Rooting out manipulation should not depend on dedicated amateurs who take personal legal risks for the greater good. From a story on Financial Times: As the Oxford university psychologist Dorothy Bishop has written, we only know about the ones who get caught. In her view, our "relaxed attitude" to the scientific fraud epidemic is a "disaster-in-waiting." The microbiologist Elisabeth Bik, a data sleuth who specialises in spotting suspect images, might argue the disaster is already here: her Patreon-funded work has resulted in over a thousand retractions and almost as many corrections. That work has been mostly done in Bik's spare time, amid hostility and threats of lawsuits. Instead of this ad hoc vigilantism, Bishop argues, there should be a proper police force, with an army of scientists specifically trained, perhaps through a masters degree, to protect research integrity.

It is a fine idea, if publishers and institutions can be persuaded to employ them (Spandidos, a biomedical publisher, has an in-house anti-fraud team). It could help to scupper the rise of the "paper mill," an estimated $1bn industry in which unscrupulous researchers can buy authorship on fake papers destined for peer-reviewed journals. China plays an outsize role in this nefarious practice, set up to feed a globally competitive "publish or perish" culture that rates academics according to how often they are published and cited. Peer reviewers, mostly unpaid, don't always spot the scam. And as the sheer volume of science piles up -- an estimated 3.7mn papers from China alone in 2021 -- the chances of being rumbled dwindle. Some researchers have been caught on social media asking to opportunistically add their names to existing papers, presumably in return for cash.

The New York Times reports: Meta has received more than 1.1 million reports of users under the age of 13 on its Instagram platform since early 2019 yet it "disabled only a fraction" of those accounts, according to a newly unsealed legal complaint against the company brought by the attorneys general of 33 states.

Instead, the social media giant "routinely continued to collect" children's personal information, like their locations and email addresses, without parental permission, in violation of a federal children's privacy law, according to the court filing. Meta could face hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, in civil penalties should the states prove the allegations. "Within the company, Meta's actual knowledge that millions of Instagram users are under the age of 13 is an open secret that is routinely documented, rigorously analyzed and confirmed," the complaint said, "and zealously protected from disclosure to the public...."

It also accused Meta executives of publicly stating in congressional testimony that the company's age-checking process was effective and that the company removed underage accounts when it learned of them — even as the executives knew there were millions of underage users on Instagram... The lawsuit argues that Meta elected not to build systems to effectively detect and exclude such underage users because it viewed children as a crucial demographic — the next generation of users — that the company needed to capture to assure continued growth.
More from the Wall Street Journal: An internal 2020 Meta presentation shows that the company sought to engineer its products to capitalize on the parts of youth psychology that render teens "predisposed to impulse, peer pressure, and potentially harmful risky behavior," the filings show... "Teens are insatiable when it comes to 'feel good' dopamine effects," the Meta presentation shows, according to the unredacted filing, describing the company's existing product as already well-suited to providing the sort of stimuli that trigger the potent neurotransmitter. "And every time one of our teen users finds something unexpected their brains deliver them a dopamine hit...."

"In December 2017, an Instagram employee indicated that Meta had a method to ascertain young users' ages but advised that 'you probably don't want to open this pandora's box' regarding age verification improvements," the states say in the suit. Some senior executives raised the possibility that cracking down on underage usage could hurt Meta's business... The states say Meta made little progress on automated detection systems or adequately staffing the team that reviewed user reports of underage activity. "Meta at times has a backlog of 2-2.5 million under-13 accounts awaiting action," according to the complaint...

The unredacted material also includes allegations that Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg instructed his subordinates to give priority to boosting its platforms' usage above the well being of users... Zuckerberg also repeatedly dismissed warnings from senior company officials that its flagship social-media platforms were harming young users, according to unsealed allegations in a lawsuit filed by Massachusetts earlier this month...

The complaint cites numerous other executives making public claims that were allegedly contradicted by internal documents. While Meta's head of global safety, Antigone Davis, told Congress that the company didn't consider profitability when designing products for teens, a 2018 internal email stated that product teams should keep in mind that "The lifetime value of a 13 y/o teen is roughly $270" when making product decisions.

America celebrates "Small Business Saturday" today with special celebrations everywhere from Houston, Texas to Buffalo, New York

NBC News reports: Sandwiched between Black Friday and Cyber Monday — historically the biggest and busiest retail days of the year — there's another standout shopping event: Small Business Saturday. Started by American Express in 2010 and co-sponsored by the U.S. Small Business Administration since 2011, Small Business Saturday aims to create awareness about the impact shoppers have when they buy "small" year round, whether they physically visit stores or shop online.

