As Andy Murray says goodbye to Wimbledon for the last time, we look back at the two-times champion’s time on the grass courts of SW19

Billie Jean King praises Murray for bringing ‘credibility and excitement to British tennis’ as Raducanu makes ‘tough decision’ to exit doubles partnership

The day finally came: Andy Murray has played his final match at Wimbledon. The 37-year-old Scot, Britain’s greatest postwar tennis player, had been due to contest the mixed doubles with Emma Raducanu, the shock 2021 US Open champion, yesterday evening. To say there was excitement about the pairing would be a wild understatement: fans have been coming up with portmanteau names (Raducandy, Em&M, Maducanu) ever since the unlikely team was announced on Wednesday. Roger Federer was in the stands, ready to watch.

But Em&M was not to be. “Unfortunately, I woke up with some stiffness in my right wrist,” Raducanu announced on Saturday afternoon, “so I have decided to make the very tough decision to withdraw from the mixed doubles tonight. I’m disappointed as I was really looking forward to playing with Andy, but got to take care.”

His farewell speech at Wimbledon felt like a bereavement for some, but he was more than his tennis

‘Sports people die twice” – this was the standout line from the new documentary Federer: Twelve Final Days, which tracked the Swiss player’s emotional sign-off from professional tennis in 2022. The idea is that there’s the death that is coming for all of us, when we take our final breath, but the top-level athlete fits in another one: when they retire. In some ways, this “death” can be even harder to come to terms with. How does it feel to know – for sure – that your greatest days are behind you?

Andy Murray – who has announced he will never play singles again – died his first death at Wimbledon last week. And the 37-year-old really went kicking and screaming: “It’s hard because I want to keep playing, but I can’t,” he told the crowd on Centre Court on Thursday. “Physically it’s too tough now. I want to play forever. I love the sport. I don’t want to stop.” For some watching, the occasion did feel like a bereavement. Spectators were in tears; there was talk of “grieving” and “trauma”. This is telling about what Murray has come to mean to us. In the greatest era of men’s tennis, he was the mortal sent to battle the holy trinity of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. The fact that he sometimes prevailed was heartwarming and profound and stirring.

• Emma Raducanu withdraws due to stiffness in wrist
• Murray is unable to pick replacement partner

Andy Murray has played his last Wimbledon match after Emma Raducanu announced her withdrawal from the mixed doubles due to ­concern over her right wrist.

The pair had been due to play their first match on Saturday evening but Raducanu said she was pulling out to protect herself against injury.

• Williams tells Murray he has ‘special place in my heart’
• US star posts video celebrating ‘incredible career’ on X

Serena Williams has thanked Andy Murray for “speaking out to much for women” in a social media tribute congratulating him on his “incredible career” in tennis.

Murray, a three-time grand slam champion, is playing in his final Wimbledon and was honoured at a ceremony on Centre Court on Thursday evening. Murray and Williams played mixed doubles together at the All-England Club in 2019, and the American also referenced Murray’s grumpy on-court demeanour.

Sport fans could face choice between watching eagerly awaited tennis match and Euros quarter-final

Andy Murray’s final Wimbledon flourish could clash with England’s quarter-final match at Euro 2024 on Saturday evening, forcing sport fans and BBC schedulers into a tricky dilemma.

Murray and Emma Raducanu will team up in a mixed doubles match against Marcelo Arévalo and Shuai Zhang on No 1 Court. The match, which is the last one scheduled to play there on Saturday, looks likely to start in the early evening while England face off against Switzerland at the Merkur Spiel-Arena in Düsseldorf.

• Scot says he cannot play to the level he wants
• Murray loses in Wimbledon doubles with brother Jamie

Andy Murray says the time has come to shut the door on his illustrious career after he and his brother, Jamie, were defeated in the first round of the men’s doubles at his final Wimbledon.

“I’m ready to finish playing because I can’t play to the level that I would want to any more,” he said. “That’s something that I guess is a bit out of my control. If I knew my body was going to be able to do it, I would play – there’s nothing about the sport that I hate and I’m like, I don’t want to do it any more for this reason. I like the travelling. I love the competition, practising, trying to get better, all those things. Yeah, I know that it’s time now. I’m ready for that.”

