UK crimebusters shut down global call-spoofing outfit that claimed 170K-plus victims
The UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) has shut down an outfit called Russian Coms – a call-spoofing service believed to have swindled hundreds of thousands of victims. The agency also arrested at least four suspects thought to be involved in the fraudulent operation, which spanned more than 100 countries. Despite the moniker, all four of the arrested men are Brits. In March, the NCA detained two men, aged 26 and 28, in Newham, London, who are suspected to be the platform’s developers and administrators. The platform was shut down that same month.
Israeli hacktivist group brags it took down Iran’s internet
Israel-based hacktivists are taking credit for an ongoing internet outage in Iran. Operating under the name WeRedEvils, the group has been around since at least October 2023, likely as a direct consequence of Hamas’s attack on Israel, which led to the current Gaza war. “In the coming minutes we will attack systems and internet providers in Iran,” WeRedEvils said on Telegram yesterday. “A hard blow is on the way.” By the group’s own account, the attack was a success, claiming it had been able to infiltrate Iran’s computer systems, steal data, and cause an internet outage. The group claimed they’d passed the stolen info to the Israeli government.
Who are the two major hackers Russia just received in a prisoner swap?
As part of today’s blockbuster prisoner swap between the US and Russia, which freed the journalist Evan Gershkovich and several Russian opposition figures, Russia received in return a motley collection of serious criminals, including an assassin who had executed an enemy of the Russian state in the middle of Berlin. But the Russians also got two hackers, Vladislav Klyushin and Roman Seleznev, each of whom had been convicted of major financial crimes in the US. The US government said that Klyushin “stands convicted of the most significant hacking and trading scheme in American history, and one of the largest insider trading schemes ever prosecuted.” As for Seleznev, federal prosecutors said that he has “harmed more victims and caused more financial loss than perhaps any other defendant that has appeared before the court.”
US sues TikTok and ByteDance for allegedly failing to protect children’s privacy
The US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission have sued TikTok and its parent company ByteDance for allegedly failing to protect children’s privacy on the social media app. The government said TikTok violated a law that prohibits collecting, using, or disclosing personal information from children under 13 without parental consent. The lawsuit, filed on Friday, follows similar cases in the UK and EU that resulted in regulators fining TikTok millions of dollar over claims that it was failing to keep children safe on the platform and mishandling their data.
DARPA suggests turning old C code automatically into Rust – using AI, of course
To accelerate the transition to memory safe programming languages, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is driving the development of TRACTOR, a programmatic code conversion vehicle. The term stands for TRanslating All C TO Rust. It’s a DARPA project that aims to develop machine-learning tools that can automate the conversion of legacy C code into Rust. The reason to do so is memory safety. Memory safety bugs, such buffer overflows, account for the majority of major vulnerabilities in large codebases. And DARPA’s hope is that AI models can help with the programming language translation, in order to make software more secure. “You can go to any of the LLM websites, start chatting with one of the AI chatbots, and all you need to say is ‘here’s some C code, please translate it to safe idiomatic Rust code,’ cut, paste, and something comes out, and it’s often very good, but not always,” said Dan Wallach, DARPA program manager for TRACTOR, in a statement.
Russian hackers part of US-Russia prisoner swap
NBC News reports that the U.S. has agreed to release convicted Russian hackers Vladimir Klyushin and Roman Seleznev, along with eight others, in exchange for Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and other American political prisoners held by Russia. Arrests of both Klyushin, who was involved in a hack-and-trade scheme against U.S. companies, and Seleznev, who was engaged in credit card attacks, were noted by retired veteran FBI Special Agent and CybelAngel Chief Information Security Officer Todd Carroll to have entailed significant challenges, exacerbated by disparate laws. “I don’t want to undercut getting two U.S. citizens back that were wrongly held over there.
