War and the app economy, Google’s Messages update, Telegram ‘TV’ – TechCrunch

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the latest year-end reports. Global spending across iOS,…

Chinese APT41 Hackers Broke into at Least 6 U.S. State Governments: Mandiant

APT41, the state-sponsored threat actor affiliated with China, breached at least six U.S. state government networks between May 2021 and February 2022 by retooling its attack vectors to take advantage of vulnerable internet-facing web applications. The exploited vulnerabilities included “a zero-day vulnerability in the USAHERDS application (CVE-2021-44207) as well as the now infamous zero-day in…