Category: UNCATEGORIZED

U.S. prosecutors have brought computer hacking and fraud charges against a Russian citizen, Maksim Yakubets, who is accused of developing and distributing Dridex, a notorious banking malware used to allegedly steal more than $100 million from hundreds of banks over a multi-year operation.

Per the unsealed 10-count indictment, Yakubets is accused of leading and overseeing Evil Corp, a Russian-based cybercriminal network that oversaw the creation of Dridex. The malware is often spread by email and infects computers, silently siphoning off banking logins. The malware has also been known to be used as a delivery mechanism for ransomware, as was the case with the April cyberattack on drinks giant Arizona Beverages.

The Russian hacker is also alleged to have used the Zeus malware to successfully steal more than $70 million from victims’ bank accounts. Prosecutors said the Zeus scheme was “one of the most outrageous cybercrimes in history.”

Justice Department officials, speaking in Washington DC with their international partners from the U.K.’s National Crime Agency, said Yakubets also provided “direct assistance” to the Russian government in his role working for the FSB (formerly KGB) from 2017 to work on projects involving the theft of confidential documents through cyberattacks.

Prosecutors said Evil Corp was to blame for an “unimaginable” amount of cybercrime during the past decade, with a primary focus on attacking financial organizations in the U.S. and the U.K.

“Maksim Yakubets allegedly has engaged in a decade-long cybercrime spree that deployed two of the most damaging pieces of financial malware ever used and resulted in tens of millions of dollars of losses to victims worldwide,” said Brian Benczkowski, assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s criminal division, in remarks.

The State Department announced a $5 million reward for information related to the capture of Yakubets, who remains at large.

In a separate statement, Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin said the department issued sanctions against Evil Corp for the group’s role in international cyber crime, including two other hackers associated with the group — Igor Turashev and Denis Gusev — as well as seven Russian companies with connections to Evil Corp..

“This coordinated action is intended to disrupt the massive phishing campaigns orchestrated by this Russian-based hacker group,” said Mnuchin.

Read more:

• Two hackers behind 2016 Uber data breach have been indicted for another hack
• Justice Department indicts 80 individuals in a massive business email scam bust
• Prosecutors charge Chinese hacker for 2015 Anthem breach

Volvo is making an investment in Palo Alto-based Apex.AI, a startup working on developing a robotic operating system qualified for use in production automobiles. Apex.AI, founded by automated systems engineers Jan Becker and Dejan Pangercic, raised $15.5 million in a Series A last November, and revealed that its focus is on developing an enterprise-focused version of the Robot Operating System open-source middleware.

Apex.AI currently lists two products on its home page: Apex.OS and Apex.Autonomy. The former aims to provide a set of simple-to-integrate APIs that can give automakers and others access to fully certified autonomous mobility technology, while the latter is more focused on specific elements and components for those looking to make use of specific elements of autonomous technology including perception, localization, path planning and more.

Volvo Group Venture Capital acting CEO Anna Westerberg, who is also the automaker’s SVP of Connected Solutions, said in a press release announcing the news that Volvo Group is “excited to invest in a company that enables easier development of safety-certified systems.” In providing systems that comply with industry-standard safety requirements, Apex.AI could potentially help speed the process of getting autonomous driving systems into production vehicles, across both its commercial and consumer offerings.

The financial details of the investment were not disclosed, with publicly-traded Volvo Group saying only that it “has no significant impact” on the overall company’s “earnings or financial position,” which doesn’t mean much except that it’s not material enough to require a detailed disclosure just now. That still could mean a lot of money coming in for Apex.AI, given the relative yardstick of ‘material’ for a huge multinational automaker, and a two-year old Silicon Valley startup.

Ben Holber and Ryan Hambley grew up together. Hambley, the son of a dermatologist, always had clear skin. But Holber struggled with acne from the time he was a teenager. The two saw first-hand the difference it makes to have a dermatologist on demand. Apostrophe was born.

Apostrophe, a new startup that makes it easier to get Rx acne medications and treatments, has today announced the close of a $6 million seed round led by SignalFire, with participation from FJ Labs.

Apostrophe connects users with board certified dermatologists, who then develop a personalized Rx treatment plan for those patients. Apostrophe has a vertically integrated mail-order pharmacy, which facilitates the distribution of those treatment plans.

The goal is to eliminate the hassle of trips to the dermatologist, long waits in the waiting room and the general displeasure of visiting a pharmacy.

