Tag Archive for: assault

Michigan man sentenced for sexual assault of underage girl in Limerick

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NORRISTOWN — A Michigan man already serving time in federal prison for manufacturing child pornography while engaging in text communications with a teenage Montgomery County girl admitted in county court that he met and sexually assaulted the girl at a Limerick Township hotel.

Mark Allen Hillis, 60, of Southgate, Mich., was sentenced in county court to 15 to 30 years in a state correctional facility after he pleaded guilty to charges of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with a person under 16, unlawful contact with a minor and sexual abuse of children photographing and depicting sexual acts in connection with incidents that occurred in December 2019.

Hillis also must complete three years’ probation following parole, meaning he will be under court supervision on the county charges for 33 years.

The county sentence, imposed by Judge Thomas C. Branca as part of a plea agreement, will run concurrently with a 25-year federal sentence Hillis received in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia last November after he pleaded guilty there to charges of enticing a minor to engage in criminal sexual activity, traveling to engage in illicit sexual conduct, manufacturing and attempted manufacturing of child pornography, transferring obscene material to a minor, and possessing child pornography.

Under the federal and county sentences, Hillis won’t be eligible for parole until he’s in his 80s.

With the county charges, prosecutors essentially handled the charges related to Hillis’ hands-on contact with the underage girl at the Limerick hotel.

Assistant District Attorney Gabriella Glenning sought a significant state prison term against Hillis.

“The defendant fostered a relationship with a 13-year-old, built her trust, made her feel like they had a relationship and under that had her send him nude photographs of herself and then ultimately meeting up with her in person to accomplish his goal. That is heinous,” Glenning said. “To facilitate a hands-on offense is just horrendous.”

Prosecutors said the charges arose from Hillis’ sexual exploitation of the underage girl by using the internet and text messaging over a period of months, by traveling from…

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Bengaluru Karnataka News Live Updates: Security beefed up ahead of Lingayat seer’s sexual assault case hearing – The Indian Express

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Bengaluru Karnataka News Live Updates: Security beefed up ahead of Lingayat seer’s sexual assault case hearing  The Indian Express

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China’s assault on Big Tech’s ‘walled gardens’

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China’s months-long regulatory campaign targeting the tech sector is taking aim at a common practice that leading industry players deploy to foil rivals — blocking external links, which regulators consider anti-competitive.

For years, large Chinese internet companies from e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group to social media giant Tencent Holdings have used various means to block their users from sharing links to posts and products on other companies’ platforms. These techniques set up what are known as “walled gardens” to protect the creators’ own digital ecosystems, stymie rivals’ growth and prevent users from spending their cash elsewhere.

Now authorities vow to tear down the walls to promote connectivity among different internet platforms, a move to protect users’ rights and market competition. But it may shake the tech giants’ long-valued growth models.

At the same time, there is no unanimity among Chinese regulators on how the walls should be dismantled, as some are concerned that completely open connectivity will increase the difficulty of supervision, one industry source said. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) wants healthy growth of the internet industry, while the cybersecurity regulator focuses on content security, and the public security department is concerned about online fraud, another person close to the matter said.

At a Sept. 9 meeting, the MIIT pressed executives from leading tech titans including Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance and Baidu to dismantle link blockades. Companies were ordered to submit plans by Sept. 17. The ministry has been pursuing a campaign since July to crack down on online misconduct including pop-ups, data collection and link blocking.

“We will urge related companies to follow requirements and open up links to each other’s instant messaging platforms step by step,” Zhao Zhiguo, the general director of MIIT’s Information and Communication Management Bureau, said at a press conference shortly after the meeting. Blocking links “messes up users’ experience, harms their rights, and disrupts the market,” Zhao said.

How the three largest internet platform operators — Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance — will open their system is the…

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Ransomware groups continue assault on healthcare orgs as COVID-19 infections increase

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Ransomware groups have shown no signs of slowing down their assault on hospitals, seemingly ramping up attacks on healthcare institutions as dozens of countries deal with a new wave of COVID-19 infections thanks to the potent Delta variant. 

Vice Society, one of the newer ransomware groups, debuted in June and made a name for themselves by attacking multiple hospitals and leaking patient info. Cybersecurity researchers at Cisco Talos said Vice Society is known to be “quick to exploit new security vulnerabilities to help ransomware attacks” and frequently exploits Windows PrintNightmare vulnerabilities during attacks. 

“As with other threat actors operating in the big-game hunting space, Vice Society operates a data leak site, which they use to publish data exfiltrated from victims who do not choose to pay their extortion demands,” Cisco Talos explained last month. 

Cybersecurity firm Dark Owl added that Vice Society is “assessed to be a possible spin-off of the Hello Kitty ransomware variant based on similarities in the techniques used for Linux system encryption.” They were implicated in a ransomware attack on the Swiss city of Rolle in August, according to Black Fog. 

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The Vice Society leak site. 


Cisco Talos

Multiple hospitals — Eskenazi Health, Waikato DHB and Centre Hospitalier D’Arles — have been featured on the criminal group’s leak site and the group made waves this week by posting the data of Barlow Respiratory Hospital in California.

The hospital was attacked on August 27 but managed to avoid the worst, noting in a statement that “no patients were at risk of harm” and “hospital operations continued without interruption.”

Barlow Respiratory Hospital told ZDNet that law enforcement was immediately notified once the hospital noticed the ransomware impacting some of its IT systems. 

“Though we have taken extensive efforts to protect the privacy of our information, we learned that some data was removed from certain backup systems without…

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