Argentina Considers Cyberattack as Cause of Power Blackout in Five Countries

Argentina said it isn’t ruling out a cyberattack after what President Mauricio Macri called an “unprecedented” power blackout struck five South American countries. Macri said Argentina is investigating the incident, which began with an as yet unexplained fault in its power grid that led to outages in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile and Paraguay.

Decryption Tool Neutralizes Ransomware By Letting Victims Retrieve Files

A new decryption tool that counters one of the most prolific families of ransomware by allowing victims to retrieve their files for free has been released in a collaborative effort by Europol, the FBI, cybersecurity company Bitdefender, and others. The latest version of the GandCrab decryptor neutralizes the most recent incarnations of the file-locking malware — GandCrab 5.0 through to GandCrab 5.2 — as well as allowing users to retrieve files encrypted by older versions of the ransomware.

Lawyer Gets 14-Year Sentence for Porn Video-Sharing Fraud Scheme

A federal judge in Minneapolis has sentenced Paul Hansmeier to 14 years in prison for an elaborate fraud scheme that involved uploading pornographic videos to file-sharing networks and then threatening to sue people who downloaded them. Prenda Law came up with a novel way of ginning up more business: uploading the films itself, including some that were produced by Prenda associates.

U.S. Increases Cyberoperations Against Russia's Electric Power Grid

The United States is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid in a warning to President Vladimir V. Putin and a demonstration of how the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively, current and former government officials said. In interviews over the past three months, the officials described the previously unreported deployment of American computer code inside Russia’s grid and other targets as a classified companion to more publicly discussed action directed at Moscow’s disinformation and hacking units around the 2018 midterm elections.

European Authorities Blame Russian Groups for Disinformation Campaigns

European authorities blamed Russian groups for disinformation campaigns designed to depress turnout and sway public opinion in last month’s European Union elections, an official accounting that underscored how Russian interference has not abated and that Facebook and other tech platforms remain vulnerable to meddling. The preliminary review by the European Commission and the bloc’s foreign policy and security arm found that Russian-linked groups and other nonstate actors had worked to undermine credibility in the European Union through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Genius.com Accuses Google of Publishing Lyrics from Its Website

Genius Media Group Inc. depends on Google’s search engine to send music lovers to its website stocked with hard-to-decipher lyrics to hip-hop songs and other pop hits. Now Genius.com says its traffic is dropping because, for the past several years, Google has been publishing lyrics on its own platform, with some of them lifted directly from the music site.

Lawsuits Accuse Amazon of Using Alexa to Record Children Without Consent

Two lawsuits against Amazon claim that the company’s Alexa voice assistant illegally records kids without parental consent. The federal lawsuits, both of which seek class action status, allege that Alexa-enabled devices, such as the Echo and Echo Dot, violate laws in nine states — California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington — by storing recordings of children, according to court documents.

Telegram CEO Blames China for 'Powerful DDoS Attack' Amid Hong Kong Protests

The chief executive of Telegram, a popular encrypted messaging app, said the messaging service experienced a “state actor-sized” cyber attack and pointed to China as its likely country of origin. The service was hit by a “powerful DDoS attack” originating from IP addresses mostly inside China, Pavel Durov, Telegram’s CEO, said in a tweet.

Huawei Tells Verizon to Pay Licensing Fees for More Than 200 Patents

Huawei Technologies Co. has told Verizon Communications Inc. that the carrier should pay licensing fees for more than 200 of its patents, according to people familiar with the matter, further escalating tensions between the Chinese company and the U.S. A Huawei intellectual property licensing executive wrote to the U.S. wireless carrier in February, telling Verizon it should pay to “solve the patent licensing issue,” according to the people. Verizon isn’t a Huawei customer.

Facebook Finds Emails Connecting Zuckerberg to Questionable Privacy Practices

Facebook Inc. uncovered emails that appear to connect Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg to potentially problematic privacy practices at the company, according to people familiar with the matter. Within the company, the unearthing of the emails in the process of responding to a continuing federal privacy investigation has raised concerns that they would be harmful to Facebook — at least from a public-relations standpoint — if they were to become public, one of the people said.

Google Moves Some Nest Production Out of China to Avoid U.S. Tariffs

Alphabet Inc.’s Google is moving some production of Nest thermostats and server hardware out of China, avoiding punitive U.S. tariffs and an increasingly hostile government in Beijing, according to people familiar with the matter. Google has already shifted much of its production of U.S.-bound motherboards to Taiwan, averting a 25% tariff, said the people, asking not to be identified discussing internal matters.

WhatsApp Threatens Legal Action Against Those Who Abuse Its System

WhatsApp has threatened legal action against those who publicly claim the ability to abuse its messaging platform, after the emergence of a raft of companies advertising products to bypass usage restrictions. A Reuters investigation found in May that WhatsApp clones and software tools were helping Indian digital marketers and political activists bypass anti-spam restrictions in the run-up to India’s general election.

Warren Wants Antitrust Leader to Recuse Self from Probe of Google, Apple

Democratic U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren called on the Justice Department’s antitrust division chief, Makan Delrahim, to recuse himself from the department’s antitrust investigations into Google and Apple, saying his past lobbying for the companies raised conflict of interest concerns. In a letter to Delrahim, Warren said Alphabet Inc’s Google had hired him in 2007 to lobby federal antitrust officials on behalf of the company’s proposed acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick Inc, and he had reported an estimated $100,000 in income from Google in that year.

House Hearing Focuses on Tech Firms' Impact on News Organizations

Congress opened its antitrust investigation of big tech with a hearing focused on how platforms like Facebook and Google may have harmed publishers by siphoning off profits from news organizations. Lawmakers will hear testimony from executives at News Corp, the owner of The Wall Street Journal and other publications; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution; and the News Media Alliance, a trade group representing 2,000 news organizations, including The New York Times.

Despite Enforcement, Illegal Drug Markets Continue to Appear Online

Despite enforcement actions over the last six years that led to the shutdown of about half a dozen sites — including the most recent two — there are still close to 30 illegal online markets, according to DarknetLive, a news and information site for the dark web. That means the fight against online drug sales is starting to resemble the war on drugs in the physical world: There are raids. Sites are taken down; a few people are arrested. And after a while the trade and markets pop up somewhere else.

Top U.S. Antitrust Official Says He'll Protect High-Tech Competition

The Justice Department’s top antitrust official said he would act to protect competition in the digital marketplace, his first public remarks since news reports that the department was preparing to investigate Alphabet Inc.’s Google. U.S. Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim, in remarks delivered via video to a Tel Aviv University antitrust conference, didn’t specifically mention plans for an investigation of big tech firms, but he noted that a close examination of the digital economy is important in markets where one or two companies are dominant.

In Settlement, Infowars Agrees to Pay $15,000 to Create of Pepe the Frog

Infowars was forced to pay $15,000 in a settlement to the creator of Pepe the Frog, a cartoon amphibian who had been co-opted as a meme by right-wing Internet users, after selling a poster that featured the character on its website. Pepe’s creator, Matt Furie, had brought a copyright lawsuit against Alex Jones’s website after it began selling posters that featured Pepe alongside personalities such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Roger Stone and Diamond and Silk.

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The GigaLaw Firm helps companies of all sizes protect their brands online, using domain name dispute policies – such as the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) – and other legal tools available to copyright and trademark owners on the Internet.