Happy Friday, dear readers! You might have noticed that many tech giants made security headlines this week, starting with Apple, which has been targeted in a $50 million ransomware attack. Claiming to be in possession of Apple product data, the REvil ransomware group threatened Apple to pay up after “breaching Quanta Computer, a Taiwanese company that is the biggest laptop manufacturer in the world and which is also one of the companies that assemble official Apple products based on pre-supplied product designs and schematics,” according to Recorded Future’s The Record.

Then Facebook unearthed two Palestinian hacking groups who were using social engineering in a cyberespionage campaign targeting government officials. Later in the week, Twitter reportedly set off alarm bells after accidentally sending emails asking users to verify their accounts. The good news is, users were suspicious and thought the messages were part of a phishing campaign.

Not to be left out of this week’s headlines, Amazon announced it is starting the rollout of its “Amazon One biometric palm-scanning payment system to a Whole Foods store in Seattle, with plans to deploy the system in several more Whole Foods in the coming months.”

Wondering what else happened this week? Take a look at these industry headlines.

Apr. 23: NextGov investigated a challenge many government agencies confront when they implement new software: How do they plan for retiring technologies and mitigating the risk of software end of life?

Apr. 22: “A pair of bugs in John Deere’s apps and website could have allowed hackers to find and download the personal data of all owners of the company's farming vehicles and equipment,” Vice reported.

Apr. 21: The digital forensics and incident response framework open source project, Velociraptor, developed by Mike Cohen was acquired by Rapid7.

Apr. 21: According to Forbes, “Dogecoin is today the sixth most valuable cryptocurrency, an all-time high for what was originally conceived eight years ago as a meta joke about monetary value and the internet, its mascot a Shiba Inu, an oft-memed dog breed.”

Apr. 20: The Department of Energy announced, “As part of the Biden Administration’s effort to safeguard U.S. critical infrastructure from persistent and sophisticated threats, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) launched an initiative to enhance the cybersecurity of electric utilities’ industrial control systems (ICS) and secure the energy sector supply chain.”

Apr. 20: David Forscey, Managing Director for Aspen Digital’s cyber & technology programming, wrote of the growing risk to cloud security, “In short, the resiliency of cloud companies big and small, including infrastructure, platform, and application providers, is not a niche policy topic; it is a core national security concern.”

Apr. 19: Google has put its support behind the new security standard by which mobile apps can be certified, a program put forth by the Internet of Secure Things Alliance.