Just another obscure warrantless surveillance program. US law enforcement can access details of money transfers without a warrant through an obscure surveillance program the Arizona attorney general’s office created in 2014. A database stored at a nonprofit, the Transaction Record Analysis Center (TRAC), provides full names and amounts for larger transfers (above $500) sent between … Read More “Bulk Surveillance of Money Transfers” »
Category: law enforcement
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The two people who shut down four Washington power stations in December were arrested. This is the interesting part: Investigators identified Greenwood and Crahan almost immediately after the attacks took place by using cell phone data that allegedly showed both men in the vicinity of all four substations, according to court documents. Nowadays, it seems … Read More “Identifying People Using Cell Phone Location Data” »
This is one way of ensuring that IT keeps up with patches: Albanian prosecutors on Wednesday asked for the house arrest of five public employees they blame for not protecting the country from a cyberattack by alleged Iranian hackers. Prosecutors said the five IT officials of the public administration department had failed to check the … Read More “Arresting IT Administrators” »
Facebook—Meta—was just fined $276 million (USD) for a data leak that included full names, birth dates, phone numbers, and location. Meta’s total fine by the Data Protection Commission is over $700 million. Total GDPR fines are over €2 billion (EUR) since 2018. Powered by WPeMatico
Suspected members of a European car-theft ring have been arrested: The criminals targeted vehicles with keyless entry and start systems, exploiting the technology to get into the car and drive away. As a result of a coordinated action carried out on 10 October in the three countries involved, 31 suspects were arrested. A total of … Read More “Hacking Automobile Keyless Entry Systems” »
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” »
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” »