Author Archives: cazalla

Warrick County Prosecutor's Office Cover Up Ransomware Infection

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Prosecutor for Warrick County Michael J. Perry last week released a public statement claiming that shortly after taking office, he became aware of the fact that the ransomware known as cryptolocker had infected computers belonging to the Prosecutor's Office but that the security breach had been covered up by a Ms JoAnn Krantz, the elected Prosecutor at the time of the infection. Ms Krantz is also alleged to have directed employees of the Warrick County Prosecutor's Office not to discuss the ransom demands paid in bitcoin with anyone, telling her staff by email that: Continue reading →

More Trouble For Bryan Micon

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Bluff Magazine reports (archive) that Bryan Micon of the defunct poker website Seals with Clubs was charged Monday with operating an unlicensed interactive gaming system for his part in the operation of SwC. The charge comes two months after operational security concerns forced the original SwC poker site offline citing operation security concerns by way of the Nevada Gaming Commission and their thugs who took a sledge hammer to Micon's front door. Continue reading →

Deloitte: A Bitcoin Successor Is The Future Of Payments

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Authored by William D. Eggers and Paul Macmillan of Deloitte, a document titled "Gov2020: A Journey into the Future of Government" details possible and probable changes to our society which await future would be governments. These changes, categorised as drivers which change the context in which government operates and trends which result in a shift in how government currently acts includes topics such as: Continue reading →

Ransomware Inception

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CBC News reports (archive) that a Quebec family which paid a bitcoin ransom not once but twice still failed to recover their treasured family photos despite paying 5 BTC.

Upon reading the Cryptowall notification that their files had been encrypted and that a ransom was required to be paid if they wished to reclaim them, the couple took their PC to a local repair store which confirmed the legitimacy of the threat. Continue reading →

Garza & Friends: Additional Emails Detailed

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A cache of hundreds of thousands of emails leaked from the office of GAW Miners totalling 5.1 GB in size spanning the time period May 2014 through January 2015 detail the lengths Homero Joshua Garza has gone to in order to maintain his fraudulent business activities.

While Qntra has previously published articles specific to Garza himself, this article will focus on the people in the periphery, their communications with Garza and their eagerness to conduct business with him unwittingly or perhaps even choosing to ignore the obvious red flags in order to turn a nice dollar. Continue reading →

Mining Difficulty Decreases Off The Back Of All Time High

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With what is the eighth adjustment in the Bitcoin mining difficulty for 2015, the difficulty has decreased to 47,610,564,513. This represents a reduction of -3.71% from April 5th's all time high of 49,446,390,688. The global hashrate as of today's change stands at 340,809,696 GH/s. Today's change marks the third time the mining difficulty has decreased during 2015, something which only occurred twice during all of 2014.