Security News
A joint law enforcement operation conducted by Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland has cracked yet another encrypted messaging application named Exclu used by organized crime groups. "Exclu makes it possible to exchange messages, photos, notes, voice memos, chat conversations, and videos with other users," the Politie said.
The Dutch police announced on Friday that they dismantled the Exclu encrypted communications platform after hacking into the service to monitor the activities of criminal organizations. In the Netherlands alone, the police searched 22 locations and arrested 11 individuals believed to be connected with the Exclu platform.
The security shop's research team said it has already seen Russian cybercriminals on underground forums discussing OpenAI workarounds so that they can bring ChatGPT to the dark side. We'd have thought ChatGPT would be most useful for coming up with emails and other messages to send people to trick them into handing over their usernames and passwords, but what do we know? Some crooks may find the AI model helpful in offering malicious code and techniques to deploy.
Malware-slinging miscreants are taking advantage of a trending TikTok challenge - and viewers' dirty minds - to spread data-stealing malware via a phony app that's had more than one million views so far. The new TikTok trend is called Invisible Challenge, and it involves a person filming themself naked while using an effect called Invisible Body that removes the body from the video.
A nascent Go-based malware known as Aurora Stealer is being increasingly deployed as part of campaigns designed to steal sensitive information from compromised hosts. First advertised on Russian cybercrime forums in April 2022, Aurora was offered as a commodity malware for other threat actors, describing it as a "Multi-purpose botnet with stealing, downloading and remote access capabilities."
Two Russian nationals accused of operating Z-Library - one of the largest online book piracy websites - have been charged with criminal copyright infringement, wire fraud and money laundering. Around the same time, the Feds also took down Z-Library's network of nearly 250 domains and seized its assets - much to the dismay of students everywhere who used the site to access textbooks and academic journals without paying the hefty price tags charged by academic publishers.
American prosecutors on Monday accused 13 people of committing espionage-linked crimes in the US on behalf of the Chinese government. Their charges, spread over three separate cases, include: attempting to force a Chinese national in America to return to China; attempting to interfere with the federal criminal prosecution of a Chinese company, said to be Huawei; and attempting to recruit US academics and government officials in the US to spy for China.
You paste the hexadecimal code from the BTC transaction into the ransomware "Login page", and the process fires up a decryption program left behind by the crooks that unscrambles all your data. Loosely speaking, once Bitcoin miners see that a not-yet-processed transaction involves funds that someone else has already "Mined", they simply stop working on the unfinished transaction, on the grounds that it's now worthless to them.
A car theft ring that used fraudulent software to "Hack" and steal vehicles with remote keyless entry and ignition systems has been dismantled by the French National Gendarmerie, Europol announced on Monday. "The criminals targeted vehicles with keyless entry and start systems, exploiting the technology to get into the car and drive away," the EU law enforcement agency said.
Authorities from France, Latvia, and Spain arrested 31 suspects believed to be part of a car theft ring that targeted vehicles from two French car manufacturers. The criminals only targeted cars that use keyless entry and start systems and stole them after exploiting their keyless technology to unlock the doors and start the engines without having to use the key fobs.