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Huawei CFO is one crucial step closer to being extradited to the US
A Canadian court has ruled that Huawei's financial chief Meng Wanzhou is eligible for extradition.
AG Barr seeks 'legislative solution' to make companies unlock phones
Attorney General William Barr wants to force companies like Apple to unlock phones recovered in criminal investigations.
France gives social media sites one hour to delete criminal content
France passed a law that will give social media companies like Facebook and Twitter 60 minutes to delete content related to pedophelia and terrorism.
Disgraced Samsung heir likely won't give company control to his children
Jay Y. Lee wants to end the controversy regarding succession of managerial rights at Samsung.
A hacker stole and leaked the Xbox Series X graphics source code
AMD has been having a particularly rough few months, apparently. The chip designer has revealed that a hacker stole test files for a "subset" of current and upcoming graphics hardware, some of which had been posted online before they were taken down. While AMD was shy on details, the claimed intruder told TorrentFreak that the material included source code for Navi 10 (think Radeon RX 5700 series), the future Navi 21 and the Arden GPU inside the Xbox Series X.
Google location data led police to investigate an innocent cyclist
Those concerns about police indiscriminately collecting Google location data have some grounding in the real world. NBC News has revealed that police inadvertently made a suspect of an innocent cyclist, Gainesville, Florida resident Zachary McCoy, after using a geofence warrant (collecting all location data around the scene of a crime) to look for leads in a March 2019 burglary. McCoy had been using RunKeeper to track his biking, and had passed by the victim's house three times in the space of an hour -- enough to raise eyebrows among investigators looking for suspicious info.
Hitting the Books: How an attempt at digital allyship fell flat
Welcome to Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we've done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and delivering an easily digestible nugget of their stories.
Banjo AI surveillance is already monitoring traffic cams across Utah
A small company called Banjo is bringing pervasive AI surveillance to law enforcement throughout Utah, Motherboard reports. In July, Banjo signed a five-year, $20.7 million contract with Utah. The agreement gives the company real-time access to state traffic cameras, CCTV and public safety cameras, 911 emergency systems, location data for state-owned vehicles and more. In exchange, Banjo promises to alert law enforcement to "anomalies," aka crimes, but the arrangement raises all kinds of red flags.
Ohio man charged for laundering $300 million through Bitcoin 'mixer'
American law enforcement just illustrated how important cryptocurrency has become in the criminal world. Federal agents have charged Ohio resident Larry Harmon for allegedly running a darknet-based Bitcoin "mixer" that laundered the equivalent of roughly $300 million for drug dealers and other crooks. Helix, as it was called while it ran between 2014 and 2017, reportedly let customers pay to send Bitcoin in a way that hid the true source. It operated with "brazenness," the IRS' Don Fort said. Helix supposedly partnered with AlphaBay to serve the darknet black market's customers, and advertised Helix on the Grams search engine (which Harmon apparently ran) as a way to hide deals from police.
Hacker pleads guilty to stealing Nintendo secrets
A California man is about to face serious consequences for a string of crimes that include breaching a gaming industry giant. Palmdale resident Ryan Hernandez has pleaded guilty to federal charges of both hacking Nintendo systems (computer fraud and abuse) and possessing child pornography. Hernandez reportedly used phishing to swipe the credentials of a Nintendo worker in 2016 and used that to steal confidential info about the console maker and promptly leak that to the public. He even leaked details of the Switch before its March 2017 debut, according to court records. Moreover, he resumed hacking Nintendo systems in June 2018 despite the FBI catching him and eliciting a promise that he would stop.
London police begin using live facial recognition tech across the capital
London's Metropolitan Police Service has begun using live facial recognition (LFR) technology. At key areas throughout the city, signposted cameras will scan the faces of passing people, alerting officers to potential matches with wanted criminals. According to the Met, "this will help tackle serious crime, including serious violence, gun and knife crime, child sexual exploitation and help protect the vulnerable".
Scottish Police bought a fleet of devices for smartphone data-mining
Police in Scotland are getting ready to roll out a fleet of 'cyber kiosks' that will allow them to mine device data for evidence. The kiosks -- PC-sized machines -- have been designed to help investigations progress faster. At the moment, devices can be taken from witnesses, victims and suspects for months at a time, even if they contain no worthwhile evidence. According to Police Scotland, the kiosks will enable officers to quickly scan a device for evidence, and if relevant information is found, the device will be sent on for further investigation. If not, it can be returned to its owner straight away.
Three people sentenced for running $100 million malware crime network
The takedown of a massive malware crime network is now leading to consequences for some of its alleged participants. The US and the country of Georgia have sentenced three people for their roles in using GozNym malware to steal upwards of $100 million. Krasimir Nikolov was sentenced in the US to the 39 months he'd served in prison for serving as an "account takeover specialist," and will be retirned to Bulgaria. Two others, the "primary organizer" Alexander Konolov and his assistant Marat Kazandjian, have also been prosecuted in Georgia for their roles. The US Justice Department didn't detail their punishment.
Court says data swept up by the NSA is protected by the Fourth Amendment
An appeals court may have just shaped how the US treats the NSA's bulk data collection. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that American communications scooped up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act's Section 702 and PRISM is protected by Fourth Amendment rights baring unreasonable searches and seizures. Judges found that the "vast majority" of the evidence collected in a terrorism case against Agron Hasbajrami was permissible under the Fourth Amendment, but that the querying that data "could violate" the amendment -- and thus that it was fair to challenge the data use on constitutional grounds. It also believed that the accidental collection of Americans' data raised "novel constitutional questions" that could be answered later.
SEC charges IT administrator over $7 million insider trading ring
Insider trading among tech companies is nothing new, but some of these unscrupulous workers are more 'successful' than others. The SEC has charged former Palo Alto Networks IT administrator Janardhan Nellore and four friends with conducting insider trading that earned the group over $7 million between 2015 and 2018. Allegedly, Nellore exploited his "IT credentials and work contacts" to access his company's financial data and make illegal share trades. The group was also aware it might be tracked -- Nellore reportedly had the group use variants of the codeword "baby" in emails and texts to refer to the company stock, and the friends made small transactions to avoid tipping off the bank.
Two men plead guilty to running large illegal streaming sites
It didn't take long for federal officials to convict people operating two of the largest pirate streaming sites in the US. Darryl Polo and Luis Villarino have pleaded guilty to copyright infringement charges (and money laundering for Polo) for operating iStreamItAll and Jetflicks, streaming sites that each offered tens of thousands of bootlegged TV episodes and movies. Both Polo and Villarino admitted to using automated software and scripts to harvest pirated videos and make them available as streams and downloads across a variety of platforms -- effectively, they helped run Netflix-like services for ill-gotten goods.
Crypto expert arrested for allegedly helping North Korea evade sanctions
North Korea has long been accused of using cryptocurrency to avoid sanctions, but the US is now accusing a man of giving the country some help American law enforcement has arrested crypto expert and Ethereum project member Virgil Griffith for allegedly providing North Korea with information on how cryptocurrency and blockchain tech could help the isolated nation evade US sanctions. He presented at a crypto conference in Pyongyang despite being denied permission to travel to North Korea, and reportedly discussed how the country could "launder money" and otherwise skirt trade barriers. There were several North Korean officials in the audience who asked him questions, according to the Justice Department.
Thieves took $49 million in Ethereum from a crypto exchange
The string of recent cryptocurrency thefts isn't stopping any time soon. South Korean crypto exchange Upbit has confirmed that 342,000 Etherium coins, worth about $49 million, were transferred from its wallet to an "anonymous wallet" (read: a thief) on November 27th. The exchange quickly suspended all crypto deposits and withdrawals and moved all assets to offline wallets that couldn't be attacked. Upbit said it would "immediately" replace the missing Ethereum with its own assets, but that it would take two weeks before deposits and withdrawals would resume -- if you were depending on that virtual money, you might be in trouble.
Pennsylvania court rules suspect can't be forced to provide his password
Law enforcment might soon have a harder time forcing suspects to unlock their devices. Pennsylvania's Supreme Court has ruled that authorities were asking Joseph J. Davis, the accused in a child pornography case, to violate his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when they asked him to provide the password for his computer. A lower court had determined that the request fell under an exemption to the Fifth Amendment when Davis seemingly acknowledged the presence of child porn on his PC, but the state Supreme Court rejected that argument on the grounds that a password is testimony and thus protected under the Constitution.
Police arrest member of group that hijacked Jack Dorsey's Twitter account
Law enforcement has struck a blow against the group that compromised Twitter chief Jack Dorsey's account, albeit relatively late. Motherboard has learned that police arrested a former leader of Chuckling Squad (unnamed as the person is a child) roughly two weeks ago. The suspect allegedly used SIM swapping to obtain Dorsey's phone number, while others in the group helped with defacing the CEO's account with random messages and slurs.
