Tag Archive for: culprits

9 Years After the Mt. Gox Hack, Feds Indict Alleged Culprits


Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference this week included an array of announcements about operating system releases and, of course, the company’s anticipated mixed-reality headset, Vision Pro. Apple also announced that it is expanding on-device nudity detection for children’s accounts as part of its efforts to combat the creation and distribution of child sexual abuse material. The company also debuted more flexible nudity detection for adults.

Internal documents obtained by WIRED revealed new details this week about how the imageboard platform 4chan does, and does not, moderate content—resulting in a violent and bigoted morass. Researchers like a group at the University of Texas, Austin, are increasingly developing support resources and clinics that institutions like local governments and small businesses can lean on for critical cybersecurity advice and assistance. Meanwhile, cybercriminals are expanding their use of artificial intelligence tools to generate content for scams, but defenders are also incorporating AI into their detection strategies.

New insight from North Korean defectors illustrates the fraught digital landscape within the reclusive nation. Surveillance, censorship, and monitoring are rampant for North Koreans who can get online, and millions of others have no digital access. And research released this week from the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare sheds light on the digital threats facing participants in the company’s Project Galileo program, which provides free protections to civil society and human rights organizations around the world.

And there’s more. Each week we round up the security stories we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

The US Department of Justice on Friday indicted two Russian men, Alexey Bilyuchenko and Aleksandr Verner, for the 650,000-bitcoin hack of Mt. Gox. The two appear to have been charged in absentia while evading arrest in Russia—unlike one of their alleged accomplices, Alexander Vinnik, who was previously convicted in 2020.

Bilyuchenko and Verner are accused of breaching Mt. Gox in 2011, in the earliest days of that original bitcoin exchange’s…

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Cryptocurrency related Ransomware Attacks “Skyrocketed” Last Year but there May be “Fewer Culprits” than Expected: Report


Ransomware “skyrocketed” last year, however, there might be “fewer culprits” than we may think or expect, according to a report from blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis.

Chainalysis acknowledges that 2020 will “forever be known” as the year of COVID-19, but when it comes to cryptocurrency-related crime, it’s also the year that ransomware really began to take off.

Blockchain analysis reveals that the total amount paid by ransomware victims “increased by 311% this year to reach nearly $350 million worth of cryptocurrency,” Chainalysis confirmed in its report. Notably, there’s “no other category of cryptocurrency-based crime” that had a higher growth rate than this segment. Chainalysis also pointed out that this number is actually “a lower bound of the true total, as underreporting means we likely haven’t categorized every victim payment address in our datasets.”

2020’s ransomware increase was mainly “driven by a number of new strains taking in large sums from victims,” and other “pre-existing strains drastically increasing earnings.” Chainalysis’ report also clarified that ransomware strains “don’t operate consistently, even month-to-month.”

The report added that the number of ransomware strains active throughout 2020 may “give the impression that there are several distinct groups carrying out ransomware attacks, but this may not be the case.” As reported by Chainalysis, many of these ransomware strains function on a model that affiliates “rent” usage of a strain “from its creators or administrators, in exchange for a cut of the money from each successful attack.”

Many ransomware-as-a-service or RaaS affiliates tend to “migrate between strains,” indicating that the entire ransomware ecosystem is significantly smaller than one might expect or think “at first glance.” Cybersecurity researchers also “believe that some of the biggest strains may even have the same creators and administrators, who publicly shutter operations before simply releasing a different, very similar strain under a new name,” the Chainalysis report noted.

The report also mentioned that “with blockchain analysis, we can shed light on some…

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Android apps that are major battery drain culprits – UPDATO (blog)


UPDATO (blog)

Android apps that are major battery drain culprits
UPDATO (blog)
Some apps are just dreadful when it comes to power efficiency. AVG (a security software pioneer company) has named and shamed apps that are sucking the life out of our smartphones. You will be very surprised to see some popular apps on the list that

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