At the end of July, the government filed a sealed document with a court in Virginia that sought to portray Dallas, Texas, business owner Ladar Levison as an obstruction to an investigation of a not-publicly-named-individual (that we all know to be NSA leaker Edward Snowden).
In 2011, 43-year-old Army veteran Edwin "Trey" Gennette lived just outside Pensacola, Florida, with a pet possum and a talking Ford Mustang. One warm June evening, he began poking around the "Casual Encounters" section of Craigslist, where he found an ad promising a novel erotic situation. "2 sisters seeking a man that handle both [of] us," it said. "We are ready for a hot night, are you?"
After twenty-four hours of speculation, as well as a wall of silence from officials connected to the case, Europol's Troels Oerting, who is head of the European Cybercrime Center, has confirmed that 'Paunch' — one of the people behind the creation and maintenance of the Blackhole Exploit Kit — has been arrested in Russia.
"I know it is true, we got some information, but I cannot say anymore," Oerting told TechWeekEurope in a brief statement.
Some of the men indicted last week for allegedly taking part in the scores of denial-of-service attacks launched by hacktivist group Anonymous during 2010 don't fit the stereotype of a pajamas-wearing teen hacker causing havoc from mom's basement.
Back in 2010, “Operation Payback” involved a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against anti-piracy websites as a way to protest what some members of Anonymous viewed as an overly greedy intellectual property industry. The attack was later revived in early 2011.
The FBI arrested Ross Ulbricht, the owner and operator of "Silk Road," an underground website that allegedly generated close to $1.2 billion in revenue in the past 30 months by trafficking in illegal drugs, malware tools, hacking services and other illicit items.
Law enforcement also seized close to 26,000 Bitcoins worth an estimated $3.6 million from Ulbricht. He was arrested Tuesday in San Francisco on charges of narcotics trafficking, computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering. He is scheduled to appear in federal court in San Francisco today.
Lavabit, the encrypted email provider of choice used by Edward Snowden, spontaneously closed its doors this past summer, doing so for vague reasons related to the government, though the service’s owner was (and is) under gag order, keeping things quiet. Last month, a request to have some of the documents unsealed was submitted, which would allow amicus briefs to be filed. Such a request has been honored, revealing some information about what went down behind closed doors.
France's data protection watchdog moved closer to fining Google for the way it stores and tracks user information after the search engine ignored a three-month ultimatum to bring its practices in line with local law.
The privacy watchdog, known as CNIL, said on Friday it was opening a procedure to impose formal sanctions. Under French law, Google can be fined up to 150,000 euros.
It's widely understood that the ads Google puts in Gmail are based on the content of e-mails. The millions of Gmail users presumably accept the company's promise that "no humans read your e-mail."
Earlier this year it became illegal to unlock your smartphone or tablet so that you could use it with any carrier you wanted to.
Unlocking a mobile device requires hacking into it to alter the software.
Anyone unlocking a new cell phone or providing unlocking services after Jan. 26 risks up to five years of jail time for each offense. But on Tuesday a government agency that works on behalf of the President stepped in to try to change that. It is asking the Federal Communications Commission to make rules that would sidestep the law.