This year, 85% of consumers say they're likely to shop "small" during the holiday season, according to the American Express 2023 Shop Small Impact Study. That represents a multibillion dollar opportunity — consumers are expected to spend an estimated $125 billion at small businesses this holiday season, up 42% from $88 billion in 2022, as reported by Intuit QuickBooks.
Like CBS News, NBC has compiled its list of small businesses that can ship their products to you — and suggests leaving positive reviews online for your favorite small businesses. ("Amazon, for example, now adds badges to product pages on its site if items are sold by small businesses.")
They also recommend interacting with your favorite small businesses on social media — while "the American Express small-business map allows you to input your zip code so it can recommend local shops in your area and beyond. Google also has a 'small business' filter on desktop and mobile, and one for Google Maps on mobile."

The UK's "Small Business Saturday" will happen next week, on the first Saturday in December.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: The popular party game "Cards Against Humanity" continued their tradition of practical jokes on Black Friday. They created a new social network where users can perform only one action: posting the word "yowza."

Then announced it on their official social media accounts on Instagram, Facebook, and X...

Regardless of what words you type into the window, they're replaced with the word yowza. "For just $0.99, you'll get an exclusive black check by your name," reads an announcement on the site, "and the ability to post a new word: awooga."

It's a magical land where "yowfluencers" keep "reyowzaing" the "yowzas" of other users. And there's also a tab for trending hashtags. (Although, yes, they all seem to be "yowza".) But they've already gotten a write up in the trade industry publication Advertising Age.

"With every bad thing happening in the world, social media is always right there, making it worse," a spokesperson said.... "[W]e asked ourselves: Is there a way we could make a social network that doesn't suck? At first, the answer was 'no.' The content moderation problem is just too hard. And then we thought, why not solve the content moderation problem by having no content? That's Yowza...."

When creating your profile on the network there's a dropdown menu for specifying your age and location — although all of the choices are yowza. More details from Advertising Age:

The company said the word "yowza" was the first that came to mind when its creative teams were brainstorming—and it just stuck. "It's dumb, it's ridiculous, it means nothing. It's perfect," the rep said.

And the service is still evolving, with fresh user upgrades. The official Yowza store will now also sell you the ability to also post the word Shazam — for $29.99. (Also on sale are 100,000 followers — for 99 cents.) But there's also an official FAQ which articulates the service's deep commitment to protecting their users' privacy.

Do you promise you won't share my private information with the Chinese Communist Party, like TikTok?

Yowza.

Russia President Vladimir Putin on Friday warned that the West should not be allowed to develop a monopoly in the sphere of AI, and said that a much more ambitious Russian strategy for the development of AI would be approved shortly. From a report: China and the United States are leading the development of AI, which many researchers and global leaders think will transform the world and revolutionise society in a way similar to the introduction of computers in the 20th century. Moscow has ambitions to be an AI power too, but its efforts have been set back due to the war in Ukraine which prompted many talented specialists to leave Russia and triggered Western sanctions that have hindered the country's high-tech imports.

Speaking to an AI conference in Moscow beside Sberbank CEO German Gref, Putin said that trying to ban AI was impossible despite the sometimes troubling ethical and social consequences of new technologies. "You cannot ban something - if we ban it then it will develop somewhere else and we will fall behind," Putin said of AI, though he said ethical questions should be resolved with reference to "traditional" Russian culture. Putin cautioned that some Western online search systems and generative models ignored or even cancelled Russian language and culture. Such Western algorithms, he said, essentially thought Russia did not exist. "Of course, the monopoly and domination of such systems, such alien systems is unacceptable and dangerous," he said.

India is drafting rules to detect and limit the spread of deepfake content and other harmful AI media, a senior lawmaker said Thursday, following reports of proliferation of such content on social media platforms in recent weeks. From a report: Ashwini Vaishnaw, India's IT Minister, said the ministry held meetings with all large social media companies, industry body Nasscom and academics earlier in the day and has reached a consensus that a regulation is needed to better combat spread of deepfake videos as well as apps that facilitate their creations. "The companies share our concerns and they understood that it's [deepfakes] are not free speech. They understood that it's something that's very harmful to the society," he said. "They understood the need for much heavier regulation on this, so we agree that we will start drafting the regulation today itself." The ministry will be ready with "clear actionable items" on how to combat deepfakes in 10 days.

