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He was also secretly filming in leisure centres A perv who reportedly hacked people's iCloud accounts to obtain sexual images before sharing them online has been sent to prison for nearly three years. Tony Spencer of Victoria Hill, Eye, Suffolk, was found by Basildon Crown Court to have "accessed iCloud accounts without the owners' consent" by using "software", according to a police statement. One of Spencer's victims had told Essex Police in 2017 that her iCloud account had been breached and her "personal intimate pictures" posted online shortly afterwards. Spencer pleaded guilty in September last year to a dozen Computer Misuse Act offences, nine counts of voyeurism and five counts of making an indecent photograph of a child. On top of his 32-month sentence, handed down late last week, he was put on the Sex Offenders' Register for life and handed a Sexual Harm Prevention Order for 10 years. In addition to iCloud hacking, Spencer had also filmed women and children getting changed in his local leisure centre with hidden cameras. Detective Sergeant Ian Collins of Essex Police's Cyber Crime Team commented: "Spencer was not able to access any accounts secured with 2FA as he would have needed the mobile phone of the victims at the same time." The policeman added that Spencer's sordid secret lifestyle "went hidden for many years until we received just a single report that revealed much, much more… he used his specialist knowledge to hack his unsuspecting victims' accounts and then accessed their most intimate photographs for his own sexual purpose and that of others." No details were given of what software Spencer was using, though a simple online search throws up millions of results which may or may not actually work. The Register has asked Essex Police for more information and will update this article if the force responds. The force said it was conducting a larger investigation into iCloud account hacking, partially triggered by its investigation into Spencer. The force appears to be a fan of using the Computer Misuse Act (CMA) against hackers. Academics and campaigners have called for the CMA to be reformed for the modern era, arguing that because there is no specific sentencing guideline for judges to use, jail terms handed down to CMA criminals are inconsistent. The Crown Prosecution Service's London tentacle recently slapped a last-second fraud charge onto a man who admitted hacking the National Lottery, a wise decision from the prosecutors' perspective when the judge used that as the basis for handing down a nine-month prison sentence. Previous research by The Register found that prison sentences under the CMA tend to be measured in months rather than years. Source

Driver gets a-weigh with Chromebook thefts and doesn't get away with it Gevorg Kevliyan, a resident of Decatur, Alabama, was sentenced earlier this month to a year in prison and three years of supervised release – for stealing 900 Acer Chromebook laptops from a truck he'd been hired to drive. Back in 2017, according to the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Georgia, computer maker Acer hired a trucking company to deliver 15 pallets consisting of 900 Acer Chromebook laptops [PDF] worth an estimated $245,000, or about $267 apiece. The devices were driven from a distribution center in Los Angeles, California to a Costco warehouse in College Park, Georgia. But when they arrived, there were undisclosed problems with the purchase order paperwork, so Costco decided to return them. Kevliyan was hired to drive the notebooks back to the Golden State. According to the government, Kevliyan took control of the cargo and later reported it empty, telling investigators that he ended up driving to Chicago, Illinois, to pick up a different load before arriving in California. But the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), a state law enforcement agency, found a discrepancy with his tale. Records from a truck weigh-station in Ringgold, Georgia – most US states require large commercial vehicles to stop and be weighed to make sure they aren't destroying the roads – showed that Kevliyan's truck weighed several thousand pounds more than an empty tractor-trailer. The excess weight just happened to be more or less what 900 boxed Acer laptops on pallets would weigh. Upon arriving in Chicago, GBI agents followed the truck's GPS trail to a warehouse where they obtained surveillance video showing 15 pallets being unloaded from a truck that appeared to be Kevliyan's with the help of an on-site janitor and other unknown men. The janitor, the government said, recounted being paid $250 by the owner of a local business to unload the pallets. Investigators believe the janitor later helped load the pallets onto another truck with another driver for the same amount. However, the Chromebooks have not been recovered and further investigation appears to be unlikely. GBI agents also found that Kevliyan had gambled at the Virgin River Hotel and Casino in Mesquite, Nevada, with over $11,000 in cash after arriving from Chicago. Kevliyan's wife, two sons, and sister submitted letters to the court attesting to their father's otherwise good character and difficult circumstances. The public defender handling the case argued Kevliyan should not be incarcerated because he has Type 2 diabetes, because his offense was non-violent, and because he's remorseful and unlikely at his age to re-offend. While these pleas may have mitigated Kevliyan's sentence, they didn't keep him out of prison. In addition to serving a one-year sentence, Kevliyan must pay $245,000 in restitution. Source

John McAfee of antivirus software fame has arrived in London from the Dominican Republic, where he had been detained for several days with his wife and several others for entering the Caribbean nation with a cache of weapons on his yacht, his lawyer said Friday. Authorities “asked him where he wanted to go, and he decided on London,” his attorney Candido Simon told Reuters. News of his arrival in the UK came two days after McAfee, 73, the eponymous founder of the PC software security giant, said on Twitter that he was released “after four days of confinement” along with five other people, including his wife, Janice. “I was well treated. My superiors were friendly and helpful. In spite of the helpful circumstances, we’ve decided to move on,” the British-born tech guru said in a tweet Wednesday. After Dominican authorities ensured that the US had no active legal cases or extradition requests for McAfee, they allowed him to choose where he wanted to go, Simon said. McAfee has been sought by US tax authorities since January 2012, when he announced that he had fled the country and “living in exile” on a boat because of felony charges handed down by the Internal Revenue Service. A spokesman for the IRS told The Post on Friday that he could not release any information about the case, as per policy. McAfee — who is seeking the Libertarian Party’s nomination for US president in 2020 — asked his Twitter followers on Friday whether he should also campaign to be British prime minister. “Can a person run for, and be, President of the United States and Prime Minister of Great Britain simultaneously? Yes. Absolutely. Without question. But I believe I am one of the few people still alive who could qualify for the combined position,” he tweeted. Earlier this week, McAfee docked his yacht, Great Mystery, in Puerto Plata, a province on the DR’s Atlantic north coast, where the weapons and ammo stash was seized, Reuters reported. Customs officials said they found pistols, a shotgun and bars of suspected silver on the yacht. While in custody, McAfee retweeted a photo posted by his wife of himself sitting shirtless in a cell. “@theemrsmcafee insisted I looked better in this jailhouse photo since I was smiling. Janice was incarcerated in the cellblock next door at the same time. She just forgot how to properly smuggle phones,” he wrote. “My crime is not filing tax returns – not a crime. The rest is propaganda by the U.S. government to silence me. My voice is the voice of dissent. If I am silenced, dissent itself will be next,” he wrote in a July 19 tweet. “The CIA has attempted to collect us. We are at sea now and will report more soon. I will continue to be dark for the next few days,” he said in another tweet, which included a photograph of himself and a woman brandishing rifles. On July 22, he wrote that they had been “at sea 4 and a half in rough weather. Nearing port. All is well. Will be back in the saddle shortly.” McAfee said he couldn’t wait to “get off of this God forsaken boat that lost air conditioning and water 18 hours into the trip. None of us have bathed for 5 days.” His Twitter account was later taken over by his campaign manager Rob Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Loggia-Ramirez, who wrote: “If John misses his next check-in, events will be set into motion that I cannot prevent once they have begun. At the peak of his wealth, McAfee’s net worth topped $100 million – but he reportedly lost the bulk of his fortune during the global financial crisis in 2009. He then liquidated his assets and moved to Belize, where he surrounded himself with a harem of young women – many of whom moved in with him at his heavily fortified beachfront compound on Ambergris Caye. In 2012, Belize police said McAfee was a “person of interest” in the murder of a neighbor. He told the news outlet Wired in November of that year that he was forced into hiding because local authorities were trying to kill him. Prime Minister Dean Barrow dismissed the allegations, describing McAfee as “extremely paranoid — even bonkers.” McAfee was later arrested in Guatemala, where he sought political asylum but was charged with entering the country illegally. He was hospitalized for suspected heart attacks, which he later claimed he faked to avoid being handed over to police in Belize. On Dec. 21, 2012, Guatemalan authorities deported him to the US, where he reportedly met Janice, who solicited him as a prostitute in South Beach, Florida. The couple have lived in constant fear of his assassination by agents of the Belize government, according to a Newsweek report. McAfee sold his famous anti-virus software company, which he founded in 1987, in 1994 for about $75 million. “John has secreted data with individuals across the world. I know neither their identities or locations. They will release their payloads if John goes missing.” McAfee said in a video earlier this year that he was charged for “using cryptocurrencies in criminal acts” by Tennessee authorities, according to bitcoin.com. “I am running my campaign in exile on this boat for the duration — I will not allow them to imprison me and shut my voice down, which they will do immediately — Why? I am a flight risk. Obviously, I am in flight,” McAfee said in the video. The cybersecurity pioneer also boasted in a Jan. 3 tweet that he had not “filed a tax return for 8 years,” saying “taxation is illegal” and that his “net income is negative.” Source

Founder and operator of defunct bitcoin exchange Bitfunder gets 14 months jail time for lying to regulators about the loss of more than 6,000 bitcoins. A crypto criminal case that dates back to 2013 has finally come to an end. The founder and operator of the now-defunct Bitcoin exchange Bitfunder, Jon Montroll, was sentenced yesterday to 14 months in jail for lying to federal regulators about a hack that cost his customers more than 6,000 bitcoins—worth nearly $70 million at today’s prices. Montroll allegedly defrauded his customers by failing to disclose a hack of the exchange in July 2013. The Bitfunder operator then attempted to cover it up by misappropriating their funds to hide the lost bitcoins, according to federal prosecutors. The ordeal initially caught the eye of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in the fall of 2013. When questioned about his bitcoin exchange’s operations and the breach of its systems by the SEC in November 2013, Montroll allegedly misled regulators, assuring them that his exchange’s funds were safe through a phony screenshot of balance statements. Montroll pleaded guilty to federal charges of securities fraud and obstruction of justice and was sentenced to 14 months in prison and three years probation by a federal judge in the Southern District of New York. But the trouble doesn’t end there for Bitfunder’s founder, who also faces civil charges stemming from the case. In February 2018, the SEC charged Montroll with “operating an unregistered securities exchange and defrauding users of that exchange” in a civil-enforcement action. The Commission also alleged that Montroll sold “unregistered securities” that were supposedly “investments” in his business, and absconded with those funds as well. Source

“The world should know that what they’re doing out here is crazy,” said a man who refused to share his passcode with police. As police now routinely seek access to people’s cellphones, privacy advocates see a dangerous erosion of Americans’ rights, with courts scrambling to keep up. William Montanez is used to getting stopped by the police in Tampa, Florida, for small-time traffic and marijuana violations; it’s happened more than a dozen times. When they pulled him over last June, he didn’t try to hide his pot, telling officers, "Yeah, I smoke it, there's a joint in the center console, you gonna arrest me for that?" They did arrest him, not only for the marijuana but also for two small bottles they believed contained THC oil — a felony — and for having a firearm while committing that felony (they found a handgun in the glove box). Then things got testy. As they confiscated his two iPhones, a text message popped up on the locked screen of one of them: “OMG, did they find it?” The officers demanded his passcodes, warning him they’d get warrants to search the cellphones. Montanez suspected that police were trying to fish for evidence of illegal activity. He also didn’t want them seeing more personal things, including intimate pictures of his girlfriend. So he refused, and was locked up on the drug and firearms charges. William Montanez Five days later, after Montanez was bailed out of jail, a deputy from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office tracked him down, handed him the warrants and demanded the phone passcodes. Again, Montanez refused. Prosecutors went to a judge, who ordered him locked up again for contempt of court. “I felt like they were violating me. They can’t do that,” Montanez, 25, recalled recently. "F--- y’all. I ain’t done nothing wrong. They wanted to get in the phone for what?” He paid a steep price, spending 44 days behind bars before the THC and gun charges were dropped, the contempt order got tossed and he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor pot charge. And yet he regrets nothing, because he now sees his defiance as taking a stand against the abuse of his rights. “The world should know that what they’re doing out here is crazy,” Montanez said. The police never got into his phones. While few would choose jail, Montanez’s decision reflects a growing resistance to law enforcement’s power to peer into Americans’ digital lives. The main portals into that activity are cellphones, which are protected from prying eyes by encryption, with passcodes the only way in. As police now routinely seek access to people’s cellphones, privacy advocates see a dangerous erosion of Americans’ rights, with courts scrambling to keep up. “It’s becoming harder to escape the reach of police using technology that didn’t exist before,” said Riana Pfefferkorn, the associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. “And now we are in the position of trying to walk that back and stem the tide.” While courts have determined that police need a warrant to search a cellphone, the question of whether police can force someone to share a passcode is far from settled, with no laws on the books and a confusing patchwork of differing judicial decisions. Last month, the Indiana Supreme Court heard arguments on the issue. The state supreme courts in Pennsylvania and New Jersey are considering similar cases. As this legal battle unfolds, police keep pursuing new ways of breaking into cellphones if the owners don’t cooperate — or are enlisting help from technology firms that can do it for them. This has put them at odds with cellphone makers, all of whom continually update their products to make them harder for hackers or anyone else to break into. But the hacking techniques are imperfect and expensive, and not all law enforcement agencies have them. That is why officials say compelling suspects to unlock their cellphones is essential to police work. Making the tactic more difficult, they say, would tilt justice in favor of criminals. “It would have an extreme chilling effect on our ability to thoroughly investigate and bring many, many cases, including violent offenses,” said Hillar Moore, the district attorney in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who got the FBI’s help in breaking into a cellphone belonging to a suspect in a deadly Louisiana State University fraternity hazing ritual. “It would basically shut the door.” Clashes over passcodes In the part of Florida where Montanez lives, authorities are guided by a case involving an upskirt photo. A young mother shopping at a Target store in Sarasota in July 2014 noticed a man taking a picture of her with his phone while crouching on the floor. She confronted him. He fled. Two days later, police arrested Aaron Stahl and charged him with video voyeurism. Authorities got a search warrant for Stahl’s iPhone, but he wouldn’t give them the passcode, citing his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. A trial judge ruled in his favor, but a state appellate court reversed the decision in December 2016, saying Stahl had to provide the code. Facing the possibility of getting convicted at trial and sentenced to prison, Stahl agreed to plead no contest in exchange for probation. While Stahl did not provide the passcode in the end, prosecutors still rely on the precedent established by the appellate ruling to compel others to turn over their passcodes under the threat of jail. “Up until that point you could be a pedophile or a child pornogropher and carry around the fruits of your crime in front of law enforcement officers, prosecutors and judges and taunt them with fact that they couldn’t get the passcode,” said Cynthia Meiners, who prosecuted Stahl at the 12th Judicial Circuit State’s Attorney’s Office. “You could say, ‘I’m a child pornographer and it’s on my phone but I’m not giving you my passcode because I would be incriminating myself.’” But that ruling only holds in a few counties of Florida. Elsewhere in the country, skirmishes remain unresolved. In Indiana, police officials are trying to force a woman to share her passcode as they investigate her for harassment, saying she was making it impossible for them to obtain key evidence. The woman’s lawyer says authorities haven’t said what evidence they think is in the phone, raising concerns about a limitless search. Her appeals reached the state Supreme Court, whose ruling could influence similar cases around the country. Attorneys general in eight other states filed a brief in support of the police, warning against a ruling that “drastically alters the balance of power between investigators and criminals.” The stakes are similar in New Jersey, where a sheriff’s deputy accused of tipping off drug dealers to police activities has refused to hand over passcodes to his iPhones. The state Supreme Court agreed in May to hear the case. These clashes aren’t limited to the use of passcodes. Police have also tried to force people to open phones through biometrics, such as thumbprints or facial recognition. Legal experts see the Fifth Amendment argument against self-incrimination as more of a stretch in those cases. The law has generally been interpreted as protecting data that someone possesses — including the contents of their mind, such as passcodes — but not necessarily their physical traits, such as thumbprints. Still, some judges have refused to sign warrants seeking permission to force someone to unlock their phone using their face or finger. The rules on compelled decryption are more lenient at the U.S. border, where federal agents have given themselves wide authority to search the phones of people entering the country ─ and have reportedly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on third-party hacking tools. “Depending on where you are in the country, there is different case law on what police can do,” said Andrew Crocker, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties nonprofit. In some states, there is no authoritative court ruling, leaving law enforcement authorities to decide for themselves. Virginia falls into that category. Bryan Porter, the prosecutor in the city of Alexandria, said he has told local police it’s OK to try to force someone under the threat of jail to open a cellphone by thumbprint or face. But demanding a password seems to go too far, he said. Criminals shouldn’t be able to inoculate themselves from investigations, Porter said. “But it kind of rubs me the wrong way to present a piece of paper to someone and say, ‘Give us your passcode.’” ‘What they were doing to me was illegal’ In Tampa, Florida, where Montanez was arrested last year, judges still rely on the 2016 ruling against Stahl by the Second District Court of Appeals. That is what prosecutors cited when they tried to force Montanez to give up his passcodes. But Montanez’s lawyer, Patrick Leduc, argued that, unlike Stahl’s case, police had no reason to search the phone, because it had no connection to the offenses he was charged with. The “OMG, did they find it?” text message — which turned out to be from Montanez’s mother, who owned the car and the gun in the glove box — was meaningless, Leduc said. He warned of a police “fishing expedition” in which authorities could search for anything potentially incriminating on his phone. While sitting in lockup for contempt, Montanez’s resolve not to give up his passcodes hardened. “What they were doing to me was illegal and I wasn’t going to give them their business like that,” he said. “They told me I got the key to my freedom,” he added. “But I was like, ‘F--- that.’” But the experience shook him. “I ain’t the toughest guy in the world, but I can protect myself. But it was crazy,” he said. “Bad food, fights here and there, people trying to take your food.” At the same time, the drugs and gun case against Montanez was crumbling. Laboratory tests on the suspected THC oil came back negative, voiding that felony charge and the gun charge related to it. That left prosecutors with only minor pot charges. But he remained in jail on the contempt charge while his lawyer and prosecutors negotiated a plea deal. In August 2018, after Montanez had spent more than five weeks in jail for refusing to provide the passcode, an appellate court dismissed the contempt case on a technicality. The court invited prosecutors to try again, but by then the passcode’s value had diminished. Instead, prosecutors allowed Montanez to plead no contest to misdemeanor drug charges and he was freed. When he was released, Montanez carried a notoriety that made him feel unwelcome in his own neighborhood. He noticed people looking at him differently. He was banned from his favorite bar. The police keep pulling him over, and he now fears them, he said. He finally left Tampa and lives in Pasco County, about an hour away. “Yeah, I took a stand against them,” he said. “But I lost all that time. I gotta deal with that, going to jail for no reason.” Source