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Last August, T-Mobile confirmed it had fallen victim to a hack that saw the personal data of more than 54 million of its customers compromised. In the aftermath of that incident, the carrier announced a multi-year partnership with cybersecurity firm Mandiant. At the time, T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said the firm, alongside accounting agency KPMG, would help the carrier audit its security practices and implement policies that would help it prevent future cybersecurity incidents.

Newly unsealed court documents (PDF link) filed by the Department of Justice suggest the carrier may have also hired a third-party firm to prevent the data leaked in the hack from circulating more widely. First spotted by Motherboard, the documents detail criminal charges against Diogo Santos Coelho, the alleged founder and administrator of RaidForums. Before it was taken down by the Justice Department, the website was a place where hackers came to buy and sell stolen data, including it would seem the personal information of T-Mobile’s customers.

The documents detail an incident involving an individual who went by the alias “SubVirt.” At some point on or around August 11th, 2021, they posted to RaidForums to try and sell a trove of recently hacked data. The Justice Department doesn’t explicitly name a victim, instead referring to them simply as “Company 3,” but notes a later post “confirmed the data belonged to a major telecommunications company and wireless operator provides services in the United States.”

According to the agency, Company 3 “hired a third-party to purchase exclusive access to the database to prevent it being sold to criminals.” An employee posed as a potential buyer and paid approximately $50,000 in Bitcoin to obtain a sample of the data. They then paid an additional $150,000 for the entire database with the understanding that SubVirt would delete their copy. Unfortunately for Company 3, SubVirt and their collaborators did not honor the agreement. The Justice Department notes “it appears the co-conspirators continued to attempt to sell the databases after the third-party’s purchase.”

Based on information in the court documents and the timeline of the incident, Motherboard, which first reported the news of the data breach in 2021, suggests T-Mobile is the unnamed carrier alluded to by the Justice Department. We’ve reached out to the company and Mandiant for comment.

People have used social media as a news source for years, and Snapchat hopes to make the most of that reality. As Axiosreports, Snapchat has launched a Dynamic Stories test feature that lets media outlets automatically share news articles as Stories on the Discover platform through their existing RSS feeds. They don't need a specialist to create an app-friendly version, to put it another way. You can keep up with breaking world events (or the tabloids) when you're not posting your own content.

The initial partners include a range of major publications from the US, UK, France and India, including The Washington Post, The Independent, Le Figaro and Vogue India. The format doesn't support video, but test participant Axios said it might in the future.

This isn't much of a direct money-maker for Snapchat, according to Axios' sources. However, that's not the entire point. This gives publishers a stronger incentive to share news on Snapchat by reducing the hassles. More importantly, it might keep you glued to Snapchat — you could be less likely to jump to Instagram or TikTok if news arrives sooner on Snap's service.

Android owners who use Beats products are getting some more useful features. The Apple-owned brand is adding "Locate my Beats" and Product Widgets tools to its Android app. 

You'll be able to track down misplaced earbuds, view battery life info and control listening modes (including noise cancellation) from your Android phone or tablet. Similar features are baked into iOS — iPhone users can locate compatible devices through Find My, for instance. 

These features will be available for all products that work with the Beats app on Android, including Studio Buds. As it happens, Beats just revealed three new colors for the $150 Studio Buds, which it says is the fastest-selling Beats product to date. The Sunset Pink, Ocean Blue and Moon Gray variants are now available on Apple's website.

Highly acclaimed sci-fi mystery 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim has arrived on Nintendo Switch. Until now, the game from Atlus and Vanillaware had only been available on PlayStation 4 (and PS5 through backward compatibility).

13 Sentinels knits together 13 stories and features a beautiful hand-painted art style. It combines 2D side-scrolling adventure elements with top-down, real-time strategy battles against kaiju. You'll be able to customize your mechs' loadouts to best fit the environment and enemy types.

Atlus released 13 Sentinels in Japan in 2019 and the rest of the world in 2020. It received glowing reviews, particularly for its story and visuals. Long-time players might be glad to have the option to play it while they're on the go, while Atlue and Vanillaware might be able to find a new legion of fans on Switch. Both the digital and physical editions cost $60, though the latter comes with bonus art cards.

After nearly two years of PlayStation and Epic Games Store exclusivity, indie darling Bugsnax is making its way to additional platforms. Starting April 28th, you can play the game on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and Steam, in addition to PlayStation 5 and PS4 as was previously the case. The game is also coming to Xbox and PC Game Pass, as well as Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming platform.

