Law enforcement in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia today jointly named Russian national Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev as the alleged operator of the LockBitSupp handle and the organizational mastermind behind the notorious LockBit ransomware group, which has been on a multiyear hacking rampage exporting an estimated $500 million from …
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Most scammers and cybercriminals operate in the digital shadows and don’t want you to know how they make money. But that’s not the case for the Yahoo Boys, a loose collective of young men in West Africa who are some of the web’s most prolific—and increasingly dangerous—scammers. Thousands of people …
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One task where AI tools have proven to be particularly superhuman is analyzing vast troves of data to find patterns that humans can't see, or automating and accelerating the discovery of those we can. That makes Bitcoin's blockchain, a public record of nearly a billion transactions between pseudonymous addresses, the …
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Changpeng Zhao, founder of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has been sentenced to four months in prison. Judge Richard Jones, who presided over the sentencing hearing in the Western District of Washington on Tuesday, handed down a lighter sentence than the three years petitioned by the prosecution. In November, …
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US senators Elizabeth Warren and Bill Cassidy have called for the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security to redouble efforts to stop the use of cryptocurrency to pay for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online, a problem they claim has worsened. In a letter sent on Thursday, addressed …
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When Mayor Brandon Johnson announced in February that Chicago would stop using the gunshot-detection system known as ShotSpotter by year’s end, local activists were elated. Ever since 2021, when the police fatally shot 13-year-old Adam Toledo while responding to a ShotSpotter alert, the Stop ShotSpotter Campaign has been pressuring the …
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The compliments start flowing as soon as she answers the video call. “Wow, you so pretty, honey,” says the man on the other side of the screen. His video feed shows he’s white, with short hair, likely a few years younger than her, and is sitting in front of his …
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For months, Change Healthcare has faced an immensely messy ransomware debacle that has left hundreds of pharmacies and medical practices across the United States unable to process claims. Now, thanks to an apparent dispute within the ransomware criminal ecosystem, it may have just become far messier still. In March, the …
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It’s been a week since the world avoided a potentially catastrophic cyberattack. On March 29, Microsoft developer Andres Freund disclosed his discovery of a backdoor in XZ Utils, a compression tool widely used in Linux distributions and thus countless computer systems worldwide. The backdoor was inserted into the open source …
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A federal jury in New York has found South Korean crypto magnate Do Kwon—and his company Terraform Labs—liable for defrauding investors who collectively sank billions of dollars into cryptoassets whose value later fell to near zero. Filed in February 2023 by the Securities and Exchange Commission, a regulatory body responsible …
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