Law & Order

You may recall that almost three years ago, the BitTorrent search engine IsoHunt agreed to shut down and to "pay" Hollywood studios $110 million. The number was a joke, because IsoHunt and its creator didn't have $110 million. It's just that the legacy copyright players always like to end these lawsuits with a giant headline grabbing number, while they've quietly agreed to accept very little, if any, actual money (and whatever money they do receive is not then distributed to any artists).

A former employee of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball organization has been sentenced to nearly four years in prison for hacking computers belonging to the Houston Astros, the US Justice Department said Monday.

A 22-year-old hacker has been handed a two-year prison sentence for his role in doxing and swatting politicians, celebrities, prosecutors, the first lady, and security journalist Brian Krebs.

A Chinese businessman has been sentenced to nearly four years in prison for conspiring to hack the computer systems of Boeing and other US defense contractors to steal military technical data.

On July 5th , the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion which found, in part, that sharing passwords is a crime prosecutable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The decision, according to a dissenting opinion on the case, makes millions of people who share passwords for services like Netflix and HBOGo into “unwitting federal criminals.”

A 20-year-old Estonia man has pleaded guilty to stealing data on more than 1,300 U.S. military and government personnel and providing it to the Islamic State.

Ardit Ferizi’s goal was to “incite terrorist attacks,” the U.S. Department of Justice said on Wednesday.

Ferizi once led a hacking group called Kosova Hacker’s Security, or KHS, which claims to have defaced over 20,000 websites. Last June he hacked into a U.S. Internet hosting company to steal the personnel data, which included addresses, telephone numbers and email logins.

A New York man who identifies himself as the "Red Light Robin Hood" pleaded not guilty Friday to a 17-count indictment accusing him of cutting the wires of more than a dozen red light cameras in Suffolk County. This modern-day digital do-gooder has no apologies and wants a jury trial.

Stephen Ruth, who remains free on bail, was arrested in April shortly after he told a CBS affiliate that he was the culprit and that he dismantled the cameras "in order to save lives." He said the county shortened the yellow light duration from 5 seconds to 3 seconds in a bid to make more money.

A Southern California woman was recently ordered to provide her fingerprint to unlock a seized iPhone, according to a report by the Los Angeles Times.

A Philadelphia man suspected of possessing child pornography has been in jail for seven months and counting after being found in contempt of a court order demanding that he decrypt two password-protected hard drives.

Aleksandr Panin, the 27-year-old Russian creator behind the malware banking Trojan that allowed cybercriminals to infect millions of computers and drain bank accounts worldwide, has been sentenced to nine and half years in a US federal prison. The US Justice Department said on 20 April that his accomplice, Algerian Hamza Bendelladj, who sold versions of SpyEye online and used it to steal financial information, was sentenced to 15 years.