A man from just outside of Washington, DC turned himself in to local police—with his computer in tow—after receiving a pop-up message from what he believed was an “FBI Warning” telling him to click to pay a fine online, or face an investigation. While specific details on the case are scant as of yet, it appears that the suspect here fell victim to a type of ransomware that has been proliferating for years now—raking in millions for the scammers behind it. Police said Jay Matthew Riley, 21, of Woodbridge, Virginia, walked into Prince William’s Garfield District Station on July 1, 2013 to “inquire if he had any warrants on file for child pornography.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Man gets ransomware porn pop-up, goes to cops, gets arrested on child porn charges
A man who has won about $1.5 million in poker tournaments has been arrested and charged with running an operation that combined spam, Android malware, and a fake dating website to scam victims out of $3.9 million, according to Symantec. Symantec worked with investigators from the Chiba Prefectural Police in Japan, who earlier this week “arrested nine individuals for distributing spam that included e-mails with links to download Android.Enesoluty —a malware used to collect contact details stored on the owner’s device, ” Symantec wrote in its blog . Android.Enesoluty is a Trojan distributed as an Android application file. It steals information and sends it to computers run by hackers. It was discovered by security researchers in September 2012. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
The National Security Agency (NSA) is a ” supercomputing powerhouse ” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture. But ask the NSA as part of a freedom of information request to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees’ e-mail? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology. “There’s no central method to search an e-mail at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately, ” NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week. The system is “a little antiquated and archaic, ” she added. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments