Category Archives: Northern District of Georgia

Dark Overlord collaborator gets 3 years in prison for buying and selling stolen identities

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An associate of the Dark Overlord hacking group has been sentenced to three years in prison for his role in possessing and selling more than 1,700 stolen identities on the dark web, federal prosecutors announced Wednesday. Slava Dmitriev, a 29-year-old Canadian citizen who was apprehended in Greece in September 2020, pleaded guilty in August 2021 to fraud charges. Prosecutors said he used the handle “GoldenAce” to buy and sell stolen identities on the dark web marketplace AlphaBay in 2016 and 2017. Those deals sometimes included contact with the Dark Overlord, a notorious cyber-extortion crew. “This defendant profited off buying and selling people’s stolen identities, including victims in this district,” said U.S. Attorney Kurt Erskine, referring to the Atlanta-based Northern District of Georgia, where Dmitriev was sentenced. The stolen data included names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and other personally identifiable information, prosecutors said. Dmitriev was accused of providing the […]

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As voters cast their ballots, courts nationwide issue election security edicts

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Legal battles with election security implications raged across the country over the holiday weekend, even with early voting well underway at historic levels in many states. In no state did those two things coincide more than in Georgia. Peach State voters amassed in lines marked by reports of 10-hour waits on Tuesday, following two key court rulings. Northern District of Georgia Judge Amy Totenberg on Sunday denied a bid to scuttle touch screen voting machines over cybersecurity vulnerabilities. On Monday, she also denied a request to require a specific number of emergency ballots to be on hand at Georgia polling sites. The ruling Sunday represented a setback for election integrity advocates who contend that Georgia’s machines have not been secure enough, and still aren’t. Totenberg ruled last year that Georgia must phase out its existing paperless voting machines, citing doubts about cybersecurity safeguards for direct-recording election equipment tabulations that couldn’t be audited without a paper record. […]

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Judge orders Georgia to use paper records at polling places to avoid Election Day delays

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A federal judge on Monday ordered polling places across Georgia to keep updated, backup paper records of eligible voters to avoid long lines and disenfranchisement on Election Day. The ruling is intended to prevent a repeat of the June primary election in Georgia, in which voting integrity groups say the malfunctioning of electronic pollbooks caused long waits at the polls. It comes as election officials across the country prepare for an unprecedented election marked by changes in procedure because of the coronavirus. The order from U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg instructs Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to “provide at least a modicum of the voting backup plan tools essential to protect” voters’ rights to cast a ballot. Civil society groups had sought the injunction after the difficulties in the primary. “It is not too late for [Raffensperger and other election officials] to take these reasonable concrete measures to mitigate […]

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Equifax to pay customers $380.5 million as part of final breach settlement

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Equifax has agreed to pay $380.5 million to resolve allegations related to the 2017 data breach in which hackers stole information belonging to some 147 million Americans, under the terms of a settlement approved by a federal judge. A court in the Northern District of Georgia on Monday approved an agreement covering the roughly 147 million people whose information was compromised when hackers spent May 2017 through July 2017 lurking in Equifax’s system. Equifax had failed to fix a known vulnerability, resulting in the theft of information about many Americans who never signed up with the credit monitoring service. A House Oversight committee in October 2018 said the incident was “entirely preventable.” Under the terms of the settlement, Equifax will deposit the $380.5 million into a fund where members of the class action suit can withdraw up to $20,000, if they can prove out-of-pocket losses. Equifax may also be required to […]

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