At 26, nurse Benzor Vidal moved from the Philippines to America for work, but quit his unsafe, understaffed nursing home job after 14 weeks. His employment contract stipulated he could owe $20,000+ in damages if he resigned early. The New York Times Magazine digs deeper: This type of contract provision is known as a "stay or pay" clause, and it used to be common only for certain high-paying roles or in certain specialized industries. For airline pilots and software engineers, for example, it has been a longstanding practice at some companies to require employees to stay at their jobs for a defined period of time in order to recoup costs related to hiring and training. But the line between recouping costs and penalizing workers for leaving can be blurry, and companies have increasingly taken advantage of that ambiguity. Workers' rights advocates say that, in many cases, stay-or-pay clauses no longer accurately reflect the company's costs but instead appear to be inflated financial penalties designed to discourage quitting.

The use of stay-or-pay clauses has grown rapidly over the past decade, and it has seemingly exploded since the start of the pandemic, as companies try to retain workers in a tight labor market. The clauses have spread far beyond the handful of roles and industries where they originated and are now used by thousands of mid- and low-wage employers -- something that came to light when workers began filing lawsuits challenging the practice. These contract terms have been applied to bank workers, salespeople, dog groomers, police officers, aestheticians, firefighters, mechanics, nurses, federal employees, electricians, roofers, social workers, paramedics, truckers, mortgage brokers, teachers and metal polishers. Legal experts believe stay-or-pay clauses might now be in industries that employ a third of all American workers.

OpenAI said today it reached an agreement for Sam Altman to return as CEO days after his ouster, capping a marathon discussion about the future of the startup at the center of the artificial intelligence boom. From a report: In addition to Altman's return, the company agreed in principle to partly reconstitute the board of directors that had dismissed him. Former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers will join Quora CEO and current director Adam D'Angelo, OpenAI said. Under an "agreement in principle," Altman will serve under the supervision of a new board of directors.

"I love OpenAI, and everything I've done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together," Altman wrote on the social media site X in response to the announcement. "When I decided to join Microsoft on Sunday evening, it was clear that was the best path for me and the team." Microsoft chief Satya Nadella hired Altman after he was sacked.

With the "support" of the new OpenAI board and Nadella, Altman said, he looked forward to "returning to OpenAI, and building on our strong partnership with Microsoft." Nadella said he was "encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board" and believed that the decision was the "first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance."

Laura Snapes reports via The Guardian: Spotify is to phase out its service in Uruguay after the passing of a new music copyright bill requiring "fair and equitable remuneration" for authors, composers, performers, directors and screenwriters. In October, the country's parliament voted on a budget bill that included two new articles: per article 284, social networks and the internet are to be added "as formats for which, if a song is reproduced, the performer is entitled to financial remuneration" -- namely if a link to a song is shared online. Article 285 will put into copyright law the "right to a fair and equitable remuneration" for all "agreements entered into by authors, composers, performers, directors and screenwriters with respect to their faculty of public communication and making available to the public of phonograms and audiovisual recordings."

In response, Spotify said in a statement on November 20 that without changes to the 2023 Rendicion de Cuentas law, the streaming platform "will, unfortunately, begin to phase out its service in Uruguay effective January 1, 2024" and cease trading in the market in February 2024. The Swedish company seeks confirmation on whether additional costs to be paid to musicians are the responsibility of rights holders or the streaming platforms, arguing that the latter means that it would be required "to pay twice for the same music," Music Business Worldwide reports. The statement continued: "Spotify already pays nearly 70% of every dollar it generates from music to the record labels and publishers that own the rights for music, and represent and pay artists and songwriters. Any additional payments would make our business untenable." The platform claimed that it had contributed to a 20% growth in Uruguay's music industry in 2022. That year, the South American nation was the 53rd largest market for music.

"To celebrate my life, I've arranged to buy up others' medical debt and then destroy the debt," reads a posthumous tweet posted Tuesday after the death of 38-year-old Casey McIntyre.

The Washington Post explains... McIntyre, who served as publisher at Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House, was diagnosed in 2019 and proceeded through treatment without taking on debt, [husband Andrew Rose] Gregory told The Washington Post. But many fellow cancer patients she met were in more precarious financial positions, Gregory added. "We were both so keenly aware that Casey had great health insurance through Penguin Random House," said Gregory, 41. "Casey had no medical debt...."

