French police rescued the father of a wealthy cryptocurrency entrepreneur in a nighttime raid after he was taken hostage for ransom, the latest alleged criminal effort in France to extort people involved in the management of digital assets.
The man was kidnapped Thursday morning in Paris, the prosecutor’s office said Sunday. “The victim turned out to be the father of a man who made his fortune in cryptocurrencies, and the incident was accompanied by a ransom demand,” its statement said, without giving their names or other specifics about their identities. Police investigators located the hostage in a house in the Essonne region south of Paris, from which he was rescued on Saturday night, the prosecutor’s office said.
Read more…
Source: AP News
Sign up for our Newsletter
The latest news and insights delivered right to your inbox.
Related:
- Meta bans ‘cyber-mercenaries’ that targeted 50,000 people
December 17, 2021
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has banned several “cyber-mercenary” groups thought to have been offering surveillance services aimed at activists, dissidents and journalists worldwide. The social media giant said on Thursday it had begun warning about 50,000 people it believed may have come under scrutiny across more than 100 nations. The Facebook parent said it deleted accounts tied ...
- A deep dive into an NSO zero-click iMessage exploit: Remote Code Execution
December 16, 2021
Google Project Zero researchers want to thank Citizen Lab for sharing a sample of the FORCEDENTRY exploit with them, and Apple’s Security Engineering and Architecture (SEAR) group for collaborating with Google Project Zero on the technical analysis. The editorial opinions reflected below are solely Project Zero’s and do not necessarily reflect those of the organizations ...
- PseudoManuscrypt: a mass-scale spyware attack campaign
December 16, 2021
In June 2021, Kaspersky ICS CERT experts identified malware whose loader has some similarities to the Manuscrypt malware, which is part of the Lazarus APT group’s arsenal. In 2020, the group used Manuscrypt in attacks on defense enterprises in different countries. These attacks are described in the report “Lazarus targets defense industry with ThreatNeedle“. Curiously, the ...
- Hive ransomware enters big league with hundreds breached in four months
December 16, 2021
The Hive ransomware gang is more active and aggressive than its leak site shows, with affiliates attacking an average of three companies every day since the operation became known in late June. Security researchers gleaning information straight from Hive’s administrator panel found that affiliates had breached more than 350 organizations over four months. The gang’s data leak ...
- Lenovo laptops vulnerable to bug allowing admin privileges
December 16, 2021
Lenovo laptops, including ThinkPad and Yoga models, are vulnerable to a privilege elevation bug in the ImControllerService service allowing attackers to execute commands with admin privileges. The flaws are tracked as CVE-2021-3922 and CVE-2021-3969 and affect the ImControllerService component of all Lenovo System Interface Foundation versions below 1.1.20.3. When viewing the Windows services screen, this service ...
- Suspected Iranian hackers target airline with new backdoor
December 16, 2021
A suspected, state-sponsored Iranian threat group has attacked an airline with a never-before-seen backdoor. On Wednesday, cybersecurity researchers from IBM Security X-Force said an Asian airline was the subject of the attack, which likely began in October 2019 until 2021. The advanced persistent threat (APT) group ITG17, also known as MuddyWater, leveraged a free workspace channel on ...

