Original Nintendo DS handhelds from late 2004 keep showing up in repair piles with hinges that snap and shells that powder at the slightest pressure. Owners who stored one in a drawer for two decades often discover the damage only when they try to swap a dead screen or tighten a loose screw. Metallic paint Nintendo laid over the ABS plastic appears to be reacting with the case itself. Yellow or greenish stains leak out around edges, button wells, and hinge roots. Force the clamshell open and the plastic flakes instead of flexing.

Gold Plastic Syndrome was named after a particular annoyance among Transformers collectors who noticed that gold and bronze swirl components began to shatter from the late 1980s onwards, frequently falling apart without any visible stress. The initial wave of successes comprised late Generation 1 figures, Generation 2 combiners, and Beast Wars toys. This state was differentiated not only by the stress-free manner in which the parts dissolved, but also by the shards’ appearance to leave microscopic fine residue for the collectors to clean up.

Nintendo Switch 2 System

• The next evolution of Nintendo Switch
• One system, three play modes: TV, Tabletop, and Handheld
• Larger, vivid, 7.9” LCD touch screen with support for HDR and up to 120 fps

Hasbro later said that the main reason for this was the large number of metallic flecks mixed into the plastic, which simply did not adhere properly, leaving microscopic gaps that accumulated and grew until the part failed with very no force. Sqwerks noticed the same thing on multiple original DS units and Game Boy Advance SP shells with the same gold finish.

Sqwerks spent years dealing with dozens of original DS consoles and only lately began documenting the awful state of the situation late last August, and the results are telling. A sky blue one still has some flexibility in the hinge, but another identical one that has the syndrome is showing signs of deterioration from the lid being pushed around. The paint appears to be a thin layer over a yellow green cast on the graphite black ones. The worst of them just completely break apart, with sides missing and a shredded ribbon cable as a bonus. The board and screen are usually still functional. The case, not so much. It only takes seconds to figure out why; take a screwdriver to a mid panel on an affected case, and it snaps with light pressure. Repeat the process with an unaffected unit, and everything should be OK.

As far as he can tell, no lab study has ever been able to pinpoint exactly what kind of chemistry is at work here, but it’s clear that the additives used to give off that metal sheen and nice swirl finish don’t work well with ABS plastic in the long run, leaving it brittle and prone to shattering. What accelerates the process even more? Age. Combine that with some heat and a layer of paint, and watch it break. No, Retrobrite won’t assist much because it only changes the colors of the old yellowed plastics. Oils that soften old rubber will also be of little use in this situation.

He believes that purchasing an aftermarket shell and getting rid of the factory one before it chooses to disintegrate on its own would be a better choice for people who own an original Nintendo DS in the same state. Save the original board, displays, digitizer, buttons, and other useful components.
[Source]

The Trusted Reviews Awards are back for 2026, and we can finally reveal the shortlist for the top prizes.

Our mission is to provide our readers with the best possible product reviews. We review thousands of products across multiple categories every year with this in mind. From fridges to phones, ovens to gaming handhelds, we pride ourselves on our in-depth testing and original reporting.

The Trusted Reviews Awards is where we celebrate the very best tech reviewed by our experts. Categories for 2026 include Computing, TV & Audio, Mobile, Homes and Cameras. We’re also handing out a special Sustainability Award with eBay.

While the winners will be announced at our ceremony on October 1st, our shortlisted products have now been announced, and they can be viewed below.

A little over a decade ago, I led the controls design for a first-of-its-kind full digital control system for a U.S. nuclear plant. It was, on paper, a beautiful machine—engineered to run itself the way a modern airliner does, with operators watching over a system that rarely needed them. And we made a decision that, to an efficiency-minded observer, looked backward: We deliberately left manual steps inside sequences the system could execute on its own.

