Mark A. Forkner, Boeing's former chief technical pilot involved in the company's 737 Max testing, was indicted for fraud by a grand jury in Texas. Due to his position with the company, he was in charge of coordinating with the Federal Aviation Administration to determine the kind of training a pilot needs to fly a particular plane. The indictment accuses him of deceiving the agency's Aircraft Evaluation Group (FAA AEG) when it evaluated and certified the 737 Max model. If you'll recall, two 737 Max planes crashed within months of each other in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people.

Forkner allegedly provided the FAA with "materially false, inaccurate, and incomplete information about a new part of the flight controls for the Boeing 737 MAX called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS)." In both crashes, the AEG determined after an investigation that MCAS, a system designed to push the plane's nose down in certain situations, activated during the flight. The planes that crashed — Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 — nosedived almost as soon as they took off.

According to the Department of Justice, Forkner discovered an important change to MCAS in November 2016, but he allegedly withheld that information from the AEG. As a result, the FAA removed all reference to MCAS in the pilot training materials for the 737 Max. Acting US Attorney Chad E. Meacham for the Northern District of Texas said in a statement that the former chief pilot's actions were financially motivated:

“In an attempt to save Boeing money, Forkner allegedly withheld critical information from regulators. His callous choice to mislead the FAA hampered the agency’s ability to protect the flying public and left pilots in the lurch, lacking information about certain 737 MAX flight controls. The Department of Justice will not tolerate fraud — especially in industries where the stakes are so high."

Earlier this year, Boeing agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle the criminal charge that it had conspired to defraud the FAA. It also agreed to work with the FAA's fraud section for any ongoing and future investigations. As for Forkner, he was charged with two counts of fraud involving aircraft parts and four counts of wire fraud. He's now facing a sentence of up to 100 years in prison. 

The United States Department of Justice has formed a team of investigators to look into the use of cryptocurrency for criminal purposes. To be specific, the group, called National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET), will tackle cases committed by virtual currency exchanges and groups and individuals involved in money laundering. Members will also investigate mixing and tumbling services, which charge customers a fee to send cryptocurrency to an address while also concealing the source of the funds. In addition, they'll work on tracing and recovering assets lost to fraud or ransomware extortion demands. 

According to the DOJ's announcement, the team will combine the expertise of its money laundering and asset recovery section with its computer crime and intellectual property section. It will also include experts from US Attorneys' Offices. The group will be under the supervision of Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite Jr., though the Justice Department is still looking for an individual to lead it. DOJ is looking for someone "with experience with complex criminal investigations and prosecutions, as well as the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies and the blockchain," in particular. 

The hope is that NCET can provide the whole department and other government agencies with the expertise in cryptocurrency and blockchain needed to investigate and prosecute the growing number of cases related to the technology today. There's been a rise in cybercrime cases these past years, including ransomware attacks wherein bad actors target companies across industries to hold their networks hostage in exchange for payment via cryptocurrency. 

Some of them have had real-world consequences. The attack on Colonial Pipeline caused fuel shortage in the East Coast, for instance, while the various attacks on hospitals around the world put people's lives in danger. The Biden administration is even hosting a meeting with 30 countries later this month to discuss the threat of ransomware attacks to global economy and national security.

Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco said in a statement:

"Today we are launching the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team to draw on the Department’s cyber and money laundering expertise to strengthen our capacity to dismantle the financial entities that enable criminal actors to flourish — and quite frankly to profit — from abusing cryptocurrency platforms. As the technology advances, so too must the Department evolve with it so that we’re poised to root out abuse on these platforms and ensure user confidence in these systems."

YouTube has taken down R. Kelly's official channels after the singer was convicted of sex trafficking. The RKellyTV and RKellyVevo channels no longer exist and Kelly will not be allowed to create or own any other channel on the platform, YouTube told Reuters. YouTube made the move in line with its creator responsibility guidelines.

However, this isn't a blanket ban. Kelly's music will still be available on YouTube Music. Kelly videos that other users have uploaded will still be available. Engadget has asked YouTube for clarification on why that's the case.

Two women started a campaign in 2017 to have Kelly's music removed from streaming services and radio. Accusations have been made against him for decades. Prosecutors said Kelly used his fame to exploit women and underage girls and a federal jury found him guilty last month of sex trafficking.

Kelly's sentencing hearing will take place in May. The mandatory minimum sentence is 10 years in prison, though he faces up to life behind bars.

The Department of Justice has reportedly reached an agreement with Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou that will let her return home to China. Meng was arrested in Canada in 2018 on behalf of the US for allegedly violating American sanctions against Iran. She's been fighting attempts to extradite her to the US.

Meng, who is in house arrest while on bail, will admit to some improprieties and in return, prosecutors will postpone and eventually drop bank and wire fraud charges, according to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Meng is scheduled to remotely appear at a federal court on Friday afternoon, with the agreement expected to be filed today.

