Tech
Climate Change Is Bringing Legionnaire’s Disease to a Town Near You
This story originally appeared on Vox and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Air conditioners have been working overtime this hot summer, from those tiny window units to the massive AC towers that serve the tightly packed apartment buildings in major cities. And while they bring the relief of cool air, these contraptions also create the conditions for dangerous bacteria to multiply and spread.
One particularly nasty bacteria-borne illness is currently spreading in New York City using those enormous cooling units as its vector: Legionnaire’s disease. The bacterial pneumonia, which usually recurs each summer in the US’s largest city, has sickened more than 100 people and killed five in a growing outbreak.
If you don’t live in New York City or the Northeast, you may never have heard of Legionnaire’s, but this niche public health threat may not be niche for much longer.
Climate change is helping to make Legionnaire’s disease both more plentiful in the places where it already exists and creating the potential for it to move to new places where the population may not be accustomed to it. Cities in the Northeast and Midwest, where hotter weather meets older infrastructure, have reported more cases in recent years. Recently, Legionella bacteria was discovered in a nursing home’s water system in Dearborn, Michigan—one of the states, along with Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Wisconsin, that have seen more activity in the past few years.
Anyone can contract Legionnaire’s disease by inhaling tiny drops containing the bacteria, and the symptoms—fever, headache, shortness of breath—appear within days. It can cause a severe lung infection, with a death rate of around 10 percent.
While healthier people often experience few symptoms, the more vulnerable—young children, the elderly, pregnant people, and those with compromised immune systems—face serious danger from the illness. Around 5,000 people die every year in the United States from Legionnaire’s disease, many of them living in low-income housing with outdated cooling equipment where the bacteria can more readily grow and spread.
Legionnaire’s disease is a microcosm of climate change’s impact on low-income communities. As warmer temperatures facilitate the spread of disease, the most socially vulnerable populations are going to pay the steepest price.
The Collision of Legionnaire’s Disease, Climate Change, and Economic Disparities
Legionnaire’s disease was first documented after an unusually aggressive pneumonia outbreak during an American Legion conference in Philadelphia in 1976. Soon, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientists confirmed the cause of the mysterious illness: a previously unknown bacteria that was accordingly named Legionella. Legionella, unfortunately, is everywhere—in streams, lakes, and water pipes across the country.
But usually, it occurs in such low concentrations and is so remote that it doesn’t pose a threat to humans. Usually.
Now, city health officials have found the bacteria in the large cooling tanks that serve massive apartment buildings across New York City, particularly in Harlem. Cooling tanks are ideal places for Legionnaire’s to grow and spread. They’re filled with stagnant, warm water that is more hospitable to bacterial growth. Like an evaporative cooler, the systems convert warm stagnant water into cool air for apartment dwellers. They can spray mists laden with the bacteria into the open air, dispersing it across the surrounding air, where it can enter a person’s lungs when they inhale. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 80 percent of Legionnaire’s cases are linked to potable water systems.
Tech
Barkbox Offers: Themed Dog Toys, All-Natural Treats, and Subscription Deals
As my fellow pet parents will know, it’s amazing how quickly even the tiniest of dogs can demolish their toys and treat stash. We love and spoil them nonetheless. When you subscribe to BarkBox a fresh batch of cleverly themed treats and toys arrives at your doorstep. The costs of pet ownership can stack up quickly, especially if you’re buying your pooch a random gift box that goes well beyond the essentials. That’s why we have Barkbox promo codes and discount options ready to go for you.
Barkbox Promo: Enjoy a Free Toy for a Year at Barkbox
When your monthly Barkbox arrives, it’s like Christmas morning for your dogs. I watch as my two dogs, Rosi and Randy, shake their little Chihuahua mix bodies with barely restrained excitement. They’re never gentle on their toys but the stimulation that comes from textures and chewing is good for their little brains. With Barkbox you get a steady supply of two unique toys and two bags of all-natural treats every month. If you want to see how your dogs react, this Barkbox coupon is good for new Barkbox subscription customers and adds an additional toy in your box every month for a year.
Save 50% on Your First Barkbox Food Subscription With a Barkbox Coupon Code
Another reason why Barkbox is the best dog subscription box is how easy the company makes it to keep your pantry stocked with your dog’s food. Use this Barkbox coupon to save 50% off your first Barkbox food subscription, so you won’t have to end up running out to the grocery store in the middle of the night when your scooper scrapes across the bottom of an empty kibble bin.
Fly Travel Stress-Free With Your Dog and Get $300 Off BARK Air Flights
If you live in a Barkbox flight hub destination, please know I am insanely jealous of you. It’s no secret that flying is stressful and can be very dangerous for pets, especially if they have to ride in a cargo hold. Barkbox makes them the VIP with BARK Air, letting them ride in the cabin with you and get doted on, so things are a lot less scary. This is another perk of having a BarkBox subscription, with the opportunity to save $300 off BARK Air Flights.
Support Your Dog’s Dental Health and Get $10 Off With a Barkbox Coupon
Dental health is crucial for dogs, as it can prevent disease not just in their mouths, but their vital organs. Don’t forget to schedule your yearly cleaning with your vet, but in the meantime, use this BarkBox discount code to get $10 off a special BarkBox Dental kit.
Get an Extra Premium Toy in Every BarkBox With the Extra Toy Club
For having such tiny mouths, my dogs can gnaw through toys with surprising speed. If you’re also buried in a pile of shredded fluff and squeakers from disemboweled toys, the Extra Toy Club can help. This subscription includes dog toys for aggressive chewers of all ages, breeds, and sizes, offering extra durable toys meant to last longer. So far, so good at my house. To upgrade to this subscription box, it’s an extra $9 per month.
Get Exclusive BarkBox Discounts: Join the Email List
If you assume that the punchy branding and witty lingo extend to Barkbox’s email subscribers and not just the box subscription, you’d be correct. As a bonus, you can get exclusive BarkBox discount codes when you sign up to receive these emails. Who also doesn’t love a furry face and reminder of their pet in between work subject lines and bill payment reminders, too?
Tech
Here’s Why Trump Posted About Iran ‘Stealing’ the 2020 Election Hours After the US Attacked
At 2:30 am Eastern time on Saturday, President Donald Trump posted a video to his Truth Social account announcing that the US had joined Israel in launching attacks on Iran.
His next post, just two hours later, appeared to suggest that the attacks were, at least in part, motivated by a wild claim that Iran had helped rig the 2020 US elections. “Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States,” the president wrote on Truth Social.
The post linked to an article on Just the News, a conspiracy-filled, pro-Trump outlet that offered no explanation for its claim beyond the vague assertion that Iran operated “a sophisticated election influence effort” in 2020.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on whether the alleged interference factored into the decision to attack Iran or what exactly the so-called interference amounted to.
Trump has spent the years since 2020 boosting numerous baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being rigged. Since his return to the White House last year, he has empowered his administration to use those debunked conspiracy theories to inform decisionmaking, from election office raids in Fulton County, Georgia, to lawsuits over unredacted voter rolls.
It’s not exactly clear what supposed Iranian interference Trump was alluding to in his Truth Social post, but Patrick Byrne, a prominent conspiracy theorist who urged Trump to seize voting machines in the wake of the 2020 election, claims to WIRED that it is related to a broader conspiracy theory that also involves Venezuela and China.
Like most election-related conspiracy theories, this one is convoluted and based on no concrete evidence. In broad terms, the conspiracy theory, which first emerged in the weeks and months after the 2020 election and has grown more complex in the years since, claims that the Venezuelan government has been rigging elections across the globe for decades by creating the voting software company Smartmatic as a vehicle to remotely rig elections. (Smartmatic has repeatedly denied all allegations against it and successfully sued right-wing outlet Newsmax for promoting conspiracy theories and defaming the company.)
Byrne laid out the entire conspiracy theory in a 45-minute-long presentation posted to X in 2024. His claims have been widely shared within the election-denial community since it was posted.
Iran’s role in all of this, claims Byrne, was to hide the money trail. “They act as paymasters. They keep certain payments that would reveal this [operation] out of the banking system, out of the Swift system so you can’t see it,” claimed Byrne during this presentation “It’s done through a transfer pricing mechanism run through Iran in oil.”
When asked for evidence of Iran’s role in this conspiracy theory, Byrne did not respond. In fact, none of Byrne’s claims have ever been verified, and most have been repeatedly debunked. Smartmatic did not immediately respond to a request to comment.