We were solving a specific problem. An operator who only ever supervises automation slowly stops being an operator. The hands go cold. The mental model of what the plant is actually doing gets fuzzy. Then comes the day the automation hands control back. It’s always the worst day, because automation only quits when it’s confused or in trouble. But by then, you have a person in the chair who hasn’t truly operated the thing in years. The manual steps were there to keep the human current. It was inefficient by design, on purpose.

That plant, as it happened, was never built. It was shelved amid the politics and economics that surround nuclear power in this country, for reasons that had nothing to do with the engineering. But the design instinct outlived the project, and I’ve come to believe it’s the most useful idea I can offer to the argument now consuming every boardroom: What happens to human expertise when AI does the work that used to build it?

AI Is Disrupting the Engineering Career Ladder

The data has gotten hard to wave away. A Harvard University working paper covering some 65 million workers at more than 280,000 U.S. firms found that after companies adopted generative AI, junior employment fell roughly 9 percent within six quarters relative to non-adopters, while senior employment kept right on growing. A Stanford analysis of ADP payroll records points the same way: The youngest workers in the most AI-exposed occupations lost ground after late 2022 while their more experienced colleagues held theirs. The Stanford researchers found that the losses concentrate where AI automates the work; where it merely augments, junior employment holds steady or rises.

The causal story is still contested, and honesty requires saying so. Researchers at the New York Fed attribute much of the rise in young-graduate unemployment not to AI but to remote work, arguing that firms are reluctant to hire inexperienced people whom they cannot train and mentor at a distance. But notice what the explanations share. Whether a model is absorbing the formative work or distance is severing the mentorship around it, both describe the same broken mechanism: the apprenticeship channel through which expertise passes from senior to junior. Either way, “entry-level” has quietly come to mean “three years of experience required.”

Strip away the noise and you’re left with one deceptively simple problem: you cannot become a senior engineer without first being a junior one. Expertise is not downloaded. It is earned through failed builds, dead-end debugging sessions, and the “why on earth did that work” moments that a capable AI will now happily spare the newcomer. Spare them enough of those, and you produce a cohort that can supervise a model on paper but never developed the gut sense to know when the model is confidently, catastrophically wrong.

Most of the commentary stops at the diagnosis, or reaches for policy solutions that treat the loss of junior jobs as an economic problem. Yet it’s also an engineering problem, and safety-critical fields have already spent decades learning how to solve it.

My own career started at the sharp end of automation. My first job out of school was verifying and validating the software in the digital jet-engine controller that decides, faster than any pilot could, how a fighter plane’s engine responds. Even then, in the late 1980s, the central tension was visible: The machine outperforms the human in routine cases, but the human is all that stands between the aircraft and disaster in the cases the machine didn’t anticipate. This tension is known as the automation paradox, in which increasingly capable automation gives human operators less practice, while leaving them only the most difficult situations.

Aviation learned, repeatedly and expensively, what happens when human skills atrophy inside that gap. The canonical example is Air France flight 447, which fell into the Atlantic in 2009. The proximate cause was mundane. Iced-over airspeed sensors fed the autopilot bad data, and it did what it is designed to do: it disconnected and handed control of the airplane back to the crew. What followed was not a hardware failure. It was a competence failure. A recoverable situation became an unrecoverable one because the pilots, conditioned by thousands of hours of watching the automation fly, could not read a high-altitude aerodynamic stall and hand-fly their way out of it. The airplane was working. The training the automation had quietly eroded was not.

The industry’s response is instructive, and it’s the same move we made in that nuclear control room. It did not rip out the autopilot. It built deliberate manual practice back in. In 2017 the FAA issued Safety Alert for Operators 17007, “Manual Flight Operations Proficiency,” declaring that “manual flight is the foundation upon which other technical flying skills are built.” The alert formally recognized skill decay as a hazard in its own right. Some airlines amended their procedures to encourage hand-flying both the initial climb and initial descent in benign conditions, knowingly trading a sliver of fuel efficiency to keep the crew’s raw flying skills alive. That trade is the whole point. A perfectly optimized system that produces incompetent operators is not optimized at all. It has simply moved its failure mode somewhere the spreadsheet can’t see it.

