Security News for the Week Ending September 22, 2023

Dallas Mavericks Owner and Crypto Guru lost $1M to Scam

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who fancies himself a crypto guru just got a crypto wallet drained of about a million bucks. He says that he may have downloaded a fake version of a crypto wallet app. Oh, well, so now instead of being a billionaire, he is only a 999 millionaire. For the rest of us, that is real money. Software has both bugs and malware. Credit: Motherboard by Vice

Google Won’t Bargain With YouTube Music Workers’ Union

Google uses vendors to provide them with contract workers. In this case, the vendor is Cognizant. Google says the “employees” are really employees of Cognizant. The NLRB disagrees. Google doesn’t like the NLRB decision. Google says that they don’t control any of the essential terms and conditions of their employment. Sort of like Fedex doesn’t control the terms and conditions of their contract delivery people. Stay tuned on this one. Credit: Motherboard by Vice

MGM Restores Operations 10 Days After Being Hacked

After getting hacked last week and the consequences being very public (like customers not being able to get into their hotel rooms and not being able to order or pay for food), MGM says they are mostly back. Reports are that they lost about $75 to $100 million in direct revenue and we don’t know yet how much they spent on the repair. Since they are public, they will have to report it on their 10-Q next quarter. While things are mostly working, some things, like online room bookings, are still down. Not counting lawsuits, this is likely a quarter billion dollar hit to the pocketbook. Credit: Dark Reading

Dallas Says Attack Started with Stolen Account

The City of Dallas (Texas) said that the Royal ransomware attack that forced it to shut down all systems in May started with a stolen account. The hackers were in the system from April 7th to May 4rh and exfiltrated over a terabyte of data. After doing that, they dropped the ransomware encrypter at 2AM on May 3rd. The restoration process took 5 weeks (compared to MGMs like much larger server base that took 10 days). Would it take you 10 days or 5 weeks to recover? Need help-contact us. Credit: Bleeping Computer

Cisco Buys Splunk for $28 Billion

While the deal won’t close for a year, once done, and assuming Cisco doesn’t screw it up (which they have done in the past), it will give Cisco, who is mostly a hardware vendor, a very well respected data analytics capability that will sell well to existing high end Cisco customers are will be cash flow positive right away. Right now Cisco can collect massive amounts of data, but they don’t really have their own tool to crunch it, so they are giving away a lot of revenue to a third party. Once the deal is done they will be able to keep all of that revenue. Credit: The Register

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