Good morning and welcome to a new week. Here’s what went down in tech land over the weekend.
1. Coles customers affected by Latitude breach
On March 16, Australian financial services firm Latitude began alerting customers of a data breach, one it described as being the result of a “sophisticated and malicious cyber attack”. Last week, we updated the status of the aftermath to note that the criminals behind the attack were asking for a ransom – but Latitude Financial isn’t paying. But over the weekend, new information was made available via shopping giant Coles. It said, per a report from the ABC, that it has been impacted by the Latitude Financial data breach, saying personal information used to issue historical Coles-branded credit cards has been stolen.
2. Angry Birds could get a new mumma bird
The company behind the Angry Birds mobile game is reportedly about to be bought for about $1 billion. Per a report from The Wall Street Journal, Japan-based entertainment conglomerate, Sega Sammy Holdings Inc, could buy Rovio Entertainment Oyj (the maker of the game) as early as this week. Sega Sammy was created in 2004 through the merger of Japanese slot-machine company Sammy Corp. and Sega Corp., the video game maker behind Sonic the Hedgehog.
Rovio’s CEO has publicly confirmed that they are in discussions with SEGA regarding a potential acquisition, but says that SEGA hasn’t officially tendered an offer yet and as such there is no guarantee the deal happens https://t.co/v8Fd5hUF4G pic.twitter.com/MjI0PVvYY8
— t o m a t – The Sellout (@VinderTomat) April 16, 2023
3. Apple, Amazon go down while we were sleeping
While we were all sleeping, both Amazon and its Alexa/AWS cloud service, and Apple TV, were on the fritz. Reuters is reporting that although it’s all back online, Downdetector showed more than 16,000 reports about Alexa at the peak of the disruption and it was a similar story for Apple, with platform down for 6,000 users at the peak of the outage. While Amazon made a statement saying its services have recovered from an issue, Apple is yet to comment.
4. We’re falling for scams in droves
The ACCC has today released its latest Targeting Scams Report, which, among other many confronting stats, has revealed Australians lost a record $3.1 billion to scams in 2022 – an 80 per cent increase on total losses recorded in 2021. Investment scams were the highest loss category ($1.5 billion), followed by remote access scams ($229 million), and payment redirection scams ($224 million).
5. And lastly, Musk news
Over to everyone’s favourite* tech billionaire and Elon Musk is reportedly making his own AI company, because of course he is. Multiple sources have reported the move, but per The Guardian we learn that Musk is planning to launch an artificial intelligence company to compete with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and that he’s in the process of bringing together a team of AI researchers and engineers and is in talks with several investors about the project. Speaking of….
BONUS ITEM: Everything is going well at Elon Musk.com.
The inventor of the hashtag @chrismessina just quit Twitter pic.twitter.com/ShnyRyz6ag
— Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) April 15, 2023
See you Tuesday.