Axios

Despite increasing company budgets for cybersecurity, ransomware attacks still affected nine in 10 U.S., U.K. and Canadian organizations in the last year.

Driving the news: Cybersecurity company SpyCloud released a report today based on a survey of 310 IT professionals at organizations with at least 500 employees. The survey was conducted between September 2021 and August 2022.

The data-extortion group outed earlier this year as a group of teenagers seems to be making a comeback.

Driving the news: Uber said Monday that it believes last week's hack of its systems is affiliated with the Lapsus$ hacking group.

No matter how confusing it gets to refer to the same Russian hacker group by a handful of different names — Cozy Bear, Nobelium, APT29 and so on — don't expect the private companies behind those monikers to give them up anytime soon.

The big picture: Naming conventions for state-backed hacking groups vary from technical, advanced persistent threat (APT) group numbers to whimsical, animal-based names, making it difficult for people outside of cybersecurity research to understand which hackers do what.

India's largest crypto exchange is following Binance out of some dollar-pegged stablecoins, further tilting the tables toward the BUSD token.

Driving the news: The exchange, WazirX, on Monday said it already stopped taking new deposits denominated in USDC, USDP, and TUSD — the dollar-pegged stablecoins from Circle, Paxos, and True. And any existing deposits would soon be auto-converted to Binance's namesake stablecoin.

Slack is announcing Tuesday a new collaborative feature dubbed canvas, built on Salesforce's Quip technology, marking the first major technology integration since Slack was acquired by Salesforce last year.

Why it matters: Slack has already been trying to supplant other forms of business communication, including chat and e-mail, and now it's trying to take on tasks previously handled by productivity tools such as Google Docs and Microsoft Office.

Smartphones have moved from being a luxury or a convenience to becoming a necessity or a lifeline, yet people over 50 are both less likely to own the devices and more likely to feel excluded by them.

Why it matters: More than ever, services and businesses from banks to doctors' offices and restaurants to airlines expect users to have access to smartphones — but many older people still lack digital skills, and products don't always take their needs into account.

Workers are being tricked into giving up their digital credentials through their most trusted device — their cellphones.

Why it matters: Companies are now more vulnerable than ever for large scale hacks as employees work from home and use their personal devices.

Google is launching a pilot program to keep emails from political campaigns from going to users' spam folders this week, the company told Axios.

Why it matters: Gmail users may start seeing a lot more political emails in their inboxes, partly a result of Google bowing to pressure from conservatives who claimed the company marked Republican emails as spam more often than others.

The Treasury and Justice departments intend to act as nail and hammer to the dark side of the crypto industry — one working to identify cyber criminals and their exploits and the other, prosecuting and bringing those baddies to account.

Driving the news: Friday's slate of reports from the Biden administration on a framework for digital assets development home in on matters that threaten national security and the U.S. financial ecosystem, listing priorities and making recommendations per the president's March imperative.

The PayPal Mafia has had a good run, but it may be time to shift focus to alumni of a less fashionable Internet pioneer: LinkedIn.

Driving the news: Dylan Field was a data analytics intern at LinkedIn in 2010. He later founded Figma, which last week agreed to sell to Adobe for $20 billion.

Officials at Rockstar Games expressed disappointment today that in-development footage of their next Grand Theft Auto leaked Sunday but said it will not derail the game.

Why it matters: The unprecedented leak spilled 90 videos of the expected blockbuster online, with the apparent leaker threatening to also release the game's source code.

The Last Mile, which teaches coding skills to incarcerated people, is expanding a program that provides them with Chromebooks so they can continue their learning outside of specialized prison classrooms.

Why it matters: Incarcerated people often have limited access to technology and pay exorbitant rates for even basic communication tools, like phones.

Cities in Sweden and Norway are aiming to recycle the heat given off by data centers, in an innovative effort to repurpose what's usually treated as a useless byproduct of computer servers' constant number-crunching.

Why it matters: Data centers account for about 1% of global electricity use annually, and emit enormous amounts of heat that generally goes unused.

A new report out Monday from New York University faults Meta, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube for amplifying false claims about U.S. election fraud and urges the platforms to be more transparent and consistent in their content policies.

Why it matters: "Big lie" claims online have contributed to a lack of trust in U.S. elections and increased support for new voting laws that disproportionately impact people of color, the report says.