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(credit: Mike Mozart)

Amid an ongoing E. coli outbreak investigation at Chipotle Mexican Grill, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Tuesday announced that it is joining the effort to investigate what may be a second wave of illnesses linked to the chain restaurant. The new illnesses are caused by the same type of E. coli found in the previous cases—Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli O26 (STEC 026)—but with a different, rare genetic variant.

To investigate this second wave, the FDA has combined forces with state and local authorities, plus the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which on Monday first announced an investigation into five cases of the variant E. coli infections. Those cases included one in Kansas, one in North Dakota, and three in Oklahoma. The sickened people from Kansas and North Dakota reportedly ate at the same Chipotle restaurant in Kansas before falling ill. The three sickened in Oklahoma were separate cases, but all three reportedly ate at the same Chipotle, the FDA reported.

The new cases, if confirmed, would bring the new E. coli outbreak numbers to 58 sickened and 12 states affected. The other states linked are California (3 cases), Illinois (1), Maryland (1), Minnesota (2), New York (1), Ohio (3), Oregon (13), Pennsylvania (2), and Washington (27). All of the cases involve some form of the STEC 026 bacteria.

The Australian government has repeatedly called for citizens to turn off two-factor authentication (2FA) at its main digital government portal, myGov. The portal's Twitter account has recently been updated several times with cute pictures encouraging holidaymakers to "turn off your myGov security codes" so that "you can spend more time doing the important things."

The portal is the place where Australian citizens can use and manage a number of governmental services, including health insurance, tax payments, and child support. In case of myGov, two-factor authentication is implemented by sending users text messages that contain one-time codes to complement their usual passwords.

A number of people on Twitter pointed out that, while downplaying security isn't a good idea in general, it could be even more dangerous when citizens go abroad:

Federal prosecutors announced charges today against 23-year-old Alonzo Knowles, a Bahamas resident who stands accused of hacking into the e-mail accounts of celebrities and entertainment studios, then trying to sell off unreleased scripts, audio tracks, and personal information that he obtained.

Investigators lured Knowles to the US, where he had been hoping to sell purloined movie scripts along with scripts for six episodes of a TV series. Instead, once Knowles asked an undercover officer for $80,000, he was arrested.

Prosecutors say Knowles had other information from celebrity hacks as well, including the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of "at least 130" entertainment, sports, and media figures. In one exchange, Knowles sent the undercover agent the passport, Social Security number (SSN), and other personal identification "of a particular film actor." Another time, Knowles offered to sell sexually explicit photos and videos from a celebrity account. At one point the complaint says he tried to sell "a very popular A-list celebrity SSN along with 30 unreleased tracks towards their upcoming album."