There have been two actual documented instances of Iranian election interference, however: In 2021, the Justice Department charged two Iranians for conducting an influence operation designed to target and threaten US voters. And in 2024, the three Iranian hackers working for the government were charged with compromising the Trump campaign as part of an effort to disrupt the 2024 election.
Byrne’s allegations, however, have been wholly different. And while Byrne’s claims have been circulating among online conspiracy groups for years, they have been emailed directly to Trump in recent months by Peter Ticktin, a lawyer who has known Trump since they attended the New York Military Academy together. Ticktin also represents former Colorado election official turned election denial superstar Tina Peters.
Tech
A Possible US Government iPhone-Hacking Toolkit Is Now in the Hands of Foreign Spies and Criminals
Google notes that Apple patched vulnerabilities used by Coruna in the latest versions of its mobile operating system, iOS 26, so its exploitation techniques are only confirmed to work against iOS 13 through 17.2.1. It targets vulnerabilities in Apple’s Webkit framework for browsers, so Safari users on those older versions of iOS would be vulnerable, but there’s no confirmed techniques in the toolkit for targeting Chrome users. Google also notes that Coruna checks if an iOS devices has Apple’s most stringent security setting, known as Lockdown Mode, enabled, and doesn’t attempt to hack it if so.
Despite those limitations, iVerify says Coruna likely infected tens of thousands of phones. The company consulted with a partner that has access to network traffic and counted visits to a command-and-control server for the cybercriminal version of Coruna infecting Chinese-language websites. The volume of those connections suggest, iVerify says, that roughly 42,000devices may have already been hacked with the toolkit in the for-profit campaign alone.
Just how many other victims Coruna may have hit, including Ukrainians who visited websites infected with the code by the suspected Russian espionage operation, remains unclear. Google declined to comment beyond its published report. Apple did not immediately provide comment on Google or iVerify’s findings.
In iVerify’s analysis of the cybercriminal version of Coruna—it didn’t have access to any of the earlier versions—the company found that the code appeared to have been altered to plant malware on target devices designed to drain cryptocurrency from crypto wallets as well as steal photos and, in some cases, emails. Those additions, however, were “poorly written” compared to the underlying Coruna toolkit, according to iVerify chief product officer Spencer Parker, which he found to be impressively polished and modular.
“My god, these things are very professionally written,” Parker says of the exploits included in Coruna, suggesting that the cruder malware was added by the cybercriminals who later obtained that code.
As for the clues that suggest Coruna’s origins as a US government toolkit, iVerify’s Cole notes that it’s possible that Coruna’s code overlap with the Operation Triangulation code that Russia pinned on US hackers could be based on Triangulation’s components being picked up and repurposed after they were discovered. But Cole argues that’s unlikely. Many components of Coruna have never been seen before, he points out, and the whole toolkit appears to have been created by a “single author,” as he puts it.
“The framework holds together very well,” says Cole, who previously worked at the NSA, but notes that he’s been out of the government for more than a decade and isn’t basing any findings on his own outdated knowledge of US hacking tools. “It looks like it was written as a whole. It doesn’t look like it was pieced together.”
If Coruna is, in fact, a US hacking toolkit gone rogue, just how it got into foreign and criminal hands remains a mystery. But Cole points to the industry of brokers that may pay tens of millions of dollars for zero-day hacking techniques that they can resell for espionage, cybercrime, or cyberwar. Notably, Peter Williams, an executive of US government contractor Trenchant, was sentenced this month to seven years in prison for selling hacking tools to the Russian zero-day broker Operation Zero from 2022 to 2025. Williams’ sentencing memo notes that Trenchant sold hacking tools to the US intelligence community as well as others in the “Five Eyes” group of English-speaking governments—the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand—though it’s not clear what specific tools he sold or what devices they targeted.
“These zero-day and exploit brokers tend to be unscrupulous,” says Cole. “They sell to the highest bidder and they double dip. Many don’t have exclusivity arrangements. That’s very likely what happened here.”
“One of these tools ended up in the hands of a non-Western exploit broker, and they sold it to whoever was willing to pay,” Cole concludes. “The genie is out of the bottle.”
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