Legal
Ireland fines Meta $264 million over 2018 Facebook data breach
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) fined Meta €251 million ($263.6M) over General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) violations arising from a 2018 personal data breach impacting 29 million Facebook accounts. The breach was caused by the exploitation of user access tokens by unauthorized parties, exposing sensitive user data such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical locations, […]
Operation PowerOFF shuts down 27 DDoS-for-hire platforms
Law enforcement agencies from 15 countries have taken 27 DDoS-for-hire services offline, also known as “booters” or “stressers,” arrested three administrators, and identified 300 customers of the platforms. The action is part of ‘Operation PowerOFF,’ an international initiative to combat cybercrime, specifically distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. DDoS-for-hire services are platforms that utilize botnets on compromised […]
FTC distributes $72 million in Fortnite refunds from Epic Games
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is distributing over $72 million in Epic Game Fortnite refunds for the company’s use of dark patterns to trick players into making unwanted purchases. This is part of the record-breaking $245 million settlement the agency reached with the game publisher in December 2022. The settlement addressed allegations that Epic Games used “dark […]
Korea arrests CEO for adding DDoS feature to satellite receivers
South Korean police have arrested a CEO and five employees for manufacturing over 240,000 satellite receivers pre-loaded or later updated to include DDoS attack functionality at a purchaser’s request. While neither company has been named, the two companies have been trading since 2017. In November 2018, the purchasing company made a special request to include […]
Bitfinex hacker gets 5 years in prison for 120,000 bitcoin heist
A hacker responsible for stealing 119,754 Bitcoin in a 2016 hack on the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange was sentenced to five years in prison by U.S. authorities. The man, Ilya Lichtenstein, was arrested in February 2022 in Manhattan following a lengthy investigation led by the IRS, HSI, and the FBI, which managed to recover roughly 80% of the […]
Hacker gets 10 years in prison for extorting US healthcare provider
Robert Purbeck, a 45-year-old man from Idaho, has been sentenced to ten years in prison for hacking at least 19 organizations in the United States, stealing the personal data of more than 132,000 people, and multiple extortion attempts. As showcased in the indictment, prosecutors linked multiple data theft and blackmail incidents to Purbeck (also known online […]
Canada orders TikTok to shut down over national risk concerns
The Canadian government has ordered the dissolution of TikTok Technology Canada following a multi-step review that provided information and evidence of the social media company posing a national risk. The decision also considered advice of Canada’s security and intelligence community as well as other government partners. It does not ban Canadian users’ access to the TikTok […]
Germany drafts law to protect researchers who find security flaws
The Federal Ministry of Justice in Germany has drafted a law to provide legal protection to security researchers who discover and responsibly report security vulnerabilities to vendors. When security research is conducted within the specified boundaries, those responsible will be excluded from criminal liability and the risk of prosecution. “Those who want to close IT […]
Interpol disrupts cybercrime activity on 22,000 IP addresses, arrests 41
Interpol announced it arrested 41 individuals and taken down 1,037 servers and infrastructure running on 22,000 IP addresses facilitating cybercrime in an international law enforcement action titled Operation Synergia II. The operation took place between April and August 2024, spanning 95 countries and resulting in 41 arrests of those linked to various crimes, including ransomware, […]
DDoS site Dstat.cc seized and two suspects arrested in Germany
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 […]