Fact Check: Feds Did Not Accuse Dark.Fail of a Crime

A leaked FBI document mentions Dark.fail, Dark Eye, Darknetlive, and other onion indexes but the FBI does not refer to any of them as criminal enterprises or claim they are involved in criminal activity.

Several weeks ago, DDOSecrets released a cache of more than 250 GB of files and documents from “police departments, fusion centers and other law enforcement training and support resources.” BlueLeaks, the name given to the dump, contained a small number of internal memos about darkweb marketplaces and forums. One of those documents—a Federal Bureau of Investigation Intelligence Bulletin—included references to four indexes of onion addresses: Dark.Fail, DNStats, Dark Eye, and Darknetlive.

The report, titled “Administrators Operating on the Darknet Likely Relying on Legal Gateways to Route Users, Facilitating the Trafficking of Illicit Products and Services,” relies on the reporting of individuals who have been providing information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for at least two years.

Contrary to rumors spread by misinformed and ill-intentioned users of internet forums, the report does not describe any of the sites as criminal enterprises. Nor does the report state that any of the named sites are involved in criminal activity of any kind. The FBI said the named sites “appear to be operating legally.”

In essence, the document states that law enforcement is now aware that marketplaces are dependent on websites that provide visitors with links for an assortment of onion services.

👀 👉🏼 (TorBrowser)
https://darkzzx4avcsuofgfez5zq75cqc4mprjvfqywo45dfcaxrwqg6qrlfid.onion/post/fact-check-feds-did-not-call-darkdotfail-a-criminal-enterprise/

#feds #darkdotfail #DDoSecrets #BlueLeaks #leak
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

The AnglerPhish Podcast - Hacktivism. A Conversation with Mike Jones, A Good Man (Episode 3)

Meet Mike Jones--a good man, a former original member of anonymous, a man without a country. Mike sits down with Brett Johnson to discuss some of his history, Hacktivism, Prison Sentences, Privacy, and more.

🎧 👉🏼 The #AnglerPhish #truecrime #podcast (Episode 3)

📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Malaysian Navy Documents Uploaded on the Dark Web by Hackers

Documents belonging to the Royal Malaysian Navy have been breached and posted on the dark web although the Malaysian military has dismissed the data as obsolete

When we speak about the numerous cyberattacks that have been orchestrated in brazen campaigns of late, one thing stands out – threat actors breach an organization’s system to access critical files through a loophole, which then exposes the entire system to the attackers.

Although recent times have seen the hacking of victims such as Garmin who ended up parting with millions of dollars for ransom, it appears that threat actors have not restricted their sights to private sector entities – the Royal Malaysian Navy is the latest victim.

Media reports have intimated that about 70 documents belonging to Malaysian Navy were accessed by unknown hackers who uploaded them to a darknet platform.

According to Singapore’s English-language daily newspaper The Straits Times, it turns out that the affected documents were sourced from different threat actors who breached the communication channels belonging to the Malaysian military – including personnel email accounts.

While the newspaper reported the uncertainty to whether the hackers intended to sell the uploaded documents, it was revealed that the affected information touched on details concerning the strength of the Malaysian Navy.

👀 👉🏼
https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2020/08/17/navy-documents-leaked-on-dark-web-claims-report/

👀 👉🏼 (Tor-Browser)
https://tapeucwutvne7l5o.onion/malaysian-navy-documents-uploaded-on-the-dark-web-by-hackers

#malaysia #navy #hackers #leak #darkweb
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

A Five-Year Analysis of the Darknet

The last five years have seen the evolution and adaptation of dark web marketplaces to usher in a new era of cybercrime.

The dark web has played host to a large community of users selling illegal goods and cybercriminal services for years.

The past five years has seen the paradigm shift in the manner in which darknet markets operate, with the evolution of these sites to adapt to changing buyer need, supply chain factors and emerging technologies.

An Overview:

Looking back, Silk Road was launched in the year 2011 at the first dark web marketplace. The years that followed were marked with steady growth that has since expanded. Tor, which happens to be one of the most popular anonymity tools used by darknet market users, was found to host roughly 80,000 platforms, according to a 2015 report.

