Hackers rollerbladed into theaters almost exactly 30 years ago. The 1995 movie features young, fashionable, rebellious techies (Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Matthew Lillard, and others) as they go up against a corrupt security officer (Fisher Stevens) framing them for an oil-tanker cyberattack.

The film is filled with additional, less final-level hacks that range from realistic to eye-rollistic, including but not limited to streetlights, class schedules, permanent records, and school sprinklers.

Nathan Hunstable remembers watching Hackers shortly after its release, when he was a young teenager who had “zero interest in computers.” Now CISO at CEC Entertainment, owner of Chuck E. Cheese, Hunstable’s interest in computers has upped a bit.

Hack the planet.—BH

Google wants to nip ransomware in the bud.

In an announcement on Sept. 30, the company unveiled an AI-powered detection for its cloud-storage platform Drive. The new feature notices file changes that reek of ransomware—like lots of rapid encryption or a sudden change in extensions (for example, from .doc to locked)—and immediately stops file-syncing between a machine and Drive.

The company believes its mechanism serves a valuable place between anti-malware options that detect ransomware in the opening phases of an attack and backup options that restore ransomware files in the latter phases.

“We want to lay a trap for attackers right after the attack starts,” Luke Camery, lead group product manager for Google Workspace, said during a Sept. 24 news briefing in advance of the announcement.

Traptastic.—BH

Endpoint detection and response (EDR), a mainstay security tool for small and large organizations, has lately had to fend off threat actors’ attempts to “kill,” “freeze,” or otherwise disable it.

And to make the challenge even more intense, these attackers are sharing their EDR R&D with each other.

“Even though these groups are competitors and have different business and affiliate models, there appears to be information/tool leakage between them,” researchers from cybersecurity company Sophos wrote in the conclusion of its August 6 report.

Cool down.—BH

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