Cyberlaw

The U.S. government recommended a five-year prison sentence and US$4.5 million in damages against Team Xecuter's Gary Bowser citing that his actions of finding loopholes and making mods cost the video game industry and gamers dearly. Bowser's defense was cognizant of the offence but pleaded for a shorter 19-month stint. They argued that the feds only wanted to make an example of him since the others involved with Team Xecuter could escape charges.

The US Government has drafted a bill that would force Apple to open up its devices to third-party app repositories. Apple has petitioned the Senate judiciary committee to reconsider it, citing privacy and security concerns.

A huge number of stolen bitcoins have been spotted on the move. A total of 94,643.29 bitcoins that were taken from the 2016 Bitfinex hack have been transferred to an unknown wallet, with the current street value at the time of writing being over US$3.54 billion. The original heist involved the unauthorized transfer of 119,755 bitcoins.

An arbitration court in Moscow has refused to enforce a ruling that banned Samsung from importing and selling 61 smartphone models due to an alleged patent infringement. Back in October 2021, a Swiss company SQWIN SA filed a lawsuit against Samsung claiming that Samsung Pay infringed on the company’s patents registered in Russia.

The FBI has cautioned individuals who use QR codes to exercise vigilance when making payments or entering sensitive personal information. Cybercriminals are tampering with legitimate QR codes to create malicious codes that redirect victims to phishing websites where malware can infect their devices and steal their credentials and banking information.

The Russian Central Bank has come up with its own set of proposals to add to the Parliament's working group on crypto regulation that was formed back in December. The head of Bank of Russia's Financial Stability Department presented a report that essentially suggests a full ban on crypto payments, mining, and transactions in the country.

Complying with an order by the Netherlands' Authority for Consumers and Markets, Apple is now allowing developers of dating apps to offer non-Apple payment options. By allowing developers to use payment options outside of Apple's system, the company is forgoing the 15-30% cut that it takes on app sales and in-app purchases.

Analysts have now discovered that attackers behind the Magniber ransomware, who have been exploiting IE-based vulnerabilities so far, are now targeting PCs via modern browsers such as Edge and Chrome. The Magniber ransomware is disguised as a legit update package for Edge or Chrome and comes as a signed .appx file. Installing this "update" will encrypt all user data and demand money for decryption.

The Federal Cyber Security Authority, Germany's cybersecurity watchdog, has failed to find any evidence that Xiaomi is censoring certain words from its smartphones. In September 2021, Lithuania alleged that Xiaomi smartphones automatically censor words such as "Free Tibet" and "democracy movement".

Pointing out the undeniable fact that it is being used extensively by extremist groups, Germany aims to shut down Telegram across the country, and even across the entire European Union. In addition to death threats against officials, Telegram is employed by anti-vaxxers in their campaign against COVID-19 shots.

Russia is drafting a comprehensive framework for cryptocurrency regulation to build on the digital asset legislation that it passed back in January. The government has formed a working committee in the Duma, the Russian Parliament, which held its first meeting with Bank of Russia financial experts and lawmakers to start working on a crypto regulation proposal to be presented in front of Parliament for voting some time in February.

A Moscow court has slapped Google with a US$98 million fine over the company's failure to remove content that violates Russian law. Content that glamorizes drugs, weaponry, harmful behavior, and extremism is illegal in Russia. Reportedly, Google had failed to remove 2600 pieces of such illegal material.

The cryptocurrency regulation requirements will only grow with time, and there are now services like the Astra Protocol that are offering automated compliance layer over digital asset trades. To continue its development, Astra has raised US$9 million in a private token sale from notable investors like Republic, DAOMaker, Fundamental Labs, Faculty, Richard Dai, and Wave GP Cardano. The Astra regulatory layer has built-in Know-Your-Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money-Laundering (AML) compliance abilities.

Twitch has strict community guidelines, and they seem to work better than the legislation of many countries in the world. The official Spanish-language Amazon Prime Video channel was suspended from Twitch (which is owned by Amazon) on Sunday, shortly after a presenter accidentally revealed her breast during a live show.

A report released by Meta reveals that several spy firms have targeted approximately 50,000 Facebook users to gain personal information, potentially for use in later phishing attacks. A total of seven surveillance companies were named in the report, including Black Cube.

India is currently working on a comprehensive cryptocurrency legislation to regulate the digital assets market in the country which may lead to an outright Bitcoin ban. The final say will be on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose Twitter account was hacked to announce India accepts Bitcoin as legal tender immediately after his comments that India should "jointly shape global norms for emerging technologies like social media and cryptocurrencies so that they are used to empower democracy, not to undermine it."

A zero-day exploit was recently identified within the Apache log4j logging library, which can potentially be used by hackers to take over entire servers via logging messages. The vulnerability affects a number of online services, from Steam and Twitter to Amazon and Minecraft, among others.

Amazon was penalized by Italy's antitrust authority (AGCM) for misusing its market dominance. The AGCM fined the company €1.1 billion and stated that Amazon coaxed Italian shops to use its shipping service by promising perks such as Prime label and participation in sale events such as Black Friday. Amazon stated that the company will appeal the ruling.

The verdict in the Kleiman v. Wright lawsuit, sometimes called the "Satoshi Nakamoto trial," is in, and Mr. Wright has to pay US$100 million in intellectual property damages to the plaintiff. Filed by the heirs of the deceased David Kleiman, the lawsuit aimed to prove that the alleged Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto was a collective of Mr. Kleiman and Mr. Wright hence they are entitled to their fair share of the 1.1 million bitcoins their undertaking mined. None of those bitcoins had to be accessed during the trial, as the focus was on the intellectual property of the joint venture, so the verdict couldn't definitively solve the Satoshi Nakamoto conundrum.

Alesia Haas, the CEO of Coinbase Inc., is testifying before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services alongside five other crypto exchange representatives for the first time. In prepared testimonies, the cryptocurrency platform execs urged Congress to be careful while regulating and taxing digital currency like any other asset, as they risk creating "unnecessarily onerous and chilling laws and regulations." The first Congressional hearing of crypto exchange execs is still ongoing, and you can watch the live stream here.

A patent filed by Clearview AI for part of its facial recognition technology is set to be granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Clearview's software is already being used by several bodies in the US, including the FBI.

Members of Congress recently introduced the Stopping Grinch Bots Act. If it passes through, this piece of legislation could make it illegal for scalpers to use bots and scripts to hoard electronics for resale.

Users of the popular Zoom video conferencing app between March 2016 and July 2021 can now file for compensation as part of a class-action lawsuit which the company has decided to settle outside of court for US$85 million. According to terms of the settlement, users who have taken any of Zoom's subscription plans are eligible for a US$25 settlement while free users can claim up to US$15. The deadline for filing the claim is March 5, 2022.

Maxine Waters (D-CA), the Chairwoman of the House Committee on Financial Services, has scheduled a December 8 Congressional hearing titled the "Digital Assets and the Future of Finance: Understanding the Challenges and Benefits of Financial Innovation in the United States." The hearing will see crypto platform execs testify before Congress for the first time. Witnessed include the Coinbase CFO and five others who will appear amidst a regulatory oversight push by SEC's Chair Gensler. He again demands that cryptocurrency exchanges register with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency have issued a joint statement clarifying the next steps in the US cryptocurrency regulations. After the infrastructure bill was signed into law with crypto taxation provisions, the agencies are now outlining a roadmap for their digital assets regulation guidance that stretches through 2022.

The Indian government will finally address the burgeoning cryptocurrency issue in the Winter Session of parliament. It plans to regulate crypto-related transactions in the country. A state-backed digital currency is also said to be in the works.

The US tax authority, also known as the Internal Revenue Service, anticipates seizing a record amount of cryptocurrencies in 2022. Such seizures could be conducted by hundreds of newly hired special agents, who would investigate crypto related incidents like tax evasion and money laundering.

The Chinese government strictly enforces recent bans in regard to cryptomining and financial transactions involving cryptocurrencies, and it has now caught and punished one of its own officials who allegedly accepted bribes from cryptominers and thereby violated the new laws multiple times.

Chinese servers of the popular game Fortnite stopped working on November 15 after the game failed to get approval from the Chinese government. This marks the end of Fortnite's three-year limited trial run in the country. Fortnite's failure to get approval is a byproduct of the Chinese government's tightened regulations of the games industry.

A bipartisan group of Senators has reintroduced a last-ditch amendment bill to exempt entities like miners or wallet developers from being considered crypto transaction brokers, stifling digital asset innovation. Under the new crypto taxation bill that President Biden just signed into law, they may have to report transactions to the IRS just like exchanges; analysts are worried it'd be impossible for them to comply, pending Treasury Department guidance on the new law.

