking attempts against some of its users and reset those user account passwords. Last week, an alert was visible on Pokémon’s official support website…

Pokémon resets some users’ passwords after hacking attempts

On Sunday, two competitive esports players appeared to get hacked during a live-streamed game, prompting the organizers to postpone the tournament. Players were competing in the Apex Legends Global Series,…

Esports league postponed after players hacked midgame

Featured Article

Four things we learned when US intelligence chiefs testified to Congress

Cyberattacks, regional conflict, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, commercial spyware, AI, misinformation, disinformation, deepfakes and TikTok. These are just some of the top perceived threats that the United States faces, according to the U.S. government’s intelligence agency’s latest global risk assessment. The unclassified report published Monday — sanitized for public…

Four things we learned when US intelligence chiefs testified to Congress

Earlier this week, the U.S. government announced sanctions against the founder of a controversial government spyware maker, Tal Dilian, and his business associate, Sara Aleksandra Fayssal Hamou. In announcing the…

Spyware makers express concern after US sanctions spyware veteran