Security News
Reality Winner, the former NSA intelligence contractor who leaked evidence of Russian interference in a US Presidential election to the press, has been released from prison. Her attorney Alison Allen announced Winner, 29, had been let out on Monday early due to "Exemplary" behavior while inside.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Friday the arraignment of a Latvian for her alleged role in creating and operating the infamous TrickBot malware. TrickBot is a well-known and sophisticated trojan first developed in 2016 to steal online banking credentials - but it has a history of transforming itself and adding new features.
Two members of the notorious Carbanak cybergang were sentenced to 8 years in prison, Kazakhstani authorities announced this week. While they did not reveal the names of the sentenced individuals, the Kazakh authorities did say that they were accused of stealing roughly $4.7 million from two banks in the country between 2016 and 2017, as well as of attempting to steal $18.5 million more.
The United States Department of Justice this week announced the sentencing of a Russian national for his role in a group that attempted to obtain $1.5 million in tax refunds from the Department of the Treasury. According to court documents, between June 2014 and November 2016, Bogdanov and co-conspirators hacked into the computers of private tax preparation firms in the US and stole personally identifiable information, including Social Security numbers and dates of birth.
The former systems administrator for the FIN7 card-slurping gang has been sentenced to 10 years in a US prison. Fedir Hladyr, 35, pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit computer hacking last year, and on Friday was sentenced for his role in the theft and resale of over than 20 million customer card records from over 6,500 point-of-sale terminals across the US using the malware dubbed Carbanak.
A Ukrainian national arrested for his role in a hacking group that compromised millions of financial accounts was sentenced to a decade in prison, US prosecutors said Friday. Fedir Hladyr, 35, had a high-level role as a manager and systems administrator for a hacking group known at FIN7, authorities said.
The UK's Government Reviewer of Terrorism Laws is again advising the removal of legal safeguards around a controversial law that allows people to be jailed if they refuse police demands for forced decryption of their devices. In what appears to be a recurring theme, Jonathan Hall QC said police should be able to threaten people arrested under terror laws with five years in prison if they don't hand over passwords on demand.
A former IT consultant hacked a company in Carlsbad, California, and deleted almost all its Microsoft Office 365 accounts in an act of revenge that has brought him two years of prison time. More than 1,200 user accounts were removed in this act of sabotage, causing a complete shutdown of the company's operations for two days.
The United States Department of Justice on Wednesday announced that a Cypriot national who admitted to hacking the websites of various U.S.-based companies was sentenced to 12 months and one day in prison, on top of the four years already served in custody. In January 2021, Epifaniou admitted in court to perpetrating a scheme in which he hacked the websites of multiple companies, exfiltrated data of interest, and then contacted the victim organizations to demand a ransom payment, threatening to make the data public.
A Florida teenager accused of masterminding a Twitter hack of celebrity accounts in a crypto currency scheme has been sentenced to three years in juvenile prison in a plea agreement, officials said. State prosecutors announced the deal Tuesday in the case of Graham Ivan Clark, 18, described as the mastermind of the July 2020 "Bit-Con" worldwide hack of Twitter accounts of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and others.