According to the heirs of one David Kleiman, he co-created the Bitcoin protocol together with another programmer, Craig Wright, and is entitled to half of the one million bitcoins their partnership created. They have filed a lawsuit against Mr. Wright in Florida to prove the collective is behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto that allegedly has access to the bitcoins in question, now worth north of US$60 billion.

Written in Google's own open source Golang programming language, Botenago could potentially affect millions of routers connected to the internet as well as IoT devices.

The European Commissioner for Financial Services urged EU members and the European Parliament to agree on a crypto regulation proposal by November's end. Some EP members expressed skepticism about the deadline, indicating that it'd be better if the crypto legislation is synchronized with the White House to make sure it enhances rather than stifles innovation.

A newly discovered mobile surveillance tool, Phonespy, appears to offer hackers and governments similar capabilities to NSO's Pegasus. Researchers found that Phonespy was being used by unknown actors to monitor and steal data from thousands of South Koreans.

European Union’s General Court has rejected Google’s appeal against a US$2.8 billion fine that the company had received in 2017. The fine was the result of the European Commission’s verdict that Google had broken antitrust law by giving preference to its own shopping comparison product in search results over other, potentially better alternatives.

Congress finally passed the new infrastructure bill with its provisions to tax cryptocurrency transactions essentially unchanged. Pending IRS and Treasury Department guidance, any digital asset class deal above US$10,000 may now have to be reported by the exchanges for tax purposes.

A report by RiskIQ indicates that hackers are abusing the Discord CDN to in a range of ways to send users over 27 different types of malware, including remote access trojans that allow them to gain control of victims' devices.

REvil, a Russian-led ransomware group that was involved in the Colonial Pipeline attack, has been hacked and its website was taken down by the FBI. The bureau, along with the Secret Service and partner countries, managed to infiltrate the group's infrastructure and compromise its backups. The anti-ransomware operation is part of a larger initiative by the US government to curb cyberattacks on the country's facilities.

A ransomware attack by a group called AvosLocker reportedly hit Gigabyte. As a result of the attack, sensitive information including customer credit card details, NDA'd agreements with Gigabyte partners, and employee payroll information, among other details, were leaked.

A new rule from the U.S. Department of Commerce prohibits the sale or export of cybersecurity-related software and hardware to specific countries. Citing national security and anti-terrorism reasons, the rule bans exports to governments the U.S. deems "authoritarian," including China and Russia.

US lawmakers from the House of Representatives have written a letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy demanding evidence in support of the company's 2020 congressional testimony. Recently, reports from Reuters and The Markup alleged that the company uses third-party seller data to copy popular products and manipulate search results to favor its private label products. These reports go against the congressional testimony that the company executives gave in 2020.

Acer's Indian servers have been breached by the hacker group Desorden, who claim to have access to 60 GB of sensitive corporate information and financial data. The group also claimed to release data of millions of Acer customers for a fee. Acer said that the breach has been reported to local law enforcement, and that it will have no impact on business continuity.

In a recent policy change, Valve decided that the Steam platform would no longer support games built on blockchain technology that let users receive or exchange crypto or NFT assets, raising questions about the future of player-owned NFT assets.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network stated that so far in 2021, crypto exchange and financial institutions have reported nearly US$600 million in transactions to pay ransomware attackers. This is signifcantly higher than 2020’s entire-year figure of US$416 million.

The US Energy and Commerce Committee has announced an amendment to Section 230 that previously shielded social platforms from liability. Thus, these companies will now be held accountable for algorithms that recommend harmful content. However, critics have claimed that the House Bill could conflict with the First Amendment rights.

Google’s AI department was recently hit by a class-action lawsuit in the UK, because of possible irregularities in the way that it received and handled the data of over 1.6 million NHS patients from the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust.

President Biden's administration may soon issue an executive order on crypto trading that will be a coordinated regulation push by all government agencies involved - from the Treasury Department to the national security ones.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has just announced a ban on cryptocurrency miners and related paraphernalia on its website. Sales will be allowed till October 8, following which the listings will be deleted on October 15.

After the totalitarian country has already banned crypto mining a few months ago, the new regulations also prohibit all financial transactions that involve cryptocurrencies like the popular Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Xiaomi appears to be shipping some phones in Europe with a feature that potentially allows the detection and censoring of anti-Chinese Communist Party phrases. The feature is, of course, turned off but that's unlikely to assuage doubts.