Spanish authorities announced Wednesday that they had arrested 10 people who were allegedly involved in a massive “ransomware” ring. The European Cybercrime Centre estimated that the criminal operation "affected tens of thousands of computers worldwide, bringing in profits in excess of €1 million euros ($1.34 million) per year."
The Unites States Government has submitted a brief to the Supreme Court asking it to uphold the $220,000 verdict in the RIAA vs. Thomas file-sharing case. According to the Obama administration damages of $9,250 per song is not an unconstitutional amount and is in fact needed to deter others from engaging on online piracy.
Police in Tokyo recently arrested Yusuke Katayama, 30, for allegedly hijacking other people's computers to make online threats, then taunting Japanese media and police with riddles that led them to a memory card strapped to a cat's collar.
"Katayama was arrested on suspicion of forcible obstruction of business for using [a] computer virus to remotely access the computers of others and send out threats through them, including mass murder in a school and on the streets of Osaka," The Asahi Shimbun reports.
A federal judge in Los Angeles has suggested serious penalties for Brett Gibbs, an attorney at porn copyright trolling firm Prenda Law. Facing allegations of fraud and identity theft, Gibbs will be required to explain himself at a March 11 hearing. And if Judge Otis Wright isn't satisfied with his answers, he may face fines and even jail time.
We thought we killed all those awful, horrible destroy the Internet-type bills in SOPA, PIPA and CISPA. We might've been wrong. Like a zombie looking for human blood or a sore loser demanding a rematch, Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger and Rep. Mike Rogers plan to re-introduce CISPA to the House later this year.
A French appeals court on Wednesday threw out a 1.5 million euro ($2 million) fine against energy giant EDF, overturning a lower court's ruling that the company had been complicit in hacking the computers of Greenpeace in 2006.
EDF had appealed against the November 2011 decision by the Nanterre criminal court that a company it hired had hacked into confidential information on the computer of Yannick Jadot, then campaign director for the environmental group and now a Greens member of the European Parliament.
Righthaven was a copyright-enforcement business dreamed up by Las Vegas attorney Steve Gibson. He managed to convince the largest newspaper in Nevada, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, to let him use its copyrights to sue more than 200 mostly small-time bloggers and demand several thousand dollars apiece from them for reposting Review-Journal articles. Righthaven struck a similar deal with the Denver Post, which led to about 50 more lawsuits.
A Dutch citizen who was arrested and extradited from Romania was sentenced to 12 years in prison for a computer hacking and credit card fraud scheme that victimized people around the world, announced U.S. Attorney Jenny A. Durkan.
David Benjamin Schrooten, 22, also known in the hacking world as ‘Fortezza’, pleaded guilty in November 2012 to Conspiracy to Commit Access Device Fraud and Bank Fraud, Access Device Fraud, Bank Fraud, Intentional Damage to a Protected Computer, and Aggravated Identity Theft.
The FBI recently announced that hacker Karen "Gary" Kazaryan, 27, has been arrested and charged with 15 counts of computer intrusion and 15 counts of aggravated identity theft. Kazaryan allegedly hacked into victims' e-mail, Facebook and Skype accounts, then changed the passwords to lock the users out.
Hackers have been hard at work in Indonesia, defacing web sites left right and center in protest at the treatment of a local hacker who defaced the president’s web site earlier this month and could now face a 12 year jail term.
Internet café worker Wildan Yani Ashari, 22, was cuffed by police last Friday just over a fortnight after he replaced the home page of president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) with the message: “This is a PayBack From Jember Hacker Team”.
