Hacker’s Arrest Offers Glimpse Into Crime in Russia

Andrew E. Kramer writes in The New York Times:

On the Internet, he was known as BadB, a disembodied criminal flitting from one server to another selling stolen credit card numbers despite being pursued by the United States Secret Service.

And in real life, he was nearly as untouchable — because he lived in Russia.

BadB’s real name is Vladislav A. Horohorin, according to a statement released last week by the United States Justice Department, and he was a resident of Moscow before his arrest by the police in France during a trip to that country earlier this month.

He is expected to appear soon before a French court that will decide on his potential extradition to the United States, where Mr. Horohorin could face up to 12 years in prison and a fine of $500,000 if he is convicted on charges of fraud and identity theft. For at least nine months, however, he lived openly in Moscow as one of the world’s most wanted computer criminals.

The seizing of BadB provides a lens onto the shadowy world of Russian hackers, the often well-educated and sometimes darkly ingenious programmers who pose a recognized security threat to online commerce — besides being global spam nuisances — who often seem to operate with relative impunity.

More here.

Veronika Zemanova images

Veronica Zemanova

Veronica zemanova wallpaper 1

Veronika Zemanova

Veronika Zemanová?

Veronika Zemanova Wallpapers

2008/07/veronika-zemanova-

Nokia Siemens to Defend Iran Spying Claims

Liam Tung writes on SC Magazine Australia:

Nokia Siemens Networks has released a statement claiming that it has been wrongly accused of helping the Iranian government spy on its citizens as it faces new litigation in a US court.

Last week, Iranian journalist, Isa Saharkhiz and his son Mehdi filed proceedings against Nokia Siemens Networks in a US court, alleging human rights abuses by the company for supplying Iran with telecommunications interception technology.

Isa Saharkhiz was arrested after Iran's highly-charged 2009 elections, following government intercepts placed on his mobile phone.

Saharkhiz has reportedly been tortured by Iranian authorities since his arrest.

Lawyers acting for Saharkhiz want Nokia Siemens Networks to cease the "unlawful support of intercepting centres of the Iranian government", hoping the US judicial system will hold the company accountable to its activities in Iran.

More here.

WikiLeaks Founder: Pentagon Behind Rape Claim

An AFP newswire article, via The Guardian, reports:

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, was himself the subject of a rapidly spreading online story when news cascaded across the internet for several hours at the weekend mistakenly saying he was being sought in Sweden on rape charges.

Before Stockholm's chief prosecutor made clear on Saturday afternoon that Assange was in fact neither charged with rape nor due to be arrested, the story had spread, generating more than 1,200 articles, available through internet news search, that received more than 1m hits.

"It was 7am when a friend who is Swedish and has been out on the net told me about the allegations," Assange told Stockholm daily newspaper Aftonbladet, which has hired him as a columnist : "It was shocking. I have been accused of various things in recent years, but nothing so serious as this."

More here.

India: Electronic Voting Researcher Arrested Over Anonymous Source

J. Alex Halderman writes on Freedom to Tinker:

About four months ago, Ed Felten blogged about a research paper in which Hari Prasad, Rop Gonggrijp, and I detailed serious security flaws in India's electronic voting machines. Indian election authorities have repeatedly claimed that the machines are "tamperproof," but we demonstrated important vulnerabilities by studying a machine provided by an anonymous source.

The story took a disturbing turn a little over 24 hours ago, when my coauthor Hari Prasad was arrested by Indian authorities demanding to know the identity of that source.

At 5:30 Saturday morning, about ten police officers arrived at Hari's home in Hyderabad. They questioned him about where he got the machine we studied, and at around 8 a.m. they placed him under arrest and proceeded to drive him to Mumbai, a 14 hour journey.

The police did not state a specific charge at the time of the arrest, but it appears to be a politically motivated attempt to uncover our anonymous source. The arresting officers told Hari that they were under "pressure [from] the top," and that he would be left alone if he would reveal the source's identity.

More here.

$9 Here, 20 Cents There and a Credit Card Lawsuit

Randall Stross writes in The New York Times:

It's easier to steal a million dollars a dollar at a time than a million dollars once. So goes an old saying.

If the allegations in a civil case filed in a federal court in Chicago hold up, you can even haul off $10 million if you stick to $9 here or 20 cents there.

The suit, filed in March by the Federal Trade Commission, contends that over at least four years, scammers placed more than $10 million in bogus charges on consumers’ credit and debit cards. Then, the suit says, they moved the money to bank accounts in Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Cyprus and Kyrgyzstan. The suit was filed in United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

The scammers evaded detection by keeping each charge under $10 and stealing from each cardholder only once, spreading the theft across more than a million cardholders, the suit says.

The identity of defendants has not been discovered; it may have been only a single “John Doe.” All the F.T.C. says it currently knows are the names of shell companies.

“No one has appeared to defend the companies,” said Steven M. Wernikoff, a trade commission staff lawyer overseeing the case.

When the commission filed a motion to seize the United States assets of the companies, less than $100,000 was recovered. It hopes to recover sums transferred abroad, but Mr. Wernikoff says that “it’s going to take some time.”

More here.

ICANN Asks Demand Media for Answers After Report

Robert McMillan writes on ComputerWorld:

The group responsible for managing the Internet's domain name system is asking Demand Media's eNom division for answers following complaints from Internet security groups.

ENom, the world's second-largest domain name registrar, came under fire last week in a report from HostExploit, a volunteer-run anti-malware research group. According to HostExploit, eNom is host to an unusually large number of malicious websites and is a preferred domain name registrar for pharmaceutical spammers.

ICANN now says that it is looking into the matter, according to Kurt Pritz, senior vice president of services with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Typically, ICANN advises people with information on illegal activity to take their complaints to law enforcement. "However, given the serious nature of some of the allegations made in the HostExploit report, we will ask eNom for their response and will follow up as appropriate," Pritz said in a statement, e-mailed to IDG News Service.

HostExploit says that some eNom resellers are violating ICANN rules by allowing customers to provide false Whois database information, not following ICANN deletion policy and generally not complying with their obligations as resellers.

More here.