Experts estimate that the dark web economy garners more than $1 trillion in annual revenues, a staggering figure that surpasses the Gross Domestic Product of several countries of the world.

Indeed, this success can be attributed to the fact that dark web marketplaces have continued to evolve and shift according to metamorphoses of the global threat landscape. The past five years have been marked by significant shifts to emergent platforms, communication channels and products, as darknet user paranoia continues to grow across the board.

In 2019 alone, analysts noted that the emergence of radical changes in the public sphere had a profound effect in the dark web underworld where fake news and propaganda services grew tremendously.

In addition, the channels of darknet communication were subjected to significant changes, along with shift in the manner in which dark web markets and forums were managed.

👀 👉🏼 (Tor-Browser)
https://tapeucwutvne7l5o.onion/a-five-year-analysis-of-the-darknet

#analysis #darknet
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
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Sixgill Threat Intelligence report - underground financial fraud: h1- 2020

2020 has been an extraordinary year. The new reality of Covid-19 quarantines and shutdowns diverted our attention and put what seems like “real life” largely on hold. During this time, the digital underground continued business as usual, and we witnessed as threat actors continued, without interruption, their trade of malicious content, leaked data, and payment cards.

👀 👉🏼 https://info.cybersixgill.com/underground-financial-fraud-2020

👀 👉🏼 PDF:
https://f.hubspotusercontent30.net/hubfs/5510338/Threat%20Reports/Sixgill_Report_Underground_Financial_Fraud_H1_2020.pdf

#fraud #study #report
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📡@NoGoolag

Comments to the Federal Trade Commission on Data Portability (AUGUST 21,2020)

👀 👉🏼 PDF 🇬🇧:
https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Facebook-Comments-to-FTC-on-Data-Portability.pdf

👀 👉🏼 🇬🇧 https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-antitrust/facebook-pushes-for-data-portability-legislation-ahead-of-ftc-hearing-idUKKBN25H0BG

👀 👉🏼 🇩🇪 https://t3n.de/news/datenportabilitaet-facebook-mehr-1314513

#fb #DeleteFacebook #ftc #data #portability #pdf
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Anti-Piracy Outfit Hires VPN Expert to Help Track Down The Pirate Bay

Movie companies and their anti-piracy partners are pressing ahead with their legal action to track down The Pirate Bay. The site reportedly used VPN provider OVPN, which carries no logs, but a security expert - one that regularly penetration tests several major VPN providers - believes that information about the notorious site could still be obtained.

Tracking down, prosecuting, blocking and otherwise trying to prevent The Pirate Bay from operating has become an entertainment industry project for the last 15 years.

The torrent site has faced more adversaries than any other on the planet yet today the site remains stubbornly online. Exactly where and operated by whom remains either a mystery or a topic of speculation.

After a period of what seemed like calm, this year it became clear that the site’s old enemies, Swedish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, were again working to get closer to the site and its operators.

We’ve covered the back story in detail but in summary, the site is alleged to have used Swedish VPN provider OVPN to hide its true location and Rights Alliance is now engaged in legal action to get its hands on whatever information the VPN provider may hold.

👀 👉🏼 https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-outfit-hires-vpn-expert-to-help-track-down-the-pirate-bay-200821/

#piracy #vpn #thepiratebay
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

How the Dark Web Drug Supply Has Responded to COVID-19

The darknet drug markets suffered initial disruptions in shipment speeds before recovering to become more efficient than legitimate supply chain systems.

Like legitimate supply chains, dark web drug markets depend on substance imports from China, and the coronavirus pandemic led to closure of Chinese chemical supply firms and factories.

Importantly, drug dealers depend of legitimate trade routes to sustain their illicit commercial activities. The fact that EU borders remained open did not make things better for most of the darknet and legitimate supply chains as shipping capacities took a nose dive.

Nonetheless, although the coronavirus-related restrictions seemed to freeze operations across the global drug supply chains, the situation in the dark web economy was different. Mexican drug cartels suffered from the pandemic’s economic ramifications as user buying power tanked – meanwhile, the darknet drug markets did not really suffer a serious dent in drug sales.

👀 👉🏼 (Tor-Browser)
https://tapeucwutvne7l5o.onion/how-the-dark-web-drug-supply-has-responded-to-covid-19

👀 👉🏼 Online Drug Markets Are Entering a 'Golden Age'
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/dyz3v7/online-drug-markets-are-entering-a-golden-age

👀 👉🏼 Vaccine for COVID-19 and Other Scams on the Dark Web
https://www.trustwave.com/en-us/resources/blogs/spiderlabs-blog/vaccine-for-covid-19-and-other-scams-on-the-dark-web/

👀 👉🏼 (PDF) From Dealer to Doorstep – How Drugs Are Sold On the Dark Net
https://www.swansea.ac.uk/media/From-Dealer-to-Doorstep-%C3%A2%C2%80%C2%93-How-Drugs-Are-Sold-On-the-Dark-Net.pdf

👀 👉🏼 (PDF) EMCDDA AND EUROPOL ANALYSE IMPACT OF PANDEMIC ON EU DRUG MARKETS
https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/system/files/attachments/13099/COVID19_DrugMarkets_EMCDDA_Europol_Final_web.pdf

#darknet #markets #drugs #europol #covid #study #pdf
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Stealing Data With CSS: Attack and Defense

Summary: A method is detailed - dubbed CSS Exfil - which can be used to steal targeted data using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as an attack vector. Due to the modern web's heavy reliance on CSS, a wide variety of data is potentially at risk, including: usernames, passwords, and sensitive data such as date of birth, social security numbers, and credit card numbers. The technique can also be used to de-anonymize users on dark nets like Tor. Defense methods are discussed for both website operators as well as web users, and a pair of browser extensions are offered which guard against this class of attack.

👀 👉🏼 Want to check if you are vulnerable?
https://www.mike-gualtieri.com/css-exfil-vulnerability-tester

💡 👉🏼 Want to protect yourself?

👉🏼 Install the Chrome plugin:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/css-exfil-protection/ibeemfhcbbikonfajhamlkdgedmekifo

👉🏼 Install the Firefox plugin:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/css-exfil-protection

👀 👉🏼 Methods of Exploitation and Proof of Concept
https://www.mike-gualtieri.com/posts/stealing-data-with-css-attack-and-defense

#css #attack #defense #exploitation #vulnerability #poc
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Bellingcat's free online open source research toolkit

Version 5.3 (August 19, 2020)

The list includes satellite and map services, photo and video review tools, web archiving sites, and more.

Content (All links lead to GoogleDocs):

💡 Maps, Satellites & Streetview
💡 Location Based Searches
💡 Image & Video Verification
💡 Social Media
💡 Transportation
💡 Date & Time

💡 WhoIs, IPs & Website Analysis
💡 People & Phone Numbers
💡 Archiving & Downloading
💡 Company Registries
💡 Data Visualization
💡 Online Security & Privacy
💡 Finding Experts
💡 Miscellaneous
💡 Guides & Handbooks

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BfLPJpRtyq4RFtHJoNpvWQjmGnyVkfE2HYoICKOGguA/mobilebasic#h.6igzqqftqvh4

#Bellingcat #toolkit #research #collection
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

me and my shadow - take control of your data

💡 What are digital traces?

Through your computer, mobile phone, and other digital devices, you leave behind hundreds of digital traces (also called data traces) every day: bits of information about you that are created, stored, and collected.

When your digital traces are put together to create stories about you or profiles of you, these become your digital shadows. These can give others huge insight into your life; and they can also be totally wrong. Either way, once they're out there, they are almost impossible to control....

👀 👉🏼 https://myshadow.org/

#shadow #data #digital #traces #yourdata #toolkit #video #thinkabout
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

The Digital First Aid Kit!

The Digital First Aid Kit is a free resource to help rapid responders, digital security trainers, and tech-savvy activists to better protect themselves and the communities they support against the most common types of digital emergencies. It can also be used by activists, human rights defenders, bloggers, journalists or media activists who want to learn more about how they can protect themselves and support others. If you or someone you are assisting is experiencing a digital emergency, the Digital First Aid Kit will guide you in diagnosing the issues you are facing, and refer you to support providers for further help if needed.

