Bonum Certa Men Certa

Slack Committed a Very Major Crime That Can Cost Many Billions If Not Trillions in Damages for Years to Come



Bankruptcy must follow, maybe arrests as well (the company's logo gives away the company's real worth and values)

Slack's new logo is a penis swastika



Summary: The inevitable has happened to Slack, which no longer deserves to exist as a company; moreover, the people who ran the company must be held criminally accountable

TO say that Slack got merely "compromised" would be the understatement of the decade. Yes, it did in fact get compromised, but it’s a lot worse. It's far worse than a compromise per se. We're going to explain, starting with the basics.

Slack is malware. Not just the ‘app’. Their Web site hardly works with any Web browser – they want the very worst and privacy-hostile browsers to be used for extraction of data. It’s a resource hog because it’s malware disguised as an IRC 'clone'.

"It’s a resource hog because it’s malware disguised as an IRC 'clone'."Slack the 'app' is literal malware. It follows you around if you install it on a phone. The browser side is also malicious, but it's less capable of geographical/location tracking. They use it for data-mining. See the source code (page source at least). It’s malware. GDPR should be applicable here and we suspect that EU authorities have not assessed that aspect just yet.

Slack is not a communications platform but a data harvester with an interface that looks like a communications platform. What it is to users isn't what it is to Slack, the company. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) issued strongly-worded warnings about Slack and even Microsoft, the NSA back doors giant that kick-started PRISM, outright banned Slack for security reasons! Yes, Slack is really that bad. We won't even call this 'anticompetitive' on Microsoft's behalf; Microsoft does have a few engineers and they very well understand what Slack is and why it must be avoided. Even unqualified Microsoft hacks can understand that. Slack was always a ticking time bomb, which I warned about before, e.g. here in Tux Machines. I very much foresaw the latest disaster. I did all that I could to spread information about it, at the very least to ensure people are forewarned. Now I feel vindicated, but how much damage will be done for years if not decades to come? It's difficult to assess or measure because it's almost impossible to track the sources of rogue actors' data.

"It's the complete doomsday scenario, an equivalent of having one’s own Jabber server completely and totally hijacked, and all communications in it (names, passwords) stolen."Slack did not have a mere ‘incident’. It was a CATASTROPHE! They knew about it for quite some time (at higher levels, too). It's the complete doomsday scenario, an equivalent of having one’s own Jabber server completely and totally hijacked, and all communications in it (names, passwords) stolen. But in the case of Slack millions of businesses are affected. In one fell swoop. Just like that. Even the public sector. Military, hospitals, you name it...

Slack got totally 'PWNED', but they won't admit that. They will lie about the extent of the damage, just like Yahoo and Equifax did (each time waiting months before revealing it was orders of magnitude worse). They game the news cycle that way. People must assume that all data is compromised. Everything! Slack sold everyone out and gave everything away. Even those who paid Slack (a small minority) were betrayed.

This is a major, major, MAJOR catastrophe. Businesses and their clients’ data is on Slack. Even HR stuff, which gets passed around in internal communications. Super-sensitive things like passwords, passports and so on.

Who was Slack data copied by? Mirrored or 'stolen', to put it another way? Possibly by rogue military actors that can leverage it for espionage and blackmail, as many do. Covertly. You rarely hear about blackmail because that's just the nature of the blackmail. It happens silently. It's like 'hush money'.

Some would say Slack got “hacked” (they typically mean cracked). But it’s actually a lot worse than getting cracked! We’ll explain further…

About a month ago Slack got to its IPO milestone, the legendary capitalist pigs’ initial public offering (which one can reach even while making massive losses like Uber does). Big day for Slack! These people can pretend to be billionaires 'on top of the world'. But they're not. Especially as they’re not profitable at all and there’s no business model other than spying…

So for years these people consciously covered up this massive incident. Slack is therefore a criminal organisation. It must be shut down as a matter of law. These operations are illegal.

"Slack didn’t just “mess up”. It broke the law; yes, it committed an actual crime by not informing the customers."To prevent the company from totally collapsing Slack lied to millions of people and businesses. That's a fact. To save face...

So the only justice now would be federal and private lawsuits, forcing this company to shut down. Will anyone be arrested? Unlikely. White-collar crimes are 'special'. No jail time (or rarely any, except as a symbolic token to the public, e.g. Madoff after the financial collapse more than a decade ago).

Slack didn’t just “mess up”. It broke the law; yes, it committed an actual crime by not informing the customers. They would change passwords etc. had they known. But Slack did not obey the law. It did not inform customers. It announced all this after the IPO, in order to make shareholders liable, and it did so late on a Friday (to minimise press coverage about this likely crime). The shareholders too should sue for concealment of critical information.

This is a very, very major scandal for Slack and if the company survives at the end, then it only means one thing: crime pays! Crime pays off. Just that. Because they committed a very major crime. Consciously. Now they need to hire PR people and lawyers. Maybe they can also bribe some journalists for puff pieces that belittle the severity of this mere 'incident'.

As we said at the start, Slack is technically malware. Slack is surveillance. This is their business model, which isn’t even successful (so they will likely get more aggressive at spying or holding corporate data hostage in exchange for payments). For example, scrolling limits. This is like ransomware. It preys on businesses desperate to access their own data. They try to 'monetise' separating businesses from their data/infrastructure. It's inherently unethical. It's like a drug dealer's business model/mindset.

"Companies may never know if past system breaches, identity thefts etc. were the fault of Slack."Slack basically bet on being a ‘spy agency’ (without all the associated paperwork). And later they got cracked, passing all their surveillance ‘mine’ (trove) to even more rogue actors than the company itself. The Slack 'incident' doesn’t affect just Slack. Companies everywhere can now be held legally liable for having put their information on Slack servers. It’s an espionage chain. Centralisation's doomsday in action…

Companies may never know if past system breaches, identity thefts etc. were the fault of Slack. It's hard to prove that. But it's guaranteed to have happened. Moreover, there are future legal ramifications.

Slack knew what had happened and why it waited all this time. This waiting makes the crime worse. This scandal can unfold for quite some time to come. The ramifications are immense! And we might not even know the full extent of these (ever). Privacy-centric competitors of Slack already capitalise on this very major scandal and use that to promote themselves; Keybase for instance…

It would be wise to move to locally-hosted FOSS. However, that would not in any way undo the damage of having uploaded piles of corporate data to Slack and their compromised servers.

Are managers at Slack criminally-liable? Probably. Just announcing this scandal after an IPO and late on a Friday when many people are on holiday won’t save Slack. They need to go bankrupt faster than the time period since their IPO. Anyone who still uses Slack must be masochistic.

"Just announcing this scandal after an IPO and late on a Friday when many people are on holiday won’t save Slack."In the coming days many companies will come to realise that for years they tactlessly and irresponsibly gave piles of personal/corporate data to Slack and now a bunch of crackers around the world have this data.

"Trusting our data with one company isn't feasible," one person told me this morning. "The data lasts forever & we must expect that our worst enemies will have it or get it with small time delay. Otherwise encrypt everything which slows everything down & complicates everything making those "safe" uncompetitive." That's now how Slack works.

"These troves of Slack data are invaluable to those looking to use them to blackmail people, take over servers, discredit people, and generally cause complete chaos, even deaths."We expect Slack to stonewall for a while, saying that it's the weekend anyway. Slack lied to everyone for years. They’re a bunch of frauds. Anyone who now believes a single word that comes out of their mouths is a fool. They also committed a crime (punishable by law) with these lies. When it comes to Slack, expect what happened with Yahoo; First they say it’s a small incident; Months pass; Then they toss out a note to say it was actually big; A year later (when it’s “old news”): 3 BILLION accounts affected. Anyone who now believes the lies told by Slack's PR people deserves a Darwin Award. These scammers lost millions/billions for years just pursuing an IPO (others bearing the losses); They lied, like frauds (like Donald Trump), just to get there (the IPO). Now, like Yahoo, they will downplay scope of impact. A lot of companies can suffer for years to come (e.g. data breaches, identity theft). These troves of Slack data are invaluable to those looking to use them to blackmail people, take over servers, discredit people, and generally cause complete chaos, even deaths. We'll soon do a series of articles showing how Microsoft caused deaths at hospitals.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Real Life Should be Offline, Not Online, and It Requires Free Software
Resistance means having the guts to say "no!", even in the face of great societal burden and peer pressure
 
