Popular TikTok user and Twitch streamer Pokeprincxss has been forced to rebrand and hand over money to Nintendo after being sued by the company.

Gaining a mighty 1.9 million followers on TikTok and more than 50,000 followers on Twitch, the star has been selling merchandise based around her branding and also trademarked her username. Her name and merchandise are both inspired by the Pokémon franchise, with items including imagery of things like Poké Balls.

The star has taken to YouTube to explain the reasoning behind her sudden channel name change, telling viewers that she’ll now be known as digitalprincxss, dropping the ‘Poke’ from the name altogether. “I was young and dumb and I was just going full force with it because I didn’t know what I was doing was wrong,” she says (thanks, GameRant).

Pokeprincxss – now digitalprincxss – has received a cease and desist from Nintendo, and believes that it may have been issued thanks to the merchandise imagery, her trademark, and the fact that she also works in the adult entertainment industry, presuming that Nintendo might have wanted to distance itself to keep up with its family-friendly image.

The Nintendo Ninjas strike again!

© Nintendo Life

Nintendo has revealed that it will be permanently reducing the price of its Switch Joy-Con controllers in Japan, starting from next month.

From 6th November, the price of a single Joy-Con controller will be revised from 4,480 yen + tax to 3,740 yen + tax, which is a drop of about 16.5%. The price reduction will apply to single Joy-Con products only, meaning Switch owners will still pay the same, regular price for a complete pack of two (thanks, Japanese Nintendo).

Users in Japan can buy Grey, Neon Red, Neon Blue, Neon Yellow, Neon Green, Red, and Neon Pink Joy-Con from the country’s official store.

Naturally, then, we can’t help but wonder whether or not a similar pricing restructure will arrive here in the west. Could we be about to see a permanent reduction in price across Europe and the US, or will this remain a Japan-only deal?

We’re sure a drop in price would be well received, especially with all of the Joy-Con drift issues we’ve been seeing, but feel free to have your say in the comments below. Do you think we’ll see a price drop soon?

A unknown number of GameSpot employees have been laid off following its acquisition by Red Ventures.

GameSpot senior social producer Ashley Oh, branded content editor Will Fulton, Australian editor and senior video producer Edmond Tran, host and producer Jess McDonell, and producer Tony Wilson all announced their departures on Twitter, and some indicated the redundancies are linked to the recent Red Ventures deal.

“Since GameSpot/CNET were sold and it’s not yet clear whether I’ll still have a job in a month, please get at me if you know of any open positions that need a smart weirdo with lots of experience in storytelling, writing, and editing,” wrote Fulton on September 17, before confirming his departure in a follow-up tweet on October 8.

Red Ventures agreed to buy CNET Media Group, which also includes brands like Metacritic, Giant Bomb, and CNET, in a $500 million deal last month. Commenting on the layoffs in a statement to GamesIndustry.biz, the company said it would “retain a vast majority” of staff, thereby confirming (in a rather roundabout way) that some would be let go.

“As part of Red Ventures acquisition agreement with ViacomCBS, Red Ventures will retain a vast majority of CNET Media Group employees and assets under the Red Ventures business umbrella,” said the company. “The deal has not closed and to protect the privacy of our employees we cannot release additional information at this time.”

Russia-based Donut Lab, creator of the in-development mobile game Kids vs. Zombies, has raised $1.6 million in funding, VentureBeat reports.

Game investment firm Level-Up out of Luxembourg led the round. Kids vs. Zombies is currently on Google Play in early access, and will eventually release on iOS, according to the report. The game adopts a free-to-play model, monetizing cosmetic virtual items and abilities.

“For the mainstream audience, we really wanted to make the game without a lot of violence,” Donut Lab cofounder Tim Raiter said. “They are fighting against mediocrity, boredom, and the adults who become the zombies.”

The NeoAxis game engine just had a new release, NeoAxis 2020.6. NeoAxis is a Windows based 2D/3D game engine we previously showcased here and that was recently open sourced, sorta. The biggest new feature of NeoAxis 2020.6 is initial support for the Android platform. Other NeoAxis 2020.6 features include:

• Android support via Xamarin.Android and OpenGL ES with Vulkan support in the future
• New GUI controls including:
  
  • Tab Control
  • Context Menu
  • Tooltip
  • Toolbar
  • Images on UI Buttons
• Easy Skybox importing
• Automatic material tuning

You can learn more about the NeoAxis 2020.6 release here. Our previous hands-on video is available below.

Today we took action to disrupt a botnet called Trickbot, one of the world’s most infamous botnets and prolific distributors of ransomware.

As the United States government and independent experts have warned, ransomware is one of the largest threats to the upcoming elections. Adversaries can use ransomware to infect a computer system used to maintain voter rolls or report on election-night results, seizing those systems at a prescribed hour optimized to sow chaos and distrust.

We disrupted Trickbot through a court order we obtained as well as technical action we executed in partnership with telecommunications providers around the world. We have now cut off key infrastructure so those operating Trickbot will no longer be able to initiate new infections or activate ransomware already dropped into computer systems.

In addition to protecting election infrastructure from ransomware attacks, today’s action will protect a wide range of organizations including financial services institutions, government agencies, healthcare facilities, businesses and universities from the various malware infections Trickbot enabled.

The Trickbot botnet

Trickbot has infected over a million computing devices around the world since late 2016. While the exact identity of the operators is unknown, research suggests they serve both nation-states and criminal networks for a variety of objectives.

