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4 Jun 2025

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Snowflake to acquire Crunchy Data to enhance Postgres for AI
Snowflake announces plans to buy Crunchy Data, aiming to enhance its AI Data Cloud with an enterprise-ready PostgreSQL platform for AI applications.

Pornhub pulls out of France over age verification law
It's the latest setback for the world's most popular porn site, which is also under investigation by the EU.

Snowflake expands Marketplace with AI-ready news, data apps
Snowflake expands its Marketplace with AI-ready news and data apps, integrating content from The Associated Press and USA TODAY to enhance enterprise AI applications.

Snowflake launches AI agents to ease enterprise data access
Snowflake unveils AI agents to simplify enterprise data access, enabling users to query both structured and unstructured data via natural language interactions.

New Android malware adds fake contacts to make scam calls look legit
At this point, I get so many spam calls that my blood pressure rises when numbers show up on my phone’s call screen. A new piece of Android malware seems to be designed around that instinctive revulsion, injecting fake contacts into your phone to make spam and scam calls look legitimate. It’s brilliant, in the evil way that only scammers can be. This is a new variation on the known Crocodilus malware, which has a primary function of taking over an Android phone to find and steal crypto wallet info. But the new behavior, discovered by Threat Fabric, is particularly interesting. According to the report (spotted by BleepingComputer), the novel behavior of the malware creates fake entries in a user’s Contacts list. The idea is clever: instead of seeing an unknown number, you see a name like “Bank Support,” and it’s meant to put you at ease so you’re more vulnerable to social engineering attacks. Crocodilus’ main functions appear to still be focused on theft of cryptocurrency and banking info, with malicious Facebook ads focusing on users in Turkey but expanding to larger operations in Europe, South America, and the United States. The social engineering aspect of the malware appears to be an afterthought… but it makes sense. If you have a Trojan program loaded onto someone’s phone and you’ve found that they have vulnerable bank accounts or crypto wallets, you might try passing their info off to a social engineering team to see if you can steal anything else of value. (Geez, it feels weird to think about this from the perspective of a hacker. I need a shower.) So far, the Crocodilus malware has only been observed on Android, and only seen in delivery form via unsecured “sideload” installations. But spoofing contact data on the user side—as opposed to faking caller ID info—is a novel means of attack. Keep this attack vector in mind. There’s no reason the same techniques couldn’t be used for, say, a phishing email via faked contacts in Gmail or Outlook. And no matter what operating system you’re using, don’t download apps from sketchy advertisements.

Snowflake unveils Gen2 warehouse, AI tools for analytics
Snowflake launches Gen2 Standard Warehouse and AI tools, boosting analytics speed by 2.1x and automating resource management for firms worldwide.

SOCRadar boosts MSSP support with free AI training, new tools
SOCRadar expands its MSSP programme with free AI training and new tools to help partners boost automation, scale operations and improve threat detection.

US delays extra 25% tariffs on GPUs, motherboards to September
One of the stranger effects of the Trump administration’s trade war with China has been to cause a noticeable uptick in the PC market as businesses and consumers rush to buy new computers before the full effects hit. Now might also be a good time to buy a new graphics card—for a relative value of “good”—as the US government has once again pushed back the 25 percent tariff on PC parts. This one is a bit confusing, as technically it has nothing to do with Trump’s newly-imposed import taxes on Chinese goods, which currently sit at 30 percent. Instead it’s a further delay of an existing planned tariff that dates back to 2018, imposed by the original Trump administration in his first term before Biden but later suspended in 2019. The 25 percent tariff on China-produced graphics cards, motherboards, solid-state storage, and other components that use printed circuit boards (PCBs) has been pushed back again and again since then, most recently to June 1st of this year. The Office of the US Trade Representative once again suspended the implementation of the original import tax, pushing it back to September 1st of 2025, as reported by Tom’s Hardware. That should stabilize US prices on many computer components coming in from China, at least for the time being. The Trump administration has a tentative agreement with the Chinese government for the 30 percent rate on most goods, currently set to expire in August, and down from an unprecedented 145 percent rate that peaked amid a flurry of chaotic updates. The uncertainty of prices for goods and raw materials had a chilling effect on US businesses, many of which are still wary. Presumably this latest delay on the long-overdue 25 percent increase is meant to give negotiators time to set up a more permanent status quo on import taxes, and their effects on consumer prices. The US federal government showed sensitivity to the portions of the market most likely to be immediately visible to consumers, carving out exceptions to the import taxes on finished goods like computers and smartphones, which could have increased prices by triple digits. This latest pushback on the additional 25 percent increase in tariff on PCBs seems in line with that thinking. Even so, we’re seeing a noticeable rise in prices for newly announced laptops and other electronics, like the most recent entries in the Microsoft Surface line. With these particular tariffs delayed again and again across three different US presidential administrations, it seems unlikely that they’ll actually go into effect in September. But as with everything else in the current US economy, nailing down any particular predictions might be unwise.