👀 👉🏼 https://digitalfirstaid.org/en/index.html

👀 👉🏼 Digital Security Helpline
https://www.accessnow.org/help/

#data #digital #firstaid #security #help #toolkit #guide #thinkabout
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Facebook Wanted to Be a Force for Good in Myanmar. Now It Is Rejecting a Request to Help With a Genocide Investigation

Just when it seemed like Facebook’s controversies might have peaked, the company now appears to be obstructing a genocide investigation, and it’s using U.S. law to do it.

The West African nation The Gambia is seeking to hold Myanmar accountable for charges of genocide against the Rohingya people, an ethnic and religious minority. In 2016 and 2017, Myanmar soldiers and their civilian proxies massacred Rohingya men, women and children, raped women and girls and razed villages, forcing more than 800,000 to flee into neighboring Bangladesh.

Facebook’s role in these atrocities isn’t news. In 2018, Facebook acknowledged it was used to “foment division and incite offline violence” in Myanmar, where the social media platform is so ubiquitous it’s often synonymous with the internet. An independent report commissioned by the company documented the same, as did independent fact-finders appointed by the U.N.

In response, Facebook took down the account of the commander-in-chief of the Myanmar military, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, and other military officials and organizations. In 2018 alone it shut down numerous networks that sought to incite violence against Rohingya, removing 484 pages, 157 accounts, and 17 groups for “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

To its credit, Facebook preserved the data and content it took down, and the company committed to cleaning up its act. “We know we need to do more to ensure we are a force for good in Myanmar,” a company representative said in an official statement in 2018.

Now, two years later, the company is doing exactly the opposite.

👀 👉🏼 https://time.com/5880118/myanmar-rohingya-genocide-facebook-gambia

#fb #DeleteFacebook #myanmar #thinkabout
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

How to stop the onion denial (of service)

As you might have heard, some onion services have been experiencing issues with denial-of-service (DoS) attacks over the past few years.

The attacks exploit the inherent asymmetric nature of the onion service rendezvous protocol, and that makes it a hard problem to defend against. During the rendezvous protocol, an evil client can send a small message to the service while the service has to do lots of expensive work to react to it. This asymmetry opens the protocol to DoS attacks, and the anonymous nature of our network makes it extremely challenging to filter the good clients from the bad.

For the past two years, we've been providing more scaling options to onion service operators, supporting more agile circuit management and protecting the network and the service host from CPU exhaustion. While these don't fix the root problem, they provide a framework to onion service operators to build their own DoS detection and handling infrastructure.

Even though the toolbox of available defenses for onion service operators has grown, the threat of DoS attacks still looms large. And while there is still a bunch of smaller-scale improvements that could be done, we believe that this is not the kind of problem that a parameter tweak or small code change will make it disappear. The inherent nature of the problem makes us believe that we need to make fundamental changes to address it.

In this post, we would like to present you with two options that we believe can provide a long-term defense to the problem while maintaining the usability and security of onion services.

The intuition to keep in mind when considering these designs is that we need to be able to offer different notions of fairness. In today's onion services, each connection request is indistinguishable from all the other requests (it's an anonymity system after all), so the only available fairness strategy is to treat each request equally -- which means that somebody who makes more requests will inherently get more attention.

The alternatives we describe here use two principles to change the balance: (1) the client should have the option to include some new information in its request, which the onion service can use to more intelligently prioritize which requests it answers; and (2) rather than a static requirement in place at all times, we should let onion services scale the defenses based on current load, with the default being to answer everything.

👀 👉🏼 https://blog.torproject.org/stop-the-onion-denial

#tor #onion #DoS #attack
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

The AnglerPhish Podcast - Synthetic Fraud with Vigilant Eye Inc Founder and Detective Jesse Gossman (Episode 6)

Synthetic Fraud is the fastest growing financial crime on the planet and accounts for over 80% of all new account fraud. Brett Johnson and Jesse Gossman, Law Enforcement Officer and Founder of Vigilant Eye, sit down to discuss.

