Hackers Linked to SolarWinds Return With Phishing Attack, Microsoft Says
The Russia-linked hackers behind the cyberattack on SolarWinds have returned, launching a phishing attack targeting approximately 3,000 email accounts belonging to workers at more than 150 organizations, Microsoft said late Thursday.
The attack on SolarWinds is considered by investigators to be one of most stealthy and sophisticated ever detected, but the phishing attack was in some ways the opposite of that. The hackers took over an online account used for mass emails by the U.S. Agency for International Development and sent deceptive phishing emails that contained malicious links.
Although the attack appears to have been largely unsuccessful—most of the email messages were marked as spam, Microsoft said—investigators say it shows that the hackers behind SolarWinds aren’t going away.
“These attacks appear to be a continuation of multiple efforts…to target government agencies involved in foreign policy as part of intelligence gathering efforts,” said Tom Burt, a Microsoft corporate vice president in charge of security, in a blog post.
A Microsoft spokesman declined to say how his company had linked the attack to the SolarWinds incident. U.S. government officials have said that the SolarWinds hack was conducted by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, known as the SVR. Russia has denied that the agency was behind the SolarWinds attack.
Shares of AMC, the movie theater chain, surged more than 30 percent in early trading Friday before erasing all of those gains, as the whirlwind trading of small investors returned.
By midday on Friday, AMC was down nearly 4 percent. Before Friday’s volatility, AMC shares had jumped 120 percent this week.
The trading is reminiscent of the GameStop frenzy in January. One of the aims of the retail traders is to push up a company’s share price to force losses on hedge funds that have bet against the stock in what is called a short squeeze. At the end of 2019, before AMC became a “meme stock” darling like GameStop, the video game retailer, and Blackberry, the phone company, the share price for AMC was about $2.
GameStop slid 9 percent on Friday, after having climbed 44 percent this week.
AMC Entertainment share price
The big re-opening of live music is truly upon us. Summer music festival season is nearly here. Artists are announcing tour dates. And fans are buying tickets! Or, in some cases, they're finally getting the chance to use tickets they bought a couple years ago. But it might be a while before your favorite arena-level act can set out on tour.
"We're in an interesting place that none of us have been before," said Gary Gersh in an interview with NPR. He's the president of global touring at AEG Presents, the massive live entertainment company behind such big acts as Elton John, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd and more. Gersh said that AEG acts are booking far out: past 2022, into 2023.
"Everyone, I think, was more cautious at the beginning of the year," said Gersh. But now, some acts that pushed their bookings far into the future out of precaution have tried to move back into 2021. "And it's complicated because there's traffic everywhere," Gersh explained.
AEG rival Live Nation is stuck in the same traffic jam – so many acts trying to play as soon as possible, but only so many rooms and weekends to play. "We have an incredible supply right now looking to go on tour," Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino said on a recent episode of the Vox podcast Recode Media.
"So you have a lot of these artists that are already looking and saying, I want to go out next fall, maybe next summer, but I know these four bands are going to go also looks a little crowded. We'll go out and fall or we'll go out in summer of [2022] or the fall of [2023]. So I think it's going to naturally spread over ... into [2024]."
Translated: If you're a country music star and you see that Kane Brown has an arena tour coming up, and then you see that Garth Brooks is selling out his tour to record numbers, and Dierks Bentley's also got his thing going, maybe it makes sense to wait a bit to announce your own tour.
There's also the lingering question of the coronavirus pandemic. Different states, sometimes adjacent, are in different stages of re-opening, which makes it hard to plan an efficient, well routed tour. And if you do plan a tour, but then a state goes back into lockdown, "you can throw the entire tour off," said Gersh.
Still, acts are eager to play, hoping things shake out. Starr Butler is the vice president of booking and events at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wis. Butler says as soon as the arena started opening up to 25 and 50 percent capacity, she started getting calls. "We do have some days that have four to five holds," said Butler. She suspects that by the end of the month, she'll be scheduling events for 2025.