Tag Archives: law enforcement

First Sentencing in Scheme to Help North Koreans Infiltrate US Companies

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/08/first-sentencing-in-scheme-to-help-north-koreans-infiltrate-us-companies.html

An Arizona woman was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison for her role helping North Korean workers infiltrate US companies by pretending to be US workers.

From an article:

According to court documents, Chapman hosted the North Korean IT workers’ computers in her own home between October 2020 and October 2023, creating a so-called “laptop farm” which was used to make it appear as though the devices were located in the United States.

The North Koreans were hired as remote software and application developers with multiple Fortune 500 companies, including an aerospace and defense company, a major television network, a Silicon Valley technology company, and a high-profile company.

As a result of this scheme, they collected over $17 million in illicit revenue paid for their work, which was shared with Chapman, who processed their paychecks through her financial accounts.

“Chapman operated a ‘laptop farm’ where she received and hosted computers from the U.S. companies her home, so that the companies would believe the workers were in the United States,” the Justice Department said on Thursday.

“Chapman also shipped 49 laptops and other devices supplied by U.S. companies to locations overseas, including multiple shipments to a city in China on the border with North Korea. More than 90 laptops were seized from Chapman’s home following the execution of a search warrant in October 2023.”

Silk Typhoon Hackers Indicted

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/03/silk-typhoon-hackers-indicted.html

Lots of interesting details in the story:

The US Department of Justice on Wednesday announced the indictment of 12 Chinese individuals accused of more than a decade of hacker intrusions around the world, including eight staffers for the contractor i-Soon, two officials at China’s Ministry of Public Security who allegedly worked with them, and two other alleged hackers who are said to be part of the Chinese hacker group APT27, or Silk Typhoon, which prosecutors say was involved in the US Treasury breach late last year.

[…]

According to prosecutors, the group as a whole has targeted US state and federal agencies, foreign ministries of countries across Asia, Chinese dissidents, US-based media outlets that have criticized the Chinese government, and most recently the US Treasury, which was breached between September and December of last year. An internal Treasury report obtained by Bloomberg News found that hackers had penetrated at least 400 of the agency’s PCs and stole more than 3,000 files in that intrusion.

The indictments highlight how, in some cases, the hackers operated with a surprising degree of autonomy, even choosing targets on their own before selling stolen information to Chinese government clients. The indictment against Yin Kecheng, who was previously sanctioned by the Treasury Department in January for his involvement in the Treasury breach, quotes from his communications with a colleague in which he notes his personal preference for hacking American targets and how he’s seeking to ‘break into a big target,’ which he hoped would allow him to make enough money to buy a car.

UK Is Ordering Apple to Break Its Own Encryption

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/02/uk-is-ordering-apple-to-break-its-own-encryption.html

The Washington Post is reporting that the UK government has served Apple with a “technical capability notice” as defined by the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act, requiring it to break the Advanced Data Protection encryption in iCloud for the benefit of law enforcement.

This is a big deal, and something we in the security community have worried was coming for a while now.

The law, known by critics as the Snoopers’ Charter, makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government has even made such a demand. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

Apple can appeal the U.K. capability notice to a secret technical panel, which would consider arguments about the expense of the requirement, and to a judge who would weigh whether the request was in proportion to the government’s needs. But the law does not permit Apple to delay complying during an appeal.

In March, when the company was on notice that such a requirement might be coming, it told Parliament: “There is no reason why the U.K. [government] should have the authority to decide for citizens of the world whether they can avail themselves of the proven security benefits that flow from end-to-end encryption.”

Apple is likely to turn the feature off for UK users rather than break it for everyone worldwide. Of course, UK users will be able to spoof their location. But this might not be enough. According to the law, Apple would not be able to offer the feature to anyone who is in the UK at any point: for example, a visitor from the US.

And what happens next? Australia has a law enabling it to ask for the same thing. Will it? Will even more countries follow?

This is madness.

Friday Squid Blogging: Safe Quick Undercarriage Immobilization Device

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/12/friday-squid-blogging-safe-quick-undercarriage-immobilization-device.html

Fifteen years ago I blogged about a different SQUID. Here’s an update:

Fleeing drivers are a common problem for law enforcement. They just won’t stop unless persuaded­—persuaded by bullets, barriers, spikes, or snares. Each option is risky business. Shooting up a fugitive’s car is one possibility. But what if children or hostages are in it? Lay down barriers, and the driver might swerve into a school bus. Spike his tires, and he might fishtail into a van­—if the spikes stop him at all. Existing traps, made from elastic, may halt a Hyundai, but they’re no match for a Hummer. In addition, officers put themselves at risk of being run down while setting up the traps.

But what if an officer could lay down a road trap in seconds, then activate it from a nearby hiding place? What if—­like sea monsters of ancient lore­—the trap could reach up from below to ensnare anything from a MINI Cooper to a Ford Expedition? What if this trap were as small as a spare tire, as light as a tire jack, and cost under a grand?

Thanks to imaginative design and engineering funded by the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Office of the U. S. Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate (S&T), such a trap may be stopping brigands by 2010. It’s called the Safe Quick Undercarriage Immobilization Device, or SQUID. When closed, the current prototype resembles a cheese wheel full of holes. When open (deployed), it becomes a mass of tentacles entangling the axles. By stopping the axles instead of the wheels, SQUID may change how fleeing drivers are, quite literally, caught.

Blog moderation policy.

Details about the iOS Inactivity Reboot Feature

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/12/details-about-the-ios-inactivity-reboot-feature.html

I recently wrote about the new iOS feature that forces an iPhone to reboot after it’s been inactive for a longish period of time.

Here are the technical details, discovered through reverse engineering. The feature triggers after seventy-two hours of inactivity, even it is remains connected to Wi-Fi.

What Graykey Can and Can’t Unlock

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/11/what-graykey-can-and-cant-unlock.html

This is from 404 Media:

The Graykey, a phone unlocking and forensics tool that is used by law enforcement around the world, is only able to retrieve partial data from all modern iPhones that run iOS 18 or iOS 18.0.1, which are two recently released versions of Apple’s mobile operating system, according to documents describing the tool’s capabilities in granular detail obtained by 404 Media. The documents do not appear to contain information about what Graykey can access from the public release of iOS 18.1, which was released on October 28.

More information:

Meanwhile, Graykey’s performance with Android phones varies, largely due to the diversity of devices and manufacturers. On Google’s Pixel lineup, Graykey can only partially access data from the latest Pixel 9 when in an “After First Unlock” (AFU) state—where the phone has been unlocked at least once since being powered on.

Criminals Exploiting FBI Emergency Data Requests

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/11/criminals-exploiting-fbi-emergency-data-requests.html

I’ve been writing about the problem with lawful-access backdoors in encryption for decades now: that as soon as you create a mechanism for law enforcement to bypass encryption, the bad guys will use it too.

Turns out the same thing is true for non-technical backdoors:

The advisory said that the cybercriminals were successful in masquerading as law enforcement by using compromised police accounts to send emails to companies requesting user data. In some cases, the requests cited false threats, like claims of human trafficking and, in one case, that an individual would “suffer greatly or die” unless the company in question returns the requested information.

The FBI said the compromised access to law enforcement accounts allowed the hackers to generate legitimate-looking subpoenas that resulted in companies turning over usernames, emails, phone numbers, and other private information about their users.

Robot Dog Internet Jammer

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/07/robot-dog-internet-jammer.html

Supposedly the DHS has these:

The robot, called “NEO,” is a modified version of the “Quadruped Unmanned Ground Vehicle” (Q-UGV) sold to law enforcement by a company called Ghost Robotics. Benjamine Huffman, the director of DHS’s Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC), told police at the 2024 Border Security Expo in Texas that DHS is increasingly worried about criminals setting “booby traps” with internet of things and smart home devices, and that NEO allows DHS to remotely disable the home networks of a home or building law enforcement is raiding. The Border Security Expo is open only to law enforcement and defense contractors. A transcript of Huffman’s speech was obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Dave Maass using a Freedom of Information Act request and was shared with 404 Media.

“NEO can enter a potentially dangerous environment to provide video and audio feedback to the officers before entry and allow them to communicate with those in that environment,” Huffman said, according to the transcript. “NEO carries an onboard computer and antenna array that will allow officers the ability to create a ‘denial-of-service’ (DoS) event to disable ‘Internet of Things’ devices that could potentially cause harm while entry is made.”

Slashdot thread.

Criminal Gang Physically Assaulting People for Their Cryptocurrency

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/07/criminal-gang-physically-assaulting-people-for-their-cryptocurrency.html

This is pretty horrific:

…a group of men behind a violent crime spree designed to compel victims to hand over access to their cryptocurrency savings. That announcement and the criminal complaint laying out charges against St. Felix focused largely on a single theft of cryptocurrency from an elderly North Carolina couple, whose home St. Felix and one of his accomplices broke into before physically assaulting the two victims—­both in their seventies—­and forcing them to transfer more than $150,000 in Bitcoin and Ether to the thieves’ crypto wallets.

I think cryptocurrencies are more susceptible to this kind of real-world attack because they are largely outside the conventional banking system. Yet another reason to stay away from them.

Canadian Citizen Gets Phone Back from Police

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/01/canadian-citizen-gets-phone-back-from-police.html

After 175 million failed password guesses, a judge rules that the Canadian police must return a suspect’s phone.

[Judge] Carter said the investigation can continue without the phones, and he noted that Ottawa police have made a formal request to obtain more data from Google.

“This strikes me as a potentially more fruitful avenue of investigation than using brute force to enter the phones,” he said.

Secret White House Warrantless Surveillance Program

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/11/secret-white-house-warrantless-surveillance-program.html

There seems to be no end to warrantless surveillance:

According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact as well.

The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has, for the past decade, provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure—­a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States.

The Hacker Tool to Get Personal Data from Credit Bureaus

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/09/the-hacker-tool-to-get-personal-data-from-credit-bureaus.html

The new site 404 Media has a good article on how hackers are cheaply getting personal information from credit bureaus:

This is the result of a secret weapon criminals are selling access to online that appears to tap into an especially powerful set of data: the target’s credit header. This is personal information that the credit bureaus Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion have on most adults in America via their credit cards. Through a complex web of agreements and purchases, that data trickles down from the credit bureaus to other companies who offer it to debt collectors, insurance companies, and law enforcement.

A 404 Media investigation has found that criminals have managed to tap into that data supply chain, in some cases by stealing former law enforcement officer’s identities, and are selling unfettered access to their criminal cohorts online. The tool 404 Media tested has also been used to gather information on high profile targets such as Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and even President Joe Biden, seemingly without restriction. 404 Media verified that although not always sensitive, at least some of that data is accurate.

Backdoor in TETRA Police Radios

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/07/backdoor-in-tetra-police-radios.html

Seems that there is a deliberate backdoor in the twenty-year-old TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (TETRA) standard used by police forces around the world.

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), an organization that standardizes technologies across the industry, first created TETRA in 1995. Since then, TETRA has been used in products, including radios, sold by Motorola, Airbus, and more. Crucially, TETRA is not open-source. Instead, it relies on what the researchers describe in their presentation slides as “secret, proprietary cryptography,” meaning it is typically difficult for outside experts to verify how secure the standard really is.

The researchers said they worked around this limitation by purchasing a TETRA-powered radio from eBay. In order to then access the cryptographic component of the radio itself, Wetzels said the team found a vulnerability in an interface of the radio.

[…]

Most interestingly is the researchers’ findings of what they describe as the backdoor in TEA1. Ordinarily, radios using TEA1 used a key of 80-bits. But Wetzels said the team found a “secret reduction step” which dramatically lowers the amount of entropy the initial key offered. An attacker who followed this step would then be able to decrypt intercepted traffic with consumer-level hardware and a cheap software defined radio dongle.

Looks like the encryption algorithm was intentionally weakened by intelligence agencies to facilitate easy eavesdropping.

Specifically on the researchers’ claims of a backdoor in TEA1, Boyer added “At this time, we would like to point out that the research findings do not relate to any backdoors. The TETRA security standards have been specified together with national security agencies and are designed for and subject to export control regulations which determine the strength of the encryption.”

And I would like to point out that that’s the very definition of a backdoor.

Why aren’t we done with secret, proprietary cryptography? It’s just not a good idea.

Details of the security analysis. Another news article.

New York Using AI to Detect Subway Fare Evasion

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/07/new-york-using-ai-to-detect-subway-fare-evasion.html

The details are scant—the article is based on a “heavily redacted” contract—but the New York subway authority is using an “AI system” to detect people who don’t pay the subway fare.

Joana Flores, an MTA spokesperson, said the AI system doesn’t flag fare evaders to New York police, but she declined to comment on whether that policy could change. A police spokesperson declined to comment.

If we spent just one-tenth of the effort we spend prosecuting the poor on prosecuting the rich, it would be a very different world.

AI and Microdirectives

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/07/ai-and-microdirectives.html

Imagine a future in which AIs automatically interpret—and enforce—laws.

All day and every day, you constantly receive highly personalized instructions for how to comply with the law, sent directly by your government and law enforcement. You’re told how to cross the street, how fast to drive on the way to work, and what you’re allowed to say or do online—if you’re in any situation that might have legal implications, you’re told exactly what to do, in real time.

Imagine that the computer system formulating these personal legal directives at mass scale is so complex that no one can explain how it reasons or works. But if you ignore a directive, the system will know, and it’ll be used as evidence in the prosecution that’s sure to follow.

This future may not be far off—automatic detection of lawbreaking is nothing new. Speed cameras and traffic-light cameras have been around for years. These systems automatically issue citations to the car’s owner based on the license plate. In such cases, the defendant is presumed guilty unless they prove otherwise, by naming and notifying the driver.

In New York, AI systems equipped with facial recognition technology are being used by businesses to identify shoplifters. Similar AI-powered systems are being used by retailers in Australia and the United Kingdom to identify shoplifters and provide real-time tailored alerts to employees or security personnel. China is experimenting with even more powerful forms of automated legal enforcement and targeted surveillance.

Breathalyzers are another example of automatic detection. They estimate blood alcohol content by calculating the number of alcohol molecules in the breath via an electrochemical reaction or infrared analysis (they’re basically computers with fuel cells or spectrometers attached). And they’re not without controversy: Courts across the country have found serious flaws and technical deficiencies with Breathalyzer devices and the software that powers them. Despite this, criminal defendants struggle to obtain access to devices or their software source code, with Breathalyzer companies and courts often refusing to grant such access. In the few cases where courts have actually ordered such disclosures, that has usually followed costly legal battles spanning many years.

AI is about to make this issue much more complicated, and could drastically expand the types of laws that can be enforced in this manner. Some legal scholars predict that computationally personalized law and its automated enforcement are the future of law. These would be administered by what Anthony Casey and Anthony Niblett call “microdirectives,” which provide individualized instructions for legal compliance in a particular scenario.

Made possible by advances in surveillance, communications technologies, and big-data analytics, microdirectives will be a new and predominant form of law shaped largely by machines. They are “micro” because they are not impersonal general rules or standards, but tailored to one specific circumstance. And they are “directives” because they prescribe action or inaction required by law.

A Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice is a present-day example of a microdirective. The DMCA’s enforcement is almost fully automated, with copyright “bots” constantly scanning the internet for copyright-infringing material, and automatically sending literally hundreds of millions of DMCA takedown notices daily to platforms and users. A DMCA takedown notice is tailored to the recipient’s specific legal circumstances. It also directs action—remove the targeted content or prove that it’s not infringing—based on the law.

It’s easy to see how the AI systems being deployed by retailers to identify shoplifters could be redesigned to employ microdirectives. In addition to alerting business owners, the systems could also send alerts to the identified persons themselves, with tailored legal directions or notices.

A future where AIs interpret, apply, and enforce most laws at societal scale like this will exponentially magnify problems around fairness, transparency, and freedom. Forget about software transparency—well-resourced AI firms, like Breathalyzer companies today, would no doubt ferociously guard their systems for competitive reasons. These systems would likely be so complex that even their designers would not be able to explain how the AIs interpret and apply the law—something we’re already seeing with today’s deep learning neural network systems, which are unable to explain their reasoning.

Even the law itself could become hopelessly vast and opaque. Legal microdirectives sent en masse for countless scenarios, each representing authoritative legal findings formulated by opaque computational processes, could create an expansive and increasingly complex body of law that would grow ad infinitum.

And this brings us to the heart of the issue: If you’re accused by a computer, are you entitled to review that computer’s inner workings and potentially challenge its accuracy in court? What does cross-examination look like when the prosecutor’s witness is a computer? How could you possibly access, analyze, and understand all microdirectives relevant to your case in order to challenge the AI’s legal interpretation? How could courts hope to ensure equal application of the law? Like the man from the country in Franz Kafka’s parable in The Trial, you’d die waiting for access to the law, because the law is limitless and incomprehensible.

This system would present an unprecedented threat to freedom. Ubiquitous AI-powered surveillance in society will be necessary to enable such automated enforcement. On top of that, research—including empirical studies conducted by one of us (Penney)—has shown that personalized legal threats or commands that originate from sources of authority—state or corporate—can have powerful chilling effects on people’s willingness to speak or act freely. Imagine receiving very specific legal instructions from law enforcement about what to say or do in a situation: Would you feel you had a choice to act freely?

This is a vision of AI’s invasive and Byzantine law of the future that chills to the bone. It would be unlike any other law system we’ve seen before in human history, and far more dangerous for our freedoms. Indeed, some legal scholars argue that this future would effectively be the death of law.

