AT&T Communications Security Threat Report: A Crypto Crime Investigator in the United States is Sensitive to a High-Density Jailbreak
From targeted wiretapping to bulk dragnets, phone companies have been at the center of privacy concerns for decades. AT&T said Friday that it has suffered a data-breach impacting call and text messaging records of most of its customers. The company is in the process of notifying about 110 million people that they were affected.
The incident is significant not only because of its sheer scale and reach but because AT&T says it is the latest in a staggering spate of data thefts that resulted from attackers compromising organizations’ Snowflake cloud accounts. Snowflake is a data warehousing platform, and attackers collected its customers’ account credentials in recent months to steal hundreds of millions of records from about 165 Snowflake clients, including Ticketmaster, Santander bank, and LendingTree’s QuoteWizard.
Researchers at crypto-tracing firm Elliptic revealed this week that an online marketplace, Huione Guarantee, is facilitating billions of dollars in financial scams frequently known as “pig butchering.” The offerings discovered on Houine Guarantee—a company reportedly linked to Cambodia’s ruling family—range from lists of potential targets to electric shock collars used to imprison human trafficking victims who are forced to work in scam labor camps in Southeast Asia.
Elsewhere in the crypto-tracing world, a US lawmaker this week introduced a resolution calling on the White House to classify former IRS investigator Tigran Gambaryan as a hostage due to his current imprisonment in Nigeria. Now employed as a crypto crime investigator at cryptocurrency exchange Binance after pioneering the practice for the IRS, Gambaryan was detained alongside a colleague in mid-March on the grounds that Binance had devalued the country’s fiat currency and enabled the “illicit” transfer of funds. While his colleague was able to get away, Gambaryan remained in prison despite a growing number of US lawmakers urging the Biden administration to let him go.
One of the FBI’s most-wanted cybercriminals is finally headed to prison. Vyacheslav Igorevich Penchukov—who went by “Tank” online—received two nine-year sentences in US prison on Thursday and is ordered to fork over around $75 million. The lead hacker in the group is Penchukov. tens of millions of dollars were ferried away by the group through people’s bank accounts. Several of Penchukov’s alleged hacker colleagues remain at large, with multimillion-dollar bounties on their heads.
PassKeys for Advanced Protection Program Users: An Overview of the Pentagon Mission to Equip Special Operations Forces with Artificial Intelligence Superpowers
PassKeys were rolled out this week to users of the Advanced Protection Program. PassKeys, the cryptography that promises to kill passwords once and for all, has been widely accessible to users of the products for a year, but APP users are at higher risk of targeted attacks, and so it took the company more time to find an alternative.
Finally, we got into the nitty gritty of the Pentagon’s long-running mission to equip special operation forces with AI superpowers. The goal of the Hyper enabled operator program was to create a kind of Iron Man suit but it has evolved over time to give soldiers the ability to assess risks faster than any human mind.
