After greater than two years of evading capture following a hacking spree that targeted some of the world’s largest technology firms, U.S. authorities say they’ve finally caught a minimum of some of the hackers responsible.

In August 2022 security researchers made their information public with a warning that a bunch of hackers targeted greater than 130 organizations in a complicated phishing campaign that stole the credentials of nearly 10,000 employees. The hackers specifically targeted firms that use Okta, a single sign-on service provider that hundreds of firms around the world use to permit their employees to log in from home.

Due to its give attention to Okta, the hacker group was dubbed “0ktapus”. By now the group has been hacked Caesar’s entertainmentCoinbase, DoorDash, Mailchimp, Riot Games, Twilio (twice) and dozens more.

The most notable and severe cyber attack by hackers in terms of downtime and impact was the September 2023 breach of MGM Resorts, which reportedly cost the casino and hotel giant a minimum of $100 million. In this case, the hackers collaborated with the Russian-speaking ransomware gang ALPHV and demanded a ransom from MGM for the company to get better its files. The break-in was such a nuisance that MGM-owned casinos had problems with service delivery for several days.

Over the past two years, as law enforcement has closed in on hackers, people in the cybersecurity industry have been attempting to work out exactly tips on how to classify hackers and whether to place them in a single group or one other.

Techniques utilized by hackers similar to social engineering, email and SMS phishing, and SIM swapping are common and widespread. Some of the individual hackers were part of several groups chargeable for various data breaches. These circumstances make it obscure exactly who belongs to which group. Cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike has dubbed this hacker group “Scattered Spider,” and researchers imagine it has some overlap with 0ktapus.

The group was so energetic and successful that the US cybersecurity agency CISA and the FBI issued a advice in late 2023 with detailed details about the group’s activities and techniques in an try and help organizations prepare for and defend against anticipated attacks.

Scattered Spider is a “cybercriminal group targeting large companies and their IT helpdesks,” CISA said in its advisory. The agency warned that the group “typically engaged in data theft for extortion purposes” and noted its known ties to ransomware gangs.

One thing that is comparatively certain is that hackers mostly speak English and are generally believed to be teenagers or early 20s, and are sometimes called “advanced, persistent teenagers.”

“A disproportionate number of minors are involved and this is because the group deliberately recruits minors due to the lenient legal environment in which these minors live, and they know that nothing will happen to them if the police catch the child” – Allison Nixon , director of research for Unit 221B, told TechCrunch at the time.

Over the past two years, some members of 0ktapus and Scattered Spider have been linked to a similarly nebulous group of cybercriminals generally known as “Com” People inside this broader cybercriminal community committed crimes that leaked into the real world. Some of them are chargeable for acts of violence similar to robberies, burglaries and bricklaying – hiring thugs to throw bricks at someone’s house or apartment; and swatting – when someone tricks authorities into believing that a violent crime has occurred, prompting the intervention of an armed police unit. Although born as a joke, the swat has fatal consequences.

After two years of hacking, authorities are finally starting to discover and prosecute Scattered Spider members.

in July This was confirmed by the British police arrest of a 17-year-old in reference to the MGM burglary.

In November, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it had indicted five hackers: Ahmed Hossam Eldin Elbadawy, 23, of College Station, Texas; Noah Michael Urban, 20, from Palm Coast, Florida, arrested in January; Evans Onyeaka Osiebo, 20, of Dallas, Texas; Joel Martin Evans, 25, of Jacksonville, North Carolina; and Tyler Robert Buchanan, 22, from the UK, who was arrested in June in Spain.

Lawyers for The New York Times and Daily News, who’re suing OpenAI for allegedly copying their work to coach artificial intelligence models without permission, say OpenAI engineers accidentally deleted potentially relevant data.

Earlier this fall, OpenAI agreed to offer two virtual machines in order that advisors to The Times and Daily News could seek for copyrighted content in their AI training kits. (Virtual machines are software-based computers that exist inside one other computer’s operating system and are sometimes used for testing purposes, backing up data, and running applications.) letterlawyers for the publishers say they and the experts they hired have spent greater than 150 hours since November 1 combing through OpenAI training data.

However, on November 14, OpenAI engineers deleted all publisher search data stored on one among the virtual machines, in keeping with the above-mentioned letter, which was filed late Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

OpenAI tried to get better the information – and was mostly successful. However, since the folder structure and filenames were “irretrievably” lost, the recovered data “cannot be used to determine where the news authors’ copied articles were used to build the (OpenAI) models,” the letter says.

“The news plaintiffs were forced to recreate their work from scratch, using significant man-hours and computer processing time,” lawyers for The Times and the Daily News wrote. “The plaintiffs of the news learned only yesterday that the recovered data was useless and that the work of experts and lawyers, which took a whole week, had to be repeated, which is why this supplementary letter is being filed today.”

The plaintiffs’ attorney explains that they don’t have any reason to consider the removal was intentional. However, they are saying the incident highlights that OpenAI “is in the best position to search its own datasets” for potentially infringing content using its own tools.

An OpenAI spokesman declined to make an announcement.

However, late Friday, November 22, OpenAI’s lawyer filed a motion answer to a letter sent Wednesday by attorneys to The Times and Daily News. In their response, OpenAI’s lawyers unequivocally denied that OpenAI had deleted any evidence and as a substitute suggested that the plaintiffs were guilty for a system misconfiguration that led to the technical problem.

“Plaintiffs requested that one of several machines provided by OpenAI be reconfigured to search training datasets,” OpenAI’s attorney wrote. “Implementation of plaintiffs’ requested change, however, resulted in the deletion of the folder structure and certain file names from one hard drive – a drive that was intended to serve as a temporary cache… In any event, there is no reason to believe that any files were actually lost.”

In this and other cases, OpenAI maintains that training models using publicly available data – including articles from The Times and Daily News – are permissible. In other words, by creating models like GPT-4o that “learn” from billions of examples of e-books, essays, and other materials to generate human-sounding text, OpenAI believes there isn’t a licensing or other payment required for examples – even when he makes money from these models.

With this in mind, OpenAI has signed licensing agreements with a growing number of recent publishers, including the Associated Press, Business Insider owner Axel Springer, the Financial Times, People’s parent company Dotdash Meredith and News Corp. OpenAI declined to offer the terms of those agreements. offers are public, but one among its content partners, Dotdash, is apparently earns at the least $16 million a 12 months.

OpenAI has not confirmed or denied that it has trained its AI systems on any copyrighted works without permission.

Sequoia says no going out, no problem.

According to data from the Silicon Valley enterprise capital giant, the worth of its Sequoia Capital US Venture XVII fund increased by 24.6% in June at the top of 12 months. Pitchbookwho analyzed data from the University of California Regents Fund.

Sequoia’s margin is notable since the fund hasn’t had any exits yet. This can be a positive development for the 2020 fund vintage, on condition that after the uncertain valuations of 2020 and 2021, this yr’s funds usually are not expected to perform well for any VC. The mismatch is probably going resulting from high AI valuations giving risks a way of an economic recovery that has yet to bear fruit in other sectors. Sequoia is an investor in high-growth artificial intelligence corporations including OpenAI, Glean and Harvey, amongst others.

Sequoia has raised over $800 million for Fund XVII, which closed in 2022.