Security News
The FBI's director told lawmakers Thursday that the bureau discourages ransomware payments to hacking groups even as major companies in the past month have participated in multimillion-dollar transactions aimed at getting their systems back online. Besides the fact that such payments can encourage additional cyberattacks, victims may not automatically get back their data despite forking over millions, "And that's not unknown to happen," Wray said.
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. This week, the world's police organizations announced 800 arrests based on text messages sent over the app.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation warned private sector companies of scammers impersonating construction companies in business email compromise attacks targeting organizations from multiple US critical infrastructure sectors. BEC scammers use various tactics to compromise or impersonate business email accounts with the end goal of redirecting pending or future payments to bank accounts under their control.
Even though law enforcement groups around the world urge ransomware victims not to pay up, Colonial apparently decided to hand over what was then $4.4 million in bitcoins anyway. Sadly, the value of Bitcoin has taken a tumble since last month, so even though 85% of the bitcoins involved in the blackmail payment were recovered, they're now worth about 50% of what they cost when Colonial purchased them to do its deal with the criminals.
Their messages were some of 27 million that the FBI and law enforcement partners in Australia and elsewhere scooped up and decrypted, exposing global criminal networks to an unparallelled extent. FBI Special Agent Suzanne Turner said they were stunned at how openly traffickers exchanged information on the ANOM devices.
The FBI has revealed how it managed to hoodwink the criminal underworld with its secretly backdoored AN0M encrypted chat app, leading to hundreds of arrests, the seizure of 32 tons of drugs, 250 firearms, 55 luxury cars, more than $148M, and even cocaine-filled pineapples. "The CHS offered this next generation device, named 'AN0M,' to the FBI to use in ongoing and new investigations. The CHS also agreed to offer to distribute AN0M devices to some of the CHS's existing network of distributors of encrypted communications devices."
In the "Largest and most sophisticated law enforcement operations to date," a joint international law enforcement created a fake end-to-end encrypted chat platform designed solely to catch criminals. The FBI and the Australian Federal Police started cooperating three years ago in Operation Ironside, creating a fake encrypted messaging platform called Anom that was sold exclusively to criminals, allowing law enforcement to listen in on their messages and conversations.
Police arrested more than 800 people worldwide in a huge global sting involving encrypted phones that were secretly planted by the FBI, law enforcement agencies said Tuesday. Australian police said the supposedly hardened encrypted devices were handed out to operatives within the mafia, Asian crime syndicates, drug cartels and outlaw motorcycle gangs as part of the elaborate FBI-led plot.
The Australian Federal Police has revealed it was able to decrypt messages sent on a supposedly secure messaging app that was seeded into the criminal underworld and promoted as providing snoop-proof comms. Europol and the FBI will detail their use of the app in the coming hours.
The FBI on Saturday withdrew a subpoena issued to USA Today's parent company Gannett in April to find out who read an online news story published in February about a shootout that led to the deaths of two FBI agents and the wounding of three others. The article described how an FBI operation went awry a day earlier when two agents were shot and killed and three other agents were wounded while serving a warrant in a child exploitation investigation.