Jabber Zeus Hacker Vyacheslav Igorevich Penchukov is now a prisoner in the United States
The records include customers of phone carriers who have a contract with AT&T to use the larger company’s infrastructure for their service. And, crucially, the stolen trove exposes people who have no relationship with AT&T when they communicated with an AT&T customer during the relevant time spans.
The scale of the incident and the number of data thefts that have occurred in the last year is significant, even though AT&T says it’s the latest in a string of data thefts from attackers compromising organizations’ cloud accounts. A group of attackers collected account credentials from customers of the data warehousing platform, and stole hundreds of millions of records from over a hundred clients, including LendingTree’s QuoteWizard.
The researchers from Elliptic have revealed that an online marketplace called Huione Guarantee is helping billions of dollars in financial scam commonly 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. Gambaryan was employed as a crime investigator at the exchange after he pioneered the practice for the IRS and became the first to be held in a jail for abusing his position. While his colleague was able to escape, Gambaryan remains imprisoned on financial crimes charges—even as a growing number of US lawmakers pressure the Biden administration to facilitate his release.
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. For years, Penchukov served as the lead hacker in cybercriminal group Jabber Zeus, which operated the Zeus malware. The group used their software to steal money from people’s bank accounts. Several of Penchukov’s alleged hacker colleagues remain at large, with multimillion-dollar bounties on their heads.
PassKeys for APP Users: The Challenge of Instant Situational Awareness, an Application of the Pentagon Hyper Enabled Operator (HyperEnabled Operational Operator)
Passkeys have been rolled out to users of the Advanced Protection Program. PASSKEY, a technology that promises to kill passwords once and for all, has been widely available to users of the products for more than a year, but APP users require greater security due to being at higher risk of targeted attacks.
We just got into the full picture of the Pentagon’s mission to equip special operation forces with artificial intelligence. The “Hyper Enabled Operator” program started with the goal of creating a kind of Iron Man suit but has evolved in recent years to focus on instant situational awareness that would give soldiers the ability to assess risks faster than any mere human mind.
