Genesis Market, an online-fraud-facilitation website and marketplace, has today been closed by an international joint effort coordinated by various police forces. Law enforcement agencies around the world took part in synchronized raids, including at locations in the UK and USA. 208 searches have been carried out, beginning at dawn on Tuesday 4 April, and a total of 119 suspected individuals have been arrested. This operation was spearheaded by the FBI in the US and the Dutch National Police. Consequently, users of the genesis.market website have been greeted with a boastful message and infographic on the home and login pages: "Operation Cookie Monster. This website has been seized."

Sophos, a leading software and hardware security vendor, has previously identified genesis.market as: "an invitation-only marketplace" from which buyers can acquire stolen credentials, cookies, and digital fingerprints that are gathered from compromised systems." According to the company's research, the illegal marketplace was also identified as an Initial Access Broker (IAB) - a business that compromises systems and services, steals data, and sells it. Genesis Market has special engagement capabilities in the field of illegally acquiring "credentials, cookies, and digital fingerprints". This stolen data was often sold on under individual lots, but the site also offered a longer term supply of data packages via a subscription service. This would offer the customer an up-to-date information trail, be it the tracking of an individual person or a collective.

The FBI has recently issued a Public Service Announcement (PSA) from the agency's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), the division responsible for receiving, collating and categorizing digital threats. According to the PSA, the bureau has seen a relevant increase in the number of complaints surrounding the usage of deepfake technology: actors are now combining deepfake videos with stolen citizen credentials in order to apply to remote jobs.

Deepfakes (AI-generated or AI-assisted videos falsifying human beings) are a relatively known quantity even in mainstream media - particularly due to screenwriter and director Jordan Peele's 2018 showcase of how believable the technology was in animating an otherwise digital ex-president, Barack Obama. While the tech first made forays in the Internet's underground, the increasing ease with which bad actors can weaponize the technology is raising alarms throughout most sectors - or at the very least, they should be.

Yesterday, Bloomberg ran a story entitled "Kaspersky Lab Has Been Working With Russian Intelligence", in which the editors said that "Emails show the security-software maker developed products for the FSB and accompanied agents on raids." Eugene Kaspersky, Kaspersky CEO, naturally responded by saying that claims about Kaspersky Lab's ties to the Kremlin are "unfounded conspiracy theories" and "total BS." Bloomberg Businessweek even goes so far as to say that Kaspersky Lab has "maintained a much closer working relationship with Russia's main intelligence agency, the FSB, than it has publicly admitted. It has developed security technology at the spy agency's behest and worked on joint projects the CEO knew would be embarrassing if made public."

In the same article, Bloomberg's editors go on to say that "The U.S. government hasn't identified any evidence connecting Kaspersky Lab to Russia's spy agencies (...) In June, FBI agents visited a number of the company's U.S. employees at their homes, asking to whom they reported and how much guidance they received from Kaspersky's Moscow headquarters. And a bill was introduced in Congress that would ban the U.S. military from using any Kaspersky products (...)", with one senator calling ties between the company and the Kremlin "very alarming."

US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and other US government agencies, licensed the Unreal Engine from Epic. Unreal is one of the most popular cross-platform game engines in the industry, and United States, through various agencies will use the engines in "serious games", games designed to simulate situations such as crime scenes, encounters, casualty treatment, for the agents to learn to deal with. While the full financial details of these deals were not disclosed, the deal with FBI Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) earned Epic around US $10 million.

The Fifth Amendment rules that nobody may be "compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." Or, in other words, one has a right to avoid self-incrimination. Therefore, it's highly significant that Judge Robert Blackburn ordered a Peyton, Colorado woman accused of a being involved in a mortgage scam, to decrypt the hard disc drive of her Toshiba laptop no later than February 21. If not, she would face the consequences, including contempt of court. In a 10-page opinion, the judge wrote, "I find and conclude that the Fifth Amendment is not implicated by requiring production of the unencrypted contents of the Toshiba Satellite M305 laptop computer."

Optical disc drives have been pretty cheap for years now, yet there is enough money in the business, that three executives managed to collude in price fixing of these devices, scamming HP, Dell and Microsoft in the process - and in the end the consumer, who foots the higher prices. The three are from Hitachi-LG Data Storage Inc. (HLDS) and have reached a plea agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice on price fixing charges for optical disc drives during the 2005-2009 timeframe. According to Security Week, the three executives, Sang Hun Kim, Young Keun Park, and Sik Hur, will each pay $25,000 USD in fines and serve little sentences of seven to eight months in prison at a "correctional facility" aka prison, that is yet to be decided.