Happy National Mustard Day! Grab your bottles of mustard and start eating stuff covered in that spicy, yellow sauce. This magical day only comes once a year, so take advantage of it! To celebrate the holiday, I asked you wonderful folks to create some images featuring video games and mustard. Some of you decided to…
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Earlier this week, Capcom revealed that three fan-favorite characters were coming to Street Fighter V except..well, the problem is the company didn’t reveal it. Steam leaked it early thanks to a scheduling snafu.
Valve has since apologized for the incident in the Community Hub for Street Fighter V on Steam:
On Wednesday of this week there was a mix-up in the publishing process at Valve that caused a trailer to go live on Steam ahead of schedule. The trailer includes the major reveal of Poison, Lucia, and E. Honda as characters joining the fighter roster.
It’s a regrettable and unintentional situation, and we have already implemented measures to prevent this error from happening again. We are fans of Street Fighter ourselves and we’re sorry for the error.
-The Steam Team
For more on Street Fighter V, check out our review for the launch edition here.
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If you attend E3 as someone writing or making video content about the conference, chances are you’ll need to apply for a media badge with the event’s organizer, The Entertainment Software Association (ESA). The process includes putting down your phone number, address (physical and email), and several other bits of personal information. Over 2,000 people who went through that process and received a badge for E3 2019 have just had all that information put out on the internet without their permission.
YouTube Creator Sophia Narwitz discovered the easy-to-access list and created a video to bring its existence to the public attention last night. After a public outcry from those affected by the data breach (which includes content creators, journalists, and analysts from Wall Street), the ESA removed the list but not before it was archived and made available on a number of forums. It’s not clear who took the information and initially shared it.
The ESA has since made a brief apology for the incident:
The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) was made aware yesterday of a website vulnerability on the exhibitor portal section of the E3 website. Unfortunately, a vulnerability was exploited and that list became public. We regret this happened and are sorry.
We provide ESA members and exhibitors a media list on a password-protected exhibitor site so they can invite you to E3 press events, connect with you for interviews, and let you know what they are showcasing. For more than 20 years there has never been an issue. When we found out, we took down the E3 exhibitor portal and ensured the media list was no longer available on the E3 website.
Again, we apologize for the inconvenience and have already taken steps to ensure this will not happen again.
Thank you
Entertainment Software Association
The apology, unsurprisingly, has not done much to assuage the anger and frustration of those whose data was leaked, with many demanding some form of reparation from the company. There are concerns among those affected that those with anti-media leanings will use that information to harass those whose data has been leaked. At least one member of the press has reported receiving email threats containing their own personal home address.
We’ll update this story further as it develops.
This massive breach in trust will probably have consequences that aren’t immediately apparent. The list could be accessible in Europe, meaning that this data violation could open up the ESA to a GDPR-related lawsuit. Furthermore, who’s to say that this sort of thing couldn’t happen to public attendees as well in the future? Will this breach keep people from all sides of the industry from attending future shows? For an expo that many critics have said are in its waning years, this incident is doing E3 no favors.
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Fighting games take center stage this weekend as Evo returns to Las Vegas for another around of large-scale competition. There’s some other stuff too, though!
Evo is the world’s biggest fighting game tournament, so if you’re a fan of watching people punch each other a whole lot, you’re in luck! There are major tournaments for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Tekken 7, Street Fighter V, BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, Mortal Kombat 11, Samurai Shodown, Unider Night In-Birth, Dragon Ball FighterZ, and Soulcalibur VI (Streams and Schedule)
You can also catch some more obscure games of the anime persuasion, like Darkstalkers 3, Kill La Kill: IF, Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom, Guilty Gear Xrd, Windjammers, Puyo Puyo Tetris, and more at AnimEvo, which is only going on today (so as to no interfere with Evo finals), but should plenty of great action! (Streams and Schedule)
Apex Legends continues to dip its toes into a competitive scene this weekend with a quick invitational tournament at the X-Games (yes, those X-Games) right here in Minneapolis! The action starts today at 3 p.m. (Stream)
We also have several more Overwatch League matches! The Shanghai Dragons aren’t playing, so I’ll root for, erm, The Toronto Defiant! They’re the hot team now! (Stream / Schedule)
League of Legends also has several more matches lined up for today and tomorrow, so if fighters and shooters aren’t your thing, maybe MOBAs are? (Stream and Schedule)
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“Ownership of anything is going out the window for all of us”.
When fans of the blue blur got their first glimpse of the Sonic the Hedgehog movie, there was mass outrage online about the design of the character. Following the backlash, director Jeff Fowler made the decision to delay the film and vowed to change the controversial design. The film is now due out on Valentine’s Day 2020.
Although this decision has been praised online, it doesn’t necessarily reflect everyone. Jim Carrey, who plays Dr. Robotnik in the upcoming film, was recently asked about how he felt about the delay of the movie and Sonic redesign during the Television Critics Association presentation for his new Showtime series, Kidding.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
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Cardboard innovation.