About nine months before McIntyre died, her husband came across a video online about members of a North Carolina church who purchased nearly $3.3 million of local residents' medical debt for $15,048 in a "debt jubilee," a historical reference to ancient stories about personal debts being canceled at regular intervals. The couple chose to make monthly donations to RIP Medical Debt, the same organization that partnered with the North Carolina churchgoers. The nonprofit organization aims to abolish medical debt "at pennies on the dollar," according to its website. For every $100 donated, the company relieves $10,000 of medical debt. As of Saturday, nearly $200,000 had been donated to RIP Medical Debt in McIntyre's memory, which would wipe out approximately $20 million of unpaid medical bills. [By Sunday afternoon it had risen to over $334,000...]

Allison Sesso, president and chief executive of RIP Medical Debt, said her organization found out about McIntyre's case after McIntyre's posthumous social media post went viral. Sesso said the pace of donations was record-setting for her charity. "What an incredible gesture to the world as you're exiting," Sesso told The Post. "This final act of generosity is blowing up. The amount that they're raising and the rate at which this has gone is not something that we're used to."
McIntyre's post on X has now received 65,400 likes — and 3,086 reposts.

"The Chinese government has built up the world's largest known online disinformation operation," reports CNN, "and is using it to harass US residents, politicians, and businesses."

CNN reports that disinformation operation is even "at times threatening its targets with violence, a CNN review of court documents and public disclosures by social media companies has found." The onslaught of attacks — often of a vile and deeply personal nature — is part of a well-organized, increasingly brazen Chinese government intimidation campaign targeting people in the United States, documents show. The U.S. State Department says the tactics are part of a broader multi-billion-dollar effort to shape the world's information environment and silence critics of Beijing that has expanded under President Xi Jinping... Victims face a barrage of tens of thousands of social media posts that call them traitors, dogs, and racist and homophobic slurs.

They say it's all part of an effort to drive them into a state of constant fear and paranoia. Often, these victims don't know where to turn. Some have spoken to law enforcement, including the FBI — but little has been done. While tech and social media companies have shut down thousands of accounts targeting these victims, they're outpaced by a slew of new accounts emerging virtually every day. Known as "Spamouflage" or "Dragonbridge," the network's hundreds of thousands of accounts spread across every major social media platform have not only harassed Americans who have criticized the Chinese Communist Party, but have also sought to discredit U.S. politicians, disparage American companies at odds with China's interests and hijack online conversations around the globe that could portray the CCP in a negative light.
Some numbers from the article:

• Meta "announced in August it had taken down a cluster of nearly 8,000 accounts attributed to this group in the second quarter of 2023 alone."

• YouTube owner Google "told CNN it had shut down more than 100,000 associated accounts in recent years."

• X "has blocked hundreds of thousands of China 'state-backed' or "state-linked" accounts, according to company blogs."

Doctors have long relied on a few key patient characteristics to assess risk of a heart attack or stroke, using a calculus that considers blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking and diabetes status, as well as demographics: age, sex and race. Now, the American Heart Association is taking race out of the equation. From a report: The overhaul of the widely used cardiac-risk algorithm is an acknowledgment that, unlike sex or age, race identification in and of itself is not a biological risk factor. The scientists who modified the algorithm decided from the start that race itself did not belong in clinical tools used to guide medical decision making, even though race might serve as a proxy for certain social circumstances, genetic predispositions or environmental exposures that raise the risk of cardiovascular disease.

The revision comes amid rising concern about health equity and racial bias within the U.S. health care system, and is part of a broader trend toward removing race from a variety of clinical algorithms. "We should not be using race to inform whether someone gets a treatment or doesn't get a treatment," said Dr. Sadiya Khan, a preventive cardiologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who chaired the statement writing committee for the American Heart Association, or A.H.A. The statement was published on Friday [PDF] in the association's journal, Circulation. An online calculator using the new algorithm, called PREVENT, is still in development.

Davide Castelvecchi, writing for Nature: A Nature retraction last week has put to rest the latest claim of room-temperature superconductivity -- in which researchers said they had made a material that could conduct electricity without producing waste heat and without refrigeration. The retraction follows the downfall of an even more brazen claim about a supposed superconductor called LK-99, which went viral on social media earlier this year. Despite these high-profile setbacks, superconductivity researchers say the field is enjoying somewhat of a renaissance. "It's not a dying field -- on the contrary," says Lilia Boeri, a physicist who specializes in computational predictions at the Sapienza University of Rome. The progress is fuelled in part by the new capabilities of computer simulations to predict the existence and properties of undiscovered materials.

