At the doctor’s | Phone safety | Passwords | Heinz advert Lucy Mangan, writing about her doctor joking about her kidneys ( Digested week, 4 October ), reminded me of having an examination for an enlarged prostate. As I lay on the couch waiting for the procedure, my doctor said: “In accordance with …
This is pretty horrific :...a group of men behind a violent crime spree designed to compel victims to hand over access to their cryptocurrency savings. That announcement and the criminal complaint laying out charges against St. Felix focused largely on a single theft of cryptocurrency from an elderly North …
The US Justice Department has dismantled an enormous botnet: According to an indictment unsealed on May 24, from 2014 through July 2022, Wang and others are alleged to have created and disseminated malware to compromise and amass a network of millions of residential Windows computers worldwide. These devices were …
Someone got caught trying to smuggle 322 pounds of gold (that’s about 1/4 of a cubic foot) out of Hong Kong. It was disguised as machine parts: On March 27, customs officials x-rayed two air compressors and discovered that they contained gold that had been “concealed in …
Gang sets up new site on dark web and releases rambling statement explaining how it was infiltrated by law enforcement agencies The LockBit ransomware gang is attempting a comeback days after its operations were severely disrupted by a coordinated international crackdown. The Russia-based group has set up a new …
Four arrested and LockBit victims will get help to recover data after joint operation in UK, US and Europe The entire “command and control” apparatus for the ransomware group LockBit is now in possession of law enforcement, the UK’s National Crime Agency has revealed, after it emerged that …
Information about victims of crime, witnesses and suspects included with freedom of information responses, forces say Two police forces in England have admitted mishandling the sensitive data of victims, witnesses and suspects in cases including domestic abuse incidents, sexual offences, assaults, thefts and hate crime. Norfolk and Suffolk police …
Interesting forensics in connection with a serial killer arrest: Investigators went through phone records collected from both midtown Manhattan and the Massapequa Park area of Long Island—two areas connected to a “burner phone” they had tied to the killings. (In court, prosecutors later said the burner phone was …
Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence: While security cameras are commonplace in American cities, self-driving cars represent a new level of access for law enforcement and a new method for encroachment on privacy, advocates say. Crisscrossing the city on their routes, self-driving cars capture a …
Don’t do it : Recently, the manager of the Harvard Med School morgue was accused of stealing and selling human body parts. Cedric Lodge and his wife Denise were among a half-dozen people arrested for some pretty grotesque crimes. This part is also at least a little bit funny …
Jenny Radcliffe is a professional ‘people hacker’ – someone who claims she can get past anyone and get in anywhere. No building is secure. How does she do it? Plus, an extract from her memoir ‘Do I look like someone to mess with?” says Jenny Radcliffe, folding her arms in …
Chainalysis reports that worldwide ransomware payments were down in 2022. Ransomware attackers extorted at least $456.8 million from victims in 2022, down from $765.6 million the year before. As always, we have to caveat these findings by noting that the true totals are much higher, as there …
Seems it’s now common to sneak contraband into prisons with a drone. [...]
Here’s a story of someone who, with three compatriots, rented textbooks from Amazon and then sold them instead of returning them. They used gift cards and prepaid credit cards to buy the books, so there was no available balance when Amazon tried to charge them the buyout price …
It’s a big one : As first reported by Motherboard on Sunday, someone on the dark web claims to have obtained the data of 100 million from T-Mobile’s servers and is selling a portion of it on an underground forum for 6 bitcoin, about $280,000. The trove …
Ransomware isn’t new; the idea dates back to 1986 with the “Brain” computer virus. Now, it’s become the criminal business model of the internet for two reasons. The first is the realization that no one values data more than its original owner, and it makes more sense …
The New York Times has a long story on the DarkSide ransomware gang. A glimpse into DarkSide’s secret communications in the months leading up to the Colonial Pipeline attack reveals a criminal operation on the rise, pulling in millions of dollars in ransom payments each month. DarkSide offers …
The person behind the Bitcoin Fog was identified and arrested. Bitcoin Fog was an anonymization service: for a fee, it mixed a bunch of people’s bitcoins up so that it was hard to figure out where any individual coins came from. It ran for ten years. Identifying the …
In this entertaining story of French serial criminal Rédoine Faïd and his jailbreaking ways, there’s this bit about cell phone surveillance: After Faïd’s helicopter breakout, 3,000 police officers took part in the manhunt. According to the 2019 documentary La Traque de Rédoine Faïd, detective units scoured …
Excellent New Yorker article on North Korea’s offensive cyber capabilities. [...]
Analyzing cryptocurrency data, a research group has estimated a lower-bound on 2020 ransomware revenue: $350 million, four times more than in 2019. Based on the company’s data, among last year’s top earners, there were groups like Ryuk, Maze (now-defunct), Doppelpaymer, Netwalker ( disrupted by authorities ), Conti, and REvil …