Remember when the US and Australian police surreptitiously owned and operated the encrypted cell phone app ANOM? They arrested 800 people in 2021 based on that operation. New documents received by Motherboard show that over 100 of those phones were shipped to users in the US, far more than previously believed. What’s most interesting to … Read More “Using Foreign Nationals to Bypass US Surveillance Restrictions” »
Category: law enforcement
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The US has returned $154 million in bitcoins stolen by a Sony employee. However, on December 1, following an investigation in collaboration with Japanese law enforcement authorities, the FBI seized the 3879.16242937 BTC in Ishii’s wallet after obtaining the private key, which made it possible to transfer all the bitcoins to the FBI’s bitcoin wallet. … Read More “Stolen Bitcoins Returned” »
A January 2021 FBI document outlines what types of data and metadata can be lawfully obtained by the FBI from messaging apps. Rolling Stone broke the story and it’s been written about elsewhere. I don’t see a lot of surprises in the document. Lots of apps leak all sorts of metadata: iMessage and WhatsApp seem … Read More “Law Enforcement Access to Chat Data and Metadata” »
Vice has a detailed article about how the FBI gets data from cell phone providers like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, based on a leaked (I think) 2019 139-page presentation. Powered by WPeMatico
Ransomware isn’t new; the idea dates back to 1986 with the “Brain” computer virus. Now, it’s become the criminal business model of the internet for two reasons. The first is the realization that no one values data more than its original owner, and it makes more sense to ransom it back to them — sometimes … Read More “Disrupting Ransomware by Disrupting Bitcoin” »
Motherboard got its hands on one of those Anom phones that were really FBI honeypots. The details are interesting. Powered by WPeMatico
For three years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Australian Federal Police owned and operated a commercial encrypted phone app, called AN0M, that was used by organized crime around the world. Of course, the police were able to read everything — I don’t even know if this qualifies as a backdoor. This week, the … Read More “FBI/AFP-Run Encrypted Phone” »
A lot of Russian malware — the malware that targeted the Colonial Pipeline, for example — won’t install on computers with a Cyrillic keyboard installed. Brian Krebs wonders if this could be a useful defense: In Russia, for example, authorities there generally will not initiate a cybercrime investigation against one of their own unless a … Read More “Adding a Russian Keyboard to Protect against Ransomware” »
Vice is reporting on a new police hack: playing copyrighted music when being filmed by citizens, trying to provoke social media sites into taking the videos down and maybe even banning the filmers: In a separate part of the video, which Devermont says was filmed later that same afternoon, Devermont approaches [BHPD Sgt. Billy] Fair … Read More “Deliberately Playing Copyrighted Music to Avoid Being Live-Streamed” »