Tag Archive for: arrest

Police arrest two in data theft cyberattack on Leonardo defense corp

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Leonardo

Italian police have arrested two people allegedly for using malware to steal 10 GB of confidental data and military secrets from defense company Leonardo S.p.A.

Leonardo is one of the world’s largest defense contractors, with 30% of the company owned by the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance. As a multi-national company, they are headquartered in Italy but have a large presence in the United Kingdom, the United States, a

According to Italian media, police arrested one person for allegedly using USB keys to infect 94 workstations with a trojan named ‘cftmon.exe.’ This trojan was likely named after the legitimate Windows file located at C:Windowssystem32ctfmon.exe to evade detection.

The malware is said to have been used for two years, between 2015 and 2017, to steal data and send it back to a command and control server at ‘www.fuijamaaltervista.org.’

The exfiltrated data included confidential accounting information, military secrets, and aircraft designs.

“Overall, data for 10 gigabytes, that is about 100,000 files , concerning administrative-accounting management, the use of human resources, the procurement and distribution of capital goods, as well as the  design of civil aircraft components and military aircraft for the Italian and international market were exfiltrated . Also capture credentials for accessing personal information of Leonardo spa employees,”, Agi.it reports.

The head of Leonardo’s cyber-emergency team was also placed under house arrest for allegedly misrepresenting the scope of the attack and hindering the investigation.

The prosecutors state that Leonardo’s security systems did not detect the malware as it was designed by the employee and not previously seen by antivirus programs.

In response to this news, Leonardo issued a statement that they initiated the investigation after filing an official complaint with the courts.

“With regards to the current measures adopted by the Naples judiciary, Leonardo announces that the investigation comes from a complaint by the Company’s security that has been followed by others. The measures concern a former collaborator who is not an employee of Leonardo, and a non-executive employee of the Company.”

“The…

Source…

Hacker targeted Auburn Police, Farnum Center after drug arrest | Crime

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CONCORD — A Hooksett man has admitted to hacking the computers of the Farnum Center, the Auburn Police Department and several department employees following his arrest on heroin possession charges, federal prosecutors announced.

The hacking involved rerouting a drug-help telephone number to an adult entertainment business and pop-up messages praying for the death of his arresting officer, federal prosecutors said.

Wayne Kenney Jr., 31, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court on Wednesday to unauthorized computer access and damage of protected computers.

The hacking took place five years ago:

Kenney installed malicious software on Auburn police computers that prompted pop-up messages that read “I pray for the death of” the arresting officer.

People logging into the Farnum Center found a link to a video that depicted safer heroin injection.

The Farnum Center’s 1-800 number was directed to an adult entertainment company.

Kenney impaired the integrity of Auburn police and town government data and deleted some files.

Police Department employees lost control of email and social media accounts, which were defaced with embarrassing material such as pornography.

The attacks on the Auburn Police Department took place from February to July 2015, prosecutors said in a release. The attack against the Farnum system took place July 1, 2015.

Kenney’s lawyer said he was going through personal problems when the crimes occurred.

“He is remorseful and a different person than he was at the time,” said Concord lawyer Amy Spencer

Prosecutors say the hacking took place after Auburn police arrested Kenney in early 2015 for heroin possession. He received a suspended sentence and was ordered into drug treatment at Farnum Center.

Kenney used a customized keyboard stroke logger, computer viruses and phishing emails to accomplish the hacks. The attacks were so sensitive that prosecutors identified personal victims as John and Jane Does.

“Certainly, Easterseals learned from that circumstance,” said Nancy Rollins, chief operating officer of Easterseals NH, which runs the Farnum Center drug and alcohol treatment center.

She said such an attack would not be successful nowadays,…

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Arrest Numbers Show The NYPD Is Handling Pandemic Enforcement With The Same Biased Enthusiasm It Put Into Stop And Frisk

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You can take the stop-and-frisk out of the NYPD, but you can’t remove the biased policing, as the old saying goes. The NYPD may have been forced to stop pushing every minority up against the nearest wall/fence/cop car after a federal court determined this to be a violation of their rights, but they’re apparently continuing to enforce laws very selectively.

On Thursday night, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office became the first prosecutor in the city to release statistics on social-distancing enforcement. In the borough, the police arrested 40 people for social-distancing violations from March 17 through May 4, the district attorney’s office said.

Of those arrested, 35 people were black, four were Hispanic and one was white.

More than a third of the arrests were made in the predominantly black neighborhood of Brownsville. No arrests were made in the more white Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope.

So, this is more than just anecdotal evidence. It’s, you know, evidence evidence. Plenty of anecdotal evidence exists of inconsistent social distancing enforcement is available, if you’re interested in seeing that as well.

This bothers Mayor Bill De Blasio — the man who won the election by promising to be someone other than Mike Bloomberg, who loudly and proudly supported the NYPD’s “right” to harass and detain minorities. But he’s not upset enough. And he’s upset incorrectly. Critics are calling this selective enforcement of pandemic efforts a new stop-and-frisk. De Blasio is only upset about the terminology.

“What happened with stop and frisk was a systematic, oppressive, unconstitutional strategy that created a new problem much bigger than anything it purported to solve,” he said. “This is the farthest thing from that. This is addressing a pandemic. This is addressing the fact that lives are in danger all the time. By definition, our police department needs to be a part of that because safety is what they do.”

