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Criminals are opting for the personal approach as they use the guise of executives’ children to gain big payouts in ransomware attacks.
This newest tactic is the latest in extortion attempts, but this time they’re making you believe your child needs you.
At the RSA conference held this week in San Francisco, Charles Carmakal who is the CTO of Google-owned cybersecurity firm Mandiant explained how this is happening.
“We saw situations where threat actors essentially SIM swap the phones of children of executives, and start making phone calls to executives, from the phone numbers of their children.”
“Think about the psychological dilemma that the executive goes through – seeking a phone call from the children, picking up the phone and hearing that it’s somebody else’s voice? Sometimes, it’s caller ID spoofing. Other times, we see demonstrated SIM swapping family members.”
This then makes the decision around paying the extortion demand a whole lot harder as the concern for family members becomes a whole lot more prominent.
United States has seen numerous ransomware attacks
This newest variant and extortion technique is just one of many that is hitting the States, with critical services even being affected.
On February 22, the IT provider Change Healthcare had to shut down some of its systems after a cyberattack. This then disrupted prescription orders and other pharmacy services across the U.S.
On another occasion, in November 2023, a cyberattack resulted in ambulances being diverted in East Texas, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. This resulted in some emergency room patients having to be taken to other hospitals in the area until the systems were able to go back online.
Cancer patients were victims of another ransomware attack in January 2024 as intruders broke into the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center’s IT network in Seattle. This meant medical records, Social Security numbers, diagnoses, and lab results were all stolen.
Another health network in Oklahoma, Integris Health, saw the same scare when criminals were able to access personal data records.
Featured Image: Via Ideogram
The post Scam warning from top cybersecurity CTO over ransomware criminal tactics appeared first on ReadWrite.

Hades was great. One of the best games in years and now we have the Early Access version of Hades 2 to play with and that makes us very happy here at Readwrite Gaming. While many of the things such as God Mode in Hades 2 will be familiar to you if you played through the first game, if you are new, or even need a refresher, then our Hades 2 pages will help you out now end.
Today we are going to look at Hades 2 God Mode – What it does, how to activate it, and what effect it will have on your game. After you learn all this you will be able to decide if God Mode is for you or not, so let’s crack on shall we?

How to turn on God Mode.
Hades God Mode makes a return as it was actually in the original game as well and turning it on is simple. You will find it in Hades 2’s Gameplay options – it’s the top option and is off by default.
You can activate it mid-game so you do not need to start from scratch,
What does God Mode do?
While God mode in some games, as well as being generally being known for it, makes you invincible, this is not how it works in Hades 2. Activating it will instantly increase your Damage Resistance by 20% and with each subsequent death it will rise a further 2%, so if you are struggling then the game will get gradually easier for you.
In the original Hades, turning on God Mode disabled Achievements. With Hades 2 being in Early Access, Achievements are not yet activated so there are no side-effects other than that feeling in the pit of your belly that you are deceiving yourself.
But, seriously, if you are genuinely finding things tough going, get it activated and see some more of the great story.
The post Hades 2 God Mode – what it does and how to activate it appeared first on ReadWrite.

TikTok and its owner ByteDance officially sued the federal government on Tuesday (May 7) to block the law signed by President Biden that could see the app being banned.
The lawsuit has been filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, with the Chinese-owned company saying the ‘Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act’ is unconstitutional.
TikTok is the video-focused social media platform that has come under fire over the last year, as concerns around US security have risen. On April 24, Biden signed the law that gives ByteDance until January 19 to either sell the app or face a ban.
Within the lawsuit, the social media platform company alleges the law will result in “silencing the 170 million Americans who use the platforms to communicate in ways that cannot be replicated elsewhere.”
The petitioners say “there is no choice” as the qualified divestiture required by the Act to allow TikTok to continue operating in the States “is simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally.”
“And certainly not on the 270-day timeline required by the Act.”
The team says even if a ‘qualified divestiture’ were feasible, “the Act would still be an extraordinary and unconstitutional assertion of power.
“If upheld, it would allow the government to decide that a company may no longer own and publish the innovative and unique speech platform it created.”
Time is ticking for the platform used by millions
The future of TikTok in the U.S. has been voted on over the last few months, with the United States Senate passing the bill that requires them to divest or face a ban on American shores on April 24.
In May, the Chinese owners were hit with a lawsuit from lawyers alleging TikTok offers safety features in some countries and not others.
In response, legal representatives for ByteDance countered that “those services were developed for use in other countries and are subject to different laws and regulations, reflecting those countries’ different cultures and priorities.”
Featured Image: Via Ideogram
The post TikTok’s parent firm ByteDance tries to overturn US ban Act appeared first on ReadWrite.

Researchers have cracked the code to a sperm whale ‘alphabet’ after using machine learning technologies to understand vocalizations.
In a published paper titled ‘Contextual and Combinatorial Structure in Sperm Whale Vocalisations,’ the sequences of clicks produced by the sperm whales were evaluated by researchers from MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Project CETI.
These clicks all serve different linguistic functions and are known as coda. Each with its combinations of rhythm, tempo, rubato, and ornamentation features.
The findings show how these sound elements are freely combined, helping whales to communicate a huge repertoire of distinguishable codas. The function of each sound isn’t yet known, but the results “show that the sperm whale communication system is, in principle, capable of representing a large space of possible meanings…”
The team says this is similar to those used by “human sound production and representation systems like speed, Morse code, and musical notation.”
The research into the sperm whale language was made possible through the use of machine learning which was deployed to analyze a dataset of 8,719 codas from the Eastern Caribbean region.
Like in how human speech differs, with people from other regions having different accents and intonation, the sperm whale ‘phonetic alphabet’ was found to be similar.
“[The sperm whale alphabet] shows how a small set of axes of variation (place of articulation, manner of articulation, and voicedness in humans; rhythm, tempo, ornamentation, and rubato in sperm whales) give rise to the diverse set of observed phenomes (in humans) or codas (in sperm whales).”
How machine learning help to unearth the sperm whale ‘alphabet’
In a conversation with TechCrunch, MIT CSAIL director Daniela Rus explained how machine learning was utilized: “We would get the inputs, and then we adjust our machine learning, to visualize better and to understand more.
“And then we would analyze the output with a biologist.”
“We believe that it’s possible that this is the first instance outside of human language where a communication provides an example of the linguistic concept of duality of patterning. This refers to a set of individually meaningless elements that can be combined to form larger meaningful units, sort of like combining syllables into words.”
Featured Image: Photo by Ray Harrington on Unsplash
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