An indictment against BurtW AKA Burt Wagner related to the alleged operation of an unlicenced money transmitting business has been dropped after U.S. District Court Judge William J Martinez dismissed the case at the behest of the U.S. Department of Justice. Such a victory is bittersweet though as Burt's wife Jean writes (archive): Continue reading
Monthly Archives: July 2015
Darkode Goes Dark: Members Charged as "Cybercriminals"
Reports are coming in that an investigation led by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Pittsburgh, and supported by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) and Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), has resulted in the shut down of online forum Darkode.com and the arrest of 12 people in connection with the invitation-only web portal.1
Tsinghua Unigroup Flirts With Acquisition of DRAM Maker Micron
Chinese state owned enterprise Tsinghua Unigroup is rumored to be flirting with an acquisition of Micron Technology, the last maker of DRAM based in the United States. At the moment prevailing wisdom in the mainstream financial press appears to be that the US Treasury's "Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States" would block a sale to the state owned enterprise and if they don't the Department of Defense would likely block Tsinghua Unigroup or any Chinese firm from purchasing Micron. Continue reading
US Seeks Extradition Of Irish Silk Road Administrator
The Irish Times reports (archive) the United States is seeking the extradition of alleged Silk Road administrator Gary Davis AKA Libertas in relation to charges of conspiracy to distribute narcotics, conspiracy to commit computer hacking and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Continue reading
Continued DDoS Attack Against Qntra
If you have attempted to read Qntra these past few days, chances are you've had some difficulty reaching the website. Since the inception of this site, it has come under regular ddos attack by an unknown individual or group who wish to limit our ability to publish content and your ability to read it. We publish all comments whether they are critical or not so I encourage those responsible for the down time to engage the site in that manner of discourse. Regardless, Qntra will continue to persevere despite the attack – we're not going anywhere.
New Java Zero Day Discovered Targeting NATO
Trend Micro reports a zero-day vulnerability in Oracle's Java version 8 being used against NATO and United States Department of Defense targets. This incident further illustrates the stupidity of using the web browser as a run time for executing strange code as well as the special sort of idiocy that is running strange Java code.
UK Student Convicted On Darknet Drugs Purchase
Having plead guilty (archive) to a charge of importing a Class B drug into the UK, 25 year old student Gary Trouve now faces 250 hours of community service as punishment for the 145 grams of "herbal cannabis" he purchased using bitcoin via an unnamed darknet market.
Trouve came to the attention of the UK authorities earlier this year when a parcel pertaining to contain specialist welding equipment was intercepted by customs officers who instead found it to contain cannabis. Having been notified, Humberside Police subsequently attended the residence of Trouve who then gave a full confession of his crime. Continue reading
US Missiles Carry Out "unexplained" Commands in the Field
Reports are coming in that Patriot missile systems located in Turkey and operated by the German Bundeswehr have been the target of computer hackers.
Though details are scarce, the German media outlet Behörden Spiegel is indicating that "unexplained" commands were remotely issued to the US-produced weapons systems by an unknown individual or group of hackers. Though as yet unconfirmed, there remains some cause for concern that the Patriot (MIM-104) missile systems deployed in the field, which consist of six launchers, each with four missiles designed for either anti-air or long-range tactical ballistic missile interception, and several radar systems, could fall into enemy hands without a battle ever taking place.1 Unlike the US HUMVEEs now in the hands of ISIS, this attack demonstrates the possibility that no physical interaction would have to take place for NATO technology to turn on its creators2 and deployers.3 Continue reading
The Patriot missile system is also highly mobile as it's carried on M860 semi-trailers, which are then towed by large M983 HEMTT trucks. ↩
The Patriot missile systems are produced by Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Fire Control on US soil. ↩
Current operators of this system include Bahrain, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Jordan, Japan, Israel, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates, and of course the United States of America. ↩
Mining Difficulty Reaches New High
Today sees the Bitcoin network enter new territory with the mining difficulty advancing to 51,076,366,303, crossing the 50 billion difficulty mark for the first time in its history. Today's increase represents a 3.39% increase over June 28th's difficulty of 49,402,014,931.
Pirate Bay Four Acquitted Of Charges
The group known as "The Pirate Bay Four" – Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström – accused of criminal copyright infringement and the abuse of electronic communications because prosecutors were able to download copyrighted files from the Pirate Bay website between September 2011 to November 2013 – were acquitted of criminal charges in Belgian court yesterday.
This was a significant legal victory for the four Swedish-born freedom fighters who have been involved in countless legal battles and under constant media scrutiny for nearly a decade for operating and financing the infamously agile and endlessly mirrored torrent site Pirate Bay. Continue reading