Links 27/09/2023: 3G Phase-Out, Monopolies, and Exit of Rupert Murdoch
Links for the day
IBM Took a Man’s Voice, Pitting Him Against His Own Work, While Companies Profit from Low-Effort Garbage Generated by Bots and “Self-Service”
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Links 26/09/2023: KDE, Programming, and More
Links for the day
Mozilla Promotes the Closed Web and Proprietary Webapps That Are Security and Privacy Hazards
This is just another reminder that the people who run Mozilla don't know the history of Firefox, don't understand the Web, and are beholden to "GAFAM", not to Firefox users
Debian More Like an Exploitative Sweatshop Than a Family
Wiltshire is riding a high horse in the UK, talking down to Indians who are "low-level" volunteers in his kingdom of authoritarians, guarded by an army of British lawyers who bully bloggers
Small Computers in Large Numbers: A Pipeline of Open Hardware
They guard and prioritise their "premiums", causing severe price hikes due to supply/demand disparities.
Microsoft Deserves a Medal for Being Worst at Security (the Media Deserves a Medal for Cover-up)
There are still corruptible/bribed publishers that quote Microsoft staff like they're security gurus
10 Reasons to Permanently Export or Liberate Your Site From WordPress, Drupal, and Other Bloatware
There are certainly more more advantages, but 10 should suffice for now
About 200,000 Objects in Techrights Web Site
This hopefully helps demonstrate just how colossal the migration actually is
Good Teachers Would Tell Kids to Quit Social Control Media Rather Than Participate in It (Teaching Means Education, Not Misinformation)
Insist that classrooms offer education to children rather than offer children to corporations
Twitter: From Walled Gardens to Paywalls and/or Amplifiers of Fascism
There's moreover a push to promote politicians who are as scummy as Twitter's owner
The World Wide Web is Being Confiscated From Us (Like Syndication Was Withdrawn About a Decade Ago) and We Need to Fight Back
We're worse off when fewer people promote RSS feeds and instead outsource to social control media (censorship, surveillance, manipulation)
Next Up: Restoring IRC Log Pipelines, Bulletins/Full Text RSS, Wiki (Archived, Static), and Pipelines for Daily Links
There are still many tasks left ahead of us, but we've progressed a lot
An Era of Rotting Technology, Migration Crises, and Cliffhanging
We've covered examples from IBM, resembling the Microsoft world
First Iteration of Techrights as 100% Static Pages Web Site
We want to champion another decade or two of positive impact and opinionated analysis
Links 25/09/2023: Patent News and Coding
some remaining links for today
Steam Deck is Mostly Good in the Sense That It Weakens Microsoft's Dominance (Windows)
The Steam Deck is mostly a DRM appliance
SUSE is Just Another Black Cat Working for Proprietary Giants/Monopolies
SUSE's relationship with firms such as these generally means that SUSE works for authority, not for community, and when it comes to cryptography it just follows guidelines from the US government
IBM is Selling Complexity, Not GNU/Linux
It's not about the clients, it's about money
Birthday of Techrights in 6 Weeks (Tux Machines and Techrights Reach Combined Age of 40 in 2025)
We've already begun the migration to static
Linux Foundation: We Came, We Saw, We Plundered
Linux Foundation staff uses neither Linux nor Open Source. They're essentially using, exploiting, piggybacking goodwill gestures (altruism of volunteers) while paying themselves 6-figure salaries.
Security Isn't the Goal of Today's Software and Hardware Products
Any newly-added layer represents more attack surface
Linux Too Big to Be Properly Maintained When There's an Incentive to Sell More and More Things (Complexity and Narrow Support Window)
They want your money, not your peace of mind. That's a problem.
Modern Web Means Proprietary Trash
Mozilla is financially beholden to Google and thus we cannot expect any pushback or for Firefox to "reclaims the Web" a second time around
Godot 4.2 is Approaching, But After What Happened to Unity All Game Developers Should be Careful
We hope Unity will burn in a massive fire and, as for Godot, we hope it'll get rid of Microsoft
GNU/Linux Has Conquered the World, But Users' Freedom Has Not (Impediments Remain in Hardware)
Installing one's system of choice on a device is very hard, sometimes impossible
Another Copyright Lawsuit Against Microsoft (or its Proxy) for Misuse of Large Works by Chatbot
Some people mocked us for saying this day would come; chatbots are a huge disappointment and they're on very shaky legal ground
Privacy is Not a Crime, Reporting Hidden Facts Is Not a Crime Either
the powerful companies/governments/societies get to know everything about everybody, but if anyone out there discovers or shares dark secrets about those powerful companies/governments/societies, that's a "crime"
United Workforce Always Better for the Workers
In the case of technology, it is possible that a lack of collective action is because of relatively high salaries and less physically-demanding jobs
Purge of Software Freedom and Its Voices
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
GNOME and GTK Taking Freedom Away From Users
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer