How does a tech-guru billionaire anti-gravity developer wind up in jail headed to prison?
Category: law enforcement
Ransomware extortion fell to $813.5M in 2024 from $1.25B in 2023, despite a 15% attack surge, with law enforcement disrupting cybercriminal operations.
What does it take for a kind, compassionate, and ethical person to commit acts of cruelty? Why do ordinary individuals sometimes cross the line into darkness?
In this video, we explore the psychological forces behind human behavior, delving into Philip Zimbardo’s groundbreaking Stanford Prison Experiment, Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies, and historical events that reveal the thin line between good and evil. From the power of authority and dehumanization to the roles society imposes, discover the mechanisms that can corrupt even the most virtuous among us.
But this isn’t just about others—it’s about you. Could you resist these forces? Are you aware of how they operate in your daily life?
By the end, you’ll learn practical strategies to recognize and resist these influences, uncovering your potential for moral courage, empathy, and heroism. This video will challenge your perspective on human nature and inspire you to act with integrity in a world where the battle between good and evil is ever-present.
3D-printed ‘ghost guns’, like the one Luigi Mangione allegedly used to kill a health care CEO, surge in popularity as law enforcement struggles to keep up
Posted in 3D printing, health, law enforcement, security | Leave a Comment on 3D-printed ‘ghost guns’, like the one Luigi Mangione allegedly used to kill a health care CEO, surge in popularity as law enforcement struggles to keep up
By November 2024, 15 U.S. states had established regulations on ghost guns, though exact requirements vary. The rules typically require a serial number, background checks for firearm component purchases and reporting to authorities that a person is producing 3D-printed guns.
For instance, in New Jersey, a 2019 law mandates that all ghost guns have a serial number and be registered. Under current New York law, possession or distribution of a 3D-printed gun is classified as a misdemeanor. However, a proposed law seeks to elevate the manufacturing of firearms using 3D-printing technology to a felony offense.
As technology advances and rules evolve, criminals who use 3D-printed firearms will continue to pose threats to public safety and security, and governments will continue playing catch-up to effectively regulate these weapons.
Amid heated debates about the potential pitfills of artificial intelligence, the technology has finally taken a form we can probably all get behind — an “AI granny” created expressly to waste scammers’ time.
British telecom company Virgin Media O2 on Thursday introduced Daisy, a custom-made human-like chabot that answers calls in real time, keeping fraudsters on the phone as long as possible in a bid to annoy and frustrate them, just as they do to consumers worldwide. Daisy (that’s “dAIsy”) automates the practice of “scambaiting,” which involves people posing as potential victims to squander scammers’ time and resources, publicly expose their wily ways, gather information useful to law enforcement and even confuse the con artists’ devices.
Daisy, newly dubbed O2’s “head of scammer relations,” impersonates an older adult, making her part of a demographic that’s particularly vulnerable to scams. Unlike human scambaiters who need to sleep and shower once in a while, Daisy can spend all day and night on the phone with swindlers. “While they’re busy talking to me they can’t be scamming you, and let’s face it, dear, I’ve got all the time in the world,” Daisy says in the introductory video from O2 embedded below. The video personifies her as a photorealistic AI-generated woman with gray hair, glasses and pearls talking on a pink landline.
The Dstat.cc DDoS review platform has been seized by law enforcement, and two suspects have been arrested after the service helped fuel distributed denial-of-service attacks for years.
The seizure and arrests were conducted as part of “Operation PowerOFF,” an ongoing international law enforcement operation that targets DDoS-for-hire platforms, aka “booters” or “stressers,” to seize infrastructure and arrest the operators.
These platforms are responsible for service disruptions to online services and can cause significant economic damages, as well as impact to the operation of critical services, such as healthcare.
R.I.P. Phil Philip George Zimbardo. March 23, 1933 – October 14, 2024.
“Success is not about reaching a destination; it’s about the journey and the person you become along the way.”
Philip G. Zimbardo, one of the world’s most renowned psychologists, died Oct. 14 in his home in San Francisco. He was 91.
Broadly, Zimbardo’s research explored how environments influence behavior. He is most known for his controversial 1971 study, the Stanford Prison Experiment, with W. Curtis Banks, Craig Haney, and David Jaffe. The study, intended to examine the psychological experiences of imprisonment, revealed the shocking extent to which circumstances can alter individual behavior. To this day, it is used as a case study in psychology classes to highlight both the psychology of evil as well as the ethics of doing psychological research with human subjects.
“This makes the scam much harder to spot, as the information provided is personally relevant to the victims, arrives via the expected communication channel, and the linked, fake websites look as expected.”
What’s more, the diversification of the victimology footprint has been complemented by improvements to the toolkit that allow the scammer groups to speed up the scam process using automated phishing page generation, improve communication with targets via interactive chatbots, protecting phishing websites against disruption by competitors, and other goals.
Telekopye’s operations have not been without their fair share of hiccups. In December 2023, law enforcement officials from Czechia and Ukraine announced the arrest of several cybercriminals who are alleged to have used the malicious Telegram bot.
Ransomware victims have paid $459,800,000 to cybercriminals in the first half of 2024, setting the stage for a new record this year if ransom payments continue at this level.
Last year, ransomware payments reached a record $1.1 billion, which Chainalysis previously predicted from stats gathered in the first half of the year when ransomware activity grossed $449,100,000.
We now stand at approximately 2% higher than 2023’s record-breaking trajectory from the same period despite significant law enforcement operations that disrupted large ransomware-as-a-service operations, such as LockBit.
He Jiankui, who went to prison for three years for making the world’s first gene-edited babies, talked to MIT Technology Review about his new research plans.