Law and Order

Federal prosecutors in Kansas announced Tuesday that a 25-year-old Californian has admitted that he caused a Wichita man to be killed at the hands of local police during a swatting attack late last year.

Swatting is a way to harass or threaten someone by calling in a false threat to law enforcement, and, when successful, it usually results in a police SWAT team showing up needlessly at its victim's house.

The author of the LumunosityLink malware pleaded guilty in federal court on Monday. Colton Grubs, a 21-year-old man from Kentucky, faced up to 25 years in prison had the case gone to trial.

LumunosityLink first earned a spotlight in 2015 when Proofpoint researchers looked past the benign advertisements for the product and found a “very aggressive key logger that injects its code in almost every running process on the computer.”

A fresh FBI charge against Marcus Hutchins has led to the Kronos banking trojan and the UPAS Kit backdoor being linked in the news over the past week.

However, a fresh analysis this week shows that, at least on a code level, the similarities (and differences) between the two are far from conclusive.

The Yahoo "hacker for hire" Karim Baratov, charged with helping Russian intelligence officers access compromised Yahoo email accounts, received a sentence of five years in prison, as well as a fine amounting to the forfeiture of all his remaining assets.

Baratov, a 23-year-old Kazakh native, was a Canadian national at the time of his arrest last year in Canada for his role in one of the largest breaches ever uncovered: the 2014 exposure of 500 million Yahoo email accounts.

The teenager who founded the hacking group that broke into ex-CIA chief John Brennan's email has been sentenced to serve two years at a youth detention center. Kane Gamble went by the alias "Cracka" when he and his group "Crackas With Attitude" targeted top US officials, including FBI deputy director Mark Giuliano, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and their families and colleagues, a few years ago. Authorities arrested the UK native in early 2016, and he pleaded guilty to 10 hacking charges in October 2017.

Lawmakers behind a new anti-privacy bill are trying to sneak it through Congress by attaching it to the must-pass government spending bill.

The CLOUD Act would hand police in the U.S., and other countries, extreme new powers to obtain and monitor data directly from tech companies instead of requiring a warrant and judicial review.

Congressional leadership will decide whether the CLOUD Act gets attached to the omnibus government spending bill sometime this week, potentially as early as tomorrow, so we need to flood our lawmakers with messages and calls right now.

Kim Dotcom is seeking billions of dollars in damages from the New Zealand Government over an invalid arrest warrant. The entrepreneur accuses the authorities of negligence and misfeasance, which resulted in the destruction of the highly profitable Megaupload service.

Six years ago, New Zealand police carried out a spectacular military-style raid against individuals accused only of copyright infringement.

A computer programmer has been accused of hacking, committing identity theft, and creating child pornography after allegedly developing custom malware to take control of thousands of computers.

Phillip Durachinsky, 28, of North Royalton, Ohio, USA, was indicted on Wednesday on 16 separate charges relating to the alleged creation of malware dubbed Fruitfly, which could commandeer infected macOS and Windows PC systems. Prosectors claim Durachinsky used the code to spy on thousands of people in a campaign that started in 2003, when he was just a teenager.

Three class action complaints have been filed against Intel over the Meltdown and Spectre CPU security flaws that were discovered by researchers earlier this year and widely publicized earlier this week.

A New Jersey man was just one of a trio who pled guilty to hacking charges and creating the devastating Mirai botnet, which spread via vulnerabilities in Internet-connected devices to unleash numerous massive distributed-denial-of-service attacks. As recently as last week, new Mirai strains continued to proliferate online.