Technology

A beloved regional burger chain in the Pacific Northwest is the latest fast food company to suffer a major data breach.

Burgerville, headquartered in Vancouver, Wash., disclosed today that any customers who used a credit or debit card from September 2017 to September 2018 at any of its locations may have had their card details stolen. The company operates 42 locations in the region.

In August, the FBI contacted Burgerville to notify the company that it had been targeted in a cyberattack. The company believed that intrusion to be &brief& until September 19, when an internal forensics team identified that the chain was still affected by malware running on its systems. Burgerville coordinated with the FBI to neutralize and contain the malware, working with an external cybersecurity firm.

&As soon as Burgerville learned the intrusion was still active, the company immediately began steps to completely eradicate this breach, necessitating that all Burgerville systems be taken offline and upgraded simultaneously without any warning to the criminals,& the company said in a press release.

TechCrunch contacted Burgerville and the FBI to ask how many customers might have been affected by the hack. The company declined to provide additional details at this time.

While the company has yet to disclose many technical details, it attributed the attack to Fin7, a &prolific& international cybercrime group. In August, the Department of Justice apprehended three members of Fin7 involved in &a highly sophisticated malware campaign targeting more than 100 U.S. companies, predominantly in the restaurant, gaming, and hospitality industries.& Believed to be a billion-dollar operation, Fin7 operates under the guise of a front company while selling stolen data in online marketplaces.

The attack on Burgerville was likely accomplished by malware that infected its point-of-sale systems — a common target in the recent surge of restaurant cyberattacks. In this case, the company confirms that attackers were able to exfiltrate names, credit card numbers, expiration dates and CVV numbers.

According to the Department of Justice report, Fin7 began many of its attacks with spear phishing campaigns that delivered attachments laced with an &adapted version& of the malware known as Carbanak. An FBI report provides more detail on the groupmethods.

As part of its August announcement, the Department of Justice noted that Fin7 was behind already disclosed hacks of Chipotle, Chiliand other food chains, including local businesses in Western Washington that remained unnamed at the time.

KZen, a company run by former TC editor Ouriel Ohayon, has raised $4 million in seed to build a &better wallet,& obviously the elusive Holy Grail in the crypto world.

Benson Oak Ventures, Samsung Next, Elron Ventures invested.

Ohayon, who has worked at Internet Lab and founded TechCrunch France and Appsfire, wanted to create an easy-to-use crypto wallet that wouldn&t confound users. The company name is a play on the Japanese word kaizen or improvement and it also points to the idea of the zero-knowledge proof.

Omer Shlomovits, Tal Be&ery, and Gary Benattar are deep crypto researchers and developers and helped build the wallet of Ohayondreams.

&We wanted something that did not feel like a pre-AOL experience, that was incredibly superior in terms of security, and simple to use,& he said. &We wanted a solution that brings peace of mind and that did not force the user into compromising between convenience and security which is, unfortunately, the current state of affairs. We quickly realized that this mission would not be possible to achieve with the same tools and ideas other companies tried to use so far.&

The app is launching this month and is being kept under wraps until then. Ohayon is well aware that the world doesn&t need another crypto wallet but heconvinced his solution is the best one.

&The market does not lack solutions,& he said. &On the contrary, there are software wallets, hardware wallets, paper wallets, vaults, hosted custody. But there is no great solution. To be able to use a crypto wallet you either need a good dose of Xanax or a masterdegree in computer science or both, unless you want to depend on a central entity, which is even worse as the news are reminding us weekly.&

We&ll see as they use the cash to launch a crypto wallet that anyone & not just Xanax-eaters & can use.

Helping friends meet up offline has been a massive missed opportunity for Facebook . Whether because the brand is too creepy or the politely opt-in 2015 rollout of its location sharing feature wasn&t creepy enough, Facebook Nearby Friends never quite took off. Only 103 of my 1,120 friends in San Francisco have it turned on.

Itnot the only one struggling with &The quest to cure loneliness.& Foursquare Swarm, Glympse, AppleFind My Friends and Google Maps& real-time coordinate-sharing option have all failed to become a ubiquitous standard.

The redesigned map homescreen of Facebook Nearby Friends

But last year, Snapchat launched a different take on the idea based on its biggest acquisition ever, French app Zenly. With Snap Map, it wasn&t just about the utility of seeing a list of friends& locations like on Facebook, but also splayed them out across maps that you could dive into to see their latest geo-tagged Stories. It was as much about fun and content as it was about actually hanging out with people in person.

Now Facebook is testing a significant redesign of Nearby Friends that looks a lot more like Snap Map. It replaces the list view of the neighborhoods and cities friends are in with a map that groups friends together by city. A &view list& button opens up the former homescreen, though in both views you still can only see a friendapproximate location in a neighborhood or city, not their exact coordinates. Facebook confirms to TechCrunch that &We&re testing a new design for Nearby Friends, a tool people have used for the past four years to meet with their friends in person. People have complete control over whether to use Nearby Friends or not. They can turn it on in the Nearby Friends bookmark.&

That statement both subtly promotes Facebookopt-in privacy setting for Nearby Friends while urging people to actually go back and activate it. The screenshot was generated from the code of FacebookAndroid app by mobile researcher and frequent TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong. Interestingly, after TechCrunchinquiry, Wong tells me Facebook appears to have deactivated server-side the ability to access the map feature.

The reason this matters is that Facebook is desperate for engagement, especially amongst younger users who are slipping away from it to Snapchat and Instagram. If revamped with this map and other improvements, Nearby Friends could become a more popular utility that keeps people opening Facebook. Getting more people to share their real-time location could open new opportunities for local ad targeting. And Facebook could benefit from showing it unlocks meaningful offline connections given its recent brand troubles following election interference and calls that itthe opposite of &time well spent.&

The existing design of Facebook Nearby Friends

Snap Map was smart, but itsadly buried behind an awkward pinch gesture from Snapchathomescreen, or inside the search bar where some users wouldn&t expect it. Internal Snapchat usage data scored by Taylor Lorenz for The Daily Beast revealed that Snap Map had sunk from a high of 35 million daily unique viewers after its June 2017 launch to just 19 million by that September — merely 11 percent of Snapchatusers at the time. Users never seemed to cease on it as a method of browsing Snapchatgeo-tagged content.

Unfortunately, none of these location apps have figured out that meeting up isn&t all about location. Itabout availability. It doesn&t matter if I see my best friend is at a coffee shop right away if they&re not actually available to hang out. They could be on date, having a business meeting or trying to get some work done. If I drop in just because I see they&re close by, it could be awkward. You&d have to first message them, but you can come off seeming desperate if they can&t or don&t want to meet up with you.

Location apps need an availability indicator similar to the green &online& dot used by many chat apps. You could toggle that on if you wanted to show you&re interested in some spontaneous friend time.

Facebookactually spent the last year trying to build this into Messenger in the form of &Your Emoji& status. It lets you pick an emoji like a martini, fork and knife or barbell thattemporarily overlaid on your profile pic thumbnail to let people know you&re down for drinking, getting dinner or working out. The feature is yet to be widely tested, indicating that Facebook hasn&t quite cracked the nut of encouraging online meetups.

Ideally, Facebook would combine Nearby Friends and Your Emoji to help users share both approximately where they are and whether they want to hang out. The next step would be making it easy to watch a friendgeo-tagged Facebook Story from wherever they are. And then, Facebook could further copy Snap Map by making public Stories and other location-based content accessible from the map so you could browse it for fun instead of the News Feed or Stories tray.

Still, making Nearby Friends work could require Facebook to rethink the privacy element. The friend graph has bloated to include family, co-workers, bosses and distant acquaintances with whom users might not want to share their real-time location. Finding a better way to let you share where you are with just your closest friends could make more people comfortable with the feature.

Facebook needs to rethink its entire product stack to embrace the high-definition cameras, big phone screens and fast network connections that make it easier to convey information through imagery than text.Visual communication is the future, and that goes far beyond Stories.