🎧 👉🏼 The #AnglerPhish #truecrime #podcast (Episode 6)

📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

AI Wins Against Humans In Simulated Air To Air Combat In What Air Force Colonel Calls a “Big Blue vs Gary Kasparov” Moment

Hypothetical question: What if future historians consider the big event of 2020 to be the time that AI was proven to be better than humans at Air to Air combat? It has just done that, and this demonstration via simulators will no doubt accelerate AI research in ways that has an impact on a broad range of both military and civilian applications.

First some background: The idea of artificial intelligence engaging in air to air combat is not new. But for as long as I can remember most serious professionals considered it a pipe dream, especially those that wanted a career. This is especially true in the Air Force. Since the Air Force culture is that you must be a pilot to become a senior officer or lead any significant organization, how can you have a service if there are no pilots?

The very few forward thinking military professionals I knew who supported pursuit of concepts of autonomy were not taken seriously. Many were ridiculed. It has been that way for decades. Even after years of advancements in drones and AI and incredible research into the potential of pilotless AI, that remains the dominate view in the Air Force. Academia and some in industry have built simulated AI in the past that humans could not beat, but research like this was discounted by the Air Force. Don’t believe me? Watch the reaction of the audience at the US Air Force at the Air Force Association Air Warfare Symposium on 28 Feb 2020 when Elon Musk tells them that “the fighter jet era has passed, it is drones.” The entire senior leadership of the US Air Force was there. No one cheered. They hemmed, hawed, murmured, laughed.

👀 👉🏼 https://www.oodaloop.com/archive/2020/08/21/ai-wins-against-humans-in-simulated-air-to-air-combat-in-what-air-force-colonel-calls-a-big-blue-vs-gary-kasparov-moment/

#ai #simulation #combat #airforce #bigblue #kasparov
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Data-Centric Environment Rise of Internet-Based Modern Warfare “iWar” – Survivability, Availability and Accessibility without Geographic Borders

Rise of Internet-Based Modern Warfare ‘iWar’,” addresses a collection of modern security concerns that range from social media attacks and internet-connected devices to a hypothetical defense strategy for private sector entities. This Issue’s first article, titled “Evaluation of Comprehensive Taxonomies for Information Technology Threats” evaluates the different taxonomies of cyber-physical threats and their associated impact on mission capabilities. The second offering identifies a number of social media cyber-attacks as well as solution-based platforms to ascertain whether malicious activity has occurred.

This Issue’s third article investigates the performance of several binary classifiers and their ability to distinguish between non-verified and verified tweets based on the age of training data, under the title “Times Change and Your Training Data Should Too: The Effect of Training Data Recency on Twitter Classifiers.” The final article in this Issue, titled “Rebooting Letters of Marque for Private Sector Active Cyber Defense,” discusses a modern interpretation of a Constitutional Clause to allow the private sector to defend themselves outside of their network borders.

👀 👉🏼 PDF:
https://www.csiac.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/CSIAC_Journal_V7N4_hv5.pdf

👀 👉🏼 https://www.csiac.org/journal-issue/data-centric-environment/

#iWar #security #cyber #threats #malicious #attacks #csiac #pdf
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

How Four Brothers Allegedly Fleeced $19 Million From Amazon

The scheme involved 7,000 $94 toothbrushes, according to law enforcement.

Over the course of two years, four brothers in New York allegedly swindled Amazon out of at least $19 million using thousands of $94 toothbrushes and other expensive goods, according to a Department of Justice indictment unsealed Wednesday. Federal prosecutors accused Yoel Abraham, Heshl Abraham, Zishe Abraham, and Shmuel Abraham of invoicing Amazon for a large number of products the company never ordered. The defendants allegedly discussed their gimmick openly in a family WhatsApp group. In one message from May 2018, the indictment says, Yoel wrote that he was “so in the mood to fuck Amazon.”

All four brothers, who were arrested Wednesday, are accused of using wholesale businesses they opened to engage in a scam called “overshipping.” It works by intentionally sending a company more goods than it ordered and billing for it. On Amazon, every product is given a unique identifier, a string of numbers called an Amazon Standard Identification Number. They are part of an item’s listing in Amazon’s catalog. Vendors have the ability to change listings, to make sure things like product descriptions are accurate.