Much of the excitement is focused on 'super-hydrides -- hydrogen-rich materials that have shown superconductivity at ever-higher temperatures, as long as they are kept at high pressure. The subject of the retracted Nature paper was purported to be such a material, made of hydrogen, lutetium and nitrogen. But work in the past few years has unearthed several families of materials that could have revolutionary properties. "It really does look like we're on the hairy edge of being able to find a lot of new superconductors," says Paul Canfield, a physicist at Iowa State University in Ames and Ames National Laboratory.

samleecole writes: People who paid to speak to an AI girlfriend modeled after real life 23-year-old influencer Caryn Marjorie are distraught because the service they paid for, Forever Companions, no longer works. It appears that the service stopped working shortly after Forever Companion CEO and founder John Meyer was arrested for trying to set his own apartment on fire.

404 Media tested CarynAI today as well as other AI bots and confirmed the service is not working. According to what we saw in the Telegram channel where Forever Companion users start conversations with CarynAI, the service has not been working since October 23. "I terminated my relationship with Forever Voices due to unforeseen circumstances," Marjorie told 404 Media in an email. "I wish the best for John Meyer and his family as he recovers from his mental health crisis. We didn't see this coming but I vow to push CarynAI forward for my fans and supporters." On October 30, Marjorie also announced that she's making a similar AI companion, "CarynAI 2.0," with another company called Banter AI. On social media for the last few weeks, the official Forever Voices Twitter account has been posting bizarre videos and statements about the CIA, Donald Trump, and the FBI.

Proton Mail, the leading privacy-focused email service, is making its first foray into blockchain technology with Key Transparency, which will allow users to verify email addresses. From a report: In an interview with Fortune, CEO and founder Andy Yen made clear that although the new feature uses blockchain, the key technology behind crypto, Key Transparency isn't "some sketchy cryptocurrency" linked to an "exit scam." A student of cryptography, Yen added that the new feature is "blockchain in a very pure form," and it allows the platform to solve the thorny issue of ensuring that every email address actually belongs to the person who's claiming it.

Proton Mail uses end-to-end encryption, a secure form of communication that ensures only the intended recipient can read the information. Senders encrypt an email using their intended recipient's public key -- a long string of letters and numbers -- which the recipient can then decrypt with their own private key. The issue, Yen said, is ensuring that the public key actually belongs to the intended recipient. "Maybe it's the NSA that has created a fake public key linked to you, and I'm somehow tricked into encrypting data with that public key," he told Fortune. In the security space, the tactic is known as a "man-in-the-middle attack," like a postal worker opening your bank statement to get your social security number and then resealing the envelope.

Blockchains are an immutable ledger, meaning any data initially entered onto them can't be altered. Yen realized that putting users' public keys on a blockchain would create a record ensuring those keys actually belonged to them -- and would be cross-referenced whenever other users send emails. "In order for the verification to be trusted, it needs to be public, and it needs to be unchanging," Yen said.

The FAA has cleared SpaceX to launch its second spaceflight attempt of its Starship rocket. CNBC reports: SpaceX posted on the social media platform X shortly after the greenlight that it was "targeting Friday, November 17 for Starship's second flight test." A two-hour launch window will begin at 8 a.m. ET. SpaceX plans to livestream the Starship launch, with a webcast beginning about 30 minutes before lift off. Starship first launched in April, achieving flight for a few minutes before exploding mid-air, severely damaging the ground infrastructure and raising environmental concerns. The FAA in coordination with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service launched a safety review prior to issuing a new flight license for the second attempt.

FWS determined that the rocket launch and subsequent damage to the pad infrastructure had no long-term negative effects on the surrounding ecology, according to an agency report released Wednesday. Still, SpaceX will help mitigate damage to the area by reducing sound waves and vibrations, assisting in fire suppression, and providing launch pad protection, the agency said. As a result, "the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy and financial responsibility requirements," the agency said in a statement Wednesday.

Huawei and China Mobile have built a 3,000 kilometer (1,860-mile) internet network linking Beijing to the south, which the country is touting as its latest technological breakthrough. From a report: The two firms teamed up with Tsinghua University and research provider Cernet.com to build what they claim is the world's first internet network to achieve a "stable and reliable" bandwidth of 1.2 terabits per second, several times faster than typical speeds around the world. Trials began July 31 and it's since passed various tests verifying that milestone, the university said in a statement.

Tsinghua, Chinese President Xi Jinping's alma mater, is plugging the project as an industry-first built entirely on homegrown technology, and credits Huawei prominently in its statement. The Chinese firm in August made waves when it released a 5G smartphone with a sophisticated made-in-China processor, inspiring celebration in Chinese state and social media. That event also spurred debate in Washington about whether the Biden administration has gone far enough in attempts to contain Chinese technological achievement.

Nicola Davis reports via The Guardian: A new study has found people are more likely to think pictures of white faces generated by AI are human than photographs of real individuals. "Remarkably, white AI faces can convincingly pass as more real than human faces -- and people do not realize they are being fooled," the researchers report. The team, which includes researchers from Australia, the UK and the Netherlands, said their findings had important implications in the real world, including in identity theft, with the possibility that people could end up being duped by digital impostors.

However, the team said the results did not hold for images of people of color, possibly because the algorithm used to generate AI faces was largely trained on images of white people. Dr Zak Witkower, a co-author of the research from the University of Amsterdam, said that could have ramifications for areas ranging from online therapy to robots. "It's going to produce more realistic situations for white faces than other race faces," he said. The team caution such a situation could also mean perceptions of race end up being confounded with perceptions of being "human," adding it could also perpetuate social biases, including in finding missing children, given this can depend on AI-generated faces. The findings have been published in the journal Psychological Science.

Emma Roth reports via The Verge: Meta, ByteDance, Alphabet, and Snap must proceed with a lawsuit alleging their social platforms have adverse mental health effects on children, a federal court ruled on Tuesday. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rejected the social media giants' motion to dismiss the dozens of lawsuits accusing the companies of running platforms "addictive" to kids. School districts across the US have filed suit against Meta, ByteDance, Alphabet, and Snap, alleging the companies cause physical and emotional harm to children. Meanwhile, 42 states sued Meta last month over claims Facebook and Instagram "profoundly altered the psychological and social realities of a generation of young Americans." This order addresses the individual suits and "over 140 actions" taken against the companies.

Tuesday's ruling states that the First Amendment and Section 230, which says online platforms shouldn't be treated as the publishers of third-party content, don't shield Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat from all liability in this case. Judge Gonzalez Rogers notes many of the claims laid out by the plaintiffs don't "constitute free speech or expression," as they have to do with alleged "defects" on the platforms themselves. That includes having insufficient parental controls, no "robust" age verification systems, and a difficult account deletion process.

"Addressing these defects would not require that defendants change how or what speech they disseminate," Judge Gonzalez Rogers writes. "For example, parental notifications could plausibly empower parents to limit their children's access to the platform or discuss platform use with them." However, Judge Gonzalez Rogers still threw out some of the other "defects" identified by the plaintiffs because they're protected under Section 230, such as offering a beginning and end to a feed, recommending children's accounts to adults, the use of "addictive" algorithms, and not putting limits on the amount of time spent on the platforms.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Michigan-based McLaren Health Care has confirmed that the sensitive personal and health information of 2.2 million patients was compromised during a cyberattack earlier this year. A ransomware gang later took credit for the cyberattack. In a new data breach notice filed with Maine's attorney general, McLaren said hackers were in its systems for three weeks during July 28 through August 23 before the healthcare company noticed a week later on August 31. McLaren said the hackers accessed patient names, their date of birth and Social Security number, and a wealth of medical information, including billing, claims and diagnosis information, prescription and medication details, and information relating to diagnostic results and treatments. Medicare and Medicaid patient information was also taken.

McLaren is a healthcare provider with 13 hospitals across Michigan and about 28,000 total employees. McLaren, whose website touts its cost efficiency measures, made over $6 billion in revenue in 2022. News of the incident broke in October when the Alphv ransomware gang (also known as BlackCat) claimed responsibility for the cyberattack, claiming it took millions of patients' personal information. Days after the cyberattack was disclosed, Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel warned state residents that the breach "could affect large numbers of patients." TechCrunch has seen several screenshots posted by the ransomware gang on its dark web leak site showing access to the company's password manager, internal financial statements, some employee information, and spreadsheets of patient-related personal and health information, including names, addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, and diagnostic information. Alphv/BlackCat claimed in its post that the gang had been in contact with a McLaren representative, without providing evidence of the claim.