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AT&T is reportedly closing in on a deal to sell a stake in DirecTV to TPG, a private-equity firm.

Unfortunately for customers hoping that AT&T will relinquish control of DirecTV, a Reuters report on Friday said the pending deal would give TPG a “minority stake” in AT&T’s satellite-TV subsidiary. On the other hand, a private-equity firm looking to wring value out of a declining business wouldn’t necessarily be better for DirecTV customers than AT&T is.

It’s also possible that AT&T could cede operational control of DirecTV even if it remains the majority owner. CNBC in November reported on one proposed deal in which “AT&T would retain majority economic ownership of the [DirecTV and U-verse TV] businesses, and would maintain ownership of U-verse infrastructure, including plants and fiber,” while the buyer of a DirecTV stake

Since the earliest days of warfare, commanders of forces in the field have sought greater awareness and control of what is now commonly referred to as the “battlespace”—a fancy word for all of the elements and conditions that shape and contribute to a conflict with an adversary, and all of the types of military power that can be brought to bear to achieve their objectives.

The clearer a picture military decision-makers have of the entire battlspace, the more well-informed their tactical and strategic decisions should be. Bringing computers into the mix in the 20th century meant a whole new set of challenges and opportunities, too. The ability of computers to sort through enormous piles of data to identify trends that aren’t obvious to people

DDoS-for-hire services are abusing the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol to increase the firepower of distributed denial-of-service attacks that paralyze websites and other online services, a security firm said this week.

Typically abbreviated as RDP, Remote Desktop Protocol is the underpinning for a Microsoft Windows feature that allows one device to log into another device over the Internet. RDP is mostly used by businesses to save employees the cost or hassle of having to be physically present when accessing a computer.

As is typical with many authenticated systems, RDP responds to login requests with a much longer sequence of bits that establish a connection between the two parties. So-called booter/stresser services, which for a fee will bombard Internet addresses with enough data to take them offline, have recently embraced RDP as a means to amplify their

When hackers exploited a bug in Parler to download all of the right-wing social media platform’s contents last week, they were surprised to find that many of the pictures and videos contained geolocation metadata revealing exactly how many of the site’s users had taken part in the invasion of the US Capitol building just days before. But the videos uploaded to Parler also contain an equally sensitive bounty of data sitting in plain sight: thousands of images of unmasked faces, many of whom participated in the Capitol riot. Now one website has done the work of cataloging and publishing every one of those faces in a single, easy-to-browse lineup.

Late last week, a website called Faces of the Riot appeared online, showing nothing but a vast grid of more than 6,000 images of faces, each one tagged only with a string of characters associated with

If you’re like lots of people, someone has probably nagged you to use a password manager and you still haven’t heeded the advice. Now, Chrome and Edge are coming to the rescue with beefed-up password management built directly into the browsers.

Microsoft on Thursday announced a new password generator for the recently released Edge 88. People can use the generator when signing up for a new account or when changing an existing password. The generator provides a drop-down in the password field. Clicking on the candidate selects it as a password and saves it to a password manager built into the browser. People can then have the password pushed to their other devices using the Edge password sync feature.

As I’ve explained for years, the same things that make passwords memorable and easy to use are the same things that make them

Security firm Malwarebytes said it was breached by the same nation-state-sponsored hackers who compromised a dozen or more US government agencies and private companies.

The attackers are best known for first hacking into Austin, Texas-based SolarWinds, compromising its software-distribution system and using it to infect the networks of customers who used SolarWinds’ network management software. In an online notice, however, Malwarebytes said the attackers used a different vector.

“While Malwarebytes does not use SolarWinds, we, like many other companies were recently targeted by the same threat actor,” the notice stated. “We can confirm the existence of another intrusion vector that works by abusing applications with privileged access to Microsoft Office 365 and Azure environments.”

Investigators have determined that the attacker gained access to a limited subset of internal company emails. So far, the investigators have found no evidence of unauthorized access or compromise in any Malwarebytes production environments.

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