WIRED: News from the A Swatting Spree in the US and its Implications for Online Privacy and Self-Privateness
As A Swatting spree spreads across the US, in which false reports of active shooters send police charging into schools, WIRED investigated more than 90 of the incidents and found potential connections between many of them. “In speaking to a number of people who experienced it, I can tell you that the anxiety and fear—it was real to them for 15 minutes,” Amanda Klinger, director of programs and cofounder of the Educator’s School Safety Network, told WIRED. “There’s a period of time in these incidents where people are literally running for their lives, law enforcement is responding with their weapons, and people think it’s the real thing.”
Even after extensive sanctions meant to ostracize Russia from the global economy due to its war with Ukraine investigators around the world are working to stop the influx of capital into Russian military and paramilitary groups. Former Uber executive Joe Sullivan was convicted this week of obstructing a Federal Trade Commission investigation and failure to report a felony, a development that is being watched closely by the tech industry because it is likely the first time a corporate executive has faced criminal charges related to a data breach. A new order by the Biden administration to ensure Europeans know their data is safe when stored in the US, seems to be a Band-Aid rather than a panacea.
Meanwhile, Meta released findings on more than 400 malicious Android and iOS apps that it says were harvesting Facebook credentials to take over users’ accounts. And we took a look at the toll of living your life online, the potential erosion of privacy that comes with consistent social media posting, and the ways it can impact your sense of self.
Plus, there’s more. We highlight news that we did not cover. Click on the headlines below to read the full stories. Be safe out there.
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/binance-hackers-minted-569-million/
Blockchain-based Cryptocurrency Trade-Off: A Case Study of AlphaBay founder and criminologist Cazes Rabenn
Even if they had been prepared for the windfall, they weren’t. Elliptic traded away some of their token for other cryptocurrencies. It gave them the ability to obtain over 50 million dollars in ethereum-based token. Funds can be frozen when they’re traded for other cryptocurrencies like USDC and Tether, which are more centrally controlled. There was a momentary shutting down of the BNB block on the platform to prevent the hackers from moving further. “So we have a very sophisticated exploit, managing to mint yourself $569 million,” says Elliptic research lead Thibaud Madelin. To be honest, what followed was a complete shambles.
That legal request took weeks to bear fruit. Finally, one evening in the early weeks of January 2017, Ali was in the middle of a law school night class when she got a call from the Sacramento-based FBI agent with the news: The subpoena results had come back.
He would send a note telling people that he was an early investor in digital currency. In some cases, the founder of AlphaBay claimed to have bought thousands of coins from Mt. Gox, but it would be difficult to find the records. In others, Cazes claimed to have bought them from a private seller at the exchange rate of a dollar each. He wrote that since then he has been juggling coins, stocks, buying and selling, but never cashing out.
Rabenn says he was confident that he had the right person when he saw the millions of dollars in digital currency flowing to him. You start to indict when you hit that point.
When investigators find Cazes online alter ego, they discover a new challenge to catch him, as well as a plan for the most ambitious sting in dark-web history.
IRS Criminal Investigations, or IRS-CI, has used manyBlockchain tracing techniques in the past, which have led to record breaking troves of ill-gotten bitcoins. In fact, Zhong is the second Silk Road hacker to turn over a billion-dollar cache of coins to the IRS-CI, after another unnamed individual agreed the previous year to forfeit nearly 70,000 bitcoins he’d stolen from the drug market—a record-breaking, even larger collection of coins that was worth $1 billion at Bitcoin’s lower exchange rate at the time. The records were broken again this year by the case against the two alleged money washers in NY who are accused of pocketing $4.5 billion in cryptocurrencies from the Bitfinex exchange.
In a statement about the latest indictment and 10-figure seizure, the US Attorney for New York stated that law enforcement located and recovered this impressive cache of crime proceeds through the use of state-of-the-art coins and old-fashioned police work. “This case shows that we won’t stop following the money, no matter how expertly hidden, even to a circuit board in the bottom of a popcorn tin.”