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MGM Resorts Computers Back Up After 10 Days as Analysts Eye Effects of Casino Cyberattacks

MGM Resorts brought to an end a 10-day computer shutdown prompted by efforts to shield from a cyberattack data including hotel reservations and credit card processing, the casino giant said Wednesday, as analysts and academics measured the effects of the event. “We are pleased that all of our hotels and casinos are operating normally,” the Las Vegas-based company posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. It reported last week that the attack was…

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UK Minister Warns Meta Over End-to-End Encryption

Britain’s interior minister on Wednesday warned tech giant Meta that rolling out end-to-end encryption on its platforms must “not to come at a cost to our children’s safety”. Suella Braverman and security minister Tom Tugendhat have called on the company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, to “work with us” and ensure police can access data. “The use of strong encryption for online users remains a vital part of our digital world and I support…

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Microsoft AI Researchers Expose 38TB of Data, Including Keys, Passwords and Internal Messages

Researchers at Wiz have flagged another major security misstep at Microsoft that caused the exposure of 38 terabytes of private data during a routine open source AI training material update on GitHub. The exposed data includes a disk backup of two employees’ workstations, corporate secrets, private keys, passwords, and over 30,000 internal Microsoft Teams messages, Wiz said in a note documenting the discovery. Wiz, a cloud data security startup founded by ex-Microsoft software engineers, said…

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Imagine Making Shadowy Data Brokers Erase Your Personal Info. Californians May Soon Live the Dream

You may not know it, but thousands of often shadowy companies routinely traffic in personal data you probably never agreed to share — everything from your real-time location information to private financial details. Even if you could identify these data brokers, there isn’t much you can do about their activities, including in California, which has some of the strongest digital privacy laws in the U.S. That’s on the verge of changing. Both houses of the…

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Extradited Russian Hacker Behind ‘NLBrute’ Malware Pleads Guilty

Russian hacker Dariy Pankov has pleaded guilty to computer fraud and now faces a maximum penalty of five years in federal prison, according to an announcement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Pankov, who was extradited from the Eastern European country of Georgia earlier this year, was charged with developing and selling a piece of malware called NLBrute that was used in cybercriminal activities. As part of a plea deal, the government said Pankov will forfeit…

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Pentagon’s 2023 Cyber Strategy Focuses on Helping Allies

The US Department of Defense (DoD) this week published an unclassified summary of its 2023 Cyber Strategy, outlining plans for both offensive and defensive efforts. One key focus of the 2023 Cyber Strategy is the commitment to boost the cyber capabilities of allies and partners, and to increase collective resilience against cyberattacks. This includes augmenting the capacity of partners and expanding their access to cybersecurity infrastructure, as well as helping them mature their cyber workforce…

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A Second Major British Police Force Suffers a Cyberattack in Less Than a Month

Personal details of thousands of police officers and staff from Greater Manchester Police have been hacked from a company that makes identity cards, the second such cyberattack to affect a major British police force in less than a month. Details on identity badges and warrant cards, including names, photos and identity numbers or police collar numbers, were stolen in the ransomware attack, Greater Manchester Police said Thursday. The third-party supplier was not identified. The force…

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Tech Industry Leaders Endorse Regulating Artificial Intelligence at Rare Summit in Washington

The nation’s biggest technology executives on Wednesday loosely endorsed the idea of government regulations for artificial intelligence at an unusual closed-door meeting in the U.S. Senate. But there is little consensus on what regulation would look like, and the political path for legislation is difficult. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who organized the private forum on Capitol Hill as part of a push to legislate artificial intelligence, said he asked everyone in the room —…

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Zero Day Summer: Microsoft Warns of Fresh New Software Exploits

Microsoft’s struggles with zero-day exploits rolled into a new month with a fresh warning that two new Windows vulnerabilities are being targeted by malware attacks in the wild. As part of its scheduled batch of Patch Tuesday security fixes, Redmond’s security response team flagged the two zero-days — CVE-2023-36761 and CVE-2023-36802 — in the “exploitation detected” category and urged Windows sysadmins to urgently apply available fixes. The most serious of the two bugs is described…

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MGM Resorts Confirms ‘Cybersecurity Issue’, Shuts Down Systems

Hospitality and entertainment giant MGM Resorts on Monday said a “cybersecurity issue” forced the shutdown of certain computer systems, including the websites for some of the biggest Las Vegas and New York properties. A brief note posted to X (the website formerly known as Twitter) said external cybersecurity experts and law enforcement are involved in an investigation that has all the hallmarks of a ransomware extortion attack. Here’s the full MGM Resorts statement: “MGM Resorts…

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