Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reports: More than a decade ago, researchers at antivirus company Kaspersky identified suspicious internet traffic of what they thought was a known government-backed group, based on similar targeting and its phishing techniques. Soon, the researchers realized they had found a much more advanced hacking operation that was targeting the Cuban government, among others….
Category: Miscellaneous
Texas Doctor Who Falsely Diagnosed Patients as Part of Insurance Fraud Scheme Sentenced to 10 Years’ Imprisonment
How often have you read concerns that patient information can be used for fraudulent purposes or that patient records can be altered by wrongdoers? Here’s a case where the wrongdoer is a doctor who altered patient records and inserted false diagnoses to defraud insurers — to the tune of over $118 million in false claims….
Researchers Scrape 2 Billion Discord Messages and Publish Them Online
Matthew Gault reports: Researchers published a massive database of more than 2 billion Discord messages that they say they scraped using Discord’s public API. The data was pulled from 3,167 servers and covers posts made between 2015 and 2024, the entire time Discord has been active. Though the researchers claim they’ve anonymized the data, it’s…
Cocospy stalkerware apps go offline after data breach
Zack Whittaker reports: A trio of phone surveillance apps, which was caught spying on millions of people’s phones earlier this year, has gone offline. Cocospy, Spyic, and Spyzie were three near-identical but differently branded stalkerware apps that allowed the person planting one of the apps on a target’s phone access to their personal data — including their messages, photos,…
Ex-NSA bad-guy hunter listened to Scattered Spider’s fake help-desk calls: ‘Those guys are good’
Jessica Lyons reports: The call came into the help desk at a large US retailer. An employee had been locked out of their corporate accounts. But the caller wasn’t actually a company employee. He was a Scattered Spider criminal trying to break into the retailer’s systems – and he was really good, according to Jon…
Alabama Man Sentenced to 14 Months in Connection with Securities and Exchange Commission X Hack that Spiked Bitcoin Prices
There’s an update to a previously reported case from the Department of Justice: WASHINGTON – An Alabama man was sentenced today to 14 months in prison and three years of supervised release for his role in the unauthorized takeover of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) social media account on X, formerly known as…