~ 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 ...
BleepingComputer
ABC Online
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?”
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.”
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
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 leakUNESCO report: surveillance and data collection are putting journalists and sources at risk The Conversation
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.