united states
Man sent to prison for selling data of 7 millions elderly Americans
A North Carolina man was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison for selling the personal information of over 7 million elderly Americans to Jamaican scammers. 57-year-old Troy Murray (who used the Steve Dixon pseudonym) pleaded guilty in January 2026 to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and was sentenced Thursday to […]
US charges Google security engineer with Polymarket insider trading
A Google security engineer was charged with insider trading after winning $1.2 million using confidential company data to place bets on the cryptocurrency-based Polymarket decentralized prediction market. 36-year-old Michele Spagnuolo, an Italian citizen residing in Switzerland and a Google employee since 2014, appeared on Wednesday in the Southern District of New York. In parallel, the Commodity […]
Charter Communications data breach affects 4.9 million accounts
The ShinyHunters extortion gang stole personal information from 4.9 million accounts after hacking the U.S. telecom giant Charter Communications in early April, according to data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned. Charter has over 92,000 employees and provides internet, mobile, video, and voice services to more than 32 million customers and over 57 million […]
Romanian gets 5 years in prison for hacking Oregon govt network
A Romanian national was sentenced this week to 56 months in federal prison for breaking into an Oregon state government computer network and fr cyberattacks targeting dozens of other U.S. victims. 46-year-old Catalin Dragomir (who used the online handle “inthematrixl”) of Constanta, Romania, pleaded guilty on February 19 to one count of aggravated identity theft and one count of […]
US and Canada arrest and charge suspected Kimwolf botnet admin
U.S. and Canadian authorities arrested and charged a Canadian man with operating the KimWolf distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet, which infected nearly two million devices worldwide. 23-year-old Jacob Butler (also known online as “Dort”) was arrested by Canadian authorities in Ottawa on Wednesday pursuant to an extradition warrant. According to a criminal complaint unsealed on Thursday […]
Former govt contractor convicted for wiping dozens of federal databases
A 34-year-old Virginia man was found guilty of conspiring to destroy dozens of government databases after getting fired from his job as a federal contractor. In 2016, Sohaib Akhter and his twin brother and co-defendant Muneeb Akhter were also sentenced to several years in prison after pleading guilty to accessing U.S. State Department systems without authorization and stealing the […]
Americans sentenced for running ‘laptop farms’ for North Korea
Two U.S. nationals were sentenced to 18 months in prison each for operating so-called laptop farms that helped North Korean IT workers fraudulently obtain remote employment at nearly 70 American companies. Matthew Isaac Knoot and Erick Ntekereze Prince are the seventh and eighth U.S.-based “laptop farmers” sent to prison since the start of the year […]
FTC to ban data broker Kochava from selling Americans’ location data
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will ban data broker Kochava and its subsidiary Collective Data Solutions (CDS) from selling location data without consumers’ explicit consent to settle charges brought nearly four years ago. The FTC sued Idaho-based Kochava in August 2022, alleging it collected and sold precise geolocation data from hundreds of millions of mobile devices. […]
US ransomware negotiators get 4 years in prison over BlackCat attacks
Two former employees of cybersecurity incident response companies Sygnia and DigitalMint were sentenced to four years in prison each for targeting U.S. companies in BlackCat (ALPHV) ransomware attacks. 40-year-old Ryan Clifford Goldberg (a former Sygnia incident response manager) and 36-year-old Kevin Tyler Martin (a DigitalMint ransomware negotiator) were charged in November and pleaded guilty in December to conspiracy to […]
Romanian leader of online swatting ring gets 4 years in prison
A Romanian national who led an online swatting ring that targeted more than 75 public officials, multiple journalists, and four religious institutions was sentenced to 4 years in federal prison. Swatting is a dangerous criminal harassment tactic involving making false reports to emergency responders of an ongoing violent threat at a target’s address to provoke an […]