Category: crime

During the presentation, PenLink’s Scott Tuma described how the company works with law enforcement to track users through multiple services, including the “phenomenal” Apple with iCloud. Apple is open about what it does in the event of a suboena from law enforcement. It’s specific about how it will not unlock iPhones, for instance, but it will surrender information from iCloud backups that are stored on its servers. “If you did something bad,” said Tuma, “I bet you I could find it on that backup.” Tuma also says that in his experience, it’s been possible to find people’s locations through different services, although not through iCloud. “[Google] can get me within three feet of a precise location,” he said. “I cannot tell you how many cold cases I’ve helped work on where this is five, six, seven years old and people need to put [the suspect] at a hit-and-run or it was a sexual assault that took place.” It’s also possible for law enforcement and firms like PenLink which help them, to get location data from Facebook and Snapchat. […]

Between 2020 and mid-2021 cyber-attackers stole more than $50m (£37m) of digital assets, investigators found. Such attacks are an “important revenue source” for Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile programme, they said. The findings were reportedly handed to the UN’s sanctions committee on Friday.

The cyber-attacks targeted at least three cryptocurrency exchanges in North America, Europe and Asia.

The report also referenced a study published last month by the security firm Chainalysis that suggested North Korean cyberattacks could have netted as much as $400m worth of digital assets last year. And in 2019, the UN reported that North Korea had accumulated an estimated $2bn for its weapons of mass destruction programmes by using sophisticated cyber-attacks….

The US said on Friday that North Korea — formally known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) — carried out nine missile tests last month alone.

In the existing version of the system, police are quickly dispatched to the location. If they’re using ground transportation, however, it may take a while for them to get there. And even if the police department has a helicopter, performing pre-flight checks, etc will still take some time — assuming the aircraft isn’t already in the air on patrol, that is. With these potential limitations in mind, Israeli drone manufacturer Airobotics has teamed up with ShotSpotter to add autonomous drones to the mix. In the new version of the setup, police will still be dispatched, but so will the closest system-specific drone. That aircraft will be in the air within seconds, immediately flying to the source of the gunshots. By analyzing the live video from its onboard camera, police officers can then gain a better sense of the situation they’re heading into.

“In at least six cases, hackers stole more than $100 million…”

By comparison, bank robberies netted perpetrators an average of less than $5,000 per heist last year, according to the FBI’s annual crime statistics… “If you hack a Fortune 500 company today, you might steal some usernames and passwords,” said Esteban Castaño, the CEO and co-founder of TRM Labs, a company that builds tools for companies to track digital assets. “If you hack a cryptocurrency exchange, you may have millions of dollars in cryptocurrency….”

[W]hile a handful of countries have strict regulations in place, it’s relatively easy for tech entrepreneurs to set up an exchange nearly anywhere in the world and run it however they like. Cryptocurrencies generally offer a certain amount of security — taking their name, in part, from “encryption.” But the exchanges that manage them, especially new ones building their businesses from scratch, often start with a tiny staff, which means few if any full-time cybersecurity professionals. Their developers may work frantically to make the code work, sometimes accidentally leaving flaws that give hackers a foothold. Combined with the fact that a volatile market often leaves them suddenly holding a fortune, exchanges are a particularly ripe target for criminal hackers….

The problem is exacerbated because many cryptocurrency projects, intent on avoiding government regulations, set up in countries whose law enforcement agencies don’t have much power to go after transnational hackers. Or if they are hacked, they tend to be less likely to call for government help on ideological grounds, said Beth Bisbee, head of U.S. investigations at Chainalysis, a company that tracks cryptocurrency transactions for both private companies and government agencies. Some developers “want to be anti-bank and anti-oversight,” Bisbee said. “So when something like that happens, they’re not necessarily wanting to work with law enforcement, even though they’d be considered to be a victim and it’d be valuable for them to.”
Ultimately the article points out that “Most exchange hackers are not caught.” (Although in at least one case part of the stolen money was voluntarily returned.)

But what happens after the breach, NBC News asked Dave Jevans, the founder of CipherTrace, a company that tracks theft and fraud in cryptocurrencies.

If an exchange is wealthy enough and plans ahead to have an emergency fund, it can compensate its customers if its operation is hacked, Jevans said. If not, they often goes out of business. “Not every exchange is so wealthy or has so much foresight. It just goes, pop, ‘We’re out of business. Sorry, you’re all screwed,'” he said.

And other rioters are now learning the same thing, reports the Associated Press:

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Amy Jackson read aloud some of Russell Peterson’s posts about the riot before she sentenced the Pennsylvania man to 30 days imprisonment. “Overall I had fun lol,” Peterson posted on Facebook. The judge told Peterson that his posts made it “extraordinarily difficult” for her to show him leniency….

Among the biggest takeaways so far from the Justice Department’s prosecution of the insurrection is how large a role social media has played, with much of the most damning evidence coming from rioters’ own words and videos. FBI agents have identified scores of rioters from public posts and records subpoenaed from social media platforms. Prosecutors use the posts to build cases. Judge now are citing defendants’ words and images as factors weighing in favor of tougher sentences.

As of Friday, more than 50 people have been sentenced for federal crimes related to the insurrection. In at least 28 of those cases, prosecutors factored a defendant’s social media posts into their requests for stricter sentences, according to an Associated Press review of court records….

Prosecutors also have accused a few defendants of trying to destroy evidence by deleting posts.

Other Bluetooth-based trackers have been available for some time now, but the ubiquity of Apple devices (which communicate with AirTags via Apple’s Find My app) means it’s generally faster and more accurate to track something remotely via an AirTag than a rival device like a Tile. And while they undoubtedly make it easier for users to recover lost stuff, the tags are being exploited by criminals. Apple did build some anti-stalking functions into AirTags — if your Apple device detects that you’re being followed by an unfamiliar device, it will alert you, as long as you’re running iOS 14.5 or newer.