That same day, developer Young Horses will release The Isle of Bigsnax, a free content update that adds a new island for players to explore. The studio estimates the DLC includes three to four hours of additional gameplay for players to complete. 

On the island, you’ll find new Bugsnax, including one that’s a mashup of a stick bug with celery for its long, tendril-like legs. Additionally, the update adds new challenges in the town of Snaxbug. Completing those will reward you with furniture and accessories you can use to decorate your in-game personal hut. But the most exciting part of the update is that you’ll be able to find hats for your Bugsnax.

You can see all the improvements detailed in the trailer above. The new versions of Bugsnax will cost $25 if you decide to buy them to own.

While Apple's iMovie software has always been a fairly powerful piece of movie-editing software, its main appeal is that it's a free and simple way to start making your own videos. But iMovie for the iPhone and iPad offers surprisingly little in the way of direction when you open it — it's up to the user to figure out how to structure their movie. 

Apple is changing that significantly today with iMovie 3.0 for iOS and iPadOS, a free download that's available now. The software features two new creation modes, Magic Movie and Storyboards, to help people build videos for the first time. 

Magic Movie automates a lot of the video creation process while still leaving room for plenty of customization, assuming you want to dig into the details. Apple recommends you start by choosing an album with related video clips and photos, but you can also manually select images and videos. From there, Magic Movie will analyze the content and look for things like faces, dialog and action to select the best parts of video clips and build out a movie from there, complete with transitions and music. The end result reminds me a lot of the "memories" that the iOS Photos app automatically builds — those memories also mix video and photo from the same day or event and adds a soundtrack and transitions to it. 

Apple

Once Magic Movie puts together a project for you, there's a ton of customization you can do from there. Naturally, you can remove photos or videos that you don't want in the project, as well as quickly trim clips to show only the action you want. Instead of using a traditional horizontal timeline view, clips and images are contained in a vertically-scrolling left-side column (on the iPhone, it shows up below the video preview); you can easily drag and drop them to reorder the flow of your video. And tapping on an item in the left-side column gives you a bigger set of editing controls. 

Another big part of iMovie 3.0's customization tools are a feature called Styles. These apply to the entire video and include things like fonts, color palettes and filters, music and transitions. There are a total of 20 to choose from, and while you can just set one and forget it, you also have the option to go in and adjust those individual characteristics if you want greater control over the final product. 

Apple

The Storyboards features has a lot in common with Magic Movie, but it's a more manual tool. Storyboards starts by giving you more than 20 different video templates to choose from — options include video themes like "DIY," "day in the life," "how it works," "gaming," "Q&A" and so forth. When you select one of those options, the left side column populates with a rough structure for that video style, including broad categories and then examples of specific shots.

Apple

In a demo, Apple showed off a DIY project, which includes categories like "intro," "overview," "supplies" and so forth. Each of those sections is then populated with suggestions for different types of shots (wide shot, close-up and so forth). While you can obviously just import videos from your library right into these suggestions, you can also shoot directly on your iPhone or iPad and have that clip inserted into the slot. 

As with Magic Movie, you can re-order and delete any suggestions from the left-side column, and tapping into it lets you do more involved editing. And the new Styles that are part of Magic Movie can be applied here, as well. The basic idea behind Storyboards is to give aspiring creators a framework to use when trying to put together a video, and while I haven't tried the app yet it does seem like a smart idea. As someone who has done very little video editing in his time, I could definitely see using a Storyboard as inspiration to get started on a video if I had an idea I wanted to pursue. 

Once you have your creation finished, you can export it in a variety of video formats, in resolutions up to 4K; HDR content you may have filmed with be retained, as well. You can also export your iMovie project and open it up on a Mac. But before you do so, you should know that Storyboards and Magic Movie features are only available when using iMovie on an iPad or iPhone. Videos created with those tools will be exported in a format compatible with iMovie on the Mac, but you won't be able to edit or change Styles, for example. 

If you want to try these new iMovie features, the updated app arrives today and will work on any iPhone running iOS 15.2 or higher, and on any iPad running iPadOS 15.2 or higher. 

Ukraine says Russian military hackers attempted to disrupt an energy provider in the country, but they were unsuccessful. The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) claims it was able to thwart an effort to gain access to computers linked to substations and wipe all files on them. That would have shut down the unnamed provider's infrastructure. The company in question is said to provide power to customers in a highly populated area.

