Jeffrey Epstein Had a ‘Personal Hacker,’ Informant Claims
Like the impasse Relations between the United States government and Minnesota continue this week over immigration enforcement operations that have essentially occupied the Twin Cities and other parts of the state, as a federal judge delayed his ruling this week and ordered a new briefing on whether the Department of Homeland Security was using armed raids to pressure Minnesota into abandoning its immigrant sanctuary policy.
Meanwhile, minutes after a federal immigration agent fatally shot Alex Pretti, 37, in Minneapolis last Saturday, Trump administration officials and right-wing influencers had already launched a smear campaign, calling Pretti a “terrorist” and a “crazy.”
As part of its surveillance program, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been using an AI-powered Palantir system since last spring to summarize tips sent to its tip line, according to a recently released Homeland Security document. DHS immigration agents also use the now-famous facial recognition app Mobile Fortify to scan the faces of countless people in the United States, including many citizens. And a new ICE filing provides insight into how commercial tools, including for ad technology and big data analytics, are increasingly being considered by the government for law enforcement and surveillance purposes. And an active military officer analyzed federal immigration enforcement actions in Minneapolis and across the United States for WIRED, concluding that ICE is posing as a military force but is actually using immature tactics that would result in the deaths of real soldiers.
WIRED this week released numerous internal details about the inner workings of a fraudulent resort in the Golden Triangle region of Laos after a human trafficking victim calling himself Red Bull communicated with a WIRED reporter for months and leaked a massive trove of internal documents from the resort where he was being held. Importantly, WIRED also chronicled his own experiences as a forced laborer in the compound and his attempts to escape.
Deepfake “nudification” technology and tools that produce sexual deepfakes are becoming increasingly sophisticated, capable, and easily accessible, posing more and more risks to the millions of people who are abused by this technology. Additionally, research this week found that an AI stuffed toy from Bondu had its web console almost entirely unprotected, exposing 50,000 child chat logs to anyone with a Gmail account.
And there’s more. Every week, we round up security and privacy news that we haven’t covered in depth ourselves. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.
According to a document released Friday by the Department of Justice, an informant told the FBI in 2017 that Jeffrey Epstein had a “personal hacker.” The document, first reported by TechCrunch, was released as part of a large trove of documents the DOJ is legally required to release regarding the investigation into the deceased sex offender. The document does not provide the identity of the alleged hacker, but it contains some details: They were allegedly born in Italy in the southern region of Calabria, and their hacking focused on discovering vulnerabilities in Apple’s iOS mobile operating system, BlackBerry devices and the Firefox browser. The informant told the FBI that the hacker “was very good at finding vulnerabilities.”
The hacker allegedly developed offensive hacking tools, including exploits for unknown and/or unpatched vulnerabilities, and sold them to several countries, including an unnamed central African government, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The informant even reported to the FBI that the hacker sold an exploit to Hezbollah and received “a trunkful of cash” as payment. It is unclear whether the informant’s account is accurate or whether the FBI has verified the report.
Viral AI assistant OpenClaw, previously called Clawdbot and then, briefly, Moltbot, took Silicon Valley by storm this week. Technologists let the assistant control their digital life: connecting them to online accounts and letting them perform tasks for them. The assistant, as WIRED reported, runs on a personal computer, connects to other AI models and can be allowed to access your Gmail, Amazon and many other accounts. “I could automate almost everything. It was magic,” one entrepreneur told WIRED.
They weren’t the only ones to be intrigued by the powerful AI assistant. The creators of OpenClaw claim that more than 2 million people have visited the project over the past week. However, its agent capabilities come with potential security and privacy tradeoffs – starting with the need to provide access to online accounts – that likely make it difficult for many people to operate securely. As OpenClaw grew in popularity, security researchers identified “hundreds” of cases in which users exposed their systems to the Web, the Register reported. Many had no authentication and provided complete access to the users’ system.