In the course of Microsoft’s investigation into Trickbot, we analyzed approximately 61,000 samples of Trickbot malware. What makes it so dangerous is that it has modular capabilities that constantly evolve, infecting victims for the operators’ purposes through a “malware-as-a-service” model. Its operators could provide their customers access to infected machines and offer them a delivery mechanism for many forms of malware, including ransomware. Beyond infecting end user computers, Trickbot has also infected a number of “Internet of Things” devices, such as routers, which has extended Trickbot’s reach into households and organizations.

In addition to maintaining modular capabilities for a variety of end purposes, the operators have proven adept at changing techniques based on developments in society. Trickbot’s spam and spear phishing campaigns used to distribute malware have included topics such as Black Lives Matter and COVID-19, enticing people to click on malicious documents or links. Based on the data we see through Microsoft Office 365 Advanced Threat Detection, Trickbot has been the most prolific malware operation using COVID-19 themed lures.

Disruption components and new legal strategy

We took today’s action after the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted our request for a court order to halt Trickbot’s operations.

During the investigation that underpinned our case, we were able to identify operational details including the infrastructure Trickbot used to communicate with and control victim computers, the way infected computers talk with each other, and Trickbot’s mechanisms to evade detection and attempts to disrupt its operation. As we observed the infected computers connect to and receive instructions from command and control servers, we were able to identify the precise IP addresses of those servers. With this evidence, the court granted approval for Microsoft and our partners to disable the IP addresses, render the content stored on the command and control servers inaccessible, suspend all services to the botnet operators, and block any effort by the Trickbot operators to purchase or lease additional servers.

To execute this action, Microsoft formed an international group of industry and telecommunications providers. Our Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) led investigation efforts including detection, analysis, telemetry, and reverse engineering, with additional data and insights to strengthen our legal case from a global network of partners including FS-ISAC, ESET, Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs, NTT and Symantec, a division of Broadcom, in addition to our Microsoft Defender team. Further action to remediate victims will be supported by internet service providers (ISPs) and computer emergency readiness teams (CERTs) around the world.

This action also represents a new legal approach that our DCU is using for the first time. Our case includes copyright claims against Trickbot’s malicious use of our software code. This approach is an important development in our efforts to stop the spread of malware, allowing us to take civil action to protect customers in the large number of countries around the world that have these laws in place.

We fully anticipate Trickbot’s operators will make efforts to revive their operations, and we will work with our partners to monitor their activities and take additional legal and technical steps to stop them.

Impact to additional sectors

In addition to its threat to elections, Trickbot is known for using malware to reach online banking websites and steal funds from people and financial institutions. Financial institutions ranging from global banks and payments processors to regional credit unions have been targeted by Trickbot. For this reason, the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) has been a critical partner and a co-plaintiff in our legal action.

When someone using a Trickbot-infected computer attempts to log onto a financial institutions website, Trickbot executes a series of activities to secretly hijack the user’s web browser, capture the person’s online financial login credentials and other personal information, and send that information to the criminal operators. People are unaware of Trickbot’s activity as the operators have designed it to hide itself. After Trickbot captures login credentials and personal information, operators use that information to access people’s bank accounts. People experience a normal login process and are typically unaware of the underlying surveillance and theft.

Trickbot is also known to deliver the Ryuk crypto-ransomware that has been used in attacks against a wide range of public and private institutions. Ransomware can have devastating effects. Most recently, it crippled the IT network of a German hospital resulting in the death of a woman seeking emergency treatment. Ryuk is a sophisticated crypto-ransomware because it identifies and encrypts network files and disables Windows System Restore to prevent people from being able to recover from the attack without external backups. Ryuk has been attacking organizations, including municipal governments, state courts, hospitals, nursing homes, enterprises and large universities. For example, Ryuk has been attributed to attacks targeting a contractor for the Department of Defense, the North Carolina city of Durham, an IT provider for 110 nursing homes, and a number of hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Election security and guarding against malware

As we shared last month in the Microsoft Digital Defense Report, ransomware is on the rise. For organizations involved in the elections wanting protection from ransomware and other threats, we offer the threat notification service AccountGuard at no cost which now protects more than two million email accounts around the world. We’ve completed more than 1,500 AccountGuard nation-state attack notifications to AccountGuard enrollees to date. We also offer Microsoft 365 for Campaigns, an easy-to-set-up version of Microsoft 365 that comes with intelligent and secure default settings at an affordable price. Finally, Election Security Advisors provide proactive resiliency services and reactive incident response for campaigns and election officials, also at an affordable price.

Our Digital Crimes Unit will also continue to engage in operations to protect organizations involved in the democratic process and our entire customer base. Since 2010, Microsoft, through the Digital Crimes Unit, has collaborated with law enforcement and other partners on 23 malware and nation-state domain disruptions, resulting in over 500 million devices rescued from cybercriminals. With this civil action, we have leveraged a new legal strategy that allows us to enforce copyright law to prevent Microsoft infrastructure, in this case our software code, from being used to commit crime. As copyright law is more common than computer crime law, this new approach helps us pursue bad actors in more jurisdictions around the world.

To make sure your computer is free of malware, visit support.microsoft.com/botnets.

Tags: cybersecurity, Defending Democracy Program, ElectionGuard, ransomware, trickbot

We’re almost half-way through October, which means that those adorable little Pikmin are just weeks away from waddling onto a Switch near you.

Yes, Pikmin 3 Deluxe launches exclusively for Switch on 30th October, and Nintendo is gearing up for its release with a new batch of Japanese commercials. Four new videos have been spotted in total (thanks, Japanese Nintendo), so if you can’t wait for the big day to arrive, sit back and have a watch of these:

Remember, you can download a free demo of Pikmin 3 right now from the Switch eShop, and we’ve also shared our early impressions of the title if you’d like to read our thoughts so far.

Are you planning on buying Pikmin 3 Deluxe when it launches later this month? Let us know with a comment.