As has become an unwelcome tradition, as Friday wound down and the weekend was so close we could nearly taste it, breaking news hit. The biggest Friday night bombshell came in the form of an indictment of a Russian national[1] engaged in a massive conspiracy to influence the upcoming midterm elections. With millions of dollars at her disposal, she and her co-conspirators have allegedly been engaging in a coordinated effort to use Americans’ weaknesses and divisions against us, to amp up racial discord, and generally sow chaos and discontent.
TGIF, amirite?
Of course, it wasn’t like the week had been drama free up until that point. The fun, if you can call it that, began last Saturday, when Robert Mueller expert Garrett Graff explained what he expected to see next[2] from the investigation into Russia’s attack on the 2016 election. (Hint: A lot, and soon.) A startup called Helm[3] came out of stealth mode on Tuesday to try to help you reclaim possession of your own data. A years-old Chinese malware[4] made a mysterious return to the scene. And Facebook announced it wasn’t nation-state hackers who stole the data of 33 millions users; it was just spammers. We laid out all the terrible things[5] spammers could do with that data. Earlier in the week, after facing criticism for its new video-chatting Portal’s spying potential, Facebook also showed off its War Room[6], from which it intends to protect the midterm elections from hackers. We hope those inside the War Room were reading Friday’s indictment with keen interest.
That’s not all. As always, we’ve rounded up all the news we didn’t break or cover in depth this week. Click on the headlines to