Apple Is Coming for Your Password Manager

Plus: A media executive is charged in an alleged money-laundering scheme, a ransomware attack disrupts care at London hospitals, and Google’s former CEO has a secretive drone project up his sleeve...

U.S. Dismantles World's Largest 911 S5 Botnet with 19 Million Infected Devices

The U.S. Department of Justice DoJ on Wednesday said it dismantled what it described as "likely the world's largest botnet ever," which consisted of an army of 19 million infected devices that was leased to other threat actors to commit a wide array of offenses. The botnet, which has a global...

U.S. Sentences 31-Year-Old to 10 Years for Laundering $4.5M in Email Scams

The U.S. Department of Justice DoJ has sentenced a 31-year-old man to 10 years in prison for laundering more than $4.5 million through business email compromise BEC schemes and romance scams. Malachi Mullings, 31, of Sandy Springs, Georgia pleaded guilty to the money laundering offenses in Januar...

Chinese Nationals Arrested for Laundering $73 Million in Pig Butchering Crypto Scam

The U.S. Department of Justice DoJ has charged two arrested Chinese nationals for allegedly orchestrating a pig butchering scam that laundered at least $73 million from victims through shell companies. The individuals, Daren Li, 41, and Yicheng Zhang, 38, were arrested in Atlanta and Los Angeles ...

Dutch Court Sentences Tornado Cash Co-Founder to 5 Years in Prison for Money Laundering

A Dutch court on Tuesday sentenced one of the co-founders of the now-sanctioned Tornado Cash cryptocurrency mixer service to 5 years and 4 months in prison. While the name of the defendant was redacted in the verdict, it's known that Alexey Pertsev, a 31-year-old Russian national, had been awaiti...

Russian Operator of BTC-e Crypto Exchange Pleads Guilty to Money Laundering

A Russian operator of a now-dismantled BTC-e cryptocurrency exchange has pleaded guilty to money laundering charges from 2011 to 2017. Alexander Vinnik, 44, was charged in January 2017 and taken into custody in Greece in July 2017. He was subsequently extradited to the U.S. in August 2022. Vinnik...

Ukrainian REvil Hacker Sentenced to 13 Years and Ordered to Pay $16 Million

A Ukrainian national has been sentenced to more than 13 years in prison and ordered to pay $16 million in restitution for carrying out thousands of ransomware attacks and extorting victims. Yaroslav Vasinskyi aka Rabotnik, 24, along with his co-conspirators part of the REvil ransomware group...

Bitcoin Forensic Analysis Uncovers Money Laundering Clusters and Criminal Proceeds

A forensic analysis of a graph dataset containing transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain has revealed clusters associated with illicit activity and money laundering, including detecting criminal proceeds sent to a crypto exchange and previously unknown wallets belonging to a Russian darknet marke...

A Vast New Data Set Could Supercharge the AI Hunt for Crypto Money Laundering

Blockchain analysis firm Elliptic, MIT, and IBM have released a new AI model—and the 200-million-transaction dataset it's trained on—that aims to spot the “shape” of bitcoin money laundering...

DOJ Arrests Founders of Crypto Mixer Samourai for $2 Billion in Illegal Transactions

The U.S. Department of Justice DoJ on Wednesday announced the arrest of two co-founders of a cryptocurrency mixer called Samourai and seized the service for allegedly facilitating over $2 billion in illegal transactions and for laundering more than $100 million in criminal proceeds. To that end,...

Ex-Security Engineer Jailed 3 Years for $12.3 Million Crypto Exchange Thefts

A former security engineer has been sentenced to three years in prison in the U.S. for charges relating to hacking two decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges in July 2022 and stealing over $12.3 million. Shakeeb Ahmed, the defendant in question, pled guilty to one count of computer fraud in...

YouTube ordered to reveal the identities of video viewers

Federal US authorities have asked Google for the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and user activity of accounts that watched certain YouTube videos, according to unsealed court documents Forbes has seen. Of those users that weren’t logged in when they watched those videos between January 1 an...

German Police Seize 'Nemesis Market' in Major International Darknet Raid

German authorities have announced the takedown of an illicit underground marketplace called Nemesis Market that peddled narcotics, stolen data, and various cybercrime services. The Federal Criminal Police Office aka Bundeskriminalamt or BKA said it seized the digital infrastructure associated wit...

How Cybercriminals are Exploiting India's UPI for Money Laundering Operations

Cybercriminals are using a network of hired money mules in India using an Android-based application to orchestrate a massive money laundering scheme. The malicious application, called XHelper, is a "key tool for onboarding and managing these money mules," CloudSEK researchers Sparsh Kulshrestha,...

Android Money Transfer XHelper App Exposed as Money Laundering Network

By Deeba Ahmed Don't confuse the XHelper app with the notorious XHelper malware, which targets Android devices and is notoriously difficult to remove. This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Android Money Transfer XHelper App Exposed as Money Laundering Network...

FBI's Most-Wanted Zeus and IcedID Malware Mastermind Pleads Guilty

A Ukrainian national has pleaded guilty in the U.S. to his role in two different malware schemes, Zeus and IcedID, between May 2009 and February 2021. Vyacheslav Igorevich Penchukov aka Vyacheslav Igoravich Andreev, father, and tank, 37, was arrested by Swiss authorities in October 2022 and...

Belarusian National Linked to BTC-e Faces 25 Years for $4 Billion Crypto Money Laundering

A 42-year-old Belarusian and Cypriot national with alleged connections to the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e is facing charges related to money laundering and operating an unlicensed money services business. Aliaksandr Klimenka, who was arrested in Latvia on December 21, 2023, was...

How a 27-Year-Old Codebreaker Busted the Myth of Bitcoin’s Anonymity

Once, drug dealers and money launderers saw cryptocurrency as perfectly untraceable. Then a grad student named Sarah Meiklejohn proved them all wrong—and set the stage for a decade-long crackdown...

North Korea's Cyber Heist: DPRK Hackers Stole $600 Million in Cryptocurrency in 2023

Threat actors affiliated with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea also known as North Korea have plundered at least $600 million in cryptocurrency in 2023. The DPRK "was responsible for almost a third of all funds stolen in crypto attacks last year, despite a 30% reduction from the USD 850...

German Authorities Dismantle Dark Web Hub 'Kingdom Market' in Global Operation

German law enforcement has announced the disruption of a dark web platform called Kingdom Market that specialized in the sales of narcotics and malware to "tens of thousands of users." The exercise, which involved collaboration from authorities from the U.S., Switzerland, Moldova, and Ukraine,...