The Morning After: Hacking a Vegas casino may just take a single phone call
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The ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware group claimed responsibility for the MGM Resorts cyber outage on Tuesday, and it apparently took the group only 10 minutes on a phone call to glean the information needed to shut down systems and slot machines — not the slot machines! — at casinos owned by MGM Resorts.
“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. Those details came from ALPHV but have not been independently confirmed by security researchers.
MGM Resorts didn’t respond to a request for comment but said on Tuesday that “Our resorts, including dining, entertainment and gaming, are currently operational.”
— Mat Smith
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The only people who asked for this are the PR execs.
Coca-Cola launched a new flavor co-created by artificial intelligence. The company’s calling it the soda “from the future,” and it’s available for a limited time in both regular and zero sugar. It’s called Y3000, with a flavor described as resembling a raspberry slushy. Coke also tasked AI to help design the artwork on the slim can, which looks like a Now That’s What I Call Music CD case from the early ’00s. Inspired.
Your application has to be manually approved, though.
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Xbox Live Gold will be no more after today. Replacing it is a new tier of Game Pass called Xbox Game Pass Core. It’s a different offering to Games with Gold in that there will be a rotating library of a few dozen games. There are some solid, if cheap / old games, including Vampire Survivors, Celeste, Doom Eternal and Dishonored 2, but it’s not the most exciting selection assembled for this base version of Game Pass.
