If you’re like me, you wait until the 11th hour to renew the inspection sticker on your vehicle. That day came on Wednesday, March 31. But, this year, it came and went without my being able to get my car inspected. When I called to make an appointment, I was told that I’d have to wait until Monday, April 5, because the state-wide inspection systems were down. “I don’t know if they got hacked or what,” Buddy, the serviceman, said.

Indeed it was a malware attack on the vendor Applus Technologies that downed systems in Massachusetts and other states. Despite hopes that the systems would be up and running by Tuesday and then Wednesday, as each day passed, it became clear that the Wisconsin-based vendor was still experiencing issues. By April 8, the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles (RMV) announced it was offering a grace period for those drivers whose March stickers had expired.

Also of note this week were two massive data leaks that involved Facebook and LinkedIn. Each case involved the scraped data of more than 500 million users. CyberNews reported, “An archive containing data purportedly scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles has been put for sale on a popular hacker forum, with another 2 million records leaked as a proof-of-concept sample by the post author.” As the week unfolded, millions of users were anxious to know whether their personal data had been compromised. According to multiple reports, Facebook does not plan to notify users affected by the data leak.

Those are some of my top stories this week. Let’s take a look at what else made industry headlines.

Apr. 9: Cryptocurrency markets are growing exponentially, and while they have surpassed the $2 trillion mark, the Singapore government is advising the public to “exercise extreme caution” with investments.

Apr. 8: “Tech support scammers are pretending to be from Microsoft, McAfee, and Norton to target users with fake antivirus billing renewals in a large-scale email campaign,” BleepingComputer reported.

Apr. 7: New research from Cisco Talos revealed that threat actors are still leveraging collaboration tools to hide malware, noting that they’ve seen an increase in this type of attack on Slack and Discord throughout the pandemic.

Apr. 7: Ars Technica reported, “Ransomware operators shut down two production facilities belonging to a European manufacturer after deploying a relatively new strain that encrypted servers that control a manufacturer’s industrial processes.”

Apr. 7: Security researchers at Check Point identified a wormable malware hiding as a Netflix app on the Google Play store.

Apr. 6: CNN Business reported, “Nearly half of businesses say work-from-home policies have hurt their cybersecurity practices, according to Verizon’s (VZ) 2021 Mobile Security Index.”

Apr. 5: Dark Reading reported that according to analysis from eSentire, “Phishing attacks are targeting out-of-work users on LinkedIn, creating lures using job titles scraped from the targeted workers’ profiles in an attempt to convince them to open and execute different malicious files or links.”