ProPublica: Nepal Wants a Sacred Necklace Returned. But a Major Museum Still Keeps It on Display.. “Questions about the origins and ownership of some Asian artifacts in a key collection at the Art Institute of Chicago have cast doubt on the museum’s commitment to keeping its galleries free of stolen antiquities.”
WIRED: Online Sleuths Untangle the Mystery of the Nord Stream Sabotage. ” Open source intelligence (OSINT) researchers are using public sources of data in their efforts to verify or debunk the snippets of information published about the Nord Stream explosions. They’re providing a glimpse of clarity to an incident that’s shrouded by secrecy and international politics.”
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: More than 1000 artifacts in Metropolitan Museum of Art catalog linked to alleged looting and trafficking figures. “In the antiquities trade, the Met’s reputation has begun to erode. Over the last two years, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and its media partners have reported on the Met’s acquisition practices — often in relation to a trove of items obtained from Cambodia in an era when that country’s cultural heritage was sold off wholesale to the highest bidder.”
WIRED: AI-Generated Voice Deepfakes Aren’t Scary Good—Yet. “There have been a couple of high-profile incidents in recent years in which cybercriminals have reportedly used voice deepfakes of company CEOs in attempts to steal large amounts of money—not to mention that documentarians posthumously created voice deepfakes of Anthony Bourdain. But are criminals at the turning point where any given spam call could contain your sibling’s cloned voice desperately seeking ‘bail money?’ No, researchers say—at least not yet.”
Krebs on Security: Feds Charge NY Man as BreachForums Boss “Pompompurin”. “The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) this week arrested a New York man on suspicion of running BreachForums, a popular English-language cybercrime forum where some of the world biggest hacked databases routinely show up for sale.”
Mashable: Twitter silent as hackers scam users with stolen high-profile verified accounts. “Looking at Jase Robertson and David Dayen, you wouldn’t think the two of them have much in common. Robertson is known for his time on the A&E reality TV show Duck Dynasty. He currently hosts a show on the conservative digital outlet TheBlaze. David Dayen is a longtime progressive journalist and executive editor for The American Prospect magazine. However, over the past few weeks, tweets from both Robertson’s and Dayen’s Twitter accounts have been sharing the exact same messaging.”
TechCrunch: Police shut down dark web crypto laundering service linked to FTX hack. “An international coalition of law enforcement agencies announced on Wednesday that it had taken down the popular dark web crypto laundering service ChipMixer, seizing more than $46 million in crypto and terabytes of server data. The service, for example, was used last year by the attacker who stole funds from the now failed crypto exchange FTX, as well as by several ransomware groups.”
Krebs on Security: Two U.S. Men Charged in 2022 Hacking of DEA Portal. “Two U.S. men have been charged with hacking into a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) online portal that taps into 16 different federal law enforcement databases. Both are alleged to be part of a larger criminal organization that specializes in using fake emergency data requests from compromised police and government email accounts to publicly threaten and extort their victims.”
BuzzFeed News: Murderous Mexican Drug Cartels Are Thriving On Elon Musk’s Twitter. “Prominent members of Mexican drug cartels are using Twitter to recruit new members, send warnings to rival gangs, post gory images and videos, and glorify the narco lifestyle. Some of these accounts were banned by Twitter’s safety team between 2012 and 2015, but they have been reinstated since Elon Musk bought the company last year.”
OCCRP: How a Montenegrin Gang Used Open-Source Intelligence to Kill. “Hitmen working for a criminal group active in Montenegro and Serbia used open-source intelligence techniques, poring over apartment listing sites, satellite images, and tourist photos posted online, to track down and kill the leader of a rival clan as he hid out in Greece.”
NBC News: 3,000 Asians in Texas had their driver’s licenses sent to a criminal group. They want answers.. “Asian Americans in Texas are angered after officials revealed this week that thousands of Asians statewide may be impacted by identity theft orchestrated through a website that involved using personal information to answer security questions.”
Baltimore Sun: Baltimore launches new public safety accountability dashboard with crime, arrest, conviction metrics. “The Public Safety Accountability Dashboard… will offer the public a view of police and court data broken down by neighborhood, police district and crime types. It also will offer metrics around neighborhood demographics and the city’s community violence intervention sites, including Safe Streets locations and hospital-based sites.”
Associated Press: Lebanese state media archives looted in heart of Beirut. “Unknown assailants broke into the offices of Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency and stole the servers that contain its archives, the Information Ministry said Monday.”
Wall Street Journal: A Basic iPhone Feature Helps Criminals Steal Your Entire Digital Life. “In the early hours of Thanksgiving weekend, Reyhan Ayas was leaving a bar in Midtown Manhattan when a man she had just met snatched her iPhone 13 Pro Max. Within a few minutes, the 31-year-old, a senior economist at a workforce intelligence startup, could no longer get into her Apple account and all the stuff attached to it, including photos, contacts and notes. Over the next 24 hours, she said, about $10,000 vanished from her bank account.”
The Tennessean: Firm named to create Southern Baptist Convention database of ministers accused of abuse. “A Southern Baptist Convention leader announced details Monday of the creation of a database containing names of ministers credibly accused of sexual abuse, a major milestone in the denomination’s effort to implement abuse reform.”
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