Last year, Nintendo said Labo was a title and platform that would be supported and sold for a prolonged period of time. Staying true to its word, earlier this week the company released a special VR update for Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. This follows on from Labo VR updates for multiple other first-party Switch titles.
Now, to help spread the word about this magnificent cardboard tech, Nintendo has uploaded the second segment of its special video series with Labo director, Tsubasa Sakaguchi. In this brief three-minute video, you’ll hear Sakaguchi speak about how the concept for Labo came about and how VR was incorporated. Interestingly, basic VR research at Nintendo was already underway prior to Labo’s creation. Last, of all, you can find out what inspired the different gameplay concepts within the VR Kit.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
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Motion capture heroes weigh in on The Last of Us, Death Stranding, more.
There are very few celebrities in the gaming industry, but Nolan North and Troy Baker demand top billing. Having starred as the heroes in some of PlayStation’s biggest games, we simply couldn’t resist the opportunity to grill the pair on their current projects – including The Last of Us: Part II, Marvel’s Avengers, and Death Stranding. Speaking at Manchester Comic-Con, we also learned a little more about the duo’s tight-knit relationship, which has led to the launch of a new YouTube channel named Retro Replay.
Push Square: Hey, it’s good to meet you. You guys are our heroes.
Read the full article on pushsquare.com
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Coming to PS4 in 2019.
Sumo Digital sure has its fingers in a lot of pies, doesn’t it? Not only is it working on all kinds of support work for various publishers, it’s busy making its very own titles too. Snake Pass was a pleasant surprise when it slithered onto PlayStation 4 a couple of years ago, and now the studio returns with another original property. Pass the Punch is a 2D beat ’em up with visuals inspired by 90s cartoons.
Read the full article on pushsquare.com
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The online clothing marketplace Poshmark which allows users in North America to buy and sell new or used clothes, shoes and accessories has revealed that it has suffered a data breach.
According to the company, an unauthorized party was able to gain access to its servers and steal information on users including their usernames, hashed passwords, first and last names, gender and city of residence.
Users who connected their social media accounts to Poshmark also had their clothing size preferences, user emails and social media profile information stolen by the attackers.
While user’s hashed passwords were stolen in the breach, Poshmark uses a one-way hashing algorithm to scramble its passwords and the company also salted or randomly scrambled some passwords on a per-user basis which makes it almost impossible for the stolen passwords to be used to access an account.
Those behind the data breach also managed to obtain some internal Poshmark account preferences which are used by the company to send email, browser and push notifications on mobile.
The online marketplace did not reveal when the breach occurred or when it first found out about it. However, Poshmark did say that no financial data or physical addresses were taken by hackers.
In a security notice, the company explained its course of action following the breach, saying:
“We conducted an internal investigation and retained outside experts, including a leading security forensics firm. The security forensics firm we retained ran extensive testing designed to find vulnerabilities in our software and systems. After the testing, the firm reported that it did not find any material vulnerabilities. While our security was already strong, we have implemented enhanced security measures across all systems to help prevent this type of incident from happening in the future.”
Poshmark is now notifying all impacted customers via email on a rolling basis and luckily none of its Canadian users were affected by the breach.
Via ZDNet
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Many people are aware of the need for a firewall on their personal computer, either as a standalone package or as part of an anti-virus or internet security suite.
However, there has been both an increasing need and demand for something similar to protect websites and their users from similar malicious activity. The solution? A cloud-based firewall know as a Web Application Firewall (WAF).
WAFs have become increasingly necessary due to various attacked vectors. These include Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacked in which a malicious user or bot tries to leverage code executions in your database or scripting software to gain access to the underlying database, and so have a direct way into your server.
Another known threat is Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacked, in which a botnet tries to flood a server or network with too much information for it to be able to handle, thus crashing the server and taking down your network and website presence with it.
There are also other user-based attacks, such as phishing, credential stuffing, and clickjacking, in which malicious software comes into play between your visitor’s browser and your website itself, allowing hackers to steal information that should be secure, such as passwords or even credit card information.
These are all issues that Web Application Firewalls aim to prevent and protect against. However, a WAF should be invisible to users, so they will never know it’s there.
Usually, WAFs come with dynamic rules that are constantly updated to keep abreast of the latest threats, along with a backend dashboard to provide analytics of how it’s working.
There are a number of WAFs on the market, and here we’ll look at some of the best available now.
CloudFlare is a company that provides content delivery services, DDoS mitigation, Internet security and distributed domain name server providers. It was founded in 2009.
The solution monitors the internet on a regular basis for any new updates such as attacks and vulnerabilities. Anything that is considered a threat to the majority of their clients automatically have WAF (Web application Firewalls) rules enabled. These will protect all internet properties. Constant updates ensure that CloudFlare’s protection is in place at all times.