Prosecutors claimed that Meng misled banks in 2013 about Huawei's connections to Iran. She denied the charges.

Meng's detainment caused an international incident. Two Canadians were apprehended in China within days of Meng's arrest. The WSJ reports the deal with Meng could prompt China to release Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig.

Officials from the Trump administration are said to have offered Meng a similar deal last year, but she reportedly refused to admit to any wrongdoing. Biden admin officials reopened the talks in recent weeks, according to reports, and with Meng seemingly seeking a reunion with her family, she may have been more open to a compromise. A judge in Vancouver was expected to rule on Meng's possible extradition to the US later this year, following almost two years of hearings.

Huawei and its subsidiaries are still facing charges in the US, including conspiracy to steal trade secrets and racketeering conspiracy. The company is not said to be part of Meng's deal and it will reportedly keep fighting the charges.

The US and Huawei have been at loggerheads for several years. American officials have lobbied allies to avoid using the company's 5G telecoms gear due to national security concerns, though Huawei has insisted that its equipment is safe. US sanctions against the company led Google to block Huawei from Android updates, prompting its switch to HarmonyOS 2 (which is a fork of Android) on phones and tablets.

A US district court has sentenced a man who unlocked 1.9 million AT&T phones to 12 years in prison. Muhammad Fahd continued the seven-year scheme to defraud the company even after learning of an investigation against him, according to the Department of Justice. At Fahd's sentencing hearing, Judge Robert S. Lasnik said he committed a “terrible cybercrime over an extended period,” with AT&T said to have lost $201.5 million as a result.

Fahd contacted an AT&T employee through Facebook in 2012 and bribed them to help him unlock customers' phones with "significant sums of money," the DOJ said. Fahd, a citizen of Pakistan and Grenada, urged the employee to recruit co-workers at a Bothell, Washington call center for the scheme too.

The DOJ says the employees unlocked phones for "ineligible customers," who paid Fahd a fee. In spring 2013, AT&T rolled out a system that made it more difficult for the employees to unlock IMEIs. Fahd then recruited an engineer to build malware that would be installed on AT&T's systems to help him unlock phones more efficiently and remotely. The DOJ says the employees gave Fahd details about the company's systems and unlocking methods to aid that process. The malware is said to have obtained information about the system and other AT&T employees' access credentials. The developer used those details to modify the malware.

AT&T claims Fahd and his associates unlocked just over 1.9 million phones through the scheme. The company says because of the unlocks, customers didn't complete payments on their devices, leading to the nine-figure loss.

Fahd was arrested in Hong Kong in 2018 following a 2017 indictment. He was extradited to the US and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in September 2020.

A dual US-Canadian national has been sentenced to 140 months in prison for laundering tens of millions of dollars, including funds stolen from a bank by a North Korean hacking group. Ghaleb Alaumary from Mississauga, Ontario pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit money laundering. According to the US Department of Justice, Alaumary used spoofed emails to trick a university in Canada in the first case. The emails, which looked like they were from a construction company working on a major building project for the university, asked for payment amounting to US$9.4 million. 

After the university wired the money to accounts controlled by Alaumary and his co-conspirators, he worked with various people across the US and elsewhere to launder the funds through various financial institutions. He also had people impersonating wealthy bankers go to Texas to get personally identifiable information from victims and then use that to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from their accounts. 

The second case is wider in scope and involves receiving funds from cyber-heists and fraud schemes. Those funds include money from a North Korean-perpetrated cyber-heist on a Maltese bank in 2019. He also received funds stolen from banks in India and Pakistan, companies in the United States and the UK, individuals in the US and a professional soccer club in the UK. Alaumary laundered the funds he received via cash withdrawals, wire transfers and cryptocurrency purchases.

Acting US Attorney David H. Estes for the Southern District of Georgia said in a statement:

"This defendant served as an integral conduit in a network of cybercriminals who siphoned tens of millions of dollars from multiple entities and institutions across the globe. He laundered money for a rogue nation and some of the world’s worst cybercriminals, and he managed a team of co-conspirators who helped to line the pockets and digital wallets of thieves."

In addition to being sentenced for more than 11 years in prison, Alaumary was also ordered to pay $30 million in restitution to victims.

Peter Thiel's AI company Palantir, whose clients have included the CIA and US immigration agency ICE, is back in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons. A new report claims a glitch in its secretive software program used by the FBI allowed unauthorized personnel to access private data for more than a year. According to The New York Post, the mishap was revealed in a letter by prosecutors in the Manhattan federal court case against accused hacker Virgil Griffith. Palantir denied the claims in a statement and said the fault was caused by the FBI's incorrect use of the software.

