Russian lawmakers prepare legal amendment to confiscate crypto

Russia’s prosecutor general, Igor Krasnov, says new crypto regulations are needed to combat corruption as — in his view — digital assets are often used to facilitate crime.

Russian lawmakers are working on new legislation that would allow the government to confiscate cryptocurrencies, according to a senior official.

Russian Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov claimed that the government is now developing a set of amendments to the country’s criminal code to allow authorities to seize crypto obtained from illegal activity, local news agency TASS reported.

Speaking at a conference of prosecutors’ offices of European countries on Wednesday, Krasnov stressed that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) have been increasingly used for corruption and bribery. The official said that cryptocurrency is also a tool for laundering embezzled budget funds.

“The criminal usage of cryptocurrencies poses a serious challenge in our country,” Krasnov said. He claimed that Russia’s adopted crypto law “On Digital Financial Assets” (DFA) has played a crucial role in tackling this problem, but new criminal code amendments would bring additional protection. “This would allow the application of restrictive measures and confiscation of virtual assets,” Krasnov stated.

According to some local industry experts, no amount of legislation would make it possible for the government to actually seize crypto assets. Nikita Soshnikov, a former senior lawyer at Deloitte CIS and director of Alfacash, told Cointelegraph that it is “obvious that digital assets kept in wallets would be impossible to confiscate like any other type of assets.” “However, there is already one landmark case where FSB officers were found guilty for accepting bribes, and the court formally seized 0.1 and 4.70235 BTC as state revenue,” he noted.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/russian-lawmakers-prepare-legal-amendment-to-confiscate-crypto

#russia #lawmakers #crypto #regulations
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Invites are live on https://cock.li!

Each user has been granted 5 invites, except for accounts over 3 years old which have 15. Invites will be replenished from time to time.

You can create your invites at https://cock.li/invites . Have fun!

https://nitter.pussthecat.org/gexcolo/status/1412682754224017414

via Twitter

#vincent #cockli #email #invites
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Shocking extent of biometric surveillance in Europe

A network of civil rights organizations has studied biometric surveillance systems in Germany, the Netherlands and Poland. The study concludes that the systems are often used unlawfully.

https://edri.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/EDRI_RISE_REPORT.pdf

#eu #biometric #surveillance #study #pdf
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PrintNightmare Hits Windows, REvil Kaseya Ransomware Hits Businesses Worldwide - ThreatWire

3 Vulnerabilities were Found In Netgear Routers, Ransomware Hits Businesses Worldwide, and PrintNightmare Leads to remote code execution attacks! All that coming up now on ThreatWire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCGuqW7NL9U

#threatwire #hak5 #video
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Movie Companies Want U.S. Internet Provider ‘Frontier’ to Block Pirate Sites

A group of independent movie companies want to hold Internet provider Frontier Communications liable for pirating subscribers. In addition to damages, the filmmakers request a site-blocking order, targeting The Pirate Bay, YTS, RARBG, and many others. As a bonus, the movie companies note that the most prolific pirates can be sued directly too.

Over the past two decades, online piracy has proven a massive challenge for the entertainment industries.

It’s a global issue that’s hard to contain, but Hollywood and the major U.S. record labels are at the forefront of this battle.

One of the key strategies they’ve employed in recent years is website blocking. US companies have traveled to courts all over the world to have ISP blockades put in place, with quite a bit of success.

Interestingly, however, site blocking is noticeably absent in the United States, which harbors the most pirates of any country in the world. This can, in part, be explained by legislative backlashes and legal uncertainty. But it’s noteworthy nonetheless.

In recent years, the tide slowly started to turn, with major copyright groups strengthening their calls for blockades. However, the first move in court now comes from a group of smaller movie companies, including Millenium Media and Voltage Pictures, which have built up an impressive anti-piracy track record in recent years.

https://torrentfreak.com/movie-companies-want-u-s-internet-provider-frontier-to-block-pirate-sites-210707/

#usa #isp #block #pirate #sites
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Researchers uncovered the network infrastructure of REVil – The notorious ransomware group that hit Kaseya

Resecurity® HUNTER, cyber threat intelligence and R&D unit, identified a strong connection to a cloud hosting and IoT company servicing the domain belonging to cybercriminals.

According to the recent research published by ReSecurity on Twitter, starting January 2021 REVil leveraged a new domain ‘decoder[.]re’ in addition to a ransomware page available in the TOR network.

https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/119799/cyber-crime/researchers-infrastructure-revil-ransomware-gang.html

#revil #kaseya #ransomware
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Mozilla Investigation: YouTube Algorithm Recommends Videos that Violate the Platform’s Very Own Policies

Conducted using data donated by thousands of YouTube users, research reveals the algorithm is recommending videos with misinformation, violent content, hate speech, and scams.

Research also finds that people in non-English speaking countries are far more likely to encounter disturbing videos.

(July 7, 2021) -- YouTube’s controversial algorithm is recommending videos considered disturbing and hateful that often violate the platform’s very own content policies, according to a 10-month long, crowdsourced investigation released today by Mozilla. The in-depth study also found that people in non-English speaking countries are far more likely to encounter videos they considered disturbing.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/mozilla-investigation-youtube-algorithm-recommends-videos-that-violate-the-platforms-very-own-policies/

👉🏼 The Report (PDF)
https://assets.mofoprod.net/network/documents/Mozilla_YouTube_Regrets_Report.pdf

#mozilla #research #youtube #pdf
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China’s gene giant harvests data from millions of women

A prenatal test used worldwide sends gene data of pregnant women to the company that developed it with China's military. The U.S. sees a security risk.

A Chinese gene company selling prenatal tests around the world developed them in collaboration with the country's military and is using them to collect genetic data from millions of women for sweeping research on the traits of populations, a Reuters review of scientific papers and company statements found.

U.S. government advisors warned in March that a vast bank of genomic data that the company, BGI Group, is amassing and analyzing with artificial intelligence could give China a path to economic and military advantage. As science pinpoints new links between genes and human traits, access to the biggest, most diverse set of human genomes is a strategic edge. The technology could propel China to dominate global pharmaceuticals, and also potentially lead to genetically enhanced soldiers, or engineered pathogens to target the U.S. population or food supply, the advisors said.

Reuters has found that BGI’s prenatal test, one of the most popular in the world, is a source of genetic data for the company, which has worked with the Chinese military to improve “population quality” and on genetic research to combat hearing loss and altitude sickness in soldiers.

BGI says it stores and re-analyzes left-over blood samples and genetic data from the prenatal tests, sold in at least 52 countries to detect abnormalities such as Down syndrome in the fetus. The tests – branded NIFTY for “Non-Invasive Fetal TrisomY” – also capture genetic information about the mother, as well as personal details such as her country, height and weight, but not her name, BGI computer code viewed by Reuters shows.

So far, more than 8 million women have taken BGI’s prenatal tests globally. BGI has not said how many of the women took the test abroad, and said it only stores location data on women in mainland China.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/health-china-bgi-dna/

#china #bgi #dna #security #risk #usa
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iMessage: End-to-end encryption leveraged by iCloud backup.

Apple itself states that all communication via iMessage is end-to-end encrypted (E2EE). Unfortunately, the messenger is not open source and thus the security cannot be independently confirmed. That being said, messages are only actually E2E encrypted if the iCloud backup feature is disabled for iMessage. By default, iMessage messages that are readable with a private key stored on the local device are namely transmitted to the iCloud.

Before being transferred to the iCloud, the messages are decrypted locally (with the private key) and then transferred to the iCloud via TLS channel. There they are encrypted again with a key that is, however, managed by Apple or is known there. This enables Apple to read all iMessage messages or forward them to the authorities. E2E encryption reduced to absurdity.

So, if you want your iMessage messages to actually remain E2EE, you have to manually deactivate the backup function for iMessages in iOS.

However, this problem does not only apply in connection with iMessage, but also with other messengers whose messages are transferred to the iCloud as a backup.

💡And what do we learn from this:
Manufacturers often advertise security and data protection features in their external presentation, which, on closer inspection, only serve marketing purposes and practically have little to no effect - except under certain conditions. Now you can check whether you have already manually deactivated the backup of iMessage messages on your device.

https://www.kuketz-blog.de/imessage-ende-zu-ende-verschluesselung-durch-icloud-backup-ausgehebelt/

#imessage #icloud #backup #encryption
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Code in huge ransomware attack written to avoid computers that use Russian, says new report

"They don't want to annoy the local authorities, and they know they will be able to run their business much longer if they do it this way," said an expert.

WASHINGTON — The computer code behind the massive ransomware attack by the Russian-speaking hacking ring REvil was written so that the malware avoids systems that primarily use Russian or related languages, according to a new report by a cybersecurity firm.

It's long been known that some malicious software includes this feature, but the report by Trustwave SpiderLabs, obtained exclusively by NBC News, appears to be the first to publicly identify it as an element of the latest attack, which is believed to be the largest ransomware campaign ever.

"They don't want to annoy the local authorities, and they know they will be able to run their business much longer if they do it this way," said Ziv Mador, Trustwave SpiderLabs' vice president of security research.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/code-huge-ransomware-attack-written-avoid-computers-use-russian-says-n1273222

👉🏼 read the report:
https://www.trustwave.com/en-us/resources/blogs/spiderlabs-blog/diving-deeper-into-the-kaseya-vsa-attack-revil-returns-and-other-hackers-are-riding-their-coattails/

#ransomware #revil #usa #russia
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US offers Julian Assange time in Australian prison instead of American supermax if he loses London extradition fight Appeal against January decision to be heard by High Court

Julian Assange will remain in a British prison for now after the US government won permission to appeal against a January court ruling that freed him from extradition to America.

News of the appeal came as the US Department of Justice offered Assange a deal that would keep him out of the notoriously cruel US supermax prisons, according to The Times.

The High Court this morning granted the US permission to appeal against a ruling by Westminster Magistrates' Court that Assange couldn't be extradited because he would commit suicide if handed over to the Americans. The WikiLeaker-in-chief's legal team lost on every other legal ground against extradition.

US authorities gained that permission on three grounds, including a deal that would rule out his being sent to a federal supermax in Colorado or being automatically subject to extra-harsh punishments within prison.

"The United States has also provided an assurance that the United States will consent to Mr Assange being transferred to Australia to serve any custodial sentence imposed on him," said the High Court's ruling.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/08/assange_us_to_appeal_extradition_ruling/

#assange #usa #australia #london
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Inside the FBI, Russia, and Ukraine’s failed cybercrime investigation

Russia and Ukraine promised to cooperate and help catch the world’s most successful hackers. But things didn’t quite go to plan.

The American cops took the slower, cheaper train from Kyiv to Donetsk.

After repeatedly traveling between Ukraine and the United States, there were more comfortable ways to make this final, 400-mile journey. But the five FBI agents felt like luxury tourists compared to most travelers onboard. They could afford spacious private rooms while locals were sleeping 10 to a cabin. The train moved haltingly, past empty country and villages that, to the Americans at least, looked as if they’d been frozen in the Cold War.

The overnight trek was set to take 12 hours, but it had truly begun two years earlier, in 2008, at the FBI offices in Omaha, Nebraska. That’s where the agents had started trying to understand a cybercrime explosion that was targeting Americans and pulling in millions of dollars from victims. At that point, with at least $79 million stolen, it was by far the biggest cybercrime case the FBI had ever seen. Even today, there are few to match its scale.

