Author Archives: Patrick Howell O'Neill

Jury trial against extradited Russian hacking suspect will begin in January

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The criminal jury trial against Yevgeniy Nikulin, the Russian hacker accused of stealing data from LinkedIn and other U.S.-based tech firms, will begin in January, United States District  Judge William Alsup ordered on Tuesday. The decision was a denial of the defense’s entreaties to delay the beginning of the case. Nikulin’s lawyers say they have not been able to adequately prepare for trial in the time allotted to them by the court. “No, we need to get the trial moving,” Alsup said, apparently unmoved. “This case is drifting, progress is not being made at a fast enough pace.” The exact date will be decided upon soon after prosecutors and defense counsel discuss the issue. Alsup gave the lawyers just a few weeks leeway in proposing a start time. The defense cites the “voluminous discovery, including several terabytes of server logs and Internet service provider records” along with “thousands of pages of reports and analysis” that prosecutors produced […]

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Former NSA contractor Reality Winner accepts guilty plea for leaking classified report

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Former National Security Agency contractor Reality Winner accepted a guilty plea agreement on Tuesday. For one count of espionage, Winner faces 63 months in prison and three years of supervised release. She originally faced ten years in prison. Final sentencing is yet to come. Winner, 26, is a former Air Force linguist who then worked as a contractor for the NSA in Georgia where she printed out classified material about the Russian government’s attempts at interference in U.S. elections and mailed the file to a reporter at The Intercept. The report was published on June 5, 2017. Winner had already been arrested two days earlier. “All of these actions I did willfully, meaning I did them of my own free will,” she said at Tuesday’s hearing. Winner’s lawyers and family pointed to the Espionage Act, a century-old piece of legislation routinely criticized as draconian, as the reason she pleaded guilty on Tuesday. “The […]

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Eight men arrested in alleged $15 million hacking scheme

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Eight men across the U.S. and Ghana have been arrested and charged with a $15 million hacking and fraud scheme. The indictments against the group are noticeably short on details, but do provide some small insight into how U.S. law enforcement says these schemes unfold. Prosecutors allege the conspiracy worked when the accused used virtual private networks to mask their locations in Africa, spoof identities to send emails and open fraudulent bank accounts to handle the funds. “It as a part of the conspiracy that the defendants Babatunde Martins, Maxwell [Peter], Victor Okorhi, Bernardi Okorhi and/or [Dennis] Miah would monitor the email accounts of professionals in the real estate field to determine when fund transfers were scheduled to take place,” according to the indictment. A business email compromise scheme (BEC), the technique at the center of what prosecutors call “a barrage of international fraud schemes,” typically fools targets inside businesses into interacting with […]

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Firefox is adding ‘Have I Been Pwned’ alerts

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Mozilla’s Firefox will soon feature a tool called “Firefox Monitor” that alerts users to data breaches via a partnership with Have I Been Pwned.   Have I Been Pwned maintains a database of major breaches so people can know when sensitive data including usernames and passwords are stolen by hackers. Troy Hunt, the Australian security researcher behind Have I Been Pwned, detailed the new trial integration between HIBP and Firefox in a blog post. Here’s how Firefox Monitor looks: “This is major because Firefox has an install base of hundreds of millions of people which significantly expands the audience that can be reached once this feature rolls out to the mainstream,” Hunt wrote. Besides Firefox, Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned is being integrated into a wide array of apps. The password manager 1Password now allows users to search the Have I Been Pwned database from within the app. Although it’s long been […]

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Watch a hacker’s newly published exploit brute force an iPhone

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While Apple strives to make their iPhones harder and harder to breach, a security researcher published a brute-force vulnerability for iOS devices that effectively cracks the security measures built into the system.
Researcher Matthew Hickey, co-founde… Continue reading Watch a hacker’s newly published exploit brute force an iPhone→