Griffith was arrested in 2019 for allegedly providing North Korea with information on how cryptocurrency and blockchain tech could help it to evade US sanctions. The incident in question revolves around the alleged hacker's social media data, obtained through a federal search warrant in March 2020. According to the letter, the Twitter and Facebook information was uploaded to Palantir's program through the default settings, effectively allowing unauthorized FBI employees to access it.

Between May 2020 to August 2021, the material was accessed four times by three analysts and an agent. The FBI case agent assigned to Griffith's case was alerted to the issue by a colleague earlier this month, according to the letter. Those who accessed the info reportedly told prosecutors that they did not recall using it in their investigations.

“An FBI analyst, in the course of conducting a separate investigation, had identified communications between the defendant and the subject of that other investigation by means of searches on the Platform that accessed the Search Warrant Returns,” the letter noted.

Palantir is trying to distance itself from the issue. "There was no glitch in the software," it told The New York Post in a statement, adding that the "customer" did not follow the "rigorous protocols established to protect search warrant returns."

Amid increasing growth, the last thing Palantir needs is a major PR crisis involving flaws in its software. Since going public last fall, the company has seen its revenues surge, though it's operational losses are also increasing. Palantir's customers now span government agencies, tech stalwarts like IBM and even mining group Rio Tinto. Plus, it's working with commercial space companies to manage a meta-constellation of 237 satellites.

The perpetrators of the SolarWinds hacks apparently targeted key parts of the American legal system. According to the AP, the Justice Department says hackers targeted federal prosecutors between May 2020 and December 2020. There were 27 US Attorney offices where the intruders compromised at least one email account, officials said.

The victims included some of the more prominent federal offices, including those in the Eastern and Souther Districts of New York as well as Miami, Los Angeles and Washington.

The DOJ said it had alerted all victims and was taking steps to blunt the risks resulting from the hack. The Department previously said there was no evidence the SolarWinds hackers broke into classified systems, but federal attorneys frequently exchange sensitive case details.

The Biden administration has officially blamed Russia's state-backed Cozy Bear group for the hacks, and retaliated by expelling diplomats and sanctioning 32 "entities and individuals." Russia has denied involvement.

It's not certain if the US will escalate its response. The damage has already been done, after all. This further illustrates the severity of the attacks, however, and hints at the focus — they were clearly interested in legal data in addition to source code and other valuable information.

Las Vegas police appear to have smashed a record while using ancestry to find cold case suspects. BBC Newsreports that Vegas law enforcement claims to have solved the 1989 murder of 14-year-old Stephanie Isaacson (pictured here) using the smallest known volume of DNA. Investigators sent just 0.12 nanograms of DNA samples, or about 15 cells, to Othram's gene sequencing lab to help find a match. For context, a typical home DNA testing kit collects at least 750 nanograms.

Othram used the sequences to comb through ancestry databases and pinpoint the suspect's cousin and identify Darren Roy Marchand as the culprit. The team confirmed the match by comparing the sample against Marchand's DNA from an arrest for a 1986 murder case. Marchand was never convicted and died in 1995.

Vegas police launched the investigation after resident Justin Woo donated money to help law enforcement solve cases using "minimal" DNA levels. The investigation at Othram started on January 19th, but it wasn't until July 12th that the company identified a suspect.

Othram chief David Mittlemen characterized the effort as a "huge milestone" in a discussion with the BBC. This could theoretically solve cold cases where the samples were previously thought too small to be usable.

The breakthrough won't necessarily thrill everyone, however. There have been concerns that law enforcement might violate privacy when conducting these tests, and the Justice Department has established guidelines precisely to prevent those kinds of abuses. While there's no indication Vegas authorities crossed boundaries in the Richardson case, a much larger range of potentially solvable cases also widens the potential for more privacy violations.

Authorities are still cracking down on participants in the July 2020 Twitter celebrity hacks. Spanish National Police have arrested UK citizen Joseph O'Connor at the US' request over his alleged involvement in compromising over 130 Twitter accounts. Officials didn't detail how O'Connor contributed to the campaign, but O'Connor has also been charged with hijacking TikTok and Snapchat accounts as well as cyberstalking a "juvenile" victim.

O'Connor faces a total of ten charges, including six related to unauthorized computer access, two for cyberstalking and one each for extortion and threats.

The Twitter hacks compromised accounts for a wide range of companies and personalities, including Apple, Uber, Elon Musk and eventual US President Joe Biden. The attackers apparently used social engineering to gain access to internal Twitter tools and promote a Bitcoin scam. It didn't take long for police to arrest the claimed mastermind, teen hacker Graham Ivan Clark, who later pled guilty to 30 charges.

O'Connor's arrest won't topple a criminal organization as a result. However, it's evident that US authorities want to send a message to would-be social media hackers — those perpetrators are risking serious charges, even if they're not primarily responsible for the attacks.