LockBit suspect cuffed after ransomware forces emergency services to use pen and paper A suspected member of the notorious international LockBit ransomware mob has been arrested – and could spend several years behind bars if convicted. Canadian and Russian national Mikhail Vasiliev was nabbed on November 9 in Canada and is awaiting extradition to the United States to face charges he conspired with others to …
The gang seems to have been based in Ukraine and at least some of the others were arrested last year. Vasiliev seems to have evaded the initial rounds of arrests because he lived in Canada.
He's an idiot. He would have known that the authorities were after the gang when the others were arrested in Kiev so he should have dropped all connections with it then and worked to cover his tracks. His second warning should have been when Canadian police raided him during the summer looking for evidence. He just kept at it though and there was loads of evidence laying about the place.
Big Brother Watch said, "which is then processed using facial recognition technology to find potential matches from an index of billions of photos from the internet."
So is the only way you can find out if you're on their database is to submit your photo to them? Niiiice.
Only if the system is written to associate names with photos. This system, on the other hand, appears to do it the other way around, so posting photos of other faces with your name attached won't prevent them from connecting two photos of your real face and correctly naming you if there's enough data. Their database would just think there are a lot of others sharing your name who look different. Theoretically, you could upload a ton of photos of you each connected to fake identities, but that requires giving them a lot of data and the creation of the fake identities isn't as easily automated.
I just uploaded a picture of myself to PimEyes, and it returned two images, one of me, and one of someone who looks a bit like me. The one of me shows me holding up a bit of paper with my partially blurred out name on it!. I think I know when it was taken. I would have to fork out for a subscription to see the full url. Not happy.
Where do you live? If it has privacy legislation, you can contact them and request them to take it down, and when they ignore you, you can file a report about it to hopefully steer a regulator in the right direction. If you know a good lawyer, you could also try suing them for copyright violation as you almost certainly didn't release that picture under a license that permits this, but you'd have to do the work for that one yourself. I won't do these things as I don't want to upload any pictures of me, but as you've already done it, at least the first suggestion is feasible and not too difficult if you live in a location that facilitates it.
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