Manual Gates Could Preserve Engineering Skills

Put the aviation lesson and the nuclear instinct side by side and they point to one design pattern we now need in AI-augmented work: the deliberate “manual gate.”

A manual gate is a point in a workflow where a human takes the controls, not because it is the fastest way to get the task done, and not only as a safety interlock, but specifically to exercise and preserve a skill that would otherwise decay. The distinguishing feature is that it is chosen. You decide, as a matter of design, which competencies your organization must keep alive in human beings because those are the ones you will need on the bad day. Then you engineer the friction required to keep them warm.

Picture how this might work on a software team that leans on AI for most of its code. The team places a manual gate around the skill it can least afford to lose: debugging. When a defect surfaces in a critical module, the assigned engineer—deliberately, often a junior one—must first reproduce the failure, trace it to root cause, and write an automated test that captures the bug, all with the AI assistant switched off. Only after the engineer commits to a diagnosis does the model come back on, to propose the fix, generate alternatives, and sweep the codebase for similar bugs. The engineer then compares their diagnosis against the model’s. When the two disagree, that’s the design working, surfacing the disagreement before the bad day instead of during it.

This approach reframes the junior engineer entirely. The instinct today is to let AI do the entry-level work because it is faster and cheaper. But some of that work is not overhead to be eliminated. It is the training apparatus of your future senior staff, and you should protect it the way you’d protect any other piece of critical infrastructure. It may not be efficient this quarter, but dismantling it quietly mortgages your capability a decade out.

Why Companies Must Keep Training Junior Engineers

None of this is free, and pretending otherwise would insult the people who have to sign the budgets. A deliberate manual gate is, by construction, less efficient in the near term than full automation. Keeping juniors doing formative work and running the manual sequences costs something now to protect something later.

That’s a hard sell in a market that judges most leaders on quarterly results. A hired executive who carries “unnecessary” humans that AI could replace will hear about it from the board long before the payoff arrives. The math only works for someone insulated from that pressure: a founder with control, a private company, an institution with a genuinely long horizon, or a regulator willing to require workers to demonstrate their skills regularly, as pilots must. Which means the organizations most likely to preserve their own expertise are the ones structurally able to spend short-term margin on long-term capability; everyone else will need that outside push.

So here is the argument, in one line: Deliberate inefficiency is not waste. In safety-critical engineering we have always known it as insurance, and we buy it on purpose. As AI takes over the work where expertise is forged, the smart move is not to resist the automation. It is to keep our hands on the controls by design—so that when the automation fails, as it always eventually does, there is still someone in the chair who knows how to fly.

There are plenty of smartwatches that can tell you how many steps you’ve taken, how well you slept, and whether your heart rate is doing something unusual. Then there’s the Huawei Watch D3, which looks at all of that and essentially asks: “That’s nice. But what’s your blood pressure?”

I’ve been wearing the Watch D3 for a handful of days now, and it’s quickly become one of the more interesting smartwatches I’ve tested in a while. Not necessarily because it does everything better than the competition, but because it is trying to solve a very different problem. This is a smartwatch built around cardiovascular health first, and everything else second.

A slimmer Watch D makes a big difference

The first thing you’ll notice about the Watch D3 is that it looks considerably less imposing than its predecessor. Huawei has brought the thickness down to 11.4mm from 13.3mm, and while that might not sound dramatic on paper, it makes a noticeable difference once the watch is actually sitting on your wrist.

It’s also considerably easier to live with overnight. That’s important because the D3 isn’t really a watch you buy just to glance at notifications during the day. A big part of its appeal is continuous health monitoring, and that works much better when you can comfortably forget you’re wearing it. The larger 1.92-inch display helps, too, making everything from blood-pressure readings to other health metrics easier to read at a glance.

The clever bit is hiding in the strap

The D3’s party trick is something you won’t find on your average Apple Watch or Galaxy Watch: an inflatable cuff built directly into the strap. There’s a miniature pump inside the watch that inflates the cuff around your wrist, allowing the D3 to take a pressure-based blood-pressure measurement rather than simply estimating it from optical sensor data.

