Equifax misreported credit scores for loan applications, the U.S. forms a new anti-robocall taskforce, and a Denmark student finds a flaw in Cloudflare’s email forwarding service.
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That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now, welcome to Hashtag Trending. It’s Friday, August 5, and I’m your host, Samira Balsara.
U.S. credit agency Equifax has reportedly sent inaccurate credit scores on millions of U.S. consumers during a three week period in 2022. These credit scores appeared to affect those who applied to loans. According to the Wall Street Journal, the error caused the reported credit to swing by as much as 20 points in either direction. In a brief explanation, Equifax attributed the error to a technology coding issue. And while it’s unclear if they’ve affected loan approval rates, Equifax said that consumers’ credit reports were not affected. The company has since then patched the bug.
The U.S. has formed the new Anti-Robocall Litigation Task Force to combat scam calls with the support of attorney generals from all 50 U.S. states. The taskforce will focus on seeking legal actions against gateway providers that turn a blind eye to robocalls. Sometimes, gateway providers will route foreign robocalls into their domestic telephone networks in exchange for money. According to North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, American phone numbers receive more than 33 million scam robocalls a day. They range from social security scams to impersonating the Internal Revenue Service. The U.S. lost $30 billion to scams calls in 2021 alone.
A student earned $6,000 for discovering a massive flaw in Cloudflare’s email routing service. Email routing services allow the user to set aliases for an existing email and is often used to avoid spam mail in the actual inbox. But as Albert Pedersen discovered in December, a bug in Cloudflare’s “zone ownership verification” system potentially allowed a hacker to reroute emails that don’t belong to them. It could have also prevented emails from reaching their targets at all. Cloudflare confirmed that the bug has not been exploited and has since then patched it. For his hard work, Pedersen earned $6,000 paid by Cloudflare’s bug bounty program.
As deadly heat waves sweep across Europe. Spain has put a cap on how low public places are allowed to set their air conditioning. A new law, which is expected to take effect next week, will limit the AC setting no lower than 27°C to save energy. Affected public places include offices, bars, airports and theatres. Although it’s not mandatory for individual households, Spain is urging its citizens to apply the same rule in their homes. Additionally, the country has also mandated that these places maintain a temperature of 19°C or lower during winter.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash briefings or your Google Home daily briefing. Make sure to sign up for our Daily IT Wire newsletter to get all the news that matters directly in your inbox every day. Also, catch the next episode of Hashtag Tendances, our weekly Hashtag Trending episode in French, which drops every Thursday morning. If you have a suggestion or a tip, drop us a line in the comments or via email. Thank you for listening, I’m Samira Balsara.