Lawmakers urge Google to end partnership with China’s Huawei

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Five U.S. lawmakers urged Google CEO Sundar Pichai to end the company’s partnership with Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant that faces increasingly harsh criticism from Congress on national security grounds. Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., along with Reps. Michael Conaway, R-Texas, Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., sent the public letter on Wednesday. Earlier this month, lawmakers including Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said Google’s Huawei partnerships raises “serious national security concerns.” The bipartisan group urged Google to reconsider their partnership with Huawei due to national security concerns, including investigations into Huawei dating back to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s 2012 critical report on the company. “We urge you to reconsider Google’s partnership with Huawei, particularly since your company recently refused to renew a key research partnership, Project Maven, with the Department of Defense,” the letter reads. “While we regret that Google did not want to continue a long […]

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Bithumb, South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, loses $30 million to hackers

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Bithumb, South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has lost over $30 million to hackers, the exchange announced on Tuesday. The enormous loss comes one year after hackers believed to have ties to North Korea stole over $7 million from the same exchange in 2017. [Notice for the temporary suspension of the deposits]Due to the increasing safety issues, we are changing our wallet system.Please do not deposit until we notify.*All deposits are not deposited into your wallet until all changes are completed. — Bithumb (@BithumbOfficial) June 20, 2018 The theft totals over 35 billion South Korean won. “Members should immediately discontinue depositing,” exchange administrators wrote in a statement on Tuesday. The theft took place within the some time between Monday and Tuesday, according to Bithumb. All customer losses are going to be covered by the exchange’s own reserves, but no further detail was provided on how or when that will occur. The […]

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Ex-CIA employee charged in ‘Vault 7’ leaks

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A former CIA employee was charged on Monday with leaking a collection of U.S. hacking tools used for global spying. Joshua Adam Schulte, who previously worked for both the NSA and CIA, faces charges for allegedly stealing and transmitting classified national defense information. He’s suspected of transmitting the data to WikiLeaks who then published the information under the name “Vault 7.” Schulte, 29, is also charged with possession and transportation of child pornography. The maximum penalty is 130 years in prison. The Vault 7 leaks became public in March 2017, giving an unprecedented look at the CIA’s hacking capabilities. WikiLeaks spent subsequent months publishing further data from the leak. Prosecutors say Schulte stole the data beginning in March 2016. Assistant Director-in-Charge William F. Sweeney, Jr. said Schulte “utterly betrayed this nation.” Schulte pleaded not guilty to the child pornography charges and has steadfastly denied any involvement in the Vault 7 case. WikiLeaks reacted […]

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ZTE ban, tucked inside the NDAA, passes the Senate

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The $716 billion National Defense Authorization Act passed the U.S. Senate on Monday, including an amendment that kills a deal the Trump administration made with China that effectively saved telecommunications firm ZTE. The bill still has a long way to go. The House of Representatives’ version, which omits the ZTE Ban, has to be reconciled with the Senate version. Additionally, the White House strongly opposes the measure. Despite the process ahead, the amendment’s backers are taking the NDAA’s passage as a victory. “We’re heartened that both parties made it clear that protecting American jobs and national security must come first when making deals with countries like China, which has a history of having little regard for either,”  Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Tom Cotton, R-Ark, Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. said in a statement. “It is vital that our colleagues in the House keep this bipartisan provision in the bill as […]

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Kaspersky freezes partnership with Europol after EU calls for company ban

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Kaspersky Lab pulled out of a partnership with Europol on Wednesday after the European Parliament passed a resolution characterizing Kaspersky “confirmed as malicious” and calling for a company ban. The measure passed 476 to 151. We have protected the EU for 20 years working with law enforcement leading to multiple arrests of CYBERCRIMINALS. Based upon today’s decision from the EU Parliament, we are forced to freeze our cooperation with orgs including @Europol & #NoMoreRansom pic.twitter.com/7dSGn9Bycw — Eugene Kaspersky (@e_kaspersky) June 13, 2018 The “European Parliament decision welcomes cybercrime,” Kaspersky founder Eugene Kaspersky tweeted on Wednesday. The company has worked with Europol for years on cybercrime investigations. Kaspersky also has a notable partnership with Interpol, where the company has supplied threat intelligence, hardware, software, digital forensics and other operations. Kaspersky also pulled out of the No More Ransom project, a partnership between public and private organizations to detect and prevent the spread […]

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