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The FBI has infiltrated and disrupted a major cybercriminal group that extorted schools, hospitals and critical infrastructure around the world, a law enforcement official told NBC News. As of Thursday morning, its website on the dark web showed a message saying it had been seized by an international law enforcement coalition, including the FBI and Justice Department. The FBI had secretly gained access to Hive’s network for months and provided victims keys to unlock their data, the law enforcement official said. Previous ransomware attacks have resulted in the release of sensitive information about law enforcement officers and schoolchildren. But as is often the case with such groups, Hive’s core group spoke Russian, said Allan Liska, a ransomware analyst at the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.

The U.S. has arrested a Russian national and founder of a cryptocurrency exchange on charges of allegedly laundering more than $700 million, the Department of Justice said Wednesday. Anatoly Legkodymov, the founder of Bitzlato, a Hong Kong-registered cryptocurrency exchange that touted its lax approach to verifying customers’ identity, was arrested in Miami Tuesday night. The Treasury Department also declared Bitzlato a “Primary Money Laundering Concern,” an extreme measure rarely used against financial institutions. “If the U.S. Treasury Department designates a financial institution as a ‘Primary Money Laundering Concern,’ the goal is to isolate them,” Redbord said. “Being cut off from the U.S. financial system, not being able to transact in U.S. dollars, is essentially a death sentence.”

The U.S. aviation warning system that crashed for more than an hour Wednesday traces back its origins to ocean-faring ships and has been under continuous reforms for years, experts say. At least one aviation industry group has called for it to be replaced altogether. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded all flights blaming an unspecified failure in the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system. The White House also said it saw no signs that the NOTAM system was taken down as a result of a cyberattack. “Once again, we get to see how antiquated and vulnerable the Notam system is!” he said.

Criminal hackers have posted an enormous trove of sensitive files to the internet from a San Francisco Bay Area transit system’s police department, including specific allegations of child abuse. BART’s chief communications officer, Alicia Trost, said in an email officials were investigating the posted files and that the hackers had not impacted BART services. The perpetrators are an established group of ransomware hackers, one of the many who attack specific organizations and either encrypt sensitive files or threaten to post them on the dark web. Ransomware hackers often demand a payment to not share files. More than 100 networks associated with local government agencies were successfully attacked by ransomware hackers last year, according to an Emsisoft survey.

The email went out to students at Knox College, a small liberal arts school in Illinois, on the evening of Dec. 12. But this group had a new wrinkle for Knox students. “We have compromised your collage networks,” the email said, written in the kind of broken English common among international ransomware hackers. For you, its a sad day where everyone will see your personal and private info.”The incident at Knox College marks the first known case in which hackers used their access to contact students directly in order to intimidate them. The hackers’ website lists an entry to download data for Knox College but doesn’t actually lead to any student data.

Twitter suspended several high-profile journalists Thursday evening who have been covering the company and Elon Musk. The suspensions come a day after Twitter changed its policies around accounts that track private jets, including one owned by Elon Musk. The Twitter account for Mastodon, a platform billed as an alternative, was also suspended early Thursday evening. As of Thursday evening, Twitter accounts operated by NBC News journalists were unable to tweet a link to the Mastodon account of @ElonJet. The suspensions add to what has been a tumultuous couple of days for Twitter after the company first suspended the account that tracked Musk’s jet.

A former Twitter employee found guilty of spying on users on behalf of the Saudi royal family has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison. He was sentenced Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The Justice Department has said it believes that another former Twitter employee accused of accessing user accounts and a man accused of helping the Saudi government with the scheme have fled to Saudi Arabia to evade American authorities. The Saudi government severely penalizes anti-government expression on social media sites like Twitter. In April, courts sentenced Salma al-Shehab, a Saudi citizen and 34-year-old mother of two children, to 34 years in prison for tweets protesting the government.

The Federal Communications Commission said Thursday that it had blocked all U.S. phone companies from taking calls from a tiny communications company accused of sending robocalls that push fraudulent student loan relief services. “Today we’re cutting these scammers off so they can’t use efforts to provide student loan debt relief as cover for fraud,” FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in an emailed statement. It identified a single company, UrthAccess, as the central origin for a substantial amount of student loan spam. UrthAccess was by far the single biggest provider of student loan robocalls in recent months, Quilici said. It was responsible for more than 40% of all student loan robocalls in October, the FCC said.

Other researchers have also tracked the spam campaign. Videos of the protests quickly spread on Chinese social media, with online censors struggling to keep up. Many of them also made their way onto Twitter and other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, all of which are blocked in China but some Chinese users access via virtual private networks. There are no firm numbers on the scope of the spam campaign, but Wright said she has observed thousands of Twitter posts an hour in some cases. “So essentially, it can be very effective as a method for driving out the truth, the real videos, and the real content about the protests.”

The new CEO of FTX issued a searing indictment of the company’s operations Thursday in a court filing as part of the company’s ongoing bankruptcy process. New CEO and restructuring officer John Ray wrote that the company had a striking lack of financial records, internal communications or even a clear idea of who worked there. Bankman-Fried and FTX did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Throughout his filing, Ray insisted that the financial records of the organizations overseen by Bankman-Fried are frequently either nonexistent or untrustworthy. “One of the most pervasive failures of the FTX.com business in particular is the absence of lasting records of decision-making,” Ray said.

San Francisco-based Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the security situation at the company. He echoed a pessimistic view among some Twitter users this week: The service might go down entirely under Musk's ownership. Verification serviceOn Friday, Twitter paused the rollout of its Twitter Blue verification service, intended to let users pay $8 a month for a verification badge. “The debacle with the Twitter verification is a really strong indicator as to what can go wrong,” Roger said. “When the verified Twitter users got hacked a few months ago, it was only a bitcoin scam, right?” Rogers said.

Ransomware hackers hit MercyOne in early October, part of a larger breach that caused hospitalwide outages at multiple health systems, according to The Des Moines Register. CommonSpirit Health, a nonprofit health system based in Chicago, oversees 140 hospitals in 21 states; it was not clear how many of them hospitals were affected, and it declined to share the number. For Rachel Cupples of Western Washington, the CommonSpirit Health ransomware attack meant delaying important surgery for weeks. Like some other CommonSpirit Health hospitals that were affected, hers announced it was having trouble scheduling new patients. Parsi and Cupples said they blamed the hackers, not the hospitals, for their pain caused by delayed care.

States are working to shore up what might be the most public and vulnerable parts of their election systems: the websites that publish voting results. One of its victims last month was Hawaii.gov, which also hosts the state’s election night reporting. That means avoiding even the perception of hackers’ changing votes, which makes election results websites all the more crucial. Historically, election results websites have been ripe targets for malicious hackers who want to sow chaos. Some U.S. officials emphasized that even accurate results on websites should be taken for what they are — preliminary indications of election results.

☆ More than 100 election jurisdictions waiting on federal cyber help, sources say
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-02 | by ( Https | Media-Cldnry.S-Nbcnews.Com Image Upload Newscms Julia-Ainsley-Circle-Byline-Template.Jpg | Julia Ainsley | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +5 min

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, offers the services on a voluntary basis. But some election information does run through the internet, like voting registration, official information about how and where to vote, and election officials’ email systems. The sources declined to say which states and election jurisdictions have not received the help they asked for, or how many. State and local election officials sought to beef up their security software after the 2019 report from special counsel Robert Mueller revealed Russian interference in the 2016 election. “And we have made this the top priority at CISA over the past year to ensure that we are supporting those election officials.”

Voters in at least two states have received false information about how to vote through text messages in recent days, with little idea who’s behind them. It wasn’t immediately clear how many people received the text messages. Obtained by NBC NewsExperts have warned that text messages that mislead people about how to vote are a particularly tricky problem. It’s not difficult for a malicious actor to hide where a text message comes from, and the Federal Communications Commission loosened restrictions on political text messaging before the 2020 election. Kansans were targeted with misleading text messages this year in relation to an abortion referendum.

