The U.K. Government is seeking to keep most of the $7 billion in Bitcoin it seized in connection with a Chinese investment fraud, following the conviction of the fraud’s alleged organizer this week.
Zhimin Qian pleaded guilty on counts of possessing and transferring criminal property at Southwark Crown Court on Monday, following last year’s conviction of her assistant Seng Hok Ling (also known as Jian Wen) on similar counts. This conviction now raises the question of who will keep the 61,000 BTC originally seized by UK authorities in 2018, with upwards of 120,000 victims in China seeking compensation for their losses.
Read more…
Source: Decrypt News
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- FBI’s new ransomware warning: Don’t pay up, but if you do, tell us about it
October 3, 2019
After a spate of ransomware attacks on government organizations, the FBI has come up with a new stance on paying up ransomware demands. The latest groups to be targeted by high-value ransomware attacks are hospital organizations in Alabama, USA, and Victoria, Australia. Both resulted in hospitals turning away non-critical patients as employees worked to restore IT systems. The attacks on ...
- HQWar: the higher it flies, the harder it drops
October 2, 2019
Mobile dropper Trojans are one of today’s most rapidly growing classes of malware. In Q1 2019, droppers are in the 2nd or 3rd position in terms of share of total detected threats, while holding nearly half of all Top 20 places in 2018. Since the droppers’ main task is to deliver payload while sidestepping the ...
- Dutch police take down hornets’ nest of DDoS botnets
October 2, 2019
Dutch police have taken down this week a bulletproof hosting provider that has sheltered tens of IoT botnets that have been responsible for hundreds of thousands of DDoS attacks around the world, ZDNet has learned. Servers were seized, and two men were arrested yesterday at the offices of KV Solutions BV (KV hereinafter), a so-called bulletproof hosting provider, ...
- New Fileless Botnet Novter Distributed by KovCoreG Malvertising Campaign
October 1, 2019
Trend Micro found a new modular fileless botnet malware, which we named “Novter,” (also reported and known as “Nodersok” and “Divergent”) that the KovCoreG campaign has been distributing since March. We’ve been actively monitoring this threat since its emergence and early development, and saw it being frequently updated. KovCoreG, active since 2011, is a long-running campaign ...
- Thousands of PCs Affected by Nodersok/Divergent Malware
September 27, 2019
New malware identified by Microsoft and Cisco Talos has affected thousands of PCs in the United States and Europe and turns systems into proxies for performing malicious activity, the companies said. The fileless threat—called Nodersok by Microsoft and Divergent by Cisco Talos—has many of its own components but also takes advantage of existing tools to do ...
- WhiteShadow downloader uses Microsoft SQL queries to deliver malicious payloads
September 27, 2019
Researchers have documented the emergence of a downloader that makes use of Microsoft SQL queries to pull and deliver malicious payloads. In August this year, Proofpoint researchers found the new, staged downloader, known as WhiteShadow, which is being used to deliver a variety of malware to vulnerable systems. The cybersecurity team said in a blog post on Thursday ...

