AT&T, LendingTree, Santander, and the Nigerian Pinch Butcher: A Digital Criminal Investigative Scam Investigation
In one of the largest-ever breaches of a US telecom giant, AT&T revealed this week that “nearly all” its customer phone and text records were stolen after hackers accessed its account on a third-party cloud service. That cloud service, Snowflake, has been linked to several recent breaches, including those of Ticketmaster, banking firm Santander, and a subsidiary of LendingTree. Approximately 165 companies may have been targeted in the attacks against Snowflake accounts, potentially making it one of the largest collective breaches in history.
The incident is significant not only because of its sheer scale and reach but because AT&T says it is the latest in a staggering spate of data thefts that resulted from attackers compromising organizations’ Snowflake cloud accounts. Snowflake is a data warehousing platform, and attackers collected its customers’ account credentials in recent months to steal hundreds of millions of records from about 165 Snowflake clients, including Ticketmaster, Santander bank, and LendingTree’s QuoteWizard.
The experts at Elliptic have discovered that an online marketplace is facilitating Billions of dollars in financial scam known as pig butchering. The offerings discovered on Houine Guarantee ranged from electric shock collars used to imprison human traffickers, to lists of potential targets, to a company linked to Cambodia’s ruling family.
Elsewhere in the crypto-tracing world, a US lawmaker this week introduced a resolution calling on the White House to classify former IRS investigator Tigran Gambaryan as a hostage due to his current imprisonment in Nigeria. Gambaryan, who had worked for the IRS as a crime investigator, was arrested alongside a colleague in March after it was discovered that they had been exchanging funds in a way that made them look like money. While his colleague was able to escape, Gambaryan is still on financial crime charges and is being held by the Biden administration.
One of the FBI’s most-wanted cybercriminals is finally headed to prison. The man who was called Tank online received two nine year sentences in the US and was ordered to pay over $75 million. Penchukov was the leader of a cybercriminal group that used the Zeus malware. The group gained access to people’s bank accounts and stole millions of dollars. Several alleged hacker colleagues remain at large, with multimillion-dollar bounties on their heads.
PassKeys for Advanced Protection Program users: The Case of the Pentagon’s Hyper Enabled Operator Mission to Equip Special Operations Forces with AI Superpowers
PassKeys are now available to users of the Advanced Protection Program. PassKeys have been available for more than a year to users of the products, and it takes the company more time to find a way to increase security for APP users.
Finally, we got into the nitty gritty of the Pentagon’s long-running mission to equip special operation forces with AI superpowers. The “Hyper Enabled Operator” program started with the goal of creating a kind of Iron Man suit but has evolved in recent years to focus on instant situational awareness that would give soldiers the ability to assess risks faster than any mere human mind.