As Donald Trump’s administration continues its relentless reorganization of the United States federal government, documents obtained by WIRED showed this week that the Department of Defense is looking at cutting as much as three-quarters of its workforce that’s specifically focused on stopping proliferation of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the US Army is using its “CamoGPT” AI tool to “review” diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility policies per Trump administration orders. The military originally developed the AI service to improve productivity and operational readiness.
US civil liberties organizations are pushing the director of national intelligence. Tulsi Gabbard, to declassify details about Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—a central overseas wiretap authority that is notorious for also capturing a large number of calls, texts, and emails made or sent by Americans. And the US Justice Department on Wednesday charged 10 alleged hackers and two Chinese government officials over digital crimes spanning more than a decade as part of China’s extensive hack-for-hire ecosystem.
Ongoing analysis from a consortium of researchers led by Human Security found that at least a million low-price Android devices, like TV streaming boxes and tablets, have been compromised as part of a scamming and ad fraud campaign known as Badbox 2.0. The activity, which the researchers say comes out of China, is an evolution of a previous effort to backdoor similar devices.
And there’s more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.
Two people who allegedly worked as part of a group to access nearly 1,000 tickets to concerts and other events—many for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour—before selling them on for more than $600,000 profit were arrested and charged with the potential crimes in Queens this week. Tyrone Rose, 20, and Shamara P. Simmons, 31, of Jamaica, Queens, were arrested and arraigned in connection to the theft and sales, according to Queens district attorney Melinda Katz.
Between June 2022 and July 2023, it is alleged that 350 orders—totaling 993 tickets—on ticketing platform StubHub were accessed at a third-party contractor called Sutherland. “The Sutherland employees, defendant Tyrone Rose and an unapprehended accomplice, allegedly used their access to StubHub’s computer system to find a backdoor into a secure area of the network where already sold tickets were given a URL and queued to be emailed to the purchaser to download,” the district attorney’s office wrote in a statement.
They then emailed URLs to another accomplice who has since died, the office says, before posting the tickets to StubHub for resale. While the investigations are ongoing, the District Attorney’s office claimed the proceeds of the cybercrime totaled around $635,000 and also involved tickets for Ed Sheeran concerts, NBA games, and the US Open Tennis Championships.
Every year, criminals make billions from the operations of highly organized scam compounds in Southeast Asia. As these operations have grown in sophistication, so has the wider ecosystem that supplies them with the technology and services needed to run the scams. And experts say there’s no bigger marketplace than Huione Guarantee—a Cambodian gray market selling scam services that researchers claim has facilitated more than $24 billion in transactions.
This week, according to a report by Radio Free Asia, the banking arm of Huione Guarantee’s parent company, Huione Group, had its financial license suspended by officials in Cambodia. According to the report, the Huione Pay service had its license withdrawn for failing to comply with “existing regulations.” The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and crypto tracing firm Elliptic previously had linked money moving through Huione Pay to cyberscamming. “They are willing facilitators of pig butchering and other fraud, so any regulatory action against them should be welcomed,” Elliptic founder Tom Robinson claimed to Radio Free Asia.
The US Department of Justice announced an operation this week with Germany and Finland to disrupt the digital infrastructure behind notorious Russian cryptocurrency exchange Garantex. For years, the platform has allegedly been used for money laundering and other criminal transactions, including sanctions evasion. The DOJ claimed in its announcement that “transnational criminal organizations—including terrorist organizations” have utilized the exchange. Law enforcement said that the platform has processed at least $96 billion in cryptocurrency transactions since April 2019. US authorities said they froze over $26 million in funds used to facilitate money laundering as part of the Garantex takedown.
The FBI warned this week that scammers pretending to be attackers from the BianLian ransomware gang are demanding ransoms from corporate executives in the US. The demands include claims that the group has breached a company’s network and threaten to publish sensitive information unless a target pays up. Such criminal digital extortion is common enough that scammers apparently feel that they can plausibly make the claims and intimidate targets without even attacking them. The FBI says that the scammers’ ransom demands say that they come from BianLian and range from $250,000 to $500,000 payable via a QR code that links to a Bitcoin wallet. The real BianLian group has links to Russia and has targeted US critical infrastructure since June 2022, according to a November alert from the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
