There is a quote from the movie “The Matrix” that has always stuck with me. It was a scene where Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) is explaining to Neo (Keanu Reeves) the state of the real world and the history that allowed it to get there. The line is “We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.” There is another important line from the HBO series “From the Earth to the Moon. This line take place when Frank Borman (David Andrews) was asked what caused the Apollo One fire, he replied “A failure of imagination.” These two lines compete for how I view the state of AI development. As we marvel at our own magnificence, we should not stop thinking about the potential risks involved as we push to advance AI. Yet that seems to be what is happening.

It looks like the folks at the European Commission have decided that Microsoft buying out Activision Blizzard for $69 billion (with a B) is not going to be a violation of their antitrust rules. The approval means that there are only a few roadblocks to the deal going through. South Korea and China have not decided yet, while the US and UK have challenged it. The deal has been called the world’s biggest gaming takeover and is viewed by many as a bad thing for competition as it would leave Microsoft in control of a majority of game development groups.

The same Ransomware gang that hit MSI recently also appears to have hit Pharmacy services provider PharMerica and stole information on 5.8 million patents. The data that was exfiltrated as part of the attack includes social security numbers, full name and address, health insurance, medications, and date of birth. PharMerica disclosed the breach to the Maine Attorney General on March 12th, 2023.

There is a new player in the ransomware space. Dubber RA group this new organization appears to have had their grand opening last month (April 2023). RA Group published a data leak site on the dark web as part of the now all too familiar double extortion scheme that most ransomware brings to the table. RA Group is also one of the organizations that has leveraged the Babuk source code links to get things going, as reported by Cisco Talos.

Two new variants of Cobalt Strike written in Ggoogle’s Golang have popped up on the wild internet. According to SentinelOne, this new flavor is set up to target macOS systems. They have also noted that this new beacon (called Geacon) has been popping up on malware review sites like Virus Total in the past few months. The new detections could be part of red-teaming exercises, but the increase seems to indicate that real-world malicious activity is also part of the surge in detections.

Cybersecurity firm OTORIO has announced several new vulnerabilities in cloud management platforms at Black Hat Asia 2023. The Israeli company named three industrial cellular providers with a total of eleven vulnerabilities which could allow for complete compromise of operational technology devices. These three providers represent a very large number of OT and IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) devices, making them a serious concern.

Game reviews are always fun things to do. I mean it is playing a game and then writing about anything you found while playing it (sounds like fun). The challenge comes from being objective in your writing Vs subjective. Something that I might personally dislike in a game might be the thing that makes a game fun for someone else. It is with that in mind that we bring you our first game review in years. We will be breaking the game down into a couple of areas, objective and subjective findings. So. Let’s kick this off with the fun part, the subjective part.

The popular socialization platform, Discord, is alerting users to a data breach that occurred due to the compromise of a support agent account. The breach appears to be limited in scope to the ticket queue that the third-party agent was responsible for. The ticket queue contained email addresses, attachments and all messages that might have been exchanged during ticket resolution with this agent.

The UK’s CMA (Competition and Markets Authority has added new restrictions on Microsoft and Activision Blizzard after already issuing a formal anti-trust warning over the deal back in January. Now the regulator has added additional orders that prevent either party from “acquiring an interest” in each other without written permission from the CMA.

After a Leak of Babuk ransomware source code in late 2021 researchers have identified 9 separate new stains that are intended to target VMware ESXi. The new variants first started showing up in the 2cond half of 2022. As with ransomware as a service, having leaked source code allows less sophisticated attack groups to utilize the work of others to their advantage. In this case the targeting the Linux based ESXi. ESXi is a great target as it allows for the encryption of infrastructure and prevents the rapid restoration of systems since the infrastructure those servers run on is what has been affected.