doj3 articles
Florida 'Ransomware Recovery' Boss Charged With Quietly Paying Hackers While Billing Victims $19M for Fake Expertise
Zohar Pinhasi, owner of Florida-based cybersecurity firm MonsterCloud, has been charged with wire fraud by the U.S. Department of Justice for allegedly deceiving ransomware victims by secretly paying ransoms to cybercriminals while falsely claiming to use proprietary decryption tools. Pinhasi reportedly charged clients over $19 million in total, far exceeding the $8 million he actually paid to ransomware attackers, pocketing the substantial difference as profit. If convicted on all counts, he faces up to 20 years in prison per charge.
The DOJ Is Sniffing Around Nvidia's Groq Deal. It's Probably Already Too Late.
Nvidia's $20 billion deal to license Groq's AI accelerator technology and hire its key engineers has drawn a DOJ antitrust probe, with critics arguing it was deliberately structured to avoid regulatory scrutiny while effectively gutting the startup. The deal gave Nvidia access to Groq's SRAM-based accelerators, which complement its GPUs for AI inference tasks, though similar disaggregated computing architectures are already being developed by rivals like Cerebras, SambaNova, and AMD. Even if the DOJ successfully unwinds the deal, the impact may be limited, as Nvidia has already built a broader ecosystem through open rack designs and its NVLink Fusion licensing programme that would allow Groq or others to continue as hardware partners regardless.
DoJ Quietly Walks Back Claim That Major US Agencies Were Hacked by Chinese Group
The U.S. Department of Justice corrected a press statement to clarify that several federal agencies, including NASA, the Federal Reserve, and the DoJ itself, were *targeted* by Chinese state-linked hacking group QTFY rather than confirmed *victims*, a distinction suggesting not all targeted organisations were successfully compromised. QTFY, operating through a private Chinese company with ties to the Ministry of State Security, has been active since 2018 and provides cyber espionage tools — including a vulnerability scanning platform and an obfuscation network — used to attack critical infrastructure in the U.S. and abroad. The FBI has since seized domains linked to the group's key tools, while investigators revealed QTFY also operates a botnet of compromised IoT devices to mask the origins of its malicious traffic.