
Misleading title
I was hoping for a story about some sort of feathered Cop/Bounty Hunter. Wake me up when that happens.
Turkey has arrested 23 hackers suspected of links with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and attacks on government websites. The suspects allegedly attacked government web sites under direction of PKK leaders in Iraq and Europe, UPI reports. Reports of activities of the so-called Code Attack Team are sketchy, so it's …
In brief Google on Friday pledged to update its location history system so that visits to medical clinics and similarly sensitive places are automatically deleted.
In this post-Roe era of America, there is concern that cops and other law enforcement will demand the web giant hand over information about its users if they are suspected of breaking the law by seeking an abortion.
Google keeps a log of its users whereabouts, via its Location History functionality, and provides some controls to delete all or part of those records, or switch it off. Now, seemingly in response to the above concerns and a certain US Supreme Court decision, we're told Google's going to auto-delete some entries.
The choppy waters continue at OpenSea, whose security boss this week disclosed the NFT marketplace suffered an insider attack that could lead to hundreds of thousands of people fending off phishing attempts.
An employee of OpenSea's email delivery vendor Customer.io "misused" their access to download and share OpenSea users' and newsletter subscribers' email addresses "with an unauthorized external party," Head of Security Cory Hardman warned on Wednesday.
"If you have shared your email with OpenSea in the past, you should assume you were impacted," Hardman continued.
A former Canadian government employee has pleaded guilty in a US court to several charges related to his involvement with the NetWalker ransomware gang.
On Tuesday, 34-year-old Sebastien Vachon-Desjardins admitted he conspired to commit computer and wire fraud, intentionally damaged a protected computer, and transmitted a demand in relation to damaging a protected computer.
He will also forfeit $21.5 million and 21 laptops, mobile phones, gaming consoles, and other devices, according to his plea agreement [PDF], which described Vachon-Desjardins as "one of the most prolific NetWalker Ransomware affiliates" responsible for extorting said millions of dollars from dozens of companies worldwide.
America's Federal Trade Commission has sued Walmart, claiming it turned a blind eye to fraudsters using its money transfer services to con folks out of "hundreds of millions of dollars."
In a lawsuit [PDF] filed Tuesday, the regulator claimed the superstore giant is "well aware" of telemarketing fraudsters and other scammers convincing victims to part with their hard-earned cash via its services, with the money being funneled to domestic and international crime rings.
Walmart is accused of allowing these fraudulent money transfers to continue, failing to warn people to be on their guard, and failing to adopt policies and train employees on how to prevent these types of hustles.
The FTC is warning members of the LGBTQ+ community about online extortion via dating apps such as Grindr and Feeld.
According to the American watchdog, a common scam involves a fraudster posing as a potential romantic partner on one of the apps. The cybercriminal sends explicit of a stranger photos while posing as them, and asks for similar ones in return from the mark. If the victim sends photos, the extortionist demands a payment – usually in the form of gift cards – or threatens to share the photos on the chat to the victim's family members, friends, or employer.
Such sextortion scams have been going on for years in one form or another, even attempting to hit Reg hacks, and has led to suicides.
China's internet regulator has launched an investigation into the security regime protecting academic journal database China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), citing national security concerns.
In its announcement of the investigation, the China Cyberspace Administration (CAC) said:
Spyware developed by Italian firm RCS Labs was used to target cellphones in Italy and Kazakhstan — in some cases with an assist from the victims' cellular network providers, according to Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG).
RCS Labs customers include law-enforcement agencies worldwide, according to the vendor's website. It's one of more than 30 outfits Google researchers are tracking that sell exploits or surveillance capabilities to government-backed groups. And we're told this particular spyware runs on both iOS and Android phones.
We understand this particular campaign of espionage involving RCS's spyware was documented last week by Lookout, which dubbed the toolkit "Hermit." We're told it is potentially capable of spying on the victims' chat apps, camera and microphone, contacts book and calendars, browser, and clipboard, and beam that info back to base. It's said that Italian authorities have used this tool in tackling corruption cases, and the Kazakh government has had its hands on it, too.
NSO Group told European lawmakers this week that "under 50" customers use its notorious Pegasus spyware, though these customers include "more than five" European Union member states.
The surveillance-ware maker's General Counsel Chaim Gelfand refused to answer specific questions about the company's customers during a European Parliament committee meeting on Thursday.
Instead, he frequently repeated the company line that NSO exclusively sells its spyware to government agencies — not private companies or individuals — and only "for the purpose of preventing and investigating terrorism and other serious crimes."
Europol cops have arrested nine suspected members of a cybercrime ring involved in phishing, internet scams, and money laundering.
The alleged crooks are believed to have stolen "several million euros" from at least "dozens of Belgian victims," according to that nation's police, which, along with the Dutch, supported the cross-border operation.
On Tuesday, after searching 24 houses in the Netherlands, officers cuffed eight men between the ages of 25 and 36 from Amsterdam, Almere, Rotterdam, and Spijkenisse, and a 25-year-old woman from Deventer. We're told the cops seized, among other things, a firearm, designer clothing, expensive watches, and tens of thousands of euros.
Air raid sirens sounded for over an hour in parts of Jerusalem and southern Israel on Sunday evening – but bombs never fell, leading some to blame Iran for compromising the alarms.
While the perpetrator remains unclear, Israel's National Cyber Directorate did say in a tweet that it suspected a cyberattack because the air raid sirens activated were municipality-owned public address systems, not Israel Defense Force alarms as originally believed. Sirens also sounded in the Red Sea port town of Eilat.
Netizens on social media and Israeli news sites pointed the finger at Iran, though a diplomatic source interviewed by the Jerusalem Post said there was no certainty Tehran was behind the attack. The source also said Israel faces cyberattacks regularly, and downplayed the significance of the incident.
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