Tag Archive for: TikTok

4 billion dollar Bitcoin hack makes TikTok girl Heather Morgan an Internet sensation

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More than 1,00,000 Bitcoin, US $4,000,000,000, one of the biggest crypto hacks in the world, hackers and money untraceable for nearly 6 years… Sounds like a major heist, doesn’t it?



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BitFinex was hacked in 2016 and millions of dollars worth Bitcoin was stolen.

The US Department of Justice has caught up to the hackers, arrested them and come in possession of the world’s largest crypto-holding wallet. But can you imagine who carried out such a sophisticated heist – perhaps state actors from North Korea or Russia, or some big mafia connection, shrouded in mystery and a black hoodie with no face?

All guesses are WRONG in this case!

The Crypto world has proved to be even more surreal and crazy than ever before. The hackers behind the 2016 Bitfinex hack are a TikTok girl named Heather Morgan who made cringey rap videos, and her husband of dual nationality – Russia and the US, who ran ‘cloud services and solutions business’.

The US DoJ arrested 31-year-old Heather Morgan and her husband 34-year-old Ilya Lichtenstein in the 2016 BitFinex hack. More than the movie plot-like-story behind the hack and the recovery, netizens are going gaga over Heather Morgan.

Heather Morgan has become an instant hit among netizens in the hack story due to her unique online persona, unlike anything anyone would have ever imagined a hacker to be. Heather made rap videos on YouTube, TikTok and elsewhere under the name Razzlekhan. She also gave speeches on growing businesses and called herself a ‘serial entrepreneur’ and an ‘angel investor’. She described her art as ‘surreal’, her genre as ‘horror-comedy, with a splash of weird allure’.



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Heather Morgan’s profile on Forbes.

Before this, she also worked for Forbes as a writer between 2017 and 2021. Her Forbes bio reads: When she’s not reverse-engineering…

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TikTok overtakes Google as most used internet site

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Move over Google, TikTok is the world’s new most popular online destination.

The viral video app gets more hits than even the ubiquitous American search engine, according to Cloudflare, an IT security company.

TikTok mobile video-sharing app company logo on phone screen with internet homepage in background.

Photo: 123RF

The rankings show that TikTok knocked Google off the top spot in February, March and June this year, and has held the number one position since August.

Last year Google was first, and a number of sites including TikTok, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Netflix were all in the top 10.

Cloudfare said it tracks data using its tool Cloudflare Radar, which monitors web traffic.

It is believed one of the reasons for the surge in TikTok’s popularity is because of the Covid-19 pandemic, as lockdowns meant people were stuck at home and looking for entertainment.

By July this year, TikTok had been downloaded more than three billion times, according to data company Sensor Tower.

The social network, which is owned by a Chinese company called Bytedance, now has more than one billion active users across the world, and that number continues to grow.

ANKARA, TURKEY - SEPTEMBER 30: In this photo illustration the logos of social media applications

Photo: AFP

In China, to comply with the country’s censorship rules, the app is called Douyin, and runs on a different network.

Douyin was originally released in September 2016. This year, China ruled that users under the age of 14 would be limited to 40 minutes a day on the platform.

Security concerns

TikTok was launched internationally in 2018, after merging with another Chinese social media service, Musical.ly, an app which allowed users to share videos of themselves lip-synching to songs.

The social media platform is no stranger to controversy. In 2019, it garnered a temporary ban in India, a US counter-intelligence investigation and a record £4.3m fine after Musical.ly was found to have knowingly hosted content published by under-age users.

As one of the only internationally successful Chinese apps, politicians and regulators outside China have raised concerns about security and privacy.

Last year TikTok was forced to deny it is controlled by the Chinese government.

Theo Bertram, TikTok’s head of public policy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said it would refuse any request from China to hand…

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Court orders Apple to implement App Store changes, 2022 forecast, TikTok tries gaming – TechCrunch

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Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.

The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. And in the U.S., app usage surged ahead of the time spent watching live TV. Currently, the average American watches 3.7 hours of live TV per day, but now spends four hours per day on their mobile devices.

Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re also a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. In 2020, investors poured $73 billion in capital into mobile companies — a figure that’s up 27% year-over-year.

This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and suggestions about new apps and games to try, too.

Do you want This Week in Apps in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here: techcrunch.com/newsletters

Apple lost its request to delay App Store changes

Epic Games Inc. Fortnite App As Gamers Flock

Image Credits: Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg / Getty Images

A federal judge ruled this week that Apple can’t push back the deadline to update its App Store policies, as previously ordered in the court’s decision on California’s Epic Games v. Apple lawsuit. Though Apple largely won that case when the judge declared that Apple was not acting as a monopolist (as Epic Games had alleged), the court sided with the Fortnite maker on the matter of Apple’s anti-steering policies regarding restrictions on in-app purchases.

The original ruling stated that Apple would no longer be allowed to prohibit developers from pointing to other means of payment besides Apple’s own payment systems. But Apple wanted that decision put on hold until its appeals case was decided — a delay that would have effectively pushed back the App Store changes by a matter of years.

The judge heard Apple’s requests for a stay on the injunction…

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Biden Revokes and Replaces Trump Order That Banned TikTok

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TikTok’s woes subsided with Mr. Trump’s election defeat. Though the company is still under scrutiny with the Biden administration’s new executive order, analysts say the dramatic ups and downs for the company will significantly dwindle.

James Lewis, a senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the Biden administration had shown no easing of the government’s strong stance against China. But the new order lays out much more precise criteria for weighing risks posed by TikTok and other companies owned by foreign adversaries like China.

“They are taking the same direction as the Trump administration but in some ways tougher, in a more orderly fashion and implemented in a good way,” Mr. Lewis said. He added that Mr. Biden’s order was stronger than the Trump-era directive because “it’s coherent, not random.”

Under the new system outlined in Mr. Biden’s order, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo would be empowered to “use a criteria-based decision framework and rigorous, evidence-based analysis” to examine software applications designed, manufactured or developed by a “foreign adversary,” including China, according to a memo circulated by Commerce Department officials and obtained by The New York Times.

“The Biden administration is committed to promoting an open, interoperable, reliable and secure internet,” the memo said. “Certain countries,” including China, “do not share these democratic values.”

On Wednesday, administration officials would not go into specifics about the future of TikTok’s availability to American users or say whether the U.S. government would seek to compel ByteDance, which owns the app, to transfer American user data to a company based in the United States. Amid a number of successful legal challenges waged by ByteDance, a deal to transfer the data to Oracle fell through this year shortly after Mr. Biden took office.

Administration officials said a review of TikTok by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the body that considers the national security implications of foreign investments in U.S. companies, was still continuing and separate…

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