Saturday, May 13, 2017

Ransomware: All men are frauds

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it ...
 ~ Mencken

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” – Honoré de Balzac. The closest I ever came to acting like a rich person was when I got my surname 21 years or so ago  ...

Story image for ransomware from BleepingComputerWana Decrypt0r Ransomware Using NSA Exploit Leaked by ...
BleepingComputer 

Story image for ransomware australia from ABC Online'Biggest ransomware outbreak in history' hits nearly 100 countries
ABC Online 

Story image for ransomware major from NBCNews.comCyberattack Hits Nearly 100 Countries and Thousands of Computers
NBCNews.com
Trump signs order launching voter fraud investigation








Writers Used To Be Private, Reclusive Even. Now They’re Expected To Be Public, And That’s A Problem



“We used to be okay with literary types asserting independent, fortified egos. Poets and novelists were almost expected to be aloof, even anti-social. But today, we’re too savvy to indulge such a romantic myth. The aloof rebel is nothing more than an affectation, we tell ourselves, a pair of Ray-Bans you slip on. When Bob Dylan was slow to acknowledge his Nobel Prize for Literature, many were scandalized. “It’s impolite and arrogant,” huffed a member of the Swedish Academy. What, then, has displaced the idiosyncratic recluse?”



RARELY has a Chinese city boss had more fans than Li Dakang, the earnest, driven Communist Party chief of Jingzhou. “I want development, I want speed and I want GDP,” he recently intoned. “But I want it to be modern GDP, GDP that comes without pollution.” Over the past month tens of millions have tuned in to watch him strive to fulfil these promises. On their smartphones, they share images of the heavy-eyed man with an easy smile, quoting his words and cheering him on. His policies have even been immortalised in a musical tribute, “The GDP Song”. Li Dakang is not real, nor is Jingzhou. They exist only on “In the Name of the People”, a wildly popular 55-part television series about China’s battle against graft. Since its first broadcast in March, the show has attracted attention for its depiction of official corruption, unusual in the context of Chinese censorship. Less noted is the insight it has offered into a range of China’s economic problems—not...In China, a TV soap on corruption attracts a mass following

Bitcoin hits $1600 for the first time and one investor says it could rally to $4000 in a few months

Sydney insurance fraud 'cockroach' caught


We are not Russian spies: Kaspersky

India finding it hard to end love affair with cash AFP

Thamer Ari: Refugee 'staged $1.2m fake bus crash'


Upmarket Sydney hotel targeted by cybercriminals 

Indian barber cuts customers’ hair with fire (video at link with story
Loads of Britain's 100 richest people have donated more than £19 million to the Tories and nobody's at all surprised

As anti-corruption fighter John Hatton AO recently pointed out,  “Corruption can’t occur if government departments are truly independent, open, accountable, efficient facilitators of the flow of information acting in the public interest. It just can’t happen…Corruption flows from government to government and from department to department irrespective of the political colour.”



Why taxation STILL isn’t theft…

It came to our attention recently that a blog written for us by Associate Professor of Philosophy at Central European University Philip Goff prompted extensive discussion. The blog was called No, it’s not your money: why taxation isn’t theft. This concept that taxes paid by individuals and companies, used by government for the provision of public services are somehow ‘theft’ seems to excite a lot of people. Do we believe all government expenditure is responsible and fair? No. But to end all debate by proposing (presumably) no one should pay any taxes doesn’t look like an inviting world in which to live happily and prosper. Associate Professor Philip Goff has written a response based on the reaction to his previous blog and we hand over to him...



Police seize £8m of fake designer goods and ...






Over-classified’public documents spring a leak

The UK's Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating claims that the Metropolitan Police used outsourced Indian hackers to illegally access the email accounts of Guardian journalists and environmental campaigners.
A whistleblower claiming to be a serving police employee said the Met evaded Britain’s already lax surveillance laws by asking Indian cops to break into a number of email accounts, knowing that the Indian police would simply pay local hackers to do their dirty work for them.
Police employees at the National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit were alleged by the whistle-blower to have illegally accessed the email accounts of 10 named people and the whistleblower supplied their passwords. These included environmentalists and two Guardian journalists.
“The IPCC’s investigation is looking at whether officers from NDEDIU contacted Indian counterparts and if the services of computer hackers in India were obtained to access email accounts. It will also examine if any officers within NDEDIU used any information gained from this contact if it took place,” said the IPCC in a statement today. Italians
 



MPs who are leaving the protection of parliament for the campaign trail will render the election significantly more vulnerable to hacking, leading security researchers have warned. According to Dr Udo Helmbrecht, executive director of the European Union’s Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA), hackers have their best opportunity to intervene in democracies in the weeks running up to the election because parliament’s information security services are no longer overseeing their accounts. If hackers want to disrupt a democracy, elections are the time to do it, he said. As MPs head out on the campaign trail after Wednesday’s dissolution of parliament, they are no longer granted the special status of MPs and hence lose the protection of Westminster’s IT security infrastructure. This gives attackers increased opportunities to obtain data and gain access to sensitive networks.




Around Halloween 2014, Ohio-based building materials and paint company Sherwin-Williams got an expensive scare - a cyberattack. Seven suspect wires worth around $6.45 million were sent from its French subsidiary's corporate account at Morgan Chase to organizations across China, Latvia, Liechtenstein and the Netherlands between October 27 and 30. They were not legitimate transactions. And those organizations were being used as part of a huge illegal operation. This is according to a just-unsealed search warrant unearthed by Forbes, which revealed the $30 billion-valued Sherwin-Williams was hit by one of the Russia's most successful criminal gangs, known as Dyre. A source with knowledge of the fraudulent transfers confirmed the facts outlined in the FBI warrant. It seemed that the Dyre crew's rapid rise to prominence was curtailed in late 2015, when Russia's FSB made multiple arrests of individuals suspected of being part of the group. Now sources say the hackers are likely active again with Trickbot, new but remarkably similar malware. Those sources also tell Forbes they believe many of those arrested for the multi-million criminal operation were released without being charged. And those allegations have only intensified fears that the Russian government does little to stop hackers carrying out costly cyberattacks against foreign businesses.


Business leaders for a public registry of beneficial ownership in Germany

TJN proudly unveils today its first public call among business leaders in Germany in support of a fully public and effective register of beneficial ownership (BO, or the real owners of companies). So far 12 German businesses with a combined turnover of more than €500 million have signed the petition for amending the current draft law on beneficial ownership. The call proposes amendments by making a BO registry fully public, and by ensuring that the real ultimate beneficial owner is always published, no matter in how many “shells” the German legal entity might be wrapped... 




Within a few hours of mooring up and opening his laptop, Campbell Murray had taken complete control of a nearby multimillion-dollar superyacht. He could easily have sailed it – and its super rich owner – off into the sunset. “We had control of the satellite communications,” said Murray, an IT specialist. “We had control of the telephone system, the Wi-Fi, the navigation … And we could wipe the data to erase any evidence of what we had done.” The ease with which ocean-going oligarchs or other billionaires can be hijacked on the high seas was revealed at a superyacht conference held in a private members club in central London this week. Murray, a cybercrime expert at BlackBerry, was demonstrating how criminal gangs could exploit lax data security on superyachts to steal their owners’ financial information, private photos – and even force the yacht off course.