The process itself is surprisingly painless. Raise your wrist so the watch is positioned close to heart level, start a measurement, and roughly 30 seconds later you’ve got a reading. There’s obviously some pressure involved as the cuff inflates, but it’s hardly an ordeal. After a few attempts, it becomes just another thing you can do from your wrist.

That hardware does come with a few compromises. The Watch D3 carries an IP68 rating, but Huawei’s design means this isn’t a smartwatch I’d treat like a dedicated swimming companion. Prolonged water exposure, diving, hot showers, and similar activities aren’t really what this particular piece of wrist hardware was designed for. It’s a small price to pay for having an inflatable blood-pressure cuff hiding in the strap.

Blood pressure gets a little more interesting

The real appeal of measuring blood pressure this way is that it gives the D3 a different perspective on your health. Most smartwatches build their stress and wellness insights from signals such as heart rate, heart-rate variability and sleep. The D3 can add actual blood-pressure measurements to that picture.

Huawei has also expanded the blood-pressure capabilities of the previous-generation D2. The D3 can record blood pressure before and after exercise, and Huawei says it can maintain accurate measurements at elevated heart rates. It also introduces contextual reminders to check blood pressure during situations such as sudden temperature changes or stays at high altitude.

That last bit is particularly interesting because it makes the monitoring feel a little more intelligent. Instead of simply collecting numbers and dumping them into an app, the D3 can recognize situations where a blood-pressure check may be useful and nudge you toward taking one. It’s a small feature, but one that makes the whole concept feel more purposeful.

This isn’t trying to be an Apple Watch

And that’s where the Watch D3 gets interesting. It would be easy to compare it with an Apple Watch, Galaxy Watch, or Garmin and start ticking off the features it doesn’t have. There are fewer sports modes, the water restrictions are more significant, and its entire design is dictated by hardware that most smartwatches don’t need to accommodate. But that misses the point.

The D3 isn’t really designed to win a smartwatch feature checklist. Its target audience is much more specific: people who care deeply about cardiovascular health, users managing hypertension, adults aged 40 and above, or anyone for whom regular blood-pressure monitoring is more important than having the most comprehensive sports watch on their wrist.

That medical focus was on full display when Huawei previewed the D3 at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress in Munich, where it attracted positive interest from cardiology professionals. Huawei says the D3’s CE-MDR certification in the European Union covers single blood-pressure measurements, ambulatory blood-pressure monitoring, and measurements before and after exercise.

A surprisingly compelling niche

After a handful of days with the Watch D3, I’m still figuring out how useful all of this additional health data will be over the long term. That’s something I’ll need more time to properly evaluate, particularly when it comes to accuracy in different circumstances, battery life, and whether the novelty of taking blood-pressure measurements actually translates into a lasting habit.

But the early impression is certainly positive. Huawei has managed to shrink a fairly complicated piece of health-monitoring hardware into something that feels much more like a conventional smartwatch than you might expect. And the fact that the D3’s CE-MDR certification specifically encompasses several blood-pressure monitoring scenarios makes its proposition considerably more interesting than simply adding another estimated health metric to a smartwatch.

The Watch D3 isn’t going to replace the Apple Watch or Galaxy Watch, and I don’t think Huawei wants it to. It’s going after a much narrower, but potentially much more valuable audience. If you’re someone who actually needs to keep tabs on your blood pressure, having that capability wrapped around your wrist instead of sitting in a drawer could be a pretty big deal.

Like Hetzner Online, both Softaculous and Zet.net, the transit peer downstream from Hetzner Online, failed to properly monitor their systems and, as a result, didn’t catch the hijacking until it had been ongoing on and off for 22 hours. There are also questions about another host provider, Nexon Host, whose infrastructure somehow facilitated the malicious announcement.