According to the indictment, the brothers swapped ASINs for items Amazon ordered to send large quantities of different goods instead. In one instance, Amazon ordered 12 canisters of disinfectant spray costing $94.03. The defendants allegedly shipped 7,000 toothbrushes costing $94.03 each, using the code for the disinfectant spray, and later billed Amazon for over $650,000.

In another instance, Amazon ordered a single bottle of designer perfume for $289.78. In response, according to the indictment, the defendants sent 927 plastic beard trimmers costing $289.79 each, using the ASIN for the perfume. Prosecutors say the brothers frequently shipped and charged Amazon for more than 10,000 units of an item when it had requested fewer than 100. Once Amazon detected the fraud and shut down their accounts, the brothers allegedly tried to open new ones using fake names, different email addresses, and VPNs to obscure their identity. “Open account under dummy names and they can go look for no one,” Yoel allegedly wrote on WhatsApp in the fall of 2018.

“The use of complex technology did not hide the simple fact that the defendants were bilking Amazon for goods they never provided. The more our economic life moves online, the more we must ensure the integrity of our digital markets, which my office is committed to doing,” Audrey Strauss, the acting US attorney for Manhattan, said in a press release. The defendants are each charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. Lawyers representing Yoel Abraham and Zishe Abraham did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

👀 👉🏼 https://www.wired.com/story/how-four-brothers-allegedly-fleeced-19-million-amazon/

#DeleteAmazon #amazon #scam
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Blackstone to acquire Ancestry.com for $4.7 billion

Blackstone Group Inc BX.N said on Wednesday it agreed to acquire genealogy provider Ancestry.com Inc from private equity rivals for $4.7 billion, including debt, placing a big bet on family-tree chasing as well as personalized medicine.

Ancestry.com is the world’s largest provider of DNA services, allowing customers to trace their genealogy and identify genetic health risks with tests sent to their home.

Blackstone is hoping that more consumers staying at home amid the COVID-19 pandemic will turn to Ancestry.com for its services.

“We believe Ancestry has significant runway for further growth as people of all ages and backgrounds become increasingly interested in learning more about their family histories and themselves,” David Kestnbaum, a Blackstone senior managing director, said in a statement.

The deal is Blackstone’s first acquisition out of Blackstone Capital Partners VIII, the largest-ever private equity fund that raised $26 billion from investors last year.

Ancestry.com has more than 3 million paying customers in about 30 countries, and earns more than $1 billion in annual revenue. Launched in 1996 as a family history website, it harnessed advances in DNA testing and mobile phone apps in the following two decades to expand its offerings.

Blackstone is buying Ancestry.com from private equity firms Silver Lake, Spectrum Equity and Permira. Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, another Ancestry.com investor, said it will continue to maintain a significant minority stake in the company.

👀 👉🏼 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ancestry-m-a-blackstonegroup-idUSKBN25K0R4

#blackstone #ancestry #dna
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Why we are suing the Administration

Today we are filing a complaint in federal court challenging the Administration's efforts to ban TikTok in the US. As a company we have always focused on transparency, so we want to explain why we are taking this step.

Over the past few years, people of all backgrounds have embraced the TikTok community. Today, 100 million Americans turn to TikTok for entertainment, inspiration, and connection; countless creators rely on our platform to express their creativity, reach broad audiences, and generate income; our more than 1,500 employees across the US pour their hearts into building this platform every day, with 10,000 more jobs planned in California, Texas, New York, Tennessee, Florida, Michigan, Illinois, and Washington State; and many of the country's leading brands are on TikTok to connect with consumers more authentically and directly than they can elsewhere.

Put simply, we have a thriving community and we are grateful – and responsible – to them.

The Executive Order issued by the Administration on August 6, 2020 has the potential to strip the rights of that community without any evidence to justify such an extreme action, and without any due process. We strongly disagree with the Administration's position that TikTok is a national security threat and we have articulated these objections previously.

Now is the time for us to act. We do not take suing the government lightly, however we feel we have no choice but to take action to protect our rights, and the rights of our community and employees.

👀 👉🏼 🇬🇧 https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/tiktok-files-lawsuit

👀 👉🏼 🇩🇪 https://t3n.de/news/tiktok-verklagt-trump-regierung-1315426

#DeleteTikTok #ToddlerTrump #trump #BanTikTok
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag