On Friday, Roku confirmed a cyberattack compromised roughly 576,000 accounts. It marks the second such cyberattack to affect the company, which compromised a smaller number of accounts earlier this year.

What's going on at Roku?

Roku says it detected an "increase in unusual account activity" earlier this year. After checking into it, the company found that bad actors had compromised about 15,000 Roku accounts.

This wasn't due to a security breach in Roku's systems, however. Instead, these bad actors obtained the usernames and passwords for these accounts through third-parties, likely through sources that leak stolen credentials online. They didn't necessarily know these usernames and passwords were for Roku accounts; rather, they engaged in what's known as "credential stuffing," an automated process where they try to log into popular account types with stolen credentials until they land on a winning combination. As it happens, they landed on an initial 15,000 accounts, before moving on to larger wins.

Roku says it continued to investigate following this incident, and discovered another 576,000 compromised accounts in the process. Roku still thinks the credentials for these accounts were taken from somewhere else, and even suggests they might've been taken from accounts where users had the same username and password. (Don't reuse your passwords, people.) As such, the company likely doesn't have a security issue at this time.

What you should do if your Roku account was affected

As Roku has over 80 million active accounts, the chances yours was among the fraction of a percent of users affected is small. Still, Roku says it has reset passwords for all users affected in this attack. If bad actors made a payment using your account, Roku has refunded you. The company says no financial information was breached in the attack, so you can hold onto your credit cards for now. This also affected a small number of the users (fewer than 400 cases).

The company also enabled two-factor authentication (2FA) for all affected accounts. This is a good thing: 2FA requires access to a trusted device or phone number to finish logging in after entering your password. Even if your credentials leak online, bad actors won't be able to log into your account without access to, say, your smartphone, significantly reducing the chances of a breach. If you don't have 2FA set up yet on your Roku account (or any account that offers it, for that matter), make sure to do so ASAP.

It's lucky the attacks didn't affect more users, but the incident shines a light on how important it is to be on top of your digital security. Simple steps like using strong and unique passwords for all accounts, and setting up 2FA whenever possible, can prevent your accounts from being breached.

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In two recent papers, an international team of scientists describes the first known nitrogen-fixing organelle within a eukaryotic cell, which the researchers are calling a nitroplast. Phys.Org reports: The discovery of the organelle involved a bit of luck and decades of work. In 1998, Jonathan Zehr, a UC Santa Cruz distinguished professor of marine sciences, found a short DNA sequence of what appeared to be from an unknown nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterium in Pacific Ocean seawater. Zehr and colleagues spent years studying the mystery organism, which they called UCYN-A. At the same time, Kyoko Hagino, a paleontologist at Kochi University in Japan, was painstakingly trying to culture a marine alga. It turned out to be the host organism for UCYN-A. It took her over 300 sampling expeditions and more than a decade, but Hagino eventually successfully grew the alga in culture, allowing other researchers to begin studying UCYN-A and its marine alga host together in the lab. For years, the scientists considered UCYN-A an endosymbiont that was closely associated with an alga. But the two recent papers suggest that UCYN-A has co-evolved with its host past symbiosis and now fits criteria for an organelle. In a paper published in Cell in March 2024, Zehr and colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut de Ciencies del Mar in Barcelona and the University of Rhode Island show that the size ratio between UCYN-A and their algal hosts is similar across different species of the marine haptophyte algae Braarudosphaera bigelowii. The researchers use a model to demonstrate that the growth of the host cell and UCYN-A are controlled by the exchange of nutrients. Their metabolisms are linked. This synchronization in growth rates led the researchers to call UCYN-A "organelle-like." "That's exactly what happens with organelles," said Zehr. "If you look at the mitochondria and the chloroplast, it's the same thing: they scale with the cell." But the scientists did not confidently call UCYN-A an organelle until confirming other lines of evidence. In the cover article of the journal Science, published today, Zehr, Coale, Kendra Turk-Kubo and Wing Kwan Esther Mak from UC Santa Cruz, and collaborators from the University of California, San Francisco, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, National Taiwan Ocean University, and Kochi University in Japan show that UCYN-A imports proteins from its host cells. "That's one of the hallmarks of something moving from an endosymbiont to an organelle," said Zehr. "They start throwing away pieces of DNA, and their genomes get smaller and smaller, and they start depending on the mother cell for those gene products -- or the protein itself -- to be transported into the cell." Coale worked on the proteomics for the study. He compared the proteins found within isolated UCYN-A with those found in the entire algal host cell. He found that the host cell makes proteins and labels them with a specific amino acid sequence, which tells the cell to send them to the nitroplast. The nitroplast then imports the proteins and uses them. Coale identified the function of some of the proteins, and they fill gaps in certain pathways within UCYN-A. "It's kind of like this magical jigsaw puzzle that actually fits together and works," said Zehr. In the same paper, researchers from UCSF show that UCYN-A replicates in synchrony with the alga cell and is inherited like other organelles.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.