Enlarge / The IRS detailed the winding and tangled routes the couple allegedly took to launder a portion of the nearly 120,000 bitcoins stolen from the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex in 2016. (credit: William Whitehurst | Getty Images) On Tuesday, Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan were arrested in New York and accused of laundering a record […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) Authorities in Spain said they broke up a SIM-swapping crime ring that used identity theft and falsified documents and texts to target victims’ bank accounts. In a press release, Spain’s National Police agency said it arrested eight individuals in connection with the operation, which began no later than last March. The […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) About 500 e-commerce websites were recently found to be compromised by hackers who installed a credit card skimmer that surreptitiously stole sensitive data when visitors attempted to make a purchase. A report published on Tuesday is only the latest one involving Magecart, an umbrella term given to competing crime groups that […]
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica ) Two years ago, researchers stumbled upon one of the Internet’s most intriguing botnets: a previously undiscovered network of 500 servers, many in well-known universities and businesses around the world, that was impervious to normal takedown methods. After lying low for 16 months, those researchers said, the botnet […]
Enlarge Vodafone Portugal is slowly working to recover following a “deliberate and malicious cyberattack” that brought down services used by millions of people and businesses in that country, including those for ambulances and other emergency services. Vodafone Portugal—a subsidiary of UK-based Vodafone Group with 4.3 million cellphone subscribers and 3.4 million fiber subscribers—said in a […]
Enlarge / Illustration of a coronal mass ejection impacting the Earth’s atmosphere. These events can cause geomagnetic storms. (credit: Getty Images | Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library) SpaceX had to ditch most of its latest batch of Starlink satellites because they were disrupted by a geomagnetic storm after being launched from the Falcon 9 rocket. Up […]
Enlarge / Greg Wyler in February 2019 when he was at OneWeb. (credit: Getty Images | Washington Post) A company led by satellite-industry veteran Greg Wyler says it plans to launch about 100, 000 small communication satellites into low Earth orbit. The company, E-Space, yesterday announced that it received a $50 million investment and that […]
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson) All too often, digital ads wind up improperly targeting the most vulnerable people online, including abuse victims and kids. Add to that list the customers of several digital-medicine and genetic-testing companies, whose sites used ad-tracking tools that could have exposed information about people’s health status. In a recent study from researchers […]
Enlarge (credit: Microsoft) In the interest of combating ransomware and other malware, Microsoft is planning a major change in how its Office software handles macros: when files that use macros are downloaded from the Internet, those macros will now be disabled entirely by default. Current versions of the software offer an alert banner on these […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) This is a story about how a simple software bug allowed the fourth-biggest cryptocurrency theft ever. Hackers stole more than $323 million in cryptocurrency by exploiting a vulnerability in Wormhole, a Web-based service that allows inter-blockchain transactions. Wormhole lets people move digital coins tied to one blockchain over to a different blockchain; […]