Ben Cartwright-Cox, a BGP expert and creator of the BGP Tools suite, called the lapses “silly, preventable mistakes.” Softaculous, Hetzner, and Zet.net didn’t immediately respond to emailed questions.

A brief history of BGP

BGP attacks target the underpinnings that make the Internet a unified, worldwide network. The Internet is splintered into many ASes (autonomous systems), also known as ASNs (autonomous system networks). Each AS is an independent network assigned a portion of the 3.7 billion publicly available addresses under the IPv4 protocol. BGP is the glue that binds all these ASes together and allows each one to connect to any other.

To allow an address assigned to an AS in, say, Germany to reach IPs in North America, an AS must “announce” the other ASes that should transit the traffic. These routing announcements are declarations made as entries on a global routing table used by all ASes and the hosting providers serving them. In the Internet’s early days, BGP ran on trust. Providers simply assumed announcements were valid and made in good faith.

Over the years, attackers repeatedly abused this trust by making announcements for IPs they had no valid right to control. Attackers—with ties to both nation-states and financially motivated groups—capitalized on the lax system to, in some cases, route petabytes’ worth of sensitive data through networks they controlled.

Eventually, Internet architects developed a series of measures to prevent such hijacking. The most prominent of these is RPKI (Resource Public Key Infrastructure) ROV (Route Origin Validation). RPKI ROV uses cryptographic records called Route Origin Authorizations (ROAs) to assert the proper origin and prefix mask length of routes in BGP. ASes that deploy RPKI ROV will reject routes that don’t match the information contained in ROAs, preventing hijacks from spreading throughout the Internet.

Labor Day wearable sales are packed with questionable no-name watches and discounts that aren’t really tied to the holiday. I filtered those out. These four are explicitly part of Amazon or Best Buy’s Labor Day sales, cover different budgets and use cases, and actually look worth buying.

Samsung Galaxy Watch7 40mm

Best Buy marks the Galaxy Watch7 as a Labor Day Deal at $189.99, down from $249.99. Despite being a 2024 model, it’s still an excellent Android smartwatch thanks to its bright AMOLED display, dual-frequency GPS, and broad health features. In our Galaxy Watch7 review, we found it fast, polished, and comfortable. Battery life remains its biggest weakness, but at under $200 it’s much easier to overlook.

Garmin vívoactive 5

At $181.97 instead of $299.99 at Amazon, the vívoactive 5 carries the biggest percentage discount of these four. It makes more sense for someone who prioritizes workouts, sleep, and recovery data over a huge smartwatch app ecosystem. Our Garmin vívoactive 5 review highlighted its AMOLED screen, strong battery endurance, useful wellness tools, and lack of a required subscription. It’s an especially strong buy for anyone who wants Garmin’s fitness features without paying flagship prices.

Amazfit Active 3

Amazon has the Amazfit Active 3 for $125.99, down from $169.99, making it the affordable option here without dipping into the mystery-brand watches cluttering the sale page. Its 1.32-inch AMOLED screen and sapphire glass are unusually premium touches at this price, while support for plenty of workout modes and up to 12 days of rated battery life round out the package. It’s the easiest recommendation here for someone who wants the basics covered without spending $200 or more.

Garmin Instinct 3 Solar 45mm

The rugged option comes from Garmin. Best Buy’s Labor Day price puts the Instinct 3 Solar at $299.99 instead of $349.99. Solar charging, a built-in flashlight, and its adventure-focused design make it better suited to hiking and outdoor training than everyday smartwatch duty. Our Instinct 3 hands-on shows why endurance is one of its defining strengths. It’s also the most specialized pick here, which is exactly what makes it useful in a lineup otherwise focused on more mainstream wearables.

First look: Samsung is targeting the lower-cost laptop market with the Galaxy Book6, a 14-inch Windows notebook starting at $799. Powered by Intel Wildcat Lake processors, the system is aimed at everyday work, school, web use, and streaming rather than the higher-end workloads handled by Samsung’s premium Galaxy Book models. That puts the new laptop in competition with Apple’s MacBook Neo, though Samsung is betting on a different mix of features.

Samsung’s model starts at a higher price than the Neo, but it offers a larger display, more built-in ports, and a much higher claimed battery life rating. Apple’s laptop does have a sharper and brighter screen, though.

Samsung has not identified the processors used in the Book6, though the available options are expected to be Intel’s Core 3 304 and Core 5 315 chips from its Wildcat Lake lineup. The Core 3 model is the lower-end option, while the Core 5 version should provide more room for heavier daily workloads.

The base configuration includes 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. Samsung will also offer configurations with up to 16GB of memory and 1TB of storage.

Samsung says the Book6 can run for up to 25 hours on its 61.2Wh battery. Apple rates the MacBook Neo for up to 16 hours. Those figures are not directly comparable without independent testing, since battery life changes with screen brightness, workloads, software, and wireless use. Nevertheless, Samsung’s rating is one of the most important parts of its pitch for the laptop.

The Book6 has a 14-inch display with a 1,920 x 1,200 resolution and a peak brightness rating of 350 nits. Apple’s MacBook Neo uses a 2,408 x 1,506 panel rated at 500 nits. That gives Apple an advantage for users who place a premium on display sharpness and brightness, while Samsung is betting that battery life and a slightly larger screen will carry more weight with some buyers.

Samsung also gives the Book6 a more versatile port selection than many thin laptops. It includes two USB-C ports, a USB-A port, HDMI, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 are included, along with stereo speakers that support Dolby Atmos.

The laptop measures 15.7mm thick and weighs 1.35kg, or about 2.97 pounds. That keeps it within the range of portable 14-inch systems while leaving room for HDMI and USB-A.

The Book6 differs from the Panther Lake-equipped Galaxy Book6 models Samsung previously introduced. Its use of Wildcat Lake places it in a more affordable part of the company’s lineup.

Samsung will first sell the Book6 in select markets before expanding availability. Its ability to compete with the MacBook Neo will depend on final pricing for the better-equipped versions and on how the Wildcat Lake processors and battery hold up in real-world testing.

Ransomware protection for MSPs should deliver six tested outcomes: reduce exposure, detect activity before encryption, provide 24/7 response, preserve isolated recovery points, recover cleanly and operate consistently across tenants. Backup alone is not enough, and neither is endpoint detection without a rehearsed recovery path.

The Acronis Cyberthreats Report identified 143 MSP, IT-service provider and telecom ransomware victims in 2025, with phishing accounting for 52% of initial access cases and unpatched vulnerabilities for 27%.

The checklist below turns those failure modes into controls and evidence an MSP should require before calling a service complete.

The six things your service must do and what to verify

A complete ransomware protection service connects prevention, detection, response and recovery. For each control, demand evidence from the exact tenant, workload, storage configuration and service tier being sold.

Important: Immutable, offline and air-gapped describe different controls. Verify each one separately.

How EDR, XDR, MDR and immutable backup work together

EDR monitors endpoint activity and supports investigation, isolation and remediation. XDR connects endpoint signals with other attack surfaces so analysts see one incident instead of separate alerts. MDR adds people and process: a staffed service investigates and responds around the clock. Immutable backup protects recovery points from alteration or deletion; it neither detects data theft nor replaces incident response.

Use them together. In the Acronis model, EDR provides endpoint detection and response, XDR extends visibility to email, identity and Microsoft 365 applications, and Acronis MDR operates on EDR or XDR. Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud supplies the backup, management and multi-tenant operating layer. Immutability is one recovery control; it is not the same as an offline or air-gapped copy.

The recovery runbook: Cut recovery time at every handoff

Recovery time is the total of detection, triage, containment, clean-point selection, restoration and validation. An MSP reduces RTO by shortening every stage – especially the handoffs between security, backup, identity, networking and the client.