Apostrophe contracts with a physicians group to provide the dermatologists to patients, but has no direct employment relationship with the doctors themselves. Holber explained that, given Apostrophe’s positioning as a pharmacy, it’s best to keep dermatologists at arms length from Apostrophe, and vice versa, to make sure that all parties are incentivized solely by the health of the patient.

When users sign up, they’re asked to provide photos and fill out a questionnaire. The Apostrophe platform does some assistive organization and facilitates communication, but the tech is not involved in any diagnostic analysis. Holber said that the decision to stay away from incorporating machine learning in the diagnostic process was a difficult but important one.

“In a world of a million offerings online, when you have real personalization and a real personal interaction, there is a huge premium on that,” said Holber. “There is a ton of value in knowing someone is on the other side really looking at your stuff, and who’s there to answer a question.”

Thus, Apostrophe is laser focused on the connection between dermatologists and patients through asynchronous text conversations, rather than using data and machine learning to replace the dermatologist.

Holber added that the “machine of the dermatologist’s brain is actually really fast,” noting that it takes just a few seconds for a good dermatologist to assess the issue and develop a treatment plan.

Customers pay $20 for the original consultation, and that $20 is then applied as a credit toward purchase of the suggested Rx treatment plan, which is personalized by Apostrophe. The company makes its money off of its pharmaceutical business.

Apostrophe has raised a total of $6.5 million since launch.

10 years after debut, 300 million monthly user Imgur is one of the last massively popular yet unpersonalized home pages on the internet. Since everyone sees the same upvoted posts when they open Imgur, it creates a shared experience full of inside jokes and running gags. But while you can switch to a feed of topics and creators your follow, Imgur has focused on a one-size-fits-all approach over catering to niche audiences.

The gaming community deserved better, and Imgur needed to seize this opportunity. Video and board game tags were the most popular on Imgur, with 46% of users following them. Esports, Twitch, and streaming stars like Ninja have gone mainstream. And there’s a whole world of esoteric memes about absurd in-game moments, highlights from epic wins, and commentary about the industry. That stuff gets diluted and buried on cross-functional apps like Imgur, is tough to easily browse on Reddit, and often times content about all games is mashed together even though you might only play certain ones.

That’s why today, Imgur is launching Melee, the company’s first app beyond its flagship product. Melee lets users subscribe to the games they love to get a feed of memes and gameplay clips. It’s an elegant way to prevent you from seeing jokes you don’t understand or feats of skill you don’t care about. You can also scroll through a popular posts feed if you’re curious about unfamiliar games. Melee debuts today on iOS with an Android version coming in Q1 2020 and a desktop version down the road.

“Gamers are constantly taking recordings and screenshots of the games they’re playing” Imgur founder and CEO Alan Schaaf tells me. “But we found that there’s no place for gamers to share those clips. We want to give these highlights a home.” If 92% of surveyed Imgurians consider themselves ‘gamers’, and the average one already spends 30 minutes per day on Imgur despite it being a general purpose image sharing network, there was clearly room to build something just for them.  Schaaf says “Imgur is interested in building things that the Internet wants.”

There’s an immediate in-group feel when you play with Melee. Whether you’re into Fortnite, Smash Bros, or Dungeons & Dragons, you can find your people to geek out with. There’s certainly already forums on Reddit, Memedroid, and elsewhere dedicated to specific games, but those can get a bit exhausting. Melee keeps things spicy by combining content about your picks in one feed. It’s actually a savvy way to browse any genre of memes. I could see Melee expanding into letting you follow your favorite TV shows, movies, and bands…or someone else might with a copy of its format.

I was glad to hear that Imgur took safety seriously with Melee after stumbling into building messaging into its main app without proper protections in 2016. It has multiple layers of community and staff moderation, will remove obscene content, and won’t tolerate bullying. That’s critical in the gaming space that has a nasty habit of turning toxic. If Imgur can keep things on the rails, it plans to monetize Melee with the company’s expertise in display ads.

Eventually, Schaaf hopes Melee can also help up-and-coming game streaming stars find a following, since on Twitch and YouTube they’re often overshadowed by the biggest stars. “If you start a stream today, you have virtually no chance of attracting an audience and competing in this market. Streamers need a place to post their gameplay in order to grow their audience on streaming platforms” Schaaf tells me. “Melee is that place.” He plans to add more robust profiles and ways for broadcasters to promote their streams in 2020. Viewers will benefit as Melee lets them bypass watching a multi-hour stream just for the best parts.