Cloudflare deals with a huge number of requests every hour with the solution identifying and blocking new threats. Due to their large customer base, the platform is able to rely on a collective intelligence when it comes to eradicating threats. This means that when one customer creates a new WAF rule, CloudFlare decides whether it applies to all other domains on their network.
CloudFlare has a free tier. This includes unmetered mitigation of DDoS, global CDN, shared SSL certificate and 3 page rules. Additional rules can be purchased through CloudFlare’s dashboard.
The ‘Pro’ package is $20 per month which includes Web application Firewall (WAF) with CloudFlare rulesets, mobile optimizations with Polish and 20 page rules.
For $200 per month, the ‘Business’ plan comes with WAF with 25 custom rulesets, 50 page rules and custom SSL certificate upload.
The ‘Enterprise’ tier includes 24/7 enterprise grade phone, chat and email support, 100 page rules, named solution and customer success engineers.
Some users have reported delays with analytics and log systems.
Amazon Web Services is part of Amazon.com. It provides on-demand cloud computing platforms to individuals and businesses. As part of this subscription, users have access to AWS WAF.
AWS WAF is a web application firewall which protects web applications from threats which could compromise their security or consume resources. The solution itself is straight forward and easy to use.
Users can create custom made rules designed to block common attack patterns such as cross-site scripting. The solution has a full featured API which allows users to automate the creation, deployment and maintenance of all rules in use.
AWS WAF works by charging you for each new rule you create. You are not charged a set price every month but you do have to be subscribed to Amazon Web Services to access this feature.
Amazon Web Services include a 12 month fully featured free trial.
Sophos is a British security software and hardware company. It develops products for communication endpoint, encryption, network security and unified threat management.
Sophos XG Firewall is a unified threat manager which also acts as a firewall. It also acts as application security and wireless gateway.
Users can manage settings from Sophos’ ‘Control Center’. From here subscribers can access the utilities dashboard. This allows you to view your network, users and applications. You can also add Sophos ‘iView’. This provides centralized reporting across multiple firewalls.
The XG Firewall management interface gives users an overview on features such as traffic insights, system statistics and firewall rules.
Sophos offers users a 30-day free trial. This includes IPS, ATP, Sandboxing, Dual AV, Web and App Control, Anti-phishing and Web Application Firewall. Subscribers need to contact Sophos directly to receive a quote.
Some commentators have complained the UI is not intuitive and cannot be customized.
Image Credit: Akamai
Akamai Technologies is a content delivery network and cloud service provider. It was founded in 1998.
Akamai Kona Site Defender integrates DDoS protection with its web application firewall. DDoS services identify and neutralize threats from IP addresses by using a scale system from 1 to 10. These scores are based on the IP addresses ability to source suspicious traffic. Scores are then used to allow, alert or block based on the severity of the score. Users can also customize settings so they can choose which IP addresses they want blocked.
The web application firewall inspects individual traffic. Any malicious attacks are eradicated. This tool only works against web-based attacks.
Users can use the management dashboard to access information such as reports and attack rates. The utility requires very little customization.
Subscribers will need to contact Akamai directly in order to start their free trial and to get a quote.
Online commentators have said they regret more information about the product isn’t available on Akamai’s website.
Image Credit: Imperva
Imperva is a cloud-based Web Application Firewall (WAF). It provides web application security, DDoS mitigation, content caching, application delivery and load balancing through a global content delivery network.
The Imperva Web Application Firewall works as a gateway for all traffic coming to your online services. It filters out malicious visitors and requests such as SQL injections and XSS attacks.
The solution uses several layers of security policies to identify threats. These are maintained by a security team. Imperva uses attack information from their network to provide protection for their users.
Imperva has 25 data centers around the world which ensures 24/7 monitoring.
Signal Sciences was founded five years ago by the security developers at Etsy, and since then the company has grown and developed with a string of high-profile clients.
A key promotional point of the Signal Sciences WAF is that too many existing services don’t properly service modern IT infrastructures, especially where there is extensive use of cloud technology, as opposed to being reliant on legacy hardware.
Setting up is so easy and quick it can be done in minutes, as there are no agents to deploy with all traffic being redirected through the Signal Services Cloud Engine, where it can be monitored and filtered as required.
There’s a single management console with built-in analytics that provides real-time monitoring, so there’s no need to work through multiple interfaces. There are also DevOps integration options available, not least for Slack, PagerDuty, and Jira.
Although built to cater for cloud applications, the Signal Sciences WAF can work with hybrid clouds and server hardware directly. It can also function on premise, in containers, or in the cloud.
In terms of security, it blocks all common OWASP attacks, as well as misbehaving bots, and denial of services attacks. The software is fully PCI 6 compliant.
Overall, the Signal Sciences WAF doesn’t just focus on security, but also performance, reliability, as well as overall management operability.
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