Mandiant
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T-Mobile may have secretly attempted to buy customer data leaked in 2021 hack
Newly unsealed court documents suggest T-Mobile may have hired a third-party firm to prevent the data leaked in the hack from circulating more widely.
Google is buying cybersecurity company Mandiant for $5.4 billion
Mandiant is the company the banks and phone companies call when they get hacked. Now it'll be part of Google's Cloud platform.
Fake pro-China accounts tried to push Americans to attend anti-racism protests
On Wednesday, security researchers from Google and cybersecurity firm Mandiant disclosed that a network of fake pro-China social media accounts tried to mobilize Americans to attend anti-racism protests in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack linked to a single VPN login
Last month's pipeline shutdown started with hackers taking advantage of an unused but still active VPN account at Colonial Pipeline.
Equifax will warn 2.5 million additional hacking victims by mail
The hack that compromised Equifax was bad enough, but its response only seemed to make things worse. Even the website that verified the potential threat to your data left many people wondering. Equifax wants to remove any doubt, though. In the wake of a just-completed forensic investigation by security partner (and sometimes foe) Mandiant, Equifax has announced that it's mailing written notices to everyone who was confirmed as affected since it disclosed the hack on September 7th. That's no mean feat when 2.5 million more Americans have been added to the tally (which now stands at 145.5 million affected) as a result of the investigation. The website should reflect the additional hack victims no later than October 8th, so you might not have to wait for a letter to find out whether or not you're part of this newer batch.
Equifax breach shows signs of a possible state-sponsored hack
Ever since word of the Equifax hack got out, there's been one lingering question: was it a state-sponsored attack, or just criminals who took advantage of a security hole? At the moment, it looks like it might be the former. Bloomberg sources have shed light on the ongoing investigations into the breach, and they claim there are signs of a government's involvement. The initial group of hackers weren't particularly experienced, according to the tipsters, but they handed things over to a more "sophisticated" team. There are even hints that this might be the work of Chinese intelligence agents, although it's not yet clear who's responsible.
The science of language, community, and MMORPGs
Back in August, Massively wrote a little post about Swedish research on MMOs and language learning. That article provoked me, a gamer and teacher of English for speakers of other languages (ESOL), to hunt down the original research and talk directly to the researchers, Dr. Liss Kerstin Sylvén from the University of Gothenburg and Dr. Pia Sundqvist from Karlstad University, to better understand their research and findings. Note that we'll be talking here about games and language learning specifically, not other forms of game-related education. Also, Sylvén and Sundqvist don't consider themselves "gamers." Sundqvist remembers Pac-Man as her first game, both admit to playing Angry Birds on their cell phones, and Sundqvist is "allowed" to sometimes watch her 17-year-old son play League of Legends. I find this interesting because they are non-gamers who seriously consider games capable of being educational without specifically being developed to do so. This isn't a simple merger of a hobby with work; this is work in a field of interest that's still being explored.
