Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Silk Road creator sentenced to life in prison Posted: 29 May 2015 07:48 PM PDT Ross Ulbricht, the convicted creator of the Silk Road online drug bazaar, has been sentenced to life in prison. The 31-year-old California man learned his fate Friday afternoon in a New York City courtroom from Katherine Forrest, the same United States District Court judge who presided over the brief trial earlier this year that ended with Ulbricht being convicted of all seven crimes he faced with regards to running Silk Road –an underground website where merchants advertise hard drugs, hacking services and other illegal offerings in exchange for digital cryptocurrency. Ulbricht was facing a mandatory minimum sentence of 20-years in prison, but prosecutors urged Judge Forrest to go beyond that; in a letter to the court filed earlier this week, Ulbricht pleaded with Forrest not to send him away for life. “I’ve had my youth, and I know you must take away my middle years, but please leave me my old age,” he said. “Please leave a small light at the end of the tunnel, an excuse to stay healthy, an excuse to dream of better days ahead and a chance to redeem myself in the free world before I meet my maker.” According to attendees at Friday’s hearing, Ulbricht spoke to the court for around 20 minutes and pleaded Judge Forrest to spare him a life sentence. “I wish I could go back and convince myself to take a different path,” Ulbricht reportedly said. Pete Brush, a reporter for Law360, first confirmed the sentence on Twitter Friday afternoon. Patrick O’Neil, a journalist with the Daily Dot, said Forrest took aim at Ulbricht’s “arrogance.” A jury deliberated for just three-and-a-half hours before deciding in February to find Ulbricht guilty on all counts, including narcotics trafficking conspiracy, continuing a criminal enterprise, computer hacking conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy. His attorneys asked the court for a retrial, but Judge Forrest shot down their request last month. “There is no reasonable probability of a different outcome here: The circumstances of [the]defendant’s arrest, and the evidence found in his own possession at the time of the arrest, are in and of themselves overwhelming evidence of his guilt,” she wrote. Ulbricht’s attorneys are expected to appeal the sentencing. His mother, Lyn Ulbricht, said after the sentencing was announced that “we fear for Ross’ life within the walls of a maximum security prison.”‘ Source The post Silk Road creator sentenced to life in prison appeared first on USAHM Conspiracy News.

NSA says it will keep phone records even if surveillance program ends Posted: 29 May 2015 06:04 PM PDT The National Security Agency has said it will lock down and mothball its archive of US citizens’ phone records if its legal authority to go on collecting the metadata expires as it is due to this Sunday. The political and legal dispute will come to a head on Sunday when the Republican controlled Senate will seek a resolution before the law authorizing the controversial NSA spying program expires at 11:59pm. The debate has pitted the Obama administration’s national security team against those who say the surveillance program, which was revealed to the American public by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013, infringes civil liberties and the US Constitution. The hours leading up to midnight will see a jump in activity at US phone companies and at the NSA as engineers take down servers, monitoring software and hardware from the main optic cables of telephone data traffic, according to several senior officials, the LA Times reports. “We’re in uncharted waters. We have not had to confront addressing the terrorist threat without these authorities. And it’s going to be fraught with unnecessary risk,” said one official, as quoted by the LA Times. Even if the Senate votes to renew legislation that allows for the mass surveillance program to continue, it would take three or four days to get it through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) before all the computer systems required could be rebooted. Another official said even a gap of three or four days was “playing national security roulette.” In the unlikely scenario of the Senate voting before 8pm on Sunday in favor of renewing legislation, the NSA could stop the shutdown. But there are many lawmakers that will fight against any renewal of the law. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky), who is running for a presidential nomination, told supporters on Thursday that he’s determined to “relegate the NSA’s illegal spy program to the trash bin of history where it belongs.” The NSA began the bulk collection of phone records after the September 11 attacks and FISA authorized them in 2006. But after Snowden’s leaks, Obama promised to change the NSA surveillance program. Thus, the so-called USA Freedom Act was born, which passed the house by 338 to 88 on May 13. It involves shifting the burden of holding data to the phone companies, who would then allow the NSA to access it. It would also mean the government would have to obtain a court order to search the records for phone numbers. According to the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, it “preserves the essential operational capabilities of the telephone metadata program and enhances other intelligence capabilities needed to protect our nation and its partners.” It would take six months to take effect but could be derailed by Paul and other senators who argue the NSA’s surveillance remit should simply expire. Ever prepared for a worst case scenario from politicians, the NSA has put its planning teams on “hot standby” to prepare to shut down all the networks that connect them to the nation’s phone records. They will also make sure that officials cannot access the archives. If the legal authority expires they would “lock it down with the same certainty with which we operate,” an official said. Along with the bulk collection of metadata, the “roving wiretap” would also expire, this allows the FBI to keep up with terrorists or criminals who use so-called “burner” phones to evade electronic surveillance. The FBI would also lose its “lone wolf” provision which allows them to tap phones of someone they suspect might be involved in terrorist activity, but who is not connected to a known terrorist group. “As we face a decentralized and increasingly dispersed terrorism threat, and one where [Islamic State] is extolling actors to conduct opportunistic attacks, this is not a tool that we want to see go away,” a senior official said. Source The post NSA says it will keep phone records even if surveillance program ends appeared first on USAHM Conspiracy News.

Adios, Hola! Popular privacy-minded browser plug-in has backdoor for hackers Posted: 29 May 2015 05:35 PM PDT An online service that claims to offer 46 million users a free and secure way to browse the web anonymously is plagued with issues that allow customers to be tracked and hacked, security researchers say. Hola is an Israeli-based browser plugin that since 2008 has given users the ability to surf the web by routing traffic through the connections of others–a feature the company has touted as a means of bypassing restrictions, such as country-specific censorship. However, on Friday this week, a small group of security experts announced that multiple vulnerabilities within the application can seriously compromise the security of its customers. Hackers can actually remotely execute any type of code with system-level privileges on machines of potentially millions of Hola users. According to the team that discovered the flaws–an internationally dispersed group of researchers and developers, including former members of the infamous hacking group LulzSec–issues with both Hola’s code and the company’s corporate policies pose a number of problems. You might know it as a free VPN or ‘unblocker’,” the researchers said, “but in reality it operates like a poorly secured botnet – with serious consequences.” On Hola’s website, the company explains that by sending browser traffic through other nodes in its network, a user in Moscow may be able to surf the web as if they were in Manhattan, “making your IP harder to track,” according to the site, and “thus allowing you to be more anonymous and secure.” “Hola lets you have access to information that is otherwise not available in your geography while protecting your online privacy,” the company explains on its website. “We have built Hola for you, and with your privacy and security in mind,” it boasts. Yet in the “Adios, Hola!” report published on Friday, the researchers say users of the supposedly privacy-minded plug-in can actually be tracked while they browse the web because of a bug that lets remote sites see potentially personal information about the Hola user’s computer, including uniquely crafted IDs that differ with each installation. More critical, however, is their assertion that any of the millions of users could end up having their entire computer compromised due to an error in the software’s code: if a user is navigating web pages with the Hola plugin, a simple click of a link on a malicious site is all it would take for a hacker to remotely execute any type of code on the victim’s machine, the researchers say. “They let anybody execute programs on your computer,” the report claims. To prove as much the researchers have embedded a link in their report which, when clicked, launches the targeted computer’s calculator application. “We’re nice people, so we just made a button that opens a calculator for you,” the researchers wrote. “Somebody with more… malicious goals could have easily done the same, but invisibly, automatically and with a piece of malware instead of a calculator. They could take over your entire computer, without you even knowing.” “It’s worrying when you see poorly designed security products; it’s even worse when you see privacy products that appear to be created specifically to take advantage of people looking for safety online,” Morgan Marquis-Boire, a senior researcher at University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, told RT’s Andrew Blake on Friday. The flaw has been in the plug-in since at least 2013, the group says, and the remote code execution vulnerability can be exploited in the FireFox add-on on computers operating Windows. Other browsers and operating systems, including mobile devices, are vulnerable to the exploit that discloses personal user details, the researchers say. With regards to being able to remotely execute code on a targeted machine, the researchers say Hola users face potentially dire consequences. “If an attacker can perform a Man-in-the-Middle attack against a target running the Hola client on Windows – either as a network adversary, ISP, intelligence agency or another Hola client acting as an exit node — they can create a connection seeming to originate from the hola.org or client.hola.org hosts to the local websocket port,” the report reads. From there, code can be executed by a hacker thousands of miles away, the result of which could give attackers control over entire systems. Ofer Vilenski, the cofounder of Hola, told Motherboard on Friday that “there’s absolutely no way that we know of to do that, nor have we ever heard such a claim.” “This kind of security issue can only happen if a developer is either grossly incompetent, or simply doesn’t care about the security of their users. It’s negligence, plain and simple, and there’s no excuse for it,” the researchers said. According to the group, the only way to avoid being potentially exploited by the bug is to uninstall Hola. Read More Here The post Adios, Hola! Popular privacy-minded browser plug-in has backdoor for hackers appeared first on USAHM Conspiracy News.