Russia has been blamed for previous cyberattacks on Ukraine's power infrastructure, but it hasn't successfully conducted similar hacks since it invaded the country in February. In 2014 and 2015, some residents of the capital city Kyiv lost power in the wake of attacks attributed to Sandworm, a purported wing of Russia's GRU military intelligence agency.

Cybersecurity company ESET, which has been helping shore up Ukraine's defenses, said Sandworm was behind the latest attempt as well. Sandworm is said to have used a new version of the Industroyer malware it employed to shut down Ukraine's power grid in late 2015.

The latest attempted attack had been in the works for at least two weeks, according to ESET. Microsoft also helped ESET and Ukraine fend off the hackers, according to Viktor Zhora, a cybersecurity official in the country. According to CNBC, Zhora said the attackers did gain access to some systems and created disruption at one power facility, but they were snuffed out before any residents lost electricity.

Remote collaboration on video has been virtually necessary for some producers since the pandemic began, and Adobe thinks it can help. The company has added Frame.io collaboration tools for Creative Cloud subscribers to help Premiere Pro and After Effects users share work and obtain feedback. You can upload up to 100GB to a dedicated space where colleagues can download in-progress edits, provide time-stamped commentary (including drawings) and approve changes.

The addition also includes a "Camera to Cloud" feature that can upload video directly from compatible cameras. You could remotely review raw shots long before the production crew has finished filming, in other words. Frame.io is available starting today, and should be available in the latest versions of Premiere Pro and After Effects as long as they're included in your Creative Cloud plan.

Adobe has some notable upgrades to the apps themselves. For a start, After Effects finally has native support for M1-based Macs — the company is claiming up to twice the rendering speed versus a 10-core iMac Pro, among other performance improvements. You can also expect redesigned import, export and header bar interfaces in Premiere Pro, as well as AI-based editing tools in both apps (auto color correction in Premiere, scene edits in After Effects).

Last summer, TikTok began beta testing Effect House, a platform that allows people to create their own augmented reality filters for use within the app. The closed test eventually came to include approximately 450 creators. And starting today, TikTok is opening the program to anyone who wants to take part. Visiting the Effect House website, you’ll find tools and documentation designed to help you begin making your own AR filters.

TikTok has also published a set of dedicated guidelines detailing the policies governing Effect House. In addition to the company’s Community Guidelines, creators will need to adhere to those rules if they want to see their work made accessible to the wider TikTok community. Among the filters that won’t be allowed on the platform include ones that promote plastic surgery. For instance, you can’t upload an effect that lets someone see how their face might look with lip filler.

Many platforms that offer AR effects, including TikTok, feature their share of first-party beauty filters, but in recent months there’s been a backlash against those among both users and lawmakers. In particular, Instagram has come under significant scrutiny in the US after The Wall Street Journal published a report that claimed Facebook’s own researchers had found the app was “harmful for a sizeable percentage of teens.”

TikTok says its Trust and Safety team will review all user-submitted effects to ensure they adhere to its policies before granting them approval. Users can also report filters, which will prompt the company to take another look at the offending effect to see if it misjudged its appropriateness.

If you've been pining for a Tesla EV using one of the company's higher-capacity 4680 battery cells, it's finally here — though you'll probably have to wait a short while. Electrek has learned Tesla is selling the Model Y in a new Standard Range AWD variant that uses the 4680 cells to offer 279 miles of range and a five-second 0-60MPH time for $59,990 ($3,000 less than the Long Range AWD), but only to employees at present. A version for everyday buyers will be available in the weeks ahead, according to Electrek's sources at the company.

This Model Y also includes a few features not seen on any previous trim level, such as a magnetic center armrest and a parcel shelf. Tesla reportedly delivered a handful of these EVs to workers at its "Giga Rodeo" event in Texas last week.

The 4680 cells are twice as large as Tesla's existing units, but they have five times the capacity. That lets Tesla either extend the range of its vehicles or use fewer batteries to maintain the same range, potentially shrinking costs. In the new Model Y version, they're implemented in a structural battery pack that should reduce complexity and weight, further improving efficiency.

As such, this Model Y isn't so much an expansion of the lineup as an important step in Tesla's product strategy. While it may take a while before you see the new battery tech reach every Tesla EV, it should help keep prices in check, improve range and eventually lead to the fabled $25,000 car.