Shopify is following Twitter’s footsteps and telling its employees they can work from home indefinitely, a ransomware gang executives a nasty attack against a law firm in New York City, and a medical repair database goes viral on Reddit.
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As of today, Shopify is a digital by default company. We will keep our offices closed until 2021 so that we can rework them for this new reality. And after that, most will permanently work remotely. Office centricity is over.
— Tobi Lutke 🌳🌲🛒🕹 (@tobi) May 21, 2020
Shopify’s chief executive officer dropped a bombshell on Twitter this morning – although when you look at some of the recent decisions from Twitter and OpenText, perhaps it’s not that much of a surprise. Nevertheless, Tobi Lutke yesterday tweeted that the company intends to keep its offices closed until 2021 and allow employees to work remotely on a permanent basis after that. “Office centricity is over,” he wrote, adding the future of the office is to act as an on-ramp to the same digital workplace that you can access from your #WFH setup.
Moving on, a ransomware group behind a specifically volatile ransomware strain called REvil, is extorting Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks, threatening to release sensitive files on the firm’s celebrity clients unless the firm coughs up a $42 million ransom demand. On May 7, REvil operators published a message addressed to the firm’s staff on a dark web portal, threatening to release files about its clients, files the REvil gang stole from the law firm’s internal network before encrypting its files. Data theft and encryption – nasty. Screenshots published on the site hinted that hackers stole documents pertaining to GSMS customers, included the likes of Lady Gaga, Madonna, Mariah Carey, Nicki Minaj, Bruce Springsteen, and many more.
And lastly, the healthcare sector is having a hard time getting service information to fix medical equipment, but it’s not just a COVID-19 problem. Health experts have been talking about this for years – about how medical device manufacturers make their jobs more difficult by restricting access to repair information. Travel limitations have exasperated the problem. For the last two months, iFixit, a company dedicated to helping the world learn how to fix “every single thing” says it has pivoted half of its staff toward building the world’s most comprehensive medical equipment service database. Ifixit says it posted more than 13,000 manuals from hundreds of manufacturers, online and are available for use today.
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