Yet it is not a future we must endure. Proposed bans on surveillance technology like facial recognition systems can be expanded to cover those enabling invasive automated legal enforcement. Laws can mandate interpretability and explainability for AI systems to ensure everyone can understand and explain how the systems operate. If a system is too complex, maybe it shouldn’t be deployed in legal contexts. Enforcement by personalized legal processes needs to be highly regulated to ensure oversight, and should be employed only where chilling effects are less likely, like in benign government administration or regulatory contexts where fundamental rights and freedoms are not at risk.

AI will inevitably change the course of law. It already has. But we don’t have to accept its most extreme and maximal instantiations, either today or tomorrow.

This essay was written with Jon Penney, and previously appeared on Slate.com.

Self-Driving Cars Are Surveillance Cameras on Wheels

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/07/self-driving-cars-are-surveillance-cameras-on-wheels.html

Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence:

While security cameras are commonplace in American cities, self-driving cars represent a new level of access for law enforcement ­ and a new method for encroachment on privacy, advocates say. Crisscrossing the city on their routes, self-driving cars capture a wider swath of footage. And it’s easier for law enforcement to turn to one company with a large repository of videos and a dedicated response team than to reach out to all the businesses in a neighborhood with security systems.

“We’ve known for a long time that they are essentially surveillance cameras on wheels,” said Chris Gilliard, a fellow at the Social Science Research Council. “We’re supposed to be able to go about our business in our day-to-day lives without being surveilled unless we are suspected of a crime, and each little bit of this technology strips away that ability.”

[…]

While self-driving services like Waymo and Cruise have yet to achieve the same level of market penetration as Ring, the wide range of video they capture while completing their routes presents other opportunities. In addition to the San Francisco homicide, Bloomberg’s review of court documents shows police have sought footage from Waymo and Cruise to help solve hit-and-runs, burglaries, aggravated assaults, a fatal collision and an attempted kidnapping.

In all cases reviewed by Bloomberg, court records show that police collected footage from Cruise and Waymo shortly after obtaining a warrant. In several cases, Bloomberg could not determine whether the recordings had been used in the resulting prosecutions; in a few of the cases, law enforcement and attorneys said the footage had not played a part, or was only a formality. However, video evidence has become a lynchpin of criminal cases, meaning it’s likely only a matter of time.

Identifying the Idaho Killer

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/06/identifying-the-idaho-killer.html

The New York Times has a long article on the investigative techniques used to identify the person who stabbed and killed four University of Idaho students.

Pay attention to the techniques:

The case has shown the degree to which law enforcement investigators have come to rely on the digital footprints that ordinary Americans leave in nearly every facet of their lives. Online shopping, car sales, carrying a cellphone, drives along city streets and amateur genealogy all played roles in an investigation that was solved, in the end, as much through technology as traditional sleuthing.

[…]

At that point, investigators decided to try genetic genealogy, a method that until now has been used primarily to solve cold cases, not active murder investigations. Among the growing number of genealogy websites that help people trace their ancestors and relatives via their own DNA, some allow users to select an option that permits law enforcement to compare crime scene DNA samples against the websites’ data.

A distant cousin who has opted into the system can help investigators building a family tree from crime scene DNA to triangulate and identify a potential perpetrator of a crime.

[…]

On Dec. 23, investigators sought and received Mr. Kohberger’s cellphone records. The results added more to their suspicions: His phone was moving around in the early morning hours of Nov. 13, but was disconnected from cell networks ­- perhaps turned off—in the two hours around when the killings occurred.

FBI (and Others) Shut Down Genesis Market

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/04/fbi-and-others-shut-down-genesis-market.html

Genesis Market is shut down:

Active since 2018, Genesis Market’s slogan was, “Our store sells bots with logs, cookies, and their real fingerprints.” Customers could search for infected systems with a variety of options, including by Internet address or by specific domain names associated with stolen credentials.

But earlier today, multiple domains associated with Genesis had their homepages replaced with a seizure notice from the FBI, which said the domains were seized pursuant to a warrant issued by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Wisconsin did not respond to requests for comment. The FBI declined to comment.

But sources close to the investigation tell KrebsOnSecurity that law enforcement agencies in the United States, Canada and across Europe are currently serving arrest warrants on dozens of individuals thought to support Genesis, either by maintaining the site or selling the service bot logs from infected systems.

The seizure notice includes the seals of law enforcement entities from several countries, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Slashdot story.