Security News
The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday said that an Israeli national pleaded guilty for his role as an "Administrator" of a portal called DeepDotWeb, a "News" website that "Served as a gateway to numerous dark web marketplaces." According to the unsealed court documents, Tal Prihar, 37, an Israeli citizen residing in Brazil, operated DDW alongside Michael Phan, 34, of Israel, starting October 2013, in return for which they received kickbacks from the operators of the marketplaces in the form of virtual currency amounting to 8,155 bitcoins.
Scott Matteson: How is technology being used for money laundering efforts? Gudmundur Kristjansson: Money laundering begins when illegal sums are deposited in a bank, which triggers a complex sequence of banking transfers or commercial transactions that return the money to the launderer in an obscure and indirect way.
Two Ukrainians charged for their involvement in a network providing cash-out and money laundering services to cybercriminals have been extradited to the United States. According to the indictment, the two were part of a cash-out and money laundering network offering services to cybercriminals who accessed bank accounts using stolen credentials, and then transferred funds to drop accounts maintained by the cash-out actors.
U.S. federal prosecutors have charged John McAfee, founder of cybersecurity firm McAfee, and his executive advisor Jimmy Gale Watson Jr for cryptocurrency fraud and money laundering. In total, McAfee, Watson, and other members of the McAfee Team were able to collect over $13 million from two cryptocurrency pump-and-dump schemes, according to court documents.
A Russian bitcoin expert at the center of a multi-country legal tussle was sentenced in Paris on Monday to five years in prison for money laundering and ordered to pay 100,000 euros in fines in a case of suspected cryptocurrency fraud. Vinnik denies wrongdoing, and his lawyers are discussing whether to appeal.
To empower its customers in the fight against financial crime, Computer Services has partnered with Featurespace to launch a holistic anti-money laundering solution: WatchDOG AML. WatchDOG AML protects against financial crime by identifying suspicious activity in real-time with an enterprise transaction monitoring system. Using customizable machine learning models that utilize Featurespace's award-winning Adaptive Behavioral Analytics, WatchDOG AML reduces false positives while predicting and adapting to new threats through anomaly detection.
"The traditional processes that banks and other financial institutions employ are a bit resource-intensive and often those processes are manual so they've innovated to add some software modeling in an attempt to draw inferences from patterns that they see in their transactions and in their operations to help inform a potential theft, fraud or money laundering," said Michael Reed, director of the Blockchain Program at Intel. "But even those have high false-positive rates which can be disruptive to their customer relationships and also just cost them more time and money in their operations. Confidential computing is a new tool that banks and other corporations are using to help address their own security challenges. It's an emerging technology that helps secure data while it's in use."
Multiple members of QQAAZZ, a multinational cybercriminal group, were charged today in the US, Portugal, Spain, and the UK for providing money-laundering services to several high-profile malware operations including Dridex, Trickbot, and GozNym. Law enforcement estimations say that QQAAZZ laundered, or at least attempted to launder, tens of millions stolen from cybercrime victims starting with 2016.
BAE Systems announced a new offering created on Amazon Web Services to deliver complete anti-money laundering regulatory compliance solutions. The solution is supported by the availability, reliability and security of AWS and offers banks and financial institutions the opportunity to quickly stand up an affordable integrated financial crime regulatory compliance solution.
An Instagram super-star with 2.3 million followers has been extradited to America accused of conspiring to launder hundreds of millions of dollars obtained via cyber-crime. Abbas allegedly ran so-called business email compromise scams, which typically involve hijacking email accounts, or impersonating strangers in emails, to fool victims into transferring money to the scammer's bank account rather than a legit recipient.