• Declare the incident, assign one commander and open an out-of-band channel.
• Identify affected tenants, identities, workloads and likely initial access.
• Isolate compromised endpoints and block malicious sessions, tokens and remote access.
• Preserve evidence before wiping systems or rotating logs away.
• Close the entry point by patching, disabling access and rotating credentials.
• Choose the latest recovery point that predates compromise and passes validation.
• Restore identity and infrastructure dependencies before applications and user data.
• Scan, test, reconnect in stages and monitor for renewed attacker activity.

Acronis backup scanning and malware-free recovery capabilities can help validate candidate recovery points, while Acronis Disaster Recovery can coordinate recovery workflows where licensed. The incident team should still confirm that the selected point predates the compromise.

Automation should remove repeatable waits, but an incident commander should approve high-impact actions such as mass isolation, credential resets and failover. A rehearsed path preserves the option to recover without paying, although no tool can guarantee recovery in every attack.

After each drill, record achieved RPO/RTO and every delay, then revise the runbook from evidence rather than estimated restore speed.

Is immutable backup enough against double-extortion ransomware?

No. Immutable backup can preserve recoverability, but it cannot retract data that attackers already stole or remove breach-notification duties. A ransomware protection service must therefore look for exfiltration and identity abuse before encryption begins.

Correlate endpoint, identity, email, Microsoft 365, DNS, proxy and egress telemetry. During response, isolate devices, revoke sessions and tokens, rotate credentials, block attacker destinations and preserve evidence for legal and notification decisions.

Acronis EDR provides endpoint context and response, while Acronis XDR adds telemetry and response across email, identity and Microsoft 365 applications; network egress evidence may still come from firewalls, SIEM or other client controls. Test those handoffs in advance.

How to evaluate an MSP ransomware platform

Before buying or standardizing a platform, require a live demonstration of these seven items:

• Coverage for client workloads and tenant tiers.
• Prevention and detection before broad encryption begins.
• Named 24/7 response ownership, escalation paths and approval boundaries.
• Immutable-storage mode, retention behavior and privileged-access separation.
• Clean-point selection, malware scanning and isolated restoration.
• Measured RPO/RTO in a dependency-ordered recovery drill.
• Multi-tenant roles, reporting, audit evidence and RMM/PSA/API integrations.

An integrated option is Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud with Acronis MDR.

It brings together capabilities for the six operational jobs, subject to the selected MDR tier, licensing, deployment, storage architecture and the MSP’s incident-response responsibilities. Require a live incident-and-recovery test using the production configuration.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best ransomware protection for an MSP?

A complete ransomware protection service should demonstrate all six outcomes across the client workloads it is contracted to protect. Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud with Acronis MDR is an integrated example. The MSP should validate the production configuration and confirm whether the selected MDR tier includes the required remediation and recovery actions.

What should be included in a ransomware protection service?

Include exposure reduction, EDR or XDR detection, 24/7 response, access-separated immutable recovery points, tested clean recovery and multi-tenant operations with client evidence.

How can an MSP reduce ransomware recovery time?

Remove handoff delays. Preassign owners, map dependencies, validate clean points, automate safe steps and rehearse restores until achieved RPO/RTO matches the service commitment.

Does immutable backup stop double-extortion ransomware?

No. It protects recovery data from change or deletion but cannot undo exfiltration. Detection, identity controls, egress visibility, containment and notification processes are still required.

Make recovery a tested service outcome

Ransomware resilience is the ability to contain attacks early, preserve a recovery path and prove critical services can return on schedule. Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud with Acronis MDR can bring detection, response, recovery and multitenant management into one MSP operating model.

The MSP should validate the selected tier, storage architecture, integrations and operational responsibilities against the six tests above.

See how Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud with Acronis MDR helps MSPs detect and contain ransomware, protect recovery points, and restore client operations faster.

Sponsored and written by Acronis.

If you’re on the fence about Star Wars Zero Company, you should know what you might be getting into. The game currently has an aggregate critic score of 85 on Metacritic, making it one of the best reviewed Star Wars games in recent memory. When it comes to story and gameplay, it’s a masterfully executed tactics game in the style of X-COM with memorable characters. What none of the reviews I read or watched mentioned is that Zero Company is also something of a technical mess.

On PC, the game has all the trademarks of a janky Unreal Engine 5 release. I’m running a system with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, RTX 5060 Ti and 16GB of RAM, and I’m getting constant traversal stutter and input lag when I try to play the game with a mouse and keyboard. I’ve also encountered a bug that forced me to restart the same mission twice. Yes, you might say I’m running the game on a glorified RTX 3070, but even those with more powerful GPUs like the RTX 5090 are complaining of poor performance. On Steam, the game has a “mostly positive” rating across nearly 9,000 reviews, and yet almost every one of those reviews mentions stuttering, game-breaking bugs and crashes.

“Started off having a great time,” one negative review starts. “Then came the crashes. Crashed almost every hour, so needed to save every few minutes. On the times I forgot to save, I had to replay the entire section again. Of course it only ever crashed as I was about to complete a mission.” Over on Reddit, console players are complaining of their own set of issues. YouTuber Daniel Owen has also made a video about the game’s PC issues. While I haven’t played the Xbox Series or PlayStation 5 ports, there are similar reports of crashes and stutters floating around the internet for each.

The experience of playing Zero Company is frustratingly similar to that of another recent UE5 Star Wars game, Jedi: Survivor. As I wrote about in 2023, that game was broken on release. It suffered from constant traversal and shader compilation stutter on PC, meaning the game would constantly hitch even on high-end systems. For NVIDIA users, the game also shipped without DLSS support. Even after nearly a dozen major patches, Jedi: Survivor still stutters on PC. At this point, I’ve given up hope that the game will ever play smoothly; Respawn Entertainment, Jedi: Survivor‘s developer, hasn’t released a new patch in nearly two years.

Unfortunately, I can’t confidently say Zero Company will receive even a fraction of the post-release support that Jedi: Survivor got from Respawn. That’s because while Electronic Arts published both games, the new one was made by an independent studio named Bit Reactor, not a direct subsidiary, and its future depends on whether Zero Company sells enough copies.

On Monday, Game File’s Stephen Totilo reported that Bit Reactor had furloughed the majority of its staff just weeks before Zero Company’s release on August 27. One source told Totilo that as much as 80 percent of the studio’s employees aren’t being paid right now. Another source told him that only a skeleton crew remains, “ready to address any of Zero Company’s post-launch bugs.” A spokesperson for Bit Reactor told Totilo that the studio hopes to bring the furloughed workers back with restored pay, a promise the employees he spoke to said they weren’t confident it would be able to deliver on, even if the game is a commercial success. The studio is also embroiled in a legal dispute between its co-founders that won’t go to trial until early 2027.

If what remains of Bit Reactor is working to address Zero Company’s many bugs and performance issues, the one public statement the studio has made on the subject isn’t reassuring. On the day of the game’s release, it simply said on Steam’s Community forums it was aware of “emerging issues (crashes and CPU threading),” and that it was working on implementing fixes. “We’ll let you know when we’re able to provide an update,” it added.

On the face of it, that’s a fine enough statement, but it was issued before the news about its staffing levels came out, and it hasn’t said anything since. EA and Bit Reactor did not immediately respond to Engadget’s comment request, asking what, if any, post-release support the game will receive.

If you’re thinking about buying Zero Company, just know that it might not get to a better state than it is right now. You might think I’m being overly pessimistic, but I’ll point out it took Respawn, a studio with the full financial backing of EA, a year-and-a-half to get Jedi: Survivor to its current state. Another comparison here is just as illustrative. Cold Symmetry, the indie studio behind Mortal Shell II this past Saturday announced a hefty “Week One” update for its new game, which it released just seven days before Zero Company. Those two comparisons give a sense of the potential difficult road ahead for Bit Reactor, but also what an indie studio can do when it’s fully staffed. Right now, Zero Company doesn’t that have going for it.