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Telegram founder Pavel Durov detained on arriving in France from Azerbaijan

The encrypted messaging app Telegram has raised over $1 billion by selling bonds to foreign investors, its Russia-born founder Pavel Durov said Tuesday. Durov, 36, wrote on his Telegram channel that the bonds were sold to “some of the largest and most knowledgeable investors from all over the world”. He added that this will allow Telegram to grow “while sticking to its values and remaining independent”. Durov said the funds will fuel the app’s monetisation strategy that was outlined in December, according to which the platform will launch paid services this year.

The man who fired shots at former President Donald Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania had encrypted accounts in multiple countries, according to a member of the U.S. House of Representatives task force investigating the attempted assassination.“We haven’t learned much about those overseas accounts,” Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) told a press conference in Chicago on Aug. 21. “We do know they were in ... Belgium, New Zealand, and Germany.”Waltz is on the “Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump.”FBI officials previously disclosed that Crooks used encrypted messaging applications.“Why does a 19-year-old kid who is a health care...

Trump shooter Thomas Crooks had “3 encrypted overseas accounts” — Rep. Michael Waltz (R–FL) ... Rep. Waltz did not comment further and said more will be learned Monday during House hearing.

Andrew Desiderio @AndrewDesiderio NEWS — Senate briefing on Trump rally shooting just concluded. Top lines, per 2 senators on the call: —The shooter visited the rally site a few days in advance to scope it out —62 mins elapsed between the time the shooter was photographed as being suspicious and when he fired the shots —20 mins elapsed between the time he was spotted by snipers & when he fired the shots —FBI Director Wray said there’s no known foreign nexus but no established motive as of now. Shooter used encrypted comms and had little to no social media presence

One day after the search at Trump’s home, the FBI has taken the personal cell phone of Rep. Scott Perry, a Republican from Pennsylvania. Rep. Perry gave an exclusive statement to Fox News about what happened.“This morning, while traveling with my family, 3 FBI agents visited me and seized my cell phone. They made no attempt to contact my lawyer, who would have made arrangements for them to have my phone if that was their wish. I’m outraged — though not surprised — that the FBI under the direction of Merrick Garland’s DOJ, would seize the phone of a sitting...

You might remember back in May 2018 when sketchy porn lawyer Michael Avenetti was releasing U.S. Treasury notifications on Michael Cohen received from an unknown source within the Treasury Department. You might also remember when New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow wrote a sympathetic article after talking to the leaking treasury official. As a result the Treasury Inspector General began an investigation. Today, a U.S. Treasury employee named Natalie Mayflower Sours-Edwards was arrested and charged with leaking to numerous reporters multiple financial reports about suspicious financial transactions related to: Paul Manafort, Richard Gates, Maria Butina, and others.

A French climate activist has been arrested after the private email service ProtonMail cooperated with authorities after a court ruling, logging details of a user before providing it to the police to identify a French citizen. On Monday, Andy Yen, the founder and CEO of Proton, the company behind the Swiss email provider ProtonMail, published a statement saying that he deplored the way legal tools had been used to bring about the arrest of a French climate change activist, but claimed his service was still secure. “In this case, Proton received a legally binding order from Swiss authorities which we...

Although the insecure algorithms are still implemented in modern mobile phones, the researchers do not expect them to pose a significant threat to users. Credit: RUB, Marquard ================================================================================== The encryption algorithm GEA-1 was implemented in mobile phones in the 1990s to encrypt data connections. Since then, it has been kept secret. Now, a research team from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB), together with colleagues from France and Norway, has analyzed the algorithm and has come to the following conclusion: GEA-1 is so easy to break that it must be a deliberately weak encryption that was built in as a backdoor. Although the...

Chinese security outfit Qihoo 360 Netlab on Wednesday said it has identified Linux backdoor malware that has remained undetected for a number of years.The firm said its bot monitoring system spotted on March 25 a suspicious ELF program that interacted with four command-and-control (C2) domains over the TCP HTTPS port 443 even though the protocol used isn't actually TLS/SSL."A close look at the sample revealed it to be a backdoor targeting Linux X64 systems, a family that has been around for at least three years," Netlab researchers Alex Turing and Hui Wang said in an advisory.An MD5 signature for the...

It can generate 250 terabytes of random bits per second. In fact, it was so fast that the team behind it struggled to record its output using a high-speed camera. According to the researchers, their system trumps physical random number generators both in speed and through its ability to create many bitstreams simultaneously. The results are published in the journal Science. The new invention utilizes a tiny laser, just one millimeter long, which bounces light between mirrors positioned at either end of an hourglass-shaped cavity before exiting the device, reports Science News. Unlike previous laser-based systems, the new process can...

Bitcoin owners are getting rich because the cryptocurrency has soared. But what happens when you can’t access that wealth because you forgot the password to your digital wallet? Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer living in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth, as of this week, about $220 million. The password will let him unlock a small hard drive, known as an IronKey, which contains the private keys to a digital wallet that holds 7,002 Bitcoin. While the price of Bitcoin dropped sharply on Monday, it is still up more than 50 percent...

Everything is disconnected until somebody connects it. On February 9, 2018, the DOJ released a batch of captured text messages between Senate Intelligence Committee Vice-Chairman Mark Warner and the lawyer for Christopher Steele, Adam Waldman. At the time the texts were released the media narrative surrounded the top-line story that Senator Warner was having back channel discussions to communicate with the author of the now famous Trump dossier, Chris Steele. However, no-one seemed to wonder why these messages were captured, and even more curiously why they were released. Immediately following the release, SSCI member Marco Rubio, the current acting chairman...

Saturday, May 23, 2020 President Trump had a phone call with Erdogan (I confirmed  the call per an article in Bloomberg). On June 13, some on Twitter were excited about claims being made about that call.  12:36 PM · Jun 13, 2020 https://twitter.com/Frank26689741/status/1271889209629032448 Tweeter FiestyQgrl @FQgrl  provided this Google translation of the Turkish news broadcast message "Met for the first time with Hillary Clinton (former US foreign minister and presidential candidate). He looks and loves us positively. If selected, the services here will be more comfortable. republicans are seriously against us."Another Twitter account, Scrappy-Doo aka Harpazo-girl#̷̧̢̼̤͈̼̫̋̾Q̸̼͔͕̗͚̟̉̄̄ @Scrappy94546226, offers the following...

Starting today, Mozilla will turn on by default DNS over HTTPS (DoH) for Firefox users in the US, the company has announced. DoH is a new standard that encrypts a part of your internet traffic that’s typically sent over an unencrypted plain text connection, and which could allow others to see what websites you’re visiting, even when your communication with the website itself is encrypted using HTTPS. Mozilla says it is the first browser to support the new standard by default, and will be rolling it out gradually over the coming weeks in order to address any unforeseen issues.Whenever you...

Julian Assange tried to contact Hillary Clinton and the White House when he realized that unredacted U.S. diplomatic cables given to WikiLeaks were about to be dumped on the internet, his lawyer told his London extradition hearing on Tuesday. Assange is being sought by the United States on 18 counts of hacking U.S. government computers and an espionage offense, having allegedly conspired with Chelsea Manning, then a U.S. soldier known as Bradley Manning, to leak hundreds of thousands of secret documents by WikiLeaks almost a decade ago. On Monday, the lawyer representing the United States told the hearing that Assange,...

The developer behind the game-changing, WikiLeaks inspired submission system “SecureDrop,” has allegedly committed suicide. “Second developer of WikiLeaks inspired submission system “SecureDrop”, security expert James Dolan, aged 36, has tragically died. He is said to have committed suicide. The first, Aaron Swartz, is said to have taken his own life at age 26, after being persecuted by US prosecutors,” tweeted WikiLeaks’ official Twitter account.

BOSTON (AP) — A Harvard University fellow who was studying ethics was charged with hacking into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's computer network to steal nearly 5 million academic articles. Aaron Swartz, 24, of Cambridge, was accused of stealing the documents from JSTOR, a popular research subscription service that offers digitized copies of more than 1,000 academic journals and documents, some dating back to the 17th century. In an indictment released Tuesday, prosecutors say Swartz stole 4.8 million articles between September 2010 and January after breaking into a computer wiring closet on MIT's campus. Swartz, then a student at the...

or more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret. The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software. The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran,...

Apple and the US government are at loggerheads for the second time in four years over unlocking iPhones connected to a mass shooting, reviving debate over law enforcement access to encrypted devices. Attorney General Bill Barr said Monday that Apple failed to provide "substantive assistance" in unlocking two iPhones in the investigation into the December shooting deaths of three US sailors at a Florida naval station, which he called an "act of terrorism."