Dutch hacker arrested for trying to sell the personal information of nearly every Austrian citizen

Dutch authorities arrested a hacker for obtaining and trying to sell the personal information of nearly every Austrian citizen in May 2020, according to Reuters. It includes almost nine million data sets, roughly lining up with Austria’s population.The…

Court rejects Elon Musk’s request to move Tesla shareholder trial out of San Francisco

A federal judge has denied Elon Musk’s request to move his upcoming trial against a group of Tesla shareholders to Texas, according to Bloomberg (via The Verge). On January 7th, less than two weeks before the trial was scheduled to begin on the 17th, M…

SBF thought it was a good idea to start a Substack

Sam Bankman-Fried is in a world of trouble. He’s facing up to 115 years in prison if he’s convicted of federal fraud and conspiracy charges. And yet the embattled founder of collapsed crypto exchange FTX — who has pleaded not guilty and is out on a $250 million bond while awaiting trial — figured it’d be a great idea to write about his perspective on the saga in a Substack newsletter.

In his first post, which is ostensibly about the collapse of FTX International, Bankman-Fried (aka SBF) claims that “I didn’t steal funds, and I certainly didn’t stash billions away.” SBF notes that FTX US (which serves customers in America) “remains fully solvent and should be able to return all customers’ funds.” He added that FTX International still has billions of dollars in assets and that he is “dedicating nearly all of my personal assets to customers.” SBF, who once had a net worth of approximately $26.5 billion, said at the end of November that he had $100,000 in his bank account, though he pledged to give almost all of his personal shares in Robinhood to customers.

The post covers much of the same ground that SBF has gone over in the myriad interviews he gave between FTX’s collapse in November and his arrest last month. He discusses the multiple crypto market crashes in 2022 and a tweet from Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao that sparked a run on FTX’s FTT token and prompted the implosion of his exchange. SBF also writes about how he was pressured to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for FTX. Meanwhile, he notes that many of the numbers he cites in the post are approximations, since he has been locked out of FTX’s systems by those overseeing its bankruptcy proceedings.

What’s more interesting is what SBF doesn’t address. He does not mention the fact that FTX co-founder Zixiao “Gary” Wang and former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison pleaded guilty to fraud charges and are cooperating with prosecutors.

SBF has continued to give interviews and tweet about the situation while he’s out on bail. That’s despite the complaint filed against him by the Securities and Exchange Commission citing his tweets and comments he made in an interview in early December. Perhaps this whole Substack thing will turn out to be a mistake too.

Disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried pleads not guilty to federal fraud charges

Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder and former CEO of crypto exchange FTX, has pleaded not guilty to federal wire fraud charges and other crimes. Per The New York Times, Bankman-Fried appeared before a Manhattan court on Tuesday, nearly two weeks …

Two top executives plead guilty to fraud in FTX case

Top FTX executives close to Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison and Zixiao “Gary” Wang, have pleaded guilty to fraud and are cooperating with prosecutors. The pair were convicted “in connection with their roles in the fraud that contributed to FTX’s collapse,” said Damian Williams, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York in a press conference.

Ellison, the former CEO of FTX sister company Alameda Research and ex-girlfriend of Bankman-Fried, pleaded guilty to seven counts and faces up to 110 years in prison. Former FTX co-founder Wang pleaded guilty to four counts and faces 50 years. Depending on the level of cooperation, however, they could receive lighter sentences. The pair also face civil fraud charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Future Trading Commission (CFTC). Both were released on $250,000 bonds.

The announcement was made as Bankman-Fried was being extradited from the Bahamas to New York, and add to his mounting legal woes. Wang’s lawyer Ilan Graff said that his client has “accepted responsibility for his actions and takes seriously his obligations as a cooperating witness,” according to The Washington Post. 

Despite their cooperation, the SEC didn’t mince words in laying out its case against Ellison and Wang. “Mr. Bankman-Fried, Ms. Ellison, and Mr. Wang were active participants in a scheme to conceal material information from FTX investors,” said SEC deputy director of enforcement, Sanjay Wadhwa. “By surreptitiously siphoning FTX’s customer funds onto the books of Alameda, defendants hid the very real risks that FTX’s investors and customers faced.”

Bankman-Fried, meanwhile, is accused of a long list of misdeeds by multiple agencies, including the SEC, Department of Justice and CFTC. Those include defrauding FTX investors and customers of more than $1.9 billion, multiple counts of wire fraud, conspiracy to defraud investors by sharing misleading information and “surreptitiously” siphoning customer funds. The CFTC also alleges that Bankman-Fried and his cohorts “took hundreds of millions of dollars in poorly-documented ‘loans’ from Alameda,” which they then used to purchase real estate and make political donations.