Andy and Jamie’s final doubles defeat at Wimbledon failed to dampen the celebration of a tennis dynasty

It was always going to end in tears, of the very finest kind. And, as hard as he tried, Andy Murray could not entirely resist the lachrymose tendencies that have characterised his emotional career, which moved one game closer to its conclusion on Centre Court on Thursday night.

His brother, Jamie, teared up a little too after they exited the doubles. Maybe more than a few in the crowd did as well, including their parents, and Andy’s wife and children. The press box, as far as I could tell, held firm – but who knows in the advancing darkness that enveloped the court where Murray had won so many great struggles, including two that brought him the title.

• Brothers beaten by Rinky Hijikata and John Peers
• Australian pair win 7-6 (6), 6-4 on Centre Court

Andy and Jamie Murray spent their formative childhood years ­playing tennis at their local tennis club in Dunblane, where their mother, Judy, was the club coach. They were often the youngest players on the court and as they grew into the sport, ­sharpening their tools against ­bigger and stronger opponents, they were sustained by dreams of one day ­making it all the way to Wimbledon.

After years of surpassing those dreams many times, for the first time in their careers Andy and Jamie ­competed on the same side of the net at Wimbledon as Andy began his long, emotional farewell to ­Wimbledon after 19 incredible years. Despite the strong opposition they put up with Andy’s considerable limitations, Andy and Jamie Murray were defeated 7-6 (6), 6-4 by Rinky Hijikata and John Peers in the dying light on Centre Court.

Murray is due to compete in doubles at his last Wimbledon, yet fans are also ‘pretty excited’ to see younger players

Thursday marks a changing of the guard. While for many this might mean electing a new prime minister, at Wimbledon, tens of thousands queued for a chance to bid adieu to Andy Murray and cheer on the next generation of British tennis stars.

Murray is due to compete alongside his older brother, Jamie, in the men’s doubles this week in his final Wimbledon showing. There had been hope he would play in the tournament’s singles, but he pulled out on Tuesday after being unable to sufficiently recover from the back surgery he underwent 12 days ago.

I climbed a mountain and took up the French horn. If he can hold on to who he is away from the court, Murray can find joy after tennis

• Catherine Spencer is a rugby commentator and former England captain

When you play sport at a high level, that sport is everything you know. It’s what you think of when you go to sleep and what motivates you to jump out of bed in the morning – the lure of the pitch or track or court. So, as an athlete who dedicated much of my life to playing rugby for England, I have a sense of how Andy Murray might be feeling.

Murray left it until the last minute to make his decision to retire from tennis. Asked what he hoped for from his final matches at Wimbledon this week, he said: “Maybe a bit of closure … I just want the opportunity to play one more time out there hopefully on Centre Court and feel that buzz.” I know that feeling very well. The support from the crowd and the country is like a drug. So, too, is the sense of purpose – the fight to be the best that you can be – and the sense of identity that a career in sport brings. Who are you if not the elite athlete who spends every hour planning and training? Who will he be if not the tennis player that the public know and love?

Catherine Spencer is a rugby commentator and former England captain

Enlarge / Artist's illustration of the COSI spacecraft. (credit: Northrop Grumman/European Southern Observatory (background image))

A small research satellite designed to study the violent processes behind the creation and destruction of chemical elements will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in 2027, NASA announced Tuesday.

The Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) mission features a gamma-ray telescope that will scan the sky to study gamma-rays emitted by the explosions of massive stars and the end of their lives. These supernova explosions generate reactions that fuse new atomic nuclei, a process called nucleosynthesis, of heavier elements.

Using data from COSI, scientists will map where these elements are forming in the Milky Way galaxy. COSI's observations will also yield new insights into the annihilation of positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons, which appear to be originating from the center of the galaxy. Another goal for COSI will be to rapidly report the location of short gamma-ray bursts, unimaginably violent explosions that flash and then fade in just a couple of seconds. These bursts are likely caused by merging neutron stars.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

• British pair have been granted a wildcard at SW19
• Murray was paired with Serena Williams in 2019

Andy Murray will play mixed doubles at Wimbledon with Emma Raducanu. The Scot’s representatives confirmed the pair have been granted a wildcard, with Murray looking to maximise his opportunities on his final appearance at the All England Club.