Imgur remains one of the biggest internet communities no one talks about, despite being a top 15 most popular site in the US according to Alexa. Schaaf bootstrapped the company from his bedroom and beyond for the first 5 years before taking a $40 million Series A in 2014 from Andreessen Horowitz. Now it’s focusing on becoming a more lucrative business. The startup took a $20 million funding round from strategic partner Coil which is going to help Imgur launch a premium subscription tier to its free site.

Imgur started at the end of the web era, and took years to build a full-fledged mobile app. Melee is truly mobile first, and offers a lifeboat to Imgur in case its original tribe disperses. It’s a smart way to harness the massive untapped energy of gamers, the way Instagram harnessed our newfound phone cameras. Finally, meme culture is getting purpose-built social networks.

GM Chairman and CEO Mary Barra said Thursday morning that the automaker is forming a joint venture with LG Chem to mass produce battery cells for its electric vehicles.

The two companies said they will invest up to a total of $2.3 billion into the new joint venture that will include establishing a battery cell assembly plant on a greenfield manufacturing site in the Lordstown area of Northeast Ohio that will create more than 1,100 new jobs.

“With this investment, Ohio and its highly capable workforce will play a key role in our journey toward a world with zero emissions,” Barra said. “Combining our manufacturing expertise with LG Chem’s leading battery-cell technology will help accelerate our pursuit of an all-electric future. We look forward to collaborating with LG Chem on future cell technologies that will continue to improve the value we deliver to our customers.”

Plexo Capital, the fund founded by former GV Partner Lo Toney, has closed its first fund of $42.5 million. The plan is to invest in both startups and emerging VC funds, with 60% to 65% of the capital going toward venture capital funds as a limited partner, and 35% to 40% going directly to startups, Toney told TechCrunch.

In addition to investing as LPs, Plexo Capital will make direct investments in some startups that are funded by firms where Plexo has an LP position.

While Plexo Capital plans to invest in all types of startups and founders, its thesis is that “women and people of color inherently have differentiated networks and a different lens to evaluate deals,” Toney said in a statement. “This is very important at the seed stage, as it leads to a deal flow that is differentiated, and enables us to pursue deals that require an intimate understanding of certain problems or market opportunities in the absence of an abundance of data. Women and people of color bring this to the table.”

The fund’s investors include Alphabet, Intel Capital, Cisco Investments, the Royal Bank of Canada, Kapor Capital, the Hampton University Endowment and the Ford Foundation.

Before launching Plexo Capital, Toney incubated the fund inside GV for a couple of years. For GV, this was a way for the fund to source additional deals. Moving forward, GV will continue to have a working relationship with Plexo Capital.

“One of our aims at GV is to increase access to differentiated deal flow,” GV Managing Partner David Krane said in a statement. “In 2018, Lo and I worked together to build this strategy into an independent fund. We’re proud of everything Lo and his team are building at Plexo Capital, and we’re excited to see the impact of this work with a diverse set of investors and entrepreneurs.”

SpaceX is keeping relatively close to schedule on one of the bold timelines pronounced by its CEO Elon Musk – an unusual but welcome twist from the company’s track record of sticking to its predicted timelines. Specifically, SpaceX notes that it has now completed seven system tests of the latest, upgraded version of the parachutes it plans to use with its Crew Dragon capsule when that launches with astronauts on board for the first time.

The parachute system is crucial, since it’s what provides the safe descent for astronauts on board the Crew Dragon when they return from the International Space Station to Earth once SpaceX’s crewed spacecraft is past the testing phase and fully operational. SpaceX has developed multiple iterations of the parachute system, and is currently on version 3, which features upgraded, more durable materials and new seam sewing processes to provide maximum strength.

Musk said in October that 10 successful tests in a row with the Mark 3 system would be the confidence bar SpaceX would have to attain before moving on to using the new system with the crew capsule, and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine suggested those 10 tests might be able to be run prior to the end of the year. SpaceX shared on Tuesday that it has now run seven such tests, making that 10 figure seem within range prior to the close of 2019.

That would set SpaceX up nicely for a full demonstration mission and actual crewed launch in the first half of 2020, a timeline Bridenstine has repeated lately for crew launches by both SpaceX and NASA’s other commercial crew partner, Boeing. Boeing is set to do an in-flight abort test, another key milestone for these crewed programs, later this month.

It’s take two for SpaceX’s CRS-19 mission, the 19th Commercial Resupply Mission (see how that works?) it’s flying under contract with NASA. The goal of these missions is to ferry supplies, experimental materials and other equipment to the International Space Station, where it’ll be unloaded by the astronauts living and working aboard the orbiting research station.

