Security News
Police have arrested 69 people alleged to have used bots to book up nearly all of Spain's available appointments with immigration officials, and then sold those meeting slots for between €30 and €200 to aspiring migrants. Those arrested include the four alleged leaders of the crime ring, plus lawyers, managers, advisors, recruiters, and intermediaries, who reportedly received "Large amounts of money" from the sale of the immigration appointments.
European police arrested three people in Belgrade described as "The biggest" drug lords in the Balkans in what cops are chalking up to another win in dismantling Sky ECC's encrypted messaging app last year. Sky ECC was a subscription-based, end-to-end encrypted messaging app made by Sky Global and bundled on Google, Apple, Nokia, and BlackBerry handsets stripped of their GPS units, cameras, and microphones - the idea being that you could chat via text with other users without fear of being snooped on by the cops and others.
"We will need to be persistent as we work to take down the cracked, legacy copies of Cobalt Strike hosted around the world," said Amy Hogan-Burney, the head of Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit. Last Friday, March 31, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York issued a court order allowing the coalition to seize the domain names and take down the IP addresses of servers hosting cracked versions of Cobalt Strike.
"Account access credentials advertised for sale on Genesis Market included those connected to the financial sector, critical infrastructure, and federal, state, and local government agencies," the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement. DoJ called Genesis Market one of the "Most prolific initial access brokers in the cybercrime world."
The Department of Justice declared the confiscation of digital currency valued at approximately $112 million connected to fraudulent cryptocurrency investments. In these schemes, fraudsters cultivate long-term relationships with victims met online, eventually enticing them to make investments in fraudulent cryptocurrency trading platforms.
In an unexpected twist, a Microsoft support engineer resorted to running an unofficial 'crack' on a customer's Windows PC after a genuine copy of the operating system failed to activate normally. A South-Africa based freelance technologist who paid $200 for a genuine copy of Windows 10 was startled to see a Microsoft support engineer "Crack" his copy using unofficial tools that bypass the Windows activation process.
The paper, titled "Factoring integers with sublinear resources on a superconducting quantum processor," suggests that the application of Claus Peter Schnorr's recent factoring algorithm, in conjunction with a quantum approximate optimization algorithm, can break asymmetric RSA-2048 encryption using a non-fault tolerant quantum computer with only 372 physical quantum bits or qubits. The speculation has been that orders of magnitude more qubits, in conjunction with robust error correction at scale, may allow future quantum computers to run Peter Schor's algorithm - not to be confused with the similarly named Schnorr - quickly, on very large numbers, thereby breaking RSA encryption.
A new information-stealing malware named 'RisePro' is being distributed through fake cracks sites operated by the PrivateLoader pay-per-install malware distribution service. The malware was spotted by analysts at Flashpoint and Sekoia this week, with both cybersecurity firms confirming that RisePro is a previously undocumented information stealer now being distributed via fake software cracks and key generators.
The social media conglomerate also took steps to disable accounts and block infrastructure operated by spyware vendors, including in China, Russia, Israel, the U.S. and India, that targeted individuals in about 200 countries. A second set of 250 accounts on Facebook and Instagram linked to another Israeli company called QuaDream was found "Engaged in a similar testing activity between their own fake accounts, targeting Android and iOS devices in what we assess to be an attempt to test capabilities to exfiltrate various types of data including messages, images, video and audio files, and geolocation."
The White House's second International Counter Ransomware Initiative summit has concluded, and this year the 36-nation group has made clear it intends to crack down on how cryptocurrencies are used to finance ransomware operations. Last year's summit ended with far fewer actionable, concrete steps in this direction, concluding with a joint statement indicating "Countering illicit finance" was a priority without stating in specific terms that the Countering Ransomware Initiative was focused on cryptocurrencies.