Earlier this month, the world lost a one-of-a-kind creative talent with the news of Akira Toriyama's passing. While Dragon Ball will always be Toriyama-sensei's best-known work, he leaves behind a legacy full of many other imaginative worlds across games, anime, and manga. Before leaving us, he worked with Bandai Namco to flesh out one of his short manga creations further: Sand Land. Alongside a new anime series, Toriyama-sensei gave input on a videogame adaptation of Sand Land that would allow players to explore this unique world for themselves.

The classic manga Sand Land lives on in Bandai Namco's new game, which ventures beyond where the original story concludes. Read on to find out what new adventures await our mech-powered demon hero in the wetlands, caves, and Forest Land. Speaking of Forest Land, we also have a reveal of new gameplay from the woodland biome.

Cyberattacks are an existential risk, with 89% of organizations ranking ransomware as one of the top five threats to their viability, according to a November 2023 report from TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group, a leading analyst firm. And this is just one of many risks to corporate data—insider threats, data exfiltration, hardware failures, and natural disasters also pose significant danger. Moreover, as the just-released 2024 IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index states, as the generative AI market becomes more established, it could trigger the maturity of AI as an attack surface, mobilizing even further investment in new tools from cybercriminals. The report notes that enterprises should also recognize that their existing underlying infrastructure is a gateway to their AI models that doesn't require novel tactics from attackers to target.

To help clients counter these threats with earlier and more accurate detection, we're announcing new AI-enhanced versions of the IBM FlashCore Module technology available inside new IBM Storage FlashSystem products and a new version of IBM Storage Defender software to help organizations improve their ability to detect and respond to ransomware and other cyberattacks that threaten their data. The newly available fourth generation of FlashCore Module (FCM) technology enables artificial intelligence capabilities within the IBM Storage FlashSystem family. FCM works with Storage Defender to provide end-to-end data resilience across primary and secondary workloads with AI-powered sensors designed for earlier notification of cyber threats to help enterprises recover faster.

As we're about to enter the month of November, October leaves us with a couple of final game releases. This week's AA release is a sequel to a puzzle game that was quite popular when it launched at the end of 2014. The remaining titles this coming week includes RPGs, something musical, something to do with leagues and legends, a cop that's a robot and some seasons greetings.

The Talos Principle 2 / This week's AA title / Thursday 2 November
Born into a new world where biological humanity is extinct but human culture lives on in a city of robots, you find yourself swept up in a mind-bending adventure involving a mysterious megastructure hiding enormous powers. The more you discover, the more you will be confronted with questions about the nature of the cosmos and the purpose of civilization. The broken promise of a better tomorrow, the fear of repeating humankind's mistakes, faith in reason or renouncing humanity altogether - the choices you make and the sides you take will determine the course of events.

Genesis Market, an online-fraud-facilitation website and marketplace, has today been closed by an international joint effort coordinated by various police forces. Law enforcement agencies around the world took part in synchronized raids, including at locations in the UK and USA. 208 searches have been carried out, beginning at dawn on Tuesday 4 April, and a total of 119 suspected individuals have been arrested. This operation was spearheaded by the FBI in the US and the Dutch National Police. Consequently, users of the genesis.market website have been greeted with a boastful message and infographic on the home and login pages: "Operation Cookie Monster. This website has been seized."

Sophos, a leading software and hardware security vendor, has previously identified genesis.market as: "an invitation-only marketplace" from which buyers can acquire stolen credentials, cookies, and digital fingerprints that are gathered from compromised systems." According to the company's research, the illegal marketplace was also identified as an Initial Access Broker (IAB) - a business that compromises systems and services, steals data, and sells it. Genesis Market has special engagement capabilities in the field of illegally acquiring "credentials, cookies, and digital fingerprints". This stolen data was often sold on under individual lots, but the site also offered a longer term supply of data packages via a subscription service. This would offer the customer an up-to-date information trail, be it the tracking of an individual person or a collective.

The Independent has conducted an investigative report into the underwold's usage of Fortnite as a venue for money laundering. This likely won't come as a surprise - Fortnite has pretty lax acquisition restrictions for its in-game content and V-bucks, and the world's most popular multiplayer game moves millions of players through its servers daily. with such a deep pool of likely buyers for anything Fortnite at under Fortnite-store pricing, the stage is set for an almost untraceable money laundering scheme.

Razer, maker of high performance gaming gear, has reported that two of their prototype gaming laptops were stolen on the weekend of 4th November from their Bay Area R&D lab. Looking at the basic specs of the laptop, one can see why they were so attractive to thieves: Intel Core i7 2640M Processor (2.80 GHz), 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 Memory, 17.3" LED Backlit Display (1920 x 1080 pixels) & NVIDIA GeForce GT 555M with NVIDIA Optimus Technology and 2 GB Dedicated GDDR5 Video Memory and of course the styling. The outfit is understandably miffed about this and have announced the theft on their Facebook page:

Gabe Newell of Valve has issued a statement that the forum hack they experienced over the weekend actually goes much deeper than they thought. The criminals accessed the main database containing such goodies as user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. Apparently, no personally identifying information was taken - but we await the result of the full investigation before breathing a sigh of relief. Due to this serious breach, TechPowerUp advises all Steam users to change their account password immediately. People starting up their Steam client will now see the following message from Gabe Newell about this: