Elon Musk adds to Twitter case / DOJ prepping antitrust suit against Apple / Best Buy earnings

Plus, U.S. job openings for July totaled 11.24 million.

Inside.com Part of   Network August 30, 2022

Elon Musk filed another notice on Tuesday in an attempt to terminate his $44B Twitter acquisition agreement. In the documents, the Tesla CEO referred to the recent claims by Twitter’s former head of security, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, accusing the social media company of weak privacy and security policies. More: On July 8, Musk announced he was terminating the agreement to take Twitter private, saying Twitter has not been honest about the number of spam/bots on the platform. In the filing on Tuesday, Musk’s legal team cited Zatko’s allegations as additional reasons to terminate the deal. Mike Ringler, Musk’s legal representative from Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, noted in the filing that the additional notice to terminate the deal is being delivered in case the July 8 filing is “determined to be invalid for any reason. Twitter has maintained the accuracy of its 5% figure for spam accounts on the platform. Twitter shares closed at $39.32, down ~2% on Tuesday.

The U.S. Department of Justice is in the early stages of prepping an antitrust lawsuit against Apple. According to sources, the department has been investigating the tech giant since 2019 over allegations that it has abused its market power to stifle smaller tech companies, including app developers and rival hardware firms. More: The investigation is part of an ongoing effort by the DOJ, the FTC, and Congress to rein in the power of Big Tech in the U.S. The DOJ could end up not bringing a formal lawsuit, but reports suggest a potential case could arrive before the end of the year. According to legal analysts, any case against Apple would be a difficult fight for the DOJ, as the tech giant has a market cap of over $2.5T and seemingly endless cash reserves. Apple shares closed at $158.91 on Tuesday, down ~1.5% for the day. The company is down ~12.7% YTD.

Owners of the New York Yankees, Los Angeles-based investment firm Main Street Advisors, and U.S. private equity firm RedBird are partnering up to buy Italian football club AC Milan. According to sources, the group is purchasing the club from U.S. hedge fund Elliott Management in a deal valued at €1.2B ($1.2B). More: Investors in Main Street Advisors include basketball star LeBron James, music producer Jimmy Iovine, and rapper Drake. The New York Yankees are owned by the Steinbrenner family, which has owned the Major League Baseball team since 1973. The Yankees were last valued at $6B by Forbes. The baseball franchise also co-owns the New York City FC franchise with Manchester City Football Group. As part of the deal, Elliott agreed to lend RedBird €600M ($600M) at a 7% interest rate to help finance the transaction.

Best Buy released its Q2 FY2023 earnings on Tuesday, reporting a 13% drop in sales. The consumer electronics retailer generated $10.33B in revenue. Net income came in at $306M, or $1.35 a share, down from $734M reported over the same period last year. More: Same-store sales dropped 12.1% compared to last year. Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said the company closely managed its inventory to ensure it didn’t accumulate excess products. Best Buy’s end of Q2 inventory was down 6% compared to last year. The company spent $34M on a restructuring effort that included layoffs and halting share buybacks. Best Buy shares closed at $74.89 on Tuesday, up 1.61% for the day. The company is down ~27% YTD.

First Solar, the largest solar panel manufacturer in the U.S., plans to build a new factory in the southeastern U.S. CEO Mark Widmar said the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act led the company to choose the U.S. for its new factory. Earlier this month, Congress passed the act aimed at combating climate change and lowering costs for families. More: First Solar plans to invest up to $1B in the new facility. The plant would be the company’s fourth fully integrated U.S. factory. The company also plans to spend $185M updating and expanding its existing facilities in Ohio. First Solar aims for the new factory to produce 3.5 gigawatts of solar modules annually by 2025. Shares of First Solar have jumped over 60% since the end of July. The stock closed at $122.31 a share on Tuesday, up ~0.5% for the day.

Donald Trump's Truth Social has not been approved for Google's Play Store for Android apps. According to a Google spokesperson, the social media platform was not approved due to its insufficient content moderation. More: Google said it notified Truth Social on Aug. 19 of several violations of Google's terms and policies in their app submission and reiterated that having effective moderation systems is a condition of approval for access to Google's Play store. Google said the social media company responded by acknowledging Google's feedback and said they were working on addressing the issues. About 44% of U.S. smartphone users have Android devices. A recent report revealed that Truth Social owes one of its vendors over $1.6M. The SPAC DWAC seeking to merge with Trump's media company is also under investigation by the SEC.

