Mexican state-owned petroleum company Petróleos Mexicanos, known as Pemex, has been targeted in a ransomware attack whose perpetrators are demanding a ransom of 565 bitcoin, worth $4.93 million. The attack, which forced the company to shut down much of its computer network including payment systems, struck on Sunday. According to Reuters, the Ryuk ransomware was used ...

Oculus Chief Technology Officer John Carmack is stepping down from the position he has held since 2013 to spend time working on artificial intelligence. Although he won’t have a formal role in the company, Carmack (pictured) will remain somewhat involved, taking on a new position of “consulting CTO” instead. He made the announcement today on Facebook. Carmack, ...

Smart home speaker sales surged in the third quarter and Amazon.com Inc. increased its lead in the market. According to figures today from Canalys, in the quarter overall smart speaker sales grew 44.9% from the same quarter in 2018. Amazon held a 36.6% share of the market, up from 31.9% a year ago. Amazon smart ...

Online cybersecurity career development startup Cybrary Inc. today said it has raised $15 million in new funding to accelerate the growth of the company’s online workforce development platform. The Series B round was led by BuildGroup and included Arthur Ventures and Gula Tech Adventures. As part of the deal, Gray Hall, managing director of BuildGroup, and Ron Gula, ...

Container security startup Aqua Security Software Ltd. today revealed that it has acquired cloud security-as-a-service startup CloudSploit LLC for an undisclosed price. Founded in 2015 and based in the Washington D.C. area, CloudSploit’s SaaS platform offers open-source and hosted automated security and configuration monitoring software for Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Azure cloud environments. ...

ASP.NET hosting provider SmarterASP.NET was struck with ransomware on Saturday, continuing to affect customer sites into today. The company, with more than 440,000 customers, didn’t provide many details as to the form of the attack. But it said in an announcement to customers that “your hosting account was under attack and hackers have encrypted all your ...

Cryptocurrency startup Bakkt LLC, founded by New York Stock Exchange owner Intercontinental Exchange Inc. today entered the bitcoin institutional custody business after obtaining approval from the New York Department of Financial Services. The service, an extension of the company’s Bakkt Warehouse, offers bitcoin custodial services to institutional investors. A custodial service involves an entity holding a client’s property, ...

Fresh from banning all political advertising Oct. 30, Twitter Inc.’s latest cause célèbre is deepfakes — but the microblogging platform’s new draft policy does not go far enough, according to some. Asking for feedback, Twitter’s draft policy on deepfakes — in its words, “synthetic and manipulated” media — is not proposing to ban all such ...

Apple Inc. has pushed back its long-rumored augmented reality headset to 2022 with a pair of smart glasses to follow in 2023, according to a new report. The Information, quoting people familiar with the matter, said Apple executives shared the company’s product roadmap for the devices at an internal presentation to employees in October. Apple ...

Remote IT management solutions firm ConnectWise LLC is warning customers that hackers are targeting its software to install ransomware. Florida-based ConnectWise, acquired by Thomas Bravo for $1.5 billion in February, provides collaboration and management solutions to firms such as Liberty Technology Inc. The company’s Automate remote monitoring and management product is the specific target of those behind ...