That’s just talking around the problem. Yes, the pandemic response isn’t “systematic,” but the ingrained habits that have resulted in minorities being disproportionately targeted by NYPD officers certainly are. And his siding with the NYPD aligns him more with the man he replaced than the public that elected him. Both De Blasio and Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea claim this enforcement has been deployed “sparingly and fairly.” It’s hard to square “fairly” with the numbers released by the Brooklyn DA.

It also doesn’t square with the total arrest numbers provided by the NYPD.

Citywide, black people make up 68 percent of those arrested on charges of violating social-distancing rules, while Hispanic people make up 24 percent, a deputy police commissioner, Richard Esposito, said late on Thursday night.

Only seven percent of the social distancing arrests citywide involved Caucasians.

The police union spoke up, because of course it did. The head of the PBA made one halfway decent point about bad laws and the problems inherent in enforcing them…

Patrick J. Lynch, the president of the Police Benevolent Association, declined to comment on Officer Garcia’s actions, but noted he and his colleagues “did not create the poorly conceived social-distancing policy they were sent out to enforce.”

… but followed that up by defending an officer who has been sued seven times and cost the city more than $ 200,000 in settlements. Officer Francisco X. Garcia was involved in a controversial social distancing arrest in which he punched a man onto the ground and then sat on him as he was handcuffed. Garcia has been removed from duty while this arrest is being investigated, which is apparently the equivalent of hanging this sinless man on the cross.

[Lynch] said City Hall was blaming Officer Garcia for carrying out the policy it had created. “Once again, our leaders are poised to trample a police officer’s rights in order to protect themselves,” he said.

Ah yes. Let’s not “trample” those rights. But the rights of everyone else can be trampled while the NYPD fumbles its way through the pandemic, making minorities pay the price for the social distancing sins of an entire city.

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Court To Prosecutors Who Sent Crime Victims Fake Subpoenas Threatening Them With Arrest: Pretty Sure Immunity Doesn’t Cover That

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A few years ago, The Lens exposed a super-shady tactic being used by Louisiana prosecutors. In an attempt to obtain a bit more compliance from witnesses in criminal cases, the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s office started issuing fake subpoenas to witnesses that contained (an also-bogus) threat of imprisonment.

Rather than do it the legal way — using office letterhead with no threat of incarceration — the DA’s office opted for a hard sell tactic that deliberately mislead citizens. The office claimed this was fine and that no one paid attention to the big, bold print promising jail time for not cooperating.

Two weeks after The Lens exposed the practice, the lawsuits began flowing in. Some lawsuits sought copies of the fake subpoenas the office had issued. Others sued over the practice itself. Crime victims, who had been falsely threatened with being treated like criminals themselves, sued the DA. The problem with this is prosecutors are generally given absolute immunity which makes them nearly impervious to civil lawsuits.

Fortunately, a Louisiana federal court allowed the lawsuit to proceed, finding (on very narrow grounds) absolute immunity couldn’t be stretched to cover every bit of this nasty, deceitful scheme.

This Court finds that granting the Individual Defendants absolute immunity for allegations of systematic fraud that bypassed a court meant to check powerful prosecutors would not protect the proper functioning of a district attorney’s office. It would instead grant prosecutors a license to bypass the most basic legal checks on their authority. The law does not grant prosecutors such a license.

The DA’s office is still hoping to shut the lawsuit down. It appealed the lower court’s decision, but it’s not finding any receptive judges at the higher level. Again, the DA is pitching absolute immunity — a complete, judicially-approved whitewashing of all its sins. This pitch did not perform well at the oral arguments.

It was unclear when the three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would rule, but panel members sounded clearly skeptical as W. Raley Alford III, attorney for the prosecutors, made his case.

“Threat of incarceration with no valid premise?” Judge Jennifer Elrod said at one point during arguments. She later drew laughter from some in the audience when she said, “This argument is fascinating.”

“These are pretty serious assertions of authority they did not have,” said Judge Leslie Southwick, who heard arguments with Elrod and Judge Catharina Haynes.

Tough to retain immunity without a lawful premise. As for the DA, he’s not willing to back down from his assertions the fake subpoenas were a net good for the community he inflicted them upon. DA Leon Cannizzaro was filled with compassion when he falsely threatened people with arrest for not complying with a fake subpoena.

Cannizzaro also has said the warrants are rarely used to arrest victims of domestic violence or sexual crimes.

What a guy. Material witness warrants were rarely used to further traumatize victims of trauma. For everyone else though, Cannizzaro was willing to jail crime victims until they talked.

The lead plaintiff said she was jailed after declining to pursue charges against a man who shattered her cellphone during a fight. Cannizzaro’s office responded to that part of the complaint by saying the woman was legally incarcerated after avoiding legitimate court-issued subpoenas.

Oh, okay. Given the office’s routine deployment of fake subpoenas, it’s a bit rich to accuse them of dodging the real ones. Also, someone refusing to press charges shouldn’t be locked up until they decide to assist prosecutors in prosecuting a case the crime victim has no desire to see prosecuted.

Hopefully, the appeals court will uphold the lower court’s decision and prevent the prosecutors from dodging accountability completely.

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