Tag Archive for: couple

US Judge grants bail to Crypto couple in $4.5 billion hack


A New York judge granted bail for two people charged with trying to launder billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin stolen in a 2016 hack of the Bitfinex currency exchange.

Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan appeared in a lower Manhattan federal courtroom Tuesday after being arrested at 7am in New York. The US government said it seized about $3.6 billion worth of cryptocurrency from the married couple, the largest financial seizure ever. The two allegedly conspired to launder 119,754 Bitcoin, currently valued at about $4.5 billion, stolen after a hacker breached Bitfinex’s systems.

The government initially asked the judge not to allow them to be released on bail. Each is facing the possibility of a 20-year prison sentence, so they have the motivation to run, a prosecutor told the judge. When the judge indicated she would set a bond, the government requested it be set at $100 million, an amount one of the defense lawyers called “laughable.”

The judge set bail for Morgan at $3 million and asked her parents to post their home as security. For Lichtenstein, bail was set at $5 million.

Lichtenstein, 34, holds dual US and Russian citizenship. He wore jeans and a gray shirt in the courtroom, his brown hair was slightly messy and he sported a paunch. Morgan, 31, appeared in court wearing a white hooded sweatshirt, her long hair down. They both wore masks, as did everyone else in the room, per court requirements.

They looked at the magistrate judge as she read them their rights. Neither of them spoke publicly during this initial appearance. Their lawyers – they have retained separate counsel – did the talking in court.

Morgan, who was born in Oregon and grew up in California, has foreign ties, the prosecutor said. She has lived in Hong Kong and Egypt and is studying Russian, according to her social media. She’s a journalist and economist and travels internationally for work, according to the government. Her father is a retired U.S. government biologist and her mother worked as a librarian….

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Imperial couple reach out to health care workers online : The Asahi Shimbun


With the novel coronavirus pandemic barring direct engagement with people, Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako are switching their interactions with the public in a manner picture-perfect for the pandemic.

On Nov. 18, the imperial couple held a videoconference with health care workers at various hospitals around Japan dealing with the pandemic.

From the Akasaka Imperial Residence in Tokyo, Naruhito and Masako watched and conversed with doctors and nurses in such areas as northern Hokkaido and Okinawa Prefecture in the south using a 50-inch monitor.

Imperial Household Agency officials said it was the first time the emperor and empress used an online system to interact with the public.

The session began with Yukio Honma, head of the Japanese Red Cross Medical Center, based in Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward. He explained how his hospital was treating COVID-19 patients. The medical center is one of the medical institutions designated specifically to handle the novel coronavirus.

According to Hiroki Tomita, a vice president of the Japanese Red Cross Society, Naruhito told Masako that the display gave him the impression those he was speaking to were right in front of him.

Doctors and nurses from three hospitals affiliated with the Japanese Red Cross Society spoke with the imperial couple through the videoconferencing system. The hospitals were located in Hokkaido, Fukushima Prefecture and Okinawa.

The imperial couple expressed their deep respect for the various activities carried out so far by the health care professionals. Masako also said she was worried about the difficulties facing those working on the front lines of the pandemic.

Imperial Household Agency officials said the imperial couple had long indicated their desire to thank those treating COVID-19 patients. But as having them visit a hospital in person would have burdened the staff, it was decided to hold the videoconference.

Initially, agency officials were less than enthusiastic about using online systems. with one high-ranking official saying, “It is important for the emperor and empress to directly meet with and talk to people to ensure that their thoughts are passed on.” 

But the…

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Ring Throws A Moist Towelette On Its Dumpster Fire With A Couple Of Minimal Security Tweaks

Things have gotten worse and worse for Amazon’s Ring over the past several months. Once just the pusher of a snitch app that allowed city residents to engage in racial profiling from the comfort of their homes, Ring is now synonymous with poor security practices and questionable “partnerships” with hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the nation.

Ring owners recently discovered how easily their cameras could be hijacked by assholes with no moral compass and too much time on their hands. Using credentials harvested from security breaches, online forum members took control of people’s cameras to entertain a podcast audience who listened along as hijackers verbally abused Ring owners and their children.

Ring is now being sued for selling such an easily-compromised product. Ring’s response to the original reports of hijackings was to blame customers for not taking their own security more seriously. Ring does recommend two-factor authentication but that’s about all it does. It does not inform users when login attempts are made from unrecognized IP addresses or devices, and does not put the system on lockdown after a certain number of failed attempts are made.

Yes, users should use strong passwords (and not reuse passwords), but blaming customers for engaging in behavior most customers will engage in is unproductive. Instead of making two-factor authentication a requirement before deployment, Ring has just repeatedly pointed to its prior statements about its “encouragement” of 2FA — an “encouragement” that is mostly comprised of defensive statements issued in response to another negative news cycle.

Since it can’t keep blaming its millions of customers for its own failings, Ring is taking a very, very small step in the direction of actually taking its customers’ security seriously. [Please hold your tepid applause until the end of the announcement.]

Ring has announced that it is adding a new privacy dashboard to its mobile apps that will let Ring owners manage their connected devices, third-party services, and whether local police partnered with Ring can make requests to access video from the Ring cameras on the account. The company says that other privacy and security settings will be added to the dashboard in the future. This new Control Center will be available in the iOS and Android versions of the Ring app later this month.

It’s barely enough to make any one feel whelmed, much less overly so. There are two small additions that put this ahead of what Ring offered prior to the newsworthy camera hijackings. First, the app will allow users to see who’s logged in at any given time and logout unrecognized IP addresses or locations from within the app.

The second addition finally puts some (baby) teeth into Ring’s 2FA recommendation:

[R]ing is continuing to inform its customers of the importance of two-factor authentication on their accounts and will be making it an “opt-out” thing for new account setups, as opposed to the opt-in setup it currently is.

Swell. So that’s kind of… fixed. I guess. Now Ring just needs to work on all the other problematic things about itself, like the fact that it’s still not going to notify users when new IP addresses, devices, or locations attempt to access their cameras. And it’s not going to stop using cop shops as Ring marketing street teams. And for all of its insistence footage is never handed over to cops without the proper paperwork, it still deals from the bottom of the deck by claiming end users own all their footage even as it’s handing this footage to law enforcement without the end user’s permission or involvement.

Ring has a lot to fix if it’s ever going to make its way out of the PR pit it’s dug for itself. This is something, but it’s just barely something. It’s not enough. And it says Ring still isn’t serious about protecting its customers — not from law enforcement and not from malicious idiots who’ve found a new IoT toy to play with.

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It’s been a couple of days, so Apple releases yet another iOS update

Yup, there’s a new update to iOS. But don’t expect it to have resolved the worrying Checkm8 exploit one hacker found in the iPhone’s secure ROM.

Graham Cluley