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A teenage boy may be responsible for a ransomware attack that shut down MGM Resorts in Las Vegas last year. The West Midlands Police Department in England confirmed that they arrested an unidentified 17-year-old on Thursday from the town of Walsall who allegedly shut down the resort and casino on the Las Vegas strip last year.

The teenager was arrested on suspicion of blackmail and violating the UK’s Computer Misuse Act. He was released on bail, according to a statement from the police department.

Police officials tracked the teenage suspect as part of a joint investigation with the UK’s National Crime Agency and the FBI. The police department said they recovered evidence at the teenager’s address including “a number of digital devices which will undergo forensic examination.”

The statement also said the teenager was part of a “global cyber online crime group” but did not specify which group. The ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware group announced their responsibility for the MGM Resorts cyber outage. The attack happened on Sep. 12, 2023 allegedly with a simple 10 minute phone call to a Help desk employee using information obtained from LinkedIn. The group has also claimed responsibility for a similar ransomware attack on the beauty brand Esteé Lauder.

“All ALPHV ransomware group did to compromise MGM Resorts was hop on LinkedIn, find an employee, then call the Help Desk,” the organization wrote in a post on X.

MGM Resorts’ system shutdown lasted for nine days and created a massive outage across all of its casinos on the Las Vegas Strip. News later surfaced that other casinos like Caesars were also targeted by a different group but chose to pay the hackers tens of millions of dollars to prevent private company data from being released.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/police-arrest-a-teenage-boy-in-connection-with-the-mgm-resorts-ransomware-attack-223906246.html?src=rss

Twitch has confirmed that former president and current Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s three-year ban on the gaming stream platform has been reversed. A statement from Twitch confirmed the news about the status of Trump’s ban from the platform.

“We reinstated former President Trump’s Twitch channel,” the statement read. “We believe there is value in hearing from Presidential nominees directly, when possible. Trump is now the official Republican nominee for US President.”

The Amazon-owned platform first issued a temporary suspension on President Trump’s account in 2020 for violating its hateful conduct and harassment policies and restored it two weeks later. Twitch disabled the account following the Jan. 6 riot on the US Capitol in 2021 due to “the current extraordinary circumstances and the President’s incendiary rhetoric” before issuing an indefinite suspension two weeks later, according to a Twitch spokesperson.

Four people died and 174 police officers were injured during the attack. Three more police officers involved in the riot died in the days and weeks following Jan. 6, according to the New York Times.

Twitch is the latest Internet platform to lift a ban on one of Trump’s accounts. Meta rolled back Trump’s restrictions on Facebook and Instagram a week ago.

Trump first joined Twitch in 2019 during his presidential campaign against President Joe Biden. His campaign team used the platform to stream his rallies and other events starting with a stump speech in Minneapolis.

Since then, politics has carved out a notable corner of Twitch with live broadcasts of moments like the recent Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and even its own official category. Pundits and commentators on both sides of the political aisle also regularly broadcast live streams of political events and speeches and host debates on Twitch.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/twitch-restores-former-president-trumps-twitch-account-204327050.html?src=rss

A group of international researchers at the University of Cologne in Germany recently discovered one of the rarest types of black holes in the universe. The researchers were observing a cluster of stars in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A (Sgr A) at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. They then discovered signs of an intermediate-mass black hole, a type of black hole that’s sometimes referred to as the “missing link” of black holes, according to NASA.

Black holes range in size from supermassive to primordial and the intermediate sits above primordial in size. They are believed to have formed just after the Big Bang and act as “seeds” for creating supermassive black holes.

The star cluster believed to be the latest intermediate-mass black hole dubbed IRS 13 moved in an orderly pattern when they expected them to be randomly arranged. The researchers concluded that the star cluster had to be interacting with the supermassive black hole and “there must be something inside the cluster for it to be able to maintain its observed compact shape,” according to a statement from the University of Cologne. 

Plans are underway to conduct further observations on the intermediate black hole. They will use the James Webb Space Telescope and the Extremely Large Telescope in Chile that’s currently under construction (and yes, that is its real name).

Scientists discovered the first intermediate-mass black hole in 2020 using the Hubble Space Telescope when they found the waves created by its formation. Until then, intermediate-mass black holes were considered to be a “missing link” between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes and could provide more insights on the formation of black holes and the universe.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/another-missing-link-black-hole-discovered-near-the-center-of-the-galaxy-175859313.html?src=rss

Microsoft has made changes to its Xbox Game Pass service that are “exactly the sort of consumer harm” from its Activision acquisition that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was worried about, the agency wrote in a letter addressed to the US Appeals Court. The FTC’s letter focused on a recent price hike for the Xbox Game Pass and pointed out that the Game Pass Ultimate now costs $20 a month, which is $3 more per month than before and represents a 17 percent year-over-year increase.  

In addition, the agency called attention to Microsoft’s decision to discontinue the $11 Console Game Pass plan. The agency added a new Game Pass Standard tier, but it costs more at $15 a month. While it’s a step up from the barebones Core plan, it doesn’t include access to day-one releases, leading the FTC to call it a “degraded product.” Microsoft will fully discontinue the Console tier just before the launch of the next Call of Duty game, the FTC said. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will be playable via Game Pass from its release date on October 25, which means subscribers who want to access it on day one will have to pay for the $20-a-month tier. 

The company promised that the “acquisition would benefit consumers by making [CoD] available on Microsoft’s Game Pass on the day it is released on console (with no price increase for the service based on the acquisition),” the FTC wrote. But Microsoft’s actions show a firm that’s “exercising market power post-merger,” it noted.

The FTC repeatedly challenged Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard, but a judge rejected its request for an injunction. At the time, the judge ruled that the FTC failed to demonstrate how the merger would lessen competition and even said that there was “record evidence” pointing to “more consumer access to Call of Duty and other Activision content.” 

Microsoft, which officially closed the $69 billion deal in October 2023 after that ruling and after the blessing of regulators in the EU and the UK, now officially owns Activision Blizzard. But the FTC still isn’t done opposing the merger and filed an appeal in an attempt to the block the already-closed deal, telling the court that it can prove its case by showing that Microsoft has the ability and incentive to withhold Activision’s games. Back in February, the agency also accused Microsoft of going against its pledge to allow Activision Blizzard to operate independently post-acquisition after the company laid off nearly 2,000 employees in its gaming division. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-ftc-is-as-mad-about-the-xbox-game-pass-price-increase-as-you-are-120031248.html?src=rss

A massive Microsoft Windows BSOD (blue screen of death) outage has impacted multiple companies worldwide including airlines, broadcasters and others. The problem was a caused by a faulty update from security giant CrowdStrike that forced PCs and servers into an unrecoverable boot loop. The change has since been rolled back, but many machines are still affected.

“We have widespread reports of BSODs on windows hosts, occurring on multiple sensor versions,” CrowdStrike wrote in a pinned Reddit post. “[We have] identified a content deployment related to this issue and reverted those changes.” The company went on to describe a workaround, which involves booting Windows into Safe Mode and deleting a specific driver. 

The issue forced Delta, Frontier and other airlines to ground flights, and impacted UK broadcaster Sky and the London Stock Exchange. On a Reddit thread, dozens of commenters stated that their companies were effectively offline due to the problem. 

“Even if [CrowdStrike] fixed the issue causing the BSOD, I’m thinking how are we going to restore the thousands of devices that are not booting up,” one user noted. “Let me explain to someone who is not tech savvy and is working from home how to boot their machine into safe mode,” another wrote. 

Reddit users including many IT managers from Australia, Malaysia, Japan, India, the Czech Republic and elsewhere have said they’re fighting through the issue. “Here in the Philippines, specifically in my employer, it is like Thanos snapped his fingers. Half of the entire organization [is] down due to BSOD loop. Started at 2pm and is still ongoing. What a Friday,” said one.

CrowdStrike is a US-based security firm that provides real-time protection against security threats to corporations. One of its key products is Falcon, described by the company as “providing real-time indicators of attack, hyper-accurate detection and automated protection” from threats. A CrowdStrike spokesperson said it was likely an issue with Falcon that caused the incident. 

To add to the pain, Microsoft appears to have also suffered a separate outage with its Azure services and Microsoft 365 app suite. “Users may be unable to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services,” it wrote. It’s not clear which, if any, of the outages are related to this instead of the CrowdStrike problem. 

Update July 19, 2024 6:12 AM ET: CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz has acknowledged the problem on X, saying it was caused by a defect in a content update for Windows hosts, and not a “security incident or cyberattack,” He added that “the issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.” There’s no mention on whether the fix will be usable on machines currently stuck in a boot loop.

Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted, he added. An identical statement has been posted on CrowdStrike’s blog. So far, there’s no apology from the company over the incident.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/faulty-cybersecurity-update-takes-out-banks-airlines-and-other-major-companies-worldwide-085142264.html?src=rss