STE WILLIAMS

Your daily round-up of some of the other stories in the news

GCHQ slaps down wiretap allegations

GCHQ, Britain’s intelligence centre, issued a rare rebuke to accusations that it had helped President Obama wiretap Trump Tower, saying the allegations were “nonsense”.

The allegations were made by an analyst and former New Jersey judge Andrew Napolitano on the Fox and Friends TV network earlier this week, and cited by Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, in support of the President Donald Trump’s tweeted allegation that Obama had tapped his phones during the election last year.

GCHQ, which otherwise never comments on matters of security, came out fighting, saying: “Recent allegations made by media commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct ‘wiretapping’ against the then president-elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.”

Uber likely to need humans for a while yet

Self-driving cars have some way to go before they can do away with the need for a human standing by to intervene, if data from Uber is anything to go by.

Recode obtained an internal test report from Uber, which revealed that while its 43 cars had driven an impressive autonomous 20,354 miles in the week ending March 8, humans had to take over once every 0.8 miles driven.

Reasons for the human taking over included things like the car being bamboozled by unclear road markings, or missing a turn or bad weather preventing the system from working properly.

Bug-hunters, Intel wants you

Bug-hunters, add Intel to your list of vendors who will pay you for finding and disclosing problems with its products.

The processor company has launched a bug bounty programme that will pay up to $30,000 for flaws found in its software, firmware and hardware, with critical vulnerabilities in hardware offering the highest rewards.

Intel said: “We want to encourage researchers to identify issues and bring them to us directly so that we can take prompt steps to evaluate and correct them, and we want to recognise researchers for the work they put in when researching a vulnerability.”

Intel’s web properties, third-party products and its Intel Security products aren’t part of the scheme, which is the first the Santa Clara company has done.

Catch up with all of today’s stories on Naked Security

Follow @NakedSecurity
Follow @katebevan

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/nakedsecurity/~3/TAzkDJnzEqo/

Your daily round-up of some of the other stories in the news

GCHQ slaps down wiretap allegations

GCHQ, Britain’s intelligence centre, issued a rare rebuke to accusations that it had helped President Obama wiretap Trump Tower, saying the allegations were “nonsense”.

The allegations were made by an analyst and former New Jersey judge Andrew Napolitano on the Fox and Friends TV network earlier this week, and cited by Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, in support of the President Donald Trump’s tweeted allegation that Obama had tapped his phones during the election last year.

GCHQ, which otherwise never comments on matters of security, came out fighting, saying: “Recent allegations made by media commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano about GCHQ being asked to conduct ‘wiretapping’ against the then president-elect are nonsense. They are utterly ridiculous and should be ignored.”

Uber likely to need humans for a while yet

Self-driving cars have some way to go before they can do away with the need for a human standing by to intervene, if data from Uber is anything to go by.

Recode obtained an internal test report from Uber, which revealed that while its 43 cars had driven an impressive autonomous 20,354 miles in the week ending March 8, humans had to take over once every 0.8 miles driven.

Reasons for the human taking over included things like the car being bamboozled by unclear road markings, or missing a turn or bad weather preventing the system from working properly.

Bug-hunters, Intel wants you

Bug-hunters, add Intel to your list of vendors who will pay you for finding and disclosing problems with its products.

The processor company has launched a bug bounty programme that will pay up to $30,000 for flaws found in its software, firmware and hardware, with critical vulnerabilities in hardware offering the highest rewards.

Intel said: “We want to encourage researchers to identify issues and bring them to us directly so that we can take prompt steps to evaluate and correct them, and we want to recognise researchers for the work they put in when researching a vulnerability.”

Intel’s web properties, third-party products and its Intel Security products aren’t part of the scheme, which is the first the Santa Clara company has done.

Catch up with all of today’s stories on Naked Security

Follow @NakedSecurity
Follow @katebevan

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/nakedsecurity/~3/TAzkDJnzEqo/

A New Jersey pastor and a Florida software engineer were today found guilty of bribery, wire fraud, bank fraud, and fraud conspiracy.

Their trial, which unfolded in a US district court in New York, exposed the murky world of illegal Bitcoin exchanges.

Pastor Trevon Gross and Florida coder Yuri Lebedev helped launder Bitcoins that were used in dark net drug deals and ransomware scams by disguising them as legitimate cash transactions. They face up to 20 years behind bars when sentenced in July.

The case [PDF] revolves around Coin.mx, an illegal Bitcoin exchange that masqueraded as a currency collectors club. Lebedev, his associate Anthony Murgio, his father Michael Murgio and other partners ran Coin.mx out of Florida, but claimed in bank documents to be based in New Jersey.

Between 2013 and 2015 the trio set up bank accounts to process the funds raised from the Bitcoin transactions and lied to the banks about where the money was coming from by recoding the transaction records to make it look as though it was coming from credit and debit cards.

Then, it seems, they decided to get into the banking business themselves and approached Pastor Gross, who ran the now defunct Helping Other People Excel Federal Credit Union. They gave Gross $150,000 and in exchange he appointed Lebedev and Murgio junior seats on the board of directors and let them funnel millions of dollars of transactions through the institution.

The scam worked for a while, but then Uncle Sam’s financial regulators caught on – and the FBI moved in. The Murgios have already pled guilty as part of a plea deal with prosecutors. Gross and Lebedev contested the charges against them, insisting they were innocent.

Their trial jury disagreed, and on Friday found them guilty on all counts. However the case against Coin.mx isn’t over yet: there is one other owner who will now be hauled into the dock.

Gery Shalon, an Israeli national, also owned a stake in the Bitcoin exchange and is currently facing charges [PDF] that he used customer data from the massive 2014 JP Morgan hack, in which 76 million households’ and 7 million small businesses’ records were snaffled.

Shalon is said to have used the email account data to run pump-and-dump scams, whereby worthless penny stocks are purchased, then hyped up in email campaigns to get dupes to try to get in on the action. Once the price has risen, the scam operator dumps their stock and leaves investors with worthless shares.

The US government extradited Shalon and his compatriot Ziv Orenstein from Israel last June. They face 23 charges related to the scams and Coin.mx. Their trial was put on hold by prosecutors until the Gross and Lebedev trial was concluded, but is now expected to move forward swiftly. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/17/priest_coder_drugs_guilty_verdict/

A New Jersey pastor and a Florida software engineer were today found guilty of bribery, wire fraud, bank fraud, and fraud conspiracy.

Their trial, which unfolded in a US district court in New York, exposed the murky world of illegal Bitcoin exchanges.

Pastor Trevon Gross and Florida coder Yuri Lebedev helped launder Bitcoins that were used in dark net drug deals and ransomware scams by disguising them as legitimate cash transactions. They face up to 20 years behind bars when sentenced in July.

The case [PDF] revolves around Coin.mx, an illegal Bitcoin exchange that masqueraded as a currency collectors club. Lebedev, his associate Anthony Murgio, his father Michael Murgio and other partners ran Coin.mx out of Florida, but claimed in bank documents to be based in New Jersey.

Between 2013 and 2015 the trio set up bank accounts to process the funds raised from the Bitcoin transactions and lied to the banks about where the money was coming from by recoding the transaction records to make it look as though it was coming from credit and debit cards.

Then, it seems, they decided to get into the banking business themselves and approached Pastor Gross, who ran the now defunct Helping Other People Excel Federal Credit Union. They gave Gross $150,000 and in exchange he appointed Lebedev and Murgio junior seats on the board of directors and let them funnel millions of dollars of transactions through the institution.

The scam worked for a while, but then Uncle Sam’s financial regulators caught on – and the FBI moved in. The Murgios have already pled guilty as part of a plea deal with prosecutors. Gross and Lebedev contested the charges against them, insisting they were innocent.

Their trial jury disagreed, and on Friday found them guilty on all counts. However the case against Coin.mx isn’t over yet: there is one other owner who will now be hauled into the dock.

Gery Shalon, an Israeli national, also owned a stake in the Bitcoin exchange and is currently facing charges [PDF] that he used customer data from the massive 2014 JP Morgan hack, in which 76 million households’ and 7 million small businesses’ records were snaffled.

Shalon is said to have used the email account data to run pump-and-dump scams, whereby worthless penny stocks are purchased, then hyped up in email campaigns to get dupes to try to get in on the action. Once the price has risen, the scam operator dumps their stock and leaves investors with worthless shares.

The US government extradited Shalon and his compatriot Ziv Orenstein from Israel last June. They face 23 charges related to the scams and Coin.mx. Their trial was put on hold by prosecutors until the Gross and Lebedev trial was concluded, but is now expected to move forward swiftly. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/17/priest_coder_drugs_guilty_verdict/

A New Jersey pastor and a Florida software engineer were today found guilty of bribery, wire fraud, bank fraud, and fraud conspiracy.

Their trial, which unfolded in a US district court in New York, exposed the murky world of illegal Bitcoin exchanges.

Pastor Trevon Gross and Florida coder Yuri Lebedev helped launder Bitcoins that were used in dark net drug deals and ransomware scams by disguising them as legitimate cash transactions. They face up to 20 years behind bars when sentenced in July.

The case [PDF] revolves around Coin.mx, an illegal Bitcoin exchange that masqueraded as a currency collectors club. Lebedev, his associate Anthony Murgio, his father Michael Murgio and other partners ran Coin.mx out of Florida, but claimed in bank documents to be based in New Jersey.

Between 2013 and 2015 the trio set up bank accounts to process the funds raised from the Bitcoin transactions and lied to the banks about where the money was coming from by recoding the transaction records to make it look as though it was coming from credit and debit cards.

Then, it seems, they decided to get into the banking business themselves and approached Pastor Gross, who ran the now defunct Helping Other People Excel Federal Credit Union. They gave Gross $150,000 and in exchange he appointed Lebedev and Murgio junior seats on the board of directors and let them funnel millions of dollars of transactions through the institution.

The scam worked for a while, but then Uncle Sam’s financial regulators caught on – and the FBI moved in. The Murgios have already pled guilty as part of a plea deal with prosecutors. Gross and Lebedev contested the charges against them, insisting they were innocent.

Their trial jury disagreed, and on Friday found them guilty on all counts. However the case against Coin.mx isn’t over yet: there is one other owner who will now be hauled into the dock.

Gery Shalon, an Israeli national, also owned a stake in the Bitcoin exchange and is currently facing charges [PDF] that he used customer data from the massive 2014 JP Morgan hack, in which 76 million households’ and 7 million small businesses’ records were snaffled.

Shalon is said to have used the email account data to run pump-and-dump scams, whereby worthless penny stocks are purchased, then hyped up in email campaigns to get dupes to try to get in on the action. Once the price has risen, the scam operator dumps their stock and leaves investors with worthless shares.

The US government extradited Shalon and his compatriot Ziv Orenstein from Israel last June. They face 23 charges related to the scams and Coin.mx. Their trial was put on hold by prosecutors until the Gross and Lebedev trial was concluded, but is now expected to move forward swiftly. ®

Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/17/priest_coder_drugs_guilty_verdict/