Murray famously played mixed doubles with Serena Williams in 2019, with the pair making it to the third round. The 37-year-old Scot, twice the men’s singles champion, is playing in his final Wimbledon but pulled out of the singles on Tuesday due to a back injury. He is due to feature in the men’s doubles with his brother Jamie on Thursday, with the opening round of the mixed held on Friday and Saturday.

The former BBC tennis correspondent was quick to recognise the ruthless streak in the young Scot, but was too cautious to predict on air he would become a major champion

The first time I properly met Andrew Murray he was juggling tennis balls on his feet in a low-key leisure centre. Left foot, right foot, high, low, left, right; nothing beyond control, the world at his feet. Luxembourg, of all places. A 16-year-old Scotsman, making waves in the juniors, had been invited by Britain’s then Davis Cup captain, Jeremy Bates, primarily to pick the brains of Tim Henman and Greg Rusedski but also, as it transpired, play them off the practice court.

Desperate to rise above the role of sparring partner, Murray played one set that dismantled the Rusedski serve/volley game in a devastating demonstration of potential. Clearly an astute thinker, Murray dropped returns in short, always to the backhand weakness, jamming the frazzled Rusedski and driving him to despair.

Scot made up for challenge of Federer, Nadal and Djokovic by working harder, ultimately earning him three grand slam titles

Nineteen years after taking his first steps in the Wimbledon main draw as a hopeful, precocious teenager already surrounded by suffocating hype, Andy Murray’s unprecedented grand slam singles career has come to an end. On Tuesday, he announced his withdrawal from the men’s singles draw at his final Wimbledon due to a persistent back injury.

Murray had been scheduled to face Tomas Machac of the Czech Republic on Tuesday evening, the latest possible slot on Centre Court, but after undergoing back surgery only 10 days earlier, he was simply unable to recover enough to be competitive across the best of five sets, despite making massive strides.

Two-times men’s champion will still take part in the doubles competition with his brother Jamie Murray

Tennis fans were eager to see Andy Murray’s Wimbledon swan song. But as thousands of fans began pouring into SW19 for the chance to see him, they faced disappointment after it was announced he would not be playing in the men’s singles tournament.

Charles Bowden, 32, and Kelly Ann Ethell, 24, were especially keen, having camped out since 2pm the day before to secure tickets. “I’m gutted. I got a Centre Court ticket hoping to see him,” said Bowden.

• Follow live updates from the second day’s play at SW19
• Murray out of singles, eyes doubles | You can email Daniel

OK, so the players are out knocking up on the outside courts. Time to start flitting around from match to match.

This morning’s news gives us an excuse to bask in clips such as this:

Microsoft today released updates to fix more than 50 security vulnerabilities in Windows and related software, a relatively light Patch Tuesday this month for Windows users. The software giant also responded to a torrent of negative feedback on a new feature of Redmond’s flagship operating system that constantly takes screenshots of whatever users are doing on their computers, saying the feature would no longer be enabled by default.

Last month, Microsoft debuted Copilot+ PCs, an AI-enabled version of Windows. Copilot+ ships with a feature nobody asked for that Redmond has aptly dubbed Recall, which constantly takes screenshots of what the user is doing on their PC. Security experts roundly trashed Recall as a fancy keylogger, noting that it would be a gold mine of information for attackers if the user’s PC was compromised with malware.

Microsoft countered that Recall snapshots never leave the user’s system, and that even if attackers managed to hack a Copilot+ PC they would not be able to exfiltrate on-device Recall data. But that claim rang hollow after former Microsoft threat analyst Kevin Beaumont detailed on his blog how any user on the system (even a non-administrator) can export Recall data, which is just stored in an SQLite database locally.

“I’m not being hyperbolic when I say this is the dumbest cybersecurity move in a decade,” Beaumont said on Mastodon.

In a recent Risky Business podcast, host Patrick Gray noted that the screenshots created and indexed by Recall would be a boon to any attacker who suddenly finds himself in an unfamiliar environment.

“The first thing you want to do when you get on a machine if you’re up to no good is to figure out how someone did their job,” Gray said. “We saw that in the case of the SWIFT attacks against central banks years ago. Attackers had to do screen recordings to figure out how transfers work. And this could speed up that sort of discovery process.”

Responding to the withering criticism of Recall, Microsoft said last week that it will no longer be enabled by default on Copilot+ PCs.

Only one of the patches released today — CVE-2024-30080 — earned Microsoft’s most urgent “critical” rating, meaning malware or malcontents could exploit the vulnerability to remotely seize control over a user’s system, without any user interaction.

CVE-2024-30080 is a flaw in the Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) service that can allow attackers to execute code of their choosing. Microsoft says exploitation of this weakness is likely, enough to encourage users to disable the vulnerable component if updating isn’t possible in the short run. CVE-2024-30080 has been assigned a CVSS vulnerability score of 9.8 (10 is the worst).

Kevin Breen, senior director of threat research at Immersive Labs, said a saving grace is that MSMQ is not a default service on Windows.

“A Shodan search for MSMQ reveals there are a few thousand potentially internet-facing MSSQ servers that could be vulnerable to zero-day attacks if not patched quickly,” Breen said.

CVE-2024-30078 is a remote code execution weakness in the Windows WiFi Driver, which also has a CVSS score of 9.8. According to Microsoft, an unauthenticated attacker could exploit this bug by sending a malicious data packet to anyone else on the same network — meaning this flaw assumes the attacker has access to the local network.

Microsoft also fixed a number of serious security issues with its Office applications, including at least two remote-code execution flaws, said Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7.

“CVE-2024-30101 is a vulnerability in Outlook; although the Preview Pane is a vector, the user must subsequently perform unspecified specific actions to trigger the vulnerability and the attacker must win a race condition,” Barnett said. “CVE-2024-30104 does not have the Preview Pane as a vector, but nevertheless ends up with a slightly higher CVSS base score of 7.8, since exploitation relies solely on the user opening a malicious file.”

Separately, Adobe released security updates for Acrobat, ColdFusion, and Photoshop, among others.

As usual, the SANS Internet Storm Center has the skinny on the individual patches released today, indexed by severity, exploitability and urgency. Windows admins should also keep an eye on AskWoody.com, which often publishes early reports of any Windows patches gone awry.

Authorities in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States this week levied financial sanctions against a Russian man accused of stealing data on nearly 10 million customers of the Australian health insurance giant Medibank. 33-year-old Aleksandr Ermakov allegedly stole and leaked the Medibank data while working with one of Russia’s most destructive ransomware groups, but little more is shared about the accused. Here’s a closer look at the activities of Mr. Ermakov’s alleged hacker handles.

Aleksandr Ermakov, 33, of Russia. Image: Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

The allegations against Ermakov mark the first time Australia has sanctioned a cybercriminal. The documents released by the Australian government included multiple photos of Mr. Ermakov, and it was clear they wanted to send a message that this was personal.

It’s not hard to see why. The attackers who broke into Medibank in October 2022 stole 9.7 million records on current and former Medibank customers. When the company refused to pay a $10 million ransom demand, the hackers selectively leaked highly sensitive health records, including those tied to abortions, HIV and alcohol abuse.

The U.S. government says Ermakov and the other actors behind the Medibank hack are believed to be linked to the Russia-backed cybercrime gang REvil.

“REvil was among the most notorious cybercrime gangs in the world until July 2021 when they disappeared. REvil is a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation and generally motivated by financial gain,” a statement from the U.S. Department of the Treasury reads. “REvil ransomware has been deployed on approximately 175,000 computers worldwide, with at least $200 million paid in ransom.”

The sanctions say Ermakov went by multiple aliases on Russian cybercrime forums, including GustaveDore, JimJones, and Blade Runner. A search on the handle GustaveDore at the cyber intelligence platform Intel 471 shows this user created a ransomware affiliate program in November 2021 called Sugar (a.k.a. Encoded01), which focused on targeting single computers and end-users instead of corporations.

An ad for the ransomware-as-a-service program Sugar posted by GustaveDore warns readers against sharing information with security researchers, law enforcement, or “friends of Krebs.”

In November 2020, Intel 471 analysts concluded that GustaveDore’s alias JimJones “was using and operating several different ransomware strains, including a private undisclosed strain and one developed by the REvil gang.”

In 2020, GustaveDore advertised on several Russian discussion forums that he was part of a Russian technology firm called Shtazi, which could be hired for computer programming, web development, and “reputation management.” Shtazi’s website remains in operation today.

A Google-translated version of Shtazi dot ru. Image: Archive.org.

The third result when one searches for shtazi[.]ru in Google is an Instagram post from a user named Mikhail Borisovich Shefel, who promotes Shtazi’s services as if it were also his business. If this name sounds familiar, it’s because in December 2023 KrebsOnSecurity identified Mr. Shefel as “Rescator,” the cybercriminal identity tied to tens of millions of payment cards that were stolen in 2013 and 2014 from big box retailers Target and Home Depot, among others.

How close was the connection between GustaveDore and Mr. Shefel? The Treasury Department’s sanctions page says Ermakov used the email address ae.ermak@yandex.ru. A search for this email at DomainTools.com shows it was used to register just one domain name: millioner1[.]com. DomainTools further finds that a phone number tied to Mr. Shefel (79856696666) was used to register two domains: millioner[.]pw, and shtazi[.]net.

The December 2023 story here that outed Mr. Shefel as Rescator noted that Shefel recently changed his last name to “Lenin” and had launched a service called Lenin[.]biz that sells physical USSR-era Ruble notes bearing the image of Vladimir Lenin, the founding father of the Soviet Union. The Instagram account for Mr. Shefel includes images of stacked USSR-era Ruble notes, as well as multiple links to Shtazi.

The Instagram account of Mikhail Borisovich Shefel, aka MikeMike aka Rescator.

Intel 471’s research revealed Ermakov was affiliated in some way with REvil because the stolen Medibank data was published on a blog that had one time been controlled by REvil affiliates who carried out attacks and paid an affiliate fee to the gang.

But by the time of the Medibank hack, the REvil group had mostly scattered after a series of high-profile attacks led to the group being disrupted by law enforcement. In November 2021, Europol announced it arrested seven REvil affiliates who collectively made more than $230 million worth of ransom demands since 2019. At the same time, U.S. authorities unsealed two indictments against a pair of accused REvil cybercriminals.

“The posting of Medibank’s data on that blog, however, indicated a connection with that group, although the connection wasn’t clear at the time,” Intel 471 wrote. “This makes sense in retrospect, as Ermakov’s group had also been a REvil affiliate.”

It is easy to dismiss sanctions like these as ineffective, because as long as Mr. Ermakov remains in Russia he has little to fear of arrest. However, his alleged role as an apparent top member of REvil paints a target on him as someone who likely possesses large sums of cryptocurrency, said Patrick Gray, the Australian co-host and founder of the security news podcast Risky Business.

“I’ve seen a few people poo-poohing the sanctions…but the sanctions component is actually less important than the doxing component,” Gray said. “Because this guy’s life just got a lot more complicated. He’s probably going to have to pay some bribes to stay out of trouble. Every single criminal in Russia now knows he is a vulnerable 33 year old with an absolute ton of bitcoin. So this is not a happy time for him.”

Update, Feb. 21, 1:10 p.m. ET: The Russian security firm F.A.C.C.T reports that Ermakov has been arrested in Russia, and charged with violating domestic laws that prohibit the creation, use and distribution of malicious computer programs.

“During the investigation, several defendants were identified who were not only promoting their ransomware, but also developing custom-made malicious software, creating phishing sites for online stores, and driving user traffic to fraudulent schemes popular in Russia and the CIS,” F.A.C.C.T. wrote. “Among those detained was the owner of the nicknames blade_runner, GistaveDore, GustaveDore, JimJones.”