🇺🇲 Great, here comes $9.55B of torment

For the past several days, casino giant MGM has been gripped by a cyberattack.

• Last Monday, MGM reported that a cybersecurity issue had impacted several systems, which it promptly shut down, per Vox.
• The hack wreaked havoc on its 12 Vegas properties’ digital room keys, slot machines, TVs, ATMs, and more, plus MGM’s websites.

How did it happen?

Techniques included “vishing” (“voice phishing”) and “social engineering,” or manipulating a person into revealing sensitive information.

In this case, hackers allegedly used publicly available LinkedIn info to impersonate an employee and tricked someone at MGM’s IT help desk into revealing access credentials.

Who did this?

That’s complicated, as two separate — but connected — groups have claimed responsibility.

Scattered Spider is believed to be a group of European and US hackers in their teens and 20s who specialize in social engineering.

• Someone claiming to represent Scattered Spider told the Financial Times they wanted to rig the slot machines — a la Ocean’s Thirteen, which the rep said they’d never watched. When that failed, they decided to hold stolen data for ransom instead.
• Scattered Spider also allegedly hacked Caesars Entertainment, which paid $15m in ransom.

Alphv/Black Cat runs a ransomware-as-a-service business, selling malware to other hackers. It was responsible for ~12% of cyberattacks in the first four months of 2022 and recently posted 2.5TB of data it stole from semiconductor maker Seiko.

• Via a statement, it claimed to be the real culprit of the MGM hack (but not Caesars) and denied the slot machine plot.

While Spider is affiliated with Alphv and has used its malware in the past, it remains unclear how the two are connected — if at all — here.

Why?

Alphv seemed to enjoy excoriating MGM, accusing it of insider trading, shoddy privacy practices, and “greed, incompetence, and corruption.”

But mostly, money — MGM’s market cap is $14.4B. Ransomware hacks frequently target large organizations with money and sensitive info: hospitals, school systems, cities, etc.

Experts told Wired they hope high-profile hacks like MGM’s will bring more awareness to the devastating potential of cyberattacks — and perhaps new policies and strategies to combat them.

If you find a good rock to hide under until Nov. 6, 2024, please let us know?

Another Election Day is fast approaching for Americans — just 413 days away, somehow — but political ad projections suggest it’ll feel like 413 years.

Campaign advertising spend is expected to hit a record $10.2B for the 2024 cycle, per ad-tracking firm AdImpact.

Our patience will lose, but who wins?

Incredibly, for an industry that’s been losing steam (and viewers) fast, local television will be a big beneficiary, projected to land half of the collective $10.2B ad spend, per Bloomberg.

Which is… bizarre.

This summer, streaming services saw record viewership, outdrawing both broadcast TV and, for the first time, cable. Yet:

• Local TV is expected to haul in $5.1B of the political ad spend, with cable TV landing $1.9B in prizes.
• Streaming, meanwhile, is projected to see only $1.3B, with digital ads trailing behind at $1.2B.
• At least radio’s place in all of this makes sense, accounting for only $400m.

What gives? Democratic operative Marc Levitt wrote in 2018 about the “warped” incentives of campaigns, which are “conditioned to prioritize… pricey TV ads.” He noted that older candidates and consultants, and their “TV era” orthodoxies, remained in charge.

That’s apparently still the case today; if anything shows off the slow-to-change ways of the political engine, it’s a traditional TV-led campaign spend.

But hey, at least…

… now you know to avoid your local stations for the next 14 months?

And if you’re already sick of it all, hang in there — to date, we’ve put $652m of campaign ads behind us, so there’s only another ~$9.55B worth of ads left to endure.

$74.8k: The median US household income in 2022, down 0.8% YoY, per the Census Bureau’s annual survey. Fortunately, though the median household income fell a tad, no state saw an increase in its poverty rate. Also notable: a 3% uptick in American households making $100k+, now up to 37% of homes.

4:54.631: The new record for speed-running “Super Mario Bros,” set by gamer Niftski. Per Ars Technica, this impressive feat requires a “pixel-perfect execution” of a particular level’s challenges and is just 0.35 seconds away from a machine speed run. For comparison, the average time to beat the game’s main story is two hours.

51%: Proportion of planned scientific missions canceled or curtailed at the United States Antarctic Program this summer. A leading reason for the reduction is a familiar story on the other six continents: a housing shortage. The National Science Foundation’s McMurdo Station is meant to host up to 1.2k scientists and support staff, but it’s a few hundred beds short. Covid and inflation have hampered a $500m renovation project, including a much-needed 285-bed dormitory.

1.6k miles: New record distance covered on a single charge by an EV prototype. Students from the Technical University of Munich who built the long-range EV drove it around an empty airplane hangar — for 99+ straight hours —until its battery died. Amateur Alps-adjacent scientists are on a roll this month: Students at the Academic Motorsports Club Zurich built another record-setting EV, this one recognized as the fastest accelerating electric car, going from zero to 62 mph in less than a full second.