Tech companies with manufacturing facilities in mainland China, including Apple Inc., are facing a months-long disruption amid a massive outbreak of COVID-19 in the Middle Kingdom after the Chinese Communist Party dropped its zero-COVID policy. COVID disrupting Western tech companies in the country is nothing new. Apple faced delays in manufacturing as early as February ...

Microsoft Corp. today filed a response to a lawsuit from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that seeks to block its $68.7 billion takeover of computer games maker Activision Blizzard Inc., the biggest ever in the technology business. Microsoft announced that it had entered an agreement to acquire Activitision in January, and antitrust concerns emerged not ...

Zerobot, an “internet of things” botnet discovered earlier this year, has been updated with additional features, including the ability to target vulnerabilities on unpatched Apache servers. As detailed Wednesday by researchers at Microsoft Corp.’s Security Threat Intelligence team, Zerobot is a Go-based botnet that primarily spreads through IoT and web application vulnerabilities. Zerobot is offered as ...

It won’t be a Merry Christmas for many employees of self-driving truck company TuSimple Holdings Inc. this year, as the company announced Wednesday that it’s laying off 25% of its staff in a restructuring plan. The move affects about 350 employees, with 80% of the company’s remaining 1,100 employees now undertaking research and development functions. Onetime restructuring costs are ...

Password manager LastPass US LP today revealed that a hacker who gained access to their systems last month copied data from a backup that contained customer account information. LastPass revealed the attack on Dec. 1, saying at the time that a hacker had gained access to a third-party cloud storage service used by the company and affiliate ...

Guardian News & Media Ltd., the publisher of the U.K. newspaper The Guardian, has been struck by a suspected ransomware attack. Details of the suspected ransomware attack were fittingly published today by The Guardian, which said that the “incident” began late Tuesday night U.K. time and had affected parts of the company’s technology infrastructure. The online ...

Deep Voodoo, an artificial intelligence entertainment startup founded by “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, revealed today that it has raised $20 million in funding to accelerate its development of deepfake technology, cost-effective visual effects services and synthetic media projects. Connect Ventures and New Enterprise Associates led the round. If you’ve never heard of ...

German multinational industrial engineering and steel production company ThyssenKrupp AG said today that it’s fending off a cyberattack against its Materials Services division and corporate headquarters. The form of attack was not disclosed. A spokesperson told Agence France Presse only that “Thyssenkrupp is currently the target of a cyberattack — presumably by organized crime” and that ...

Shares in BlackBerry Ltd. dropped slightly in after-hours trading today despite the company beating analyst’ expectations for its latest quarterly earnings. For the third quarter that ended Nov. 30, BlackBerry reported a net loss of $4 million, or a penny per share, on revenue of $169 million, down from a net profit of $74 million, ...

Identity and access control startup PlainID Inc. today launched a new network designed to deliver technology that helps organizations securely transform their authorization and access control. The PlainID Technology Network, developed with PlainID partners, offers identity-aware security across all segments of the enterprise technology stack by optimizing integration with mission-critical adjacent technologies. The goal of the service ...