Quick Hits Fix your email overload for as little as $7.00 a month.* Garry Tan, founder of Initialized Capital and YCombinator alumnus, will become the president and CEO of Y Combinator next year. Tan will be taking over from Geoff Ralston, who has been with YC since 2011. Tan will also continue to serve as founder and partner at Initialized. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency on Monday evening after flood waters impacted one of Jackson, Mississippi’s water-treatment plants. Residents have been warned not to drink the water. About 180,000 people in the capital city and surrounding communities could go without running water indefinitely. U.S. job openings for July totaled 11.24 million, nearly double the 5.67 million available workers. The amount is 1 million more job openings than expected in July by FactSet, which estimated 10.3 million job openings for the month. Meta Platforms has agreed to settle a lawsuit related to its Cambridge Analytica scandal when Facebook provided access to private user data, which was used for political ad targeting. Meta and the Facebook users suing the company said in the joint filing that they had reached an agreement in principle but did not disclose financial details of the agreement. Amid the shifting landscape of embedded systems, developers turn to real-time operating systems when “good enough” isn’t good enough.* *This is a sponsored post.

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Vanessa Omeokachie is a Researcher at Inside. Her interests include finance, tech, and startups. In her free time, she enjoys reading, hiking, attending music festivals, and traveling.  Connect with her on Twitter @VanessaOmeo or through email at vanessa@inside.com Editor Aaron Crutchfield is based in the high desert of California. Over the last two decades, he has spent time writing and editing at various local newspapers and defense contractors in California. When he's not working, he can often be found looking at the latest memes with his kids or working on his 1962 and 1972 Fords.

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U.S. Cyber Command and NSA partner to shield midterms from hackers / Global ransomware damages set to exceed $30B / India's newest airline could have leaked customer data

Plus: Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines have suffered an outage

Inside.com Part of   Network August 30, 2022

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The U.S. Cyber Command has partnered with the NSA to shield midterm elections from hackers. The two federal agencies made the announcement in a joint statement. More: The two agencies have created a joint task force named the Election Security Group. Officials from the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command have stated that the group comprises the best team members that the two agencies have. ESG will receive and share information with other domestic and international authorities to ensure it achieves its goal of protecting the midterm elections from foreign threat actors. The task force will also help U.S. allies to protect their electoral campaigns from actors that want to undermine them. Zoom Out: CISA has collaborated with the private sector as well. IronNet, a cybersecurity company, signed a collaboration memorandum with the agency two weeks ago. CISA has consistently released recommendations for federal agencies and private individuals to help them fend off potential cybersecurity attacks.

Global ransomware damages are set to exceed $30B next year. Phishing was the most used threat vector. More: Almost half of the ransomware victims that were breached had their credentials stolen. Hackers launched 600 email campaigns in the first half of 2022, most of which used phishing as a threat vector, while the rest tried to breach victims using malware. According to researchers, ransomware development has surpassed industry expectations. This has been proven by a large number of ransomware and phishing victims, such as the $620M Axie infinity hack, the $35M Crypto.com hack, etc. Some of the most active hacker groups this year are Conti, Lapsus, North Korea-backed groups, etc. Zoom Out: Ransomware is part of 10% of all breaches, with hackers doubling the number of ransomware attempts in 2021. According to data, only 65% of the victims who paid ransom had their data sent back to them.

A message from SECURITY COMPASS Current approaches to software threat modeling simply don’t work.  They are: Manual Inconsistent Take too long Don’t scale Don’t give developers what they need When software security and compliance are considered more as an afterthought, rather than a vital step in the development process, organizations end up trying to remediate security and compliance issues after software has been written, rather than preventing issues in the first place. Here you can find a series of posts breaking down how you can anticipate threats earlier in the software development life cycle to create more secure and compliant software. Empower DevSecOps teams to make software secure and compliant by design through automating threat modeling, generating application security requirements, and providing secure development and compliance best practices. The SD Elements platform is the best solution for organizations who need to scalably model software threats, identify countermeasures, and deliver secure, compliant code quickly. Download whitepaper bundle

India's newest airline has been found to be liable for leaking passenger data. The company is named Akasa Air. More: Hackers may have gained access to details such as names, genders, email addresses, and phone numbers. The bug was found on Sept. 7, the same day that the company began operating. Akasa Air released a statement, claiming that besides the aforementioned information, other data such as travel records, payment information, and other sensitive data were not exposed. The company believes that hackers did not steal any information, but it advises its customers to be aware and take extra safety measures. Zoom Out: Airlines have been the target of numerous cyberattacks previously. A 28-year-old Belgium national hacked the website of American Airlines this year.  According to estimates, airlines have lost over $1B in damages from website hacks alone.

Microsoft Azure virtual machines have suffered an outage. The outage affects Virtual Machines running Ubuntu 18.04. More: The error was first tracked at 06:00 UTC. This flaw was noticed by users who tried to update their Virtual Machines to systemd version 237-3ubuntu10.54. According to Microsoft, services that are currently down are: ​​ Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Monitor, Azure Sentinel, Azure Container Apps, etc. Microsoft has recommended that users either reboot their devices or wait for another fix at further notice. The company also recommends that users turn off their security updates until the bug is fixed. Zoom Out: Russia's APT29 targeted Microsoft Azure last week. The group aimed to hack NATO countries by breaching their Microsoft 365 accounts. Azure was also targeted by hacker group Lapsus$ back in March 2022. The group leaked stolen data on its Telegram channel, while further attacks against Microsoft have been prevalent for the rest of the year so far.

A message from QUANTUM Effective and Reliable Data Storage Protection that Scales on Your Terms and Budget Data recovery is possible across the entire lifecycle - and air-gapped protection is both the safest and the lowest TCO. Successful Ransomware attacks can take months to fully recover from - especially when targeted campaigns wipe out clusters of servers. So why not choose a solution that protects and recovers at any point in your data’s lifecycle? With different tiers, you’re able to ensure availability of data without compromise. You’re able to balance cost while maximizing efficiency. No one can stop ransomware or fully prevent it from taking place - but you can make sure you’re protecting your customers and your data by ensuring that there is a fully air-gapped solution. Request A Demo

Cybersecurity startup Devicie has raised a $14M Series A. The round was led by New York VC giant Insight Partners. More: Other participants in the round include CyberCX. Devicie has built a SaaS platform that automatically updates security protocols and security apps for its clients. The company aims to double its number of employees by next year. Devicie claims that since 90% of cyberattacks happen through employees' devices, helping make those devices more secure and updated must be a priority for these companies. The startup aims to use the funding for expansion into the U.S. and EMEA markets.

Quick Hits: Fix your email overload for as little as $7.00 a month.* The U.S. FTC has filed a lawsuit against Kochava, a location tracking company. Three hacking campaigns that are related to each other have been tracked. The hacking campaigns are using ModernLoader, RedLine Stealer, and cryptocurrency miners on compromised systems, spread through PowerShell, .NET assemblies, HTA, and VBS files. The Australian government is set to invest $6.8B in cybersecurity over the next decade by implementing a new program called Resilience, Effects, Defense, Space, Intelligence, Cyber, and Enablers. Edmonds College has received a $1.5M cybersecurity grant. The funding comes as a result of the Build Back Better legislation signed by President Biden a few weeks ago. Amid the shifting landscape of embedded systems, developers turn to real-time operating systems when "good enough" isn't good enough.* *This is sponsored content.

Upcoming events at Inside: August 31 - AMA with Sophia Amoruso (CEO at Business Class) (Register Here) September 07 - AMA with Andrew Gazdecki (Founder of MicroAcquire) (Register Here) September 09 - AMA with Jay Ryan (U.S. Federal Government Program Manager at Security Compass) (Register Here) September 14 - AMA with Brian Dean (Founder of Backlinko) (Register Here) September 21 - AMA with Kristen Ruby (Founder of Ruby Media Group) (Register Here) September 28 - AMA with Leigh-Ann Buchanan (Founder of aīre ventures) (Register Here) October 12 - AMA with Bill Glenn (Executive Chairman at Crenshaw Associates) (Register Here) October 25 - Meet Our Fund 4, an Inside.com Summit (Register Here)

Arbër is an Inside writer who also has experience in entrepreneurship. He has experience covering Consumer Tech, Venture Capital, NFTs, Crypto, etc. Arbër holds a Bachelor's degree in Business from XAMK University in Finland. When he is not reading(and writing) business news, he chooses to watch sports or anime...and then read news about sports or anime. Editor Aaron Crutchfield is based in the high desert of California. Over the last two decades, he has spent time writing and editing at various local newspapers and defense contractors in California. When he's not working, he can often be found looking at the latest memes with his kids or working on his 1962 and 1972 Fords.

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