U.S. law enforcement has circulated bulletins warning that conspiracy theorists could become violent around the midterm elections on Nov. 8. The bulletins, obtained by NBC News, are unclassified but intended only for law enforcement. One of the bulletins, issued Friday by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center, and marked “for official use only,” warned about domestic violent extremism, or DVE in law enforcement circles. “The most plausible DVE threat is posed by lone offenders who leverage election-related issues to justify violence,” it said. Those include an Oct. 10 post on the fringe social media platform Gab in which a user wrote, “Death penalty for election fraud!

A sprawling online propaganda campaign that pushes pro-China messaging has been trying to influence American voters, researchers say. Two companies that study large-scale online influence operations published research this week showing that a pro-China campaign was active and targeting the U.S. midterm elections as recently as this month. But such efforts show that pro-China influence operations targeting the West are experimenting with new tactics and are increasingly aimed at shaping American elections. The other report, from social media analytics firm Alethea, found 165 Twitter accounts that misled users about who they were and posted pro-China messages in English. “Speculating or accusing China of using social media to interfere in the US midterm elections is completely groundless and malicious speculation.

The FBI has warned that an Iranian government-tied hacker group that tried to interfere in the 2020 election is currently active and a threat to the U.S. The group, which federal agencies say operates from an Iranian cybersecurity company called Emennet Pasargad, is engaged in “ongoing” operations to hack and leak material, and may target American organizations, the FBI said Thursday in an industry warning. In October 2020, the FBI announced that Iran was behind the most significant foreign attempt to influence that year’s U.S. elections. Democrats registered to vote in Florida, which makes voter information publicly accessible, received intimidating emails in the weeks before the election, instructing them to become Republicans. It was not clear what organization the FBI was referring to, and the agency did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Last week, Killnet targeted the websites of several U.S. states, successfully knocking Colorado.gov offline for more than a day and briefly interrupting Kentucky.gov. Killnet frequently posts lists of targeted websites on its Telegram channel, encouraging fellow Russia supporters with entry-level hacker skills to join it in trying to disrupt them. The U.S. Department of Transportation and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. It listed the city of Chicago’s general air travel website, flychicago.com, which was inaccessible Monday, but not that of its major airports, like O’Hare International or Midway International. Similarly, it targeted Hawaii’s state website for air travel, which was also inaccessible, but not Honolulu International.

New York, home of the largest rapid transit system in the country, will install surveillance cameras in every New York City subway car by 2025, Gov. The move is aimed at increasing riders’ confidence in subway safety, Hochul said, as ridership numbers are still lagging behind pre-pandemic levels. But the decision to install cameras on subway cars worries some privacy advocates, who say it will increase the level of surveillance of New Yorkers without necessarily making the subway safer. Subway stations in the city already have surveillance cameras. Instead, Hochul framed the matter of cameras in subway cars as purely one of public safety and rider confidence.

Rockstar Games, one of the largest video game publishers in the world, was hacked over the weekend, the company announced Monday. The hacker gained access to videos and other files from Grand Theft Auto VI, Rockstar’s upcoming major title. Screen grabs and footage from the upcoming game circulated on Telegram and Twitter over the weekend, and were viewed by NBC News. The previous game in the series, Grand Theft Auto V, is one of the best-selling video games of all time. “We recently suffered a network intrusion in which an unauthorized third party illegally accessed and downloaded confidential information from our systems, including early development footage for the next Grand Theft Auto.

Criminal hackers have recently targeted U.S. school districts and will likely continue to escalate their attacks this school year, federal agencies warned Tuesday. Hackers infected the district’s computer networks with malicious software, locking up files and demanding a ransom payment. While classes in Los Angeles weren’t canceled, the attack caused a “significant disruption” to the school district and some of its services, the district announced. Since then, there haven’t been any such high-profile ransomware attacks on energy infrastructure. Ransomware attacks on schools also run the risk of giving hackers access to children’s personal information, the government warned.

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