Google has confirmed that hackers created a fraudulent account in its Law Enforcement Request System (LERS) platform that law enforcement uses to submit official data requests to the company
Category: law enforcement
Scattered Spider Hacker Gets 10 Years, $13M Restitution for SIM Swapping Crypto Theft
A 20-year-old member of the notorious cybercrime gang known as Scattered Spider has been sentenced to ten years in prison in the U.S. in connection with a series of major hacks and cryptocurrency thefts.
Noah Michael Urban pleaded guilty to charges related to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft back in April 2025. News of Urban’s sentencing was reported by Bloomberg and Jacksonville news outlet News4JAX.
In addition, 120 months in federal prison, Urban faces an additional three years of supervised release and has been ordered to pay $13 million in restitution to victims. In a statement shared with security journalist Brian Krebs, Urban called the sentence unjust.
New TETRA Radio Encryption Flaws Expose Law Enforcement Communications
New 2TETRA:2BURST flaws expose TETRA networks to injection, replay, and brute-force risks. Critical for public safety.
Researchers create shape-shifting robot that liquifies to escape cage
Researchers from China and us create shape shifting robot:
In a scene straight out of science fiction, researchers from China and the U.S. have developed a shape-shifting robot made from magnetically responsive liquid metal that can melt, flow, escape confinement, and reassemble itself—all on command.
Inspired by sea cucumbers and powered by gallium, a metal with a melting point just above room temperature, the robot can switch between solid and liquid states using magnetic fields. During tests, it was able to melt, escape from a prison-like cage, and then re-solidify into its original form—without losing function.
Unlike traditional rigid robots, this breakthrough allows machines to:
* Navigate tight or complex spaces * Heal themselves or split apart to avoid damage * Perform surgical tasks inside the human body without invasive procedures * Transition between tool-like solidity and liquid flexibility.
The magnetic fields not only induce the phase change but also control movement, making the robot swim, climb walls, and even jump. Researchers envision future uses in minimally invasive medicine, like removing foreign objects from internal organs, or in electronic assembly, where the robot could flow into hard-to-reach places and form circuits.
BlackSuit ransomware extortion sites seized in Operation Checkmate
Law enforcement has seized the dark web extortion sites of the BlackSuit ransomware operation, which has targeted and breached the networks of hundreds of organizations worldwide over the past several years.
The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed the takedown in an email earlier today, saying the authorities involved in the action executed a court-authorized seizure of the BlackSuit domains.
Earlier today, the websites on the BlackSuit.onion domains were replaced with seizure banners announcing that the ransomware gang’s sites were taken down by the U.S. Homeland Security Investigations federal law enforcement agency as part of a joint international action codenamed Operation Checkmate.
Abacus dark web drug market goes offline in suspected exit scam
Abacus Market, the largest Western darknet marketplace supporting Bitcoin payments, has shut down its public infrastructure in a move suspected to be an exit scam.
Exit scams occur when the operator of a marketplace decides to vanish with the money they hold in escrow for various transactions between platform users.
Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs reports that Abacus shutting down so abruptly has all the indications of either an exit scam or a covert law enforcement operation dismantling the activity.
Police disrupt “Diskstation” ransomware gang attacking NAS devices
An international law enforcement action dismantled a Romanian ransomware gang known as ‘Diskstation,’ which encrypted the systems of several companies in the Lombardy region, paralyzing their businesses.
The law enforcement operation codenamed ‘Operation Elicius’ was coordinated by Europol and also involved police forces in France and Romania.
Diskstation is a ransomware operation that targets Synology Network-Attached Storage (NAS) devices, which are commonly used by companies for centralized file storage and sharing, data backup and recovery, and general content hosting.
Hide and seek: Uncovering new ways to detect vault apps on smartphones
Researchers have discovered a modern solution to detect vault applications (apps) on smartphones, which could be a game-changer for law enforcement. The paper is published in the journal Future Internet.
The analysis, led by researchers from Edith Cowan University (ECU) and University of Southern Queensland, demonstrates that machine learning (ML) can be used to effectively identify vault apps.
Smartphones are an integral part of daily life, used by an estimated 5 billion people around the world.
Police seizes Archetyp Market drug marketplace, arrests admin
Law enforcement authorities from six countries took down the Archetyp Market, an infamous darknet drug marketplace that has been operating since May 2020.
Archetyp Market sellers provided the market’s customers with access to high volumes of drugs, including cocaine, amphetamines, heroin, cannabis, MDMA, and synthetic opioids like fentanyl through more than 3,200 registered vendors and over 17,000 listings.
Over its five years of activity, the marketplace amassed over 612,000 users with a total transaction volume of over €250 million (approximately $289 million) in Monero cryptocurrency transactions.
19-year-old accused of largest child data breach in U.S. agrees to plead guilty
While the documents refer to the education company only as “Victim-2” and the U.S. attorney’s office declined to name the victim, a person familiar with the matter told NBC News that it is PowerSchool. The hack of PowerSchool last year is believed to be the largest breach of American children’s sensitive data to date.
According to his plea agreement, Lane admitted obtaining information from a protected computer and aggravated identity theft and agreed not to challenge a prison sentence shorter than nine years and four months. He got access simply by trying an employee’s stolen username and password combination, the complaint says, echoing a private third-party assessment of the incident previously reported by NBC News.