Bit by bit, the American investigators began to sketch a picture of the culprits. Soon Operation Trident Breach, as they called it, homed in on a highly advanced organized-crime operation that was based in Eastern Europe but had global reach. As evidence came in from around the world, the Bureau and its international partners slowly put names and faces to the gang and started plotting the next step.

As the train made its way across Ukraine, Jim Craig, who was leading his very first case with the FBI, couldn’t sleep. He passed the time moving between his cabin and the drinks car, a baroque affair with velvet curtains. Craig stayed awake for the entire trip, staring out the window into the darkness as the country passed by.

For more than a year, Craig had traveled all over Ukraine to build a relationship between the American, Ukrainian, and Russian governments. It had been an unprecedented effort to work together and knock down the rapidly metastasizing cybercrime underworld. US agents exchanged intelligence with their Ukrainian and Russian counterparts, they drank together, and they planned a sweeping international law enforcement action.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/08/1027999/fbi-russia-ukraine-cybercrime-investigation-ransomware/

#fbi #russia #ukraine #cybercrime #investigation #ransomware
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SOS (Stephen's OS)

This is my personal operating system project. It targets the 32-bit ARMv7-A architecture. The main target board is qemu, but progress is being made on the Raspberry Pi 4B target! Despite being very imited, this one-person project has actually made a great deal of progress and continues to improve.

To build and run this, you need two important pieces of software:
QEMU 4.2+, and an ARM cross compiler. These dependencies are straightforward on Arch Linux, but Ubuntu users should see more detailed setup instructions in Ubuntu.md.

https://github.com/brenns10/sos

#sos #raspberry
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Biden signs new order cracking down on Big Tech

President Joe Biden has signed an executive order aimed at cracking down on big tech firms and promoting competition.

The move points to Mr Biden's desire for tougher scrutiny of Big Tech, which the administration has accused of "undermining competition".

"Capitalism without competition isn't capitalism. It's exploitation," Mr Biden said at Friday's signing event.

The order includes 72 actions and recommendations involving ten agencies.

It suggests that problems have arisen because of large tech firms collecting too much personal information, buying up potential competitors and competing unfairly with small businesses.

💡Several recommendations it sets out include:

- Greater scrutiny of mergers in the tech sector
- New rules to be set out by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on data collection
- Barring unfair methods of competition on internet marketplaces.

The Biden administration is also targeting a number of other sectors with the order.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57783824

#usa #biden #BigTech #crackdown
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The FBI’s honeypot Pixel 4a gets detailed in new report

FBI honeypot phones are now public—and showing up on the secondary market.

Last month, authorities disclosed that the FBI and Australian Federal Police secretly operated an "encrypted device company" called "Anom." The company sold 12,000 smartphones to criminal syndicates around the world. These were pitched as secure devices but were actually honeypot devices that routed all messages to an FBI-owned server. The disclosure was light on details, but now that it's public, Anom phones are being unloaded on the secondary market. That means us normal people are finally getting a look at them, starting with this Vice article detailing one of the devices.

The FBI has basically weaponized what the Android modding community has been doing for years. Some Android phones have unlockable bootloaders, which let you wipe out the original operating system and replace it with your own build of an OS, called a custom ROM. The Anom device Vice got was a Google Pixel 4a, one of the most developer-friendly devices out there. The FBI's custom ROM shows an "ArcaneOS" boot screen, and it replaced the normal Google Android distribution with the FBI's skin of Android 10.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/how-the-fbi-weaponized-android-modding-with-anom-devices/

#fbi #honeypot #android #anom #report
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Surveilling the Gamers: Privacy Impacts of the Video Game Industry

With many million users across all age groups and income levels, video games have become the world’s leading entertainment industry. Behind the fun experience they provide, it goes largely unnoticed that modern game devices pose a serious threat to consumer privacy. To illustrate the industry’s potential for illegitimate surveillance and user profiling, this paper offers a classification of data types commonly gathered by video games.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3881279

#surveillance #privacy #profiling #gamers #videogames #pdf
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Tracking The White House YouTube channel

A website for tracking YouTube's removal of dislikes on White House videos

Verifying the accuracy of the data

I encourage visitors to this site, especially reporters, to verify the deletion phenomenon for themselves. To do so, go to the official White House YouTube channel and find a new video that is a few hours old. Click on the video and go to its page. Take a screenshot of the likes and dislikes, being sure that your computer's/phone's clock is visible in the screenshot (example). Once per hour, come back to the page, reload it so that the newest totals appear, and take another screenshot.

Do that over the course of the day, and you will almost certainly see that YouTube deletes dislikes repeatedly. Check back the next day, and you will see the deletions continuing throughout that day as well. Finally, check your screenshots against the video's chart at 81m.org (based on the timestamp in each of your screenshots), and you will see that the two data sources, your screenshots and my charts, line up for the official likes and dislikes. (There might be small discrepancies due to our respective samples being taken a few minutes apart.)

If you want to go further:

My real likes and real dislikes stats are simply computed from all the increases to likes/dislikes (but ignoring decreases). You can check the arithmetic in the "Last ... stats" table on each video page at 81m.org. You can download the full data on each page as CSV, TSV, or JSON files if you want to do your own charting. Also note that my real likes and real dislikes statistics almost always line up very closely for the videos in the comparison data, like those by PewDiePie.

https://81m.org/

#tracking #whitehouse #youtube #manipulation
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Without Banks, Cannabis Companies Are Turning to Crypto

Here's one way that cryptocurrencies can help businesses that can't access traditional financial services.

Medicinal cannabis is now legal in 36 states, and 17 states allow recreational use.

However, banking is difficult for cannabis companies. Banks are nervous about working with cannabis businesses because federal law still prohibits the sale and distribution of marijuana -- no matter what local legislators say.

As a result, cannabis cash could be considered laundered money, and banks are reluctant to expose themselves to that kind of risk. Similarly, credit card companies and payment processors don't want to be liable if there's any kind of lawsuit.

There is a cannabis banking bill in the pipeline that may make things easier. But in the meantime, some cannabis companies are turning to cryptocurrencies to meet their banking needs.

https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/cryptocurrency/articles/without-banks-cannabis-companies-are-turning-to-crypto/

#cannabis #banking #crypto
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Today OONI data shows that #Cuba started blocking WhatsApp, Telegram & Signal amid protests.

Blocking appears to be happening by injecting a TCP RST packet during the TLS handshake.

https://nitter.pussthecat.org/OpenObservatory/status/1414622433156476930#m

#cuba #blocking #telegram #whatsapp #signal
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Bogdan Botezatu from Bitdefender in conversation with Tarnkappe.info (Interview)

Bitdefender security researcher Bogdan Botezatu on government malware, surveillance and a second firewall alongside Windows Defender.

Bogdan Botezatu is working at Bitdefender as an IT security expert since May 2008. Botezatu has many years of experience in the areas of cyberware as well as mobile and social network malware.

Botezatu kindly answers the many questions of the Tarnkappe.info community. In Bucharest, he works for Bitdefender as Director of Threat Research & Reporting. Botezatu runs his own blog and is reachable via LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, for example.

https://tarnkappe.info/bogdan-botezatu-from-bitdefender-in-conversation-with-tarnkappe-info/

#interview #bitdefender
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You make a privacy-first service → You get banned on Google

TL;DR: Google and Microsoft have super opaque and unpredictable ad moderation.

There are unofficial policies that indirectly ban the advertising of privacy-first services.

DuckDuckGo and StartPage.com use their platforms.

If you’re banned (like I am), unban is highly unlikely to happen, and the chances of your success are extremely low.

This topic is unpleasant, so there won’t be a lot of jokes. You need to have a lot of courage and composure to make jokes about your deadly wound when you’re still severely bleeding.

https://dkzlv.medium.com/google-bans-privacy-first-services-b9452e281439

#DeleteGoogle #google #privacy
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