SpaceX will be looking to launch this one at 12:29 PM EST (9:29 AM PST), during a backup window after the original planned launch on Wednesday was scrubbed due to high altitude winds. It’s not uncommon for a launch to be pushed back due to weather conditions, and there’s always a chance that today’s attempt could be postponed as well, though currently there’s no additional backup opportunity specified for the next try. The launch livestream from SpaceX above will begin at around 15 minutes before the liftoff time, so around 12:14 PM EST (9:14 AM PST).

This mission will continue SpaceX’s great track record with re-using elements of past launch and mission vehicles, with a Dragon cargo capsule (carrying 5,200 lbs of payload) that has flown twice before – once in 2014 and once in 2017. SpaceX will also look to recover the first stage booster of the Falcon 9 which will carry the Dragon to orbit.

On board, there’s a range of different science experiments, including one from Budweiser seeking to find out how beer production works in space, and new equipment for the ISS, like a robot garage for parking robotic equipment when it’s not in use.

Only 5% of the largest voting counties in the U.S. are protected against email impersonation and phishing attacks, seen as a key attack method by hackers who officials say want to disrupt the upcoming presidential election.

The findings come less than a year before millions of Americans are set to go to the polls to vote for the next U.S. commander-in-chief, amid fears that Russia is preparing to disrupt the upcoming presidential election with tactics to manipulate voters as the U.S. intelligence community found in 2016. U.S. officials aren’t only concerned about the spread of foreign-led disinformation — or “fake news” — to try to alter the outcome of the tally, but also threats facing election infrastructure, like hackers breaking into election websites to dissuade or disenfranchise voters from casting their ballot — or even stealing voter data.

Researchers at Valimail, which has a commercial stake in the email security space, looked at the largest three electoral districts in each U.S. state, and found only 10 out of 187 domains were protected with DMARC, an email security protocol that verifies the authenticity of a sender’s email and rejects fraudulent or spoofed emails.

DMARC, when enabled and properly enforced, rejects fake emails that hackers design to spoof a genuine email address by sending to spam or bouncing it from the target’s inbox altogether. Hackers often use spoofed emails to try to trick victims into opening malicious links from people they know.

But the research found that although DMARC is enabled on many domains, it’s not properly enforced, rendering its filtering efforts largely ineffective.

The researchers said 66% of the district election-related domains had no DMARC recoat all, while 28% had either a valid DMARC entry but no enforcement, or an invalid DMARC entry altogether.

That could be a problem for six swing states — Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — where their largest districts are not protected from impersonation attacks. These states are critical to both Democrats and Republicans, as their historically razor thin majorities have allowed either parties’ candidates to win.

The worry is that attackers could use the lack of DMARC to impersonate legitimate email addresses to send targeted phishing or malware in order to gain a foothold on election networks or launch attacks, steal data, or delete it altogether, a move that would potentially disrupt the democratic process.

“It does not require a stretch to imagine attackers impersonating election officials via spoofed domains in order to spread disinformation, conduct voter misdirection or voter-suppression campaigns, or even to inject malware into government networks,” said Valimail’s Seth Blank, who authored the research.

“DMARC at enforcement is a crucial best practice for stopping the largest attack vector into any organization,” said Blank.

“It’s time to get it done,” he said.

We’ve got a packed house for the TC Hackathon that kicks off at Disrupt Berlin 2019 in just six days. We may have limited the number of participants to 500 people, but there’s no limit on the skills, creativity and dogged determination of these coders. Hold up now, there’s still time to save money and buy a pass to Disrupt Berlin. Prices increase 10 December.

We can’t wait to see what this group of worthy competitors will design and build in just 24 hours. They’ve been waiting patiently, and it’s almost time to pull back the curtain and reveal our sponsors, the specific challenges and prizes.

If you’re not familiar with how the Hackathon works, here’s the Cliff Notes version. On day one, participants form teams and choose a sponsored challenge. They have 24 hours to build a working product, and we keep them fed, hydrated and pumped up on caffeine.

Judges review all completed projects and select just 10 teams to move on to the finals on day two. Finalists have two minutes to power pitch their work to the judges — on the Extra Crunch Stage in front of a live audience. A not-to-be-missed event!

Each sponsor announces its winners and awards a variety of cash and prizes. Then TechCrunch chooses one team as the creators of the best over-all hack and awards them $5,000!

Cue the drum roll please — here are the additional prizes waiting for you at the Disