Tag Archive for: Generated

Ryuk Ransomware Has Generated over $150m in Victims

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ransomware

Out of all the masses of viruses and malware you could accidentally install onto your PC, it’s hard to deny that for the casual consumer, and definitely businesses, Ransomware represents one of the current biggest dangers. – For those of you unfamiliar with it, unlike other malicious programs that may simply look to either steal your data or destroy your PC (in a filing sense), Ransomware is usually presented via a fairly generic email attachment, but once it’s opened, it encrypts all of your stored data. Following that, as the name might’ve already suggested to you, you’re given the choice of either paying (usually via Bitcoin) to get the decryption code to unlock your data or face losing your files forever.

Just how prevalent is this though? – Well, in a report via TechSpot, security researchers have confirmed that one of the latest Ransomware programs ‘Ryuk’ has already successfully generated at least $150,000,000.

Ryuk Ransomware

In a joint report submitted by Advanced Intelligence and HYAS, they believe that they have successfully identified 61 Bitcoins that have been paid by victims of the Ryuk Ransomware. Following which, they have been able to seemingly monitor the activity of the currency suggesting that it passes through a rather elaborate laundering system to fund various persons and, of course, further illegal activity.

Now, admittedly, I have no idea how they have done this as I was personally always under the impression that cryptocurrencies were very difficult if not impossible to track and monitor. The security firms are, however, willing to state that they believe at least $150,000,000 has been paid by users or businesses in order to ‘unlock’ their data. – In other words, criminal organizations utilizing this strategy have had a pretty significant cash injection by just this one pretty basic venture.

ransomware

A Vicious Cycle

Admittedly, losing all of my personal data stored on PC would be a huge blow. While I am rather sensible to back it up on independent storage drives every now and then, I can ultimately understand why some people do choose to pay the ransom. – The problem, however, is that with every payment received, it does…

Source…

NSA Blew $100 Million On Phone Records Over Five Years, Generated Exactly One Usable Lead

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The telephone metadata program the NSA finally put out to pasture in 2019 was apparently well past its expiration date. Since the initial Snowden leak in 2013, critics have argued the program needed to die since it was obviously the sort of general warrant rummaging (only without the warrant!) the founding fathers headed off with the Fourth Amendment.

The program wasn’t remade/remodeled until the passage of the USA Freedom Act in 2015. That took the phone records away from the NSA and left them at their place of origin — the databases maintained by telcos and other service providers. The government was also required to put forward some sort of articulable suspicion before asking for phone records from telcos.

The NSA was uniquely unprepared to handle these sorts of transactions, having been built from the ground up to collect everything and sort through it later. Now that its searches were more confined, it frequently found itself obtaining more records than it could legally justify having. The cost of compliance managed to outweigh the benefits of the program and the NSA just kind of stopped approaching the FISA court with requests for communications metadata.

Still, proponents argued the program had value — possibly unrealized — and that it should not be written out of existence by the periodic surveillance powers renewal process. I have no idea what they planned to use as evidence for these claims. A new report by Charlie Savage for the New York Times makes it clear even the most obligatory cost-benefit analysis should lead Congressional oversight to question why it allowed the modified Section 215 collection to limp along for another five years.

A National Security Agency system that analyzed logs of Americans’ domestic phone calls and text messages cost $ 100 million from 2015 to 2019, but yielded only a single significant investigation, according to a newly declassified study.

$ 100 million for a single investigation lead. How’s that for ROI? It actually produced two leads, but the other lead was a dead end that terminated an investigation before it could get past its initial stages.

Not only was the program useless, it was also redundant.

It also disclosed that in the four years the Freedom Act system was operational, the National Security Agency produced 15 intelligence reports derived from it. The other 13, however, contained information the F.B.I. had already collected through other means, like ordinary subpoenas to telephone companies.

Killing the program just makes sense. And Congress can do it with during the renewal process for the USA Freedom Act, which expires in March of this year. With this information in the public domain, no one can seriously argue the program should continue to consume tax dollars and provide almost zero usable intel for another five years. Given the fact these agencies can still use subpoenas to target phone records, it would seem far more beneficial for everyone if the NSA and FBI did a bit more targeted snooping, rather than use the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to sweep up Americans’ phone records.

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Techdirt.

In 2017, four US states generated more than 30% of their electricity from wind

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Enlarge / Wind turbines on private working ranch land on August 1, 2017 near Kevin, Montana. (credit: Getty Images / William Campbell-Corbis)

Last week, as President Trump made bizarre and wandering remarks about “windmills” being an inferior source of energy, the Department of Energy (DoE) released the 2017 Wind Technology Report (PDF), showing that wind energy had an extremely successful year.

In four states—Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and South Dakota—wind contributed 30 to 37 percent of each state’s entire electricity generation. These are fairly unique cases, because the states are sparsely populated and benefit from areas with high wind speeds. But the fraction of wind-generated electricity is growing in many other states, too. Fourteen states had more than 10 percent of their energy come from wind. On a wider scale, wind contributed just 6.3 percent of national generation, although that’s up from 5.7 percent in 2016.

Still, the US is behind a number of countries in how much wind power meets electricity demand. The DOE writes that “wind power capacity is estimated to supply the equivalent of 48 percent of Denmark’s electricity demand, and roughly 30 percent of demand in Ireland and in Portugal.” This year, Portugal had several days in March where renewable energy supply exceeded electricity demand.

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

One Cybercrime Gang Generated Most Phishing Attacks in ‘09 – WebProNews

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A single cybercrime gang using advanced malware was responsible for two thirds of all phishing attacks detected in the second half of 2009, according to a new report by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG). The report authors found the Avalanche phishing gang was responsible for 66 percent of all
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