Two men allegedly hacked JFK’s taxi dispatch system with Russian help

Would you pay a few bucks to skip an interminably long taxi wait line at the airport? That’s essentially what Daniel Abayev and Peter Leyman did, according to the DOJ, except they focused on taxi drivers. The two men, both from Queens, have been arrested for hacking into JFK’s taxi dispatch system with the help of Russian nationals. From September 2019 and September 2021, they charged drivers $10 to jump ahead of JFK’s taxi queue. Typically, those cars are sent out depending on their order of arrival.

“For years, the defendants’ hacking kept honest cab drivers from being able to pick up fares at JFK in the order in which they arrived,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. “Now, thanks to this Office’s teamwork with the Port Authority, these defendants are facing serious criminal charges for their alleged cybercrimes.”

According to the DOJ’s indictment, both men explored a variety of ways to break into JFK’s taxi dispatch system, from bribing people to insert a malware-filled flash drive into a computer, stealing tablets and logging into the system over Wi-Fi. Abayev at one point messaged one of the Russian hackers: “I know that the Pentagon is being hacked[.]. So, can’t we hack the taxi industry[?]”

The pair used chat threads to communicate with drivers, some of whom also had their $10 fee waived if they could recruit others. Abayev and Leyman have been charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, which carry a maximum 10-year sentence in prison. Their story follows a spate of Russian cyberattacks over the last ten years, including the infamous hack on Florida’s voter databases in 2016, a decade-long malware scheme to steal millions, and the theft of NATO data in 2014.

Two people charged with hacking Ring security cameras to livestream swattings

In a reminder of smart home security’s dark side, two people hacked Ring security cameras to livestream swattings, according to a Los Angeles grand jury indictment (according to a report from Bloomberg). The pair called in hoax emergencies to authorities and livestreamed the police response on social media in late 2020.

James Thomas Andrew McCarty, 20, of Charlotte, North Carolina, and Kya Christian Nelson, 21, of Racine, Wisconsin, hacked into Yahoo email accounts to gain access to 12 Ring cameras across nine states in November 2020 (disclaimer: Yahoo is Engadget’s parent company). In one of the incidents, Nelson claimed to be a minor reporting their parents for firing guns while drinking alcohol. When police arrived, the pair used the Ring cameras to taunt the victims and officers while livestreaming — a pattern appearing in several incidents, according to prosecutors.

The pair were charged with conspiracy to access computers without authorization, which carries a maximum five-year sentence. Nelson, currently serving time in Kentucky for an unrelated case, was charged with two additional counts of intentionally accessing a computer without authorization and two counts of aggravated identity theft, which carries a mandatory two-year consecutive sentence.

More than 10 million users own Ring doorbells and home security cameras. Although the smart devices can deter things like robberies and “porch pirates,” Amazon admits to providing footage to police without user consent or a court order when it believes someone is in danger. Inexplicably, the tech giant made a zany reality series using Ring footage, which didn’t exactly quell concerns about the tech’s Orwellian side.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried agrees to extradition to the US

When the Bahamas Attorney General’s office announced that it had arrested former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, it noted that the former FTX CEO was likely to be extradited at the request of the United States. Just over a week later, that prediction has co…

Ex-Twitter employee sentenced over spying for Saudi Arabia

In a rare case of Twitter drama unrelated to its owner, a former employee convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia received a three-and-a-half-year sentence on Wednesday. Ahmad Abouammo was found guilty in August of taking bribes from an aide to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In return, he allegedly supplied sensitive account info that could help track and silence dissidents.

Abouammo, a US resident born in Egypt, received about half of the more than seven years prosecutors sought. The former Twitter media partnership manager said he was only doing his job, but evidence revealed that he received $300,000 and a $20,000 Hublot watch from bin Salman’s aide. A Twitter whistleblower suggested in late August that the scandal reflected a broader practice of lax data security at the company.

Two other men were charged in the scheme. Ali Alzabarah, a Saudi citizen, is another former Twitter employee who prosecutors say acquired personal info for over 6,000 accounts, including that of high-profile dissident (and Jamal Khashoggi ally) Omar Abdulaziz. A third man, Ahmed Almutairi, was also charged but didn’t work at Twitter. Instead, he allegedly served as a contact between Twitter staffers and the Saudi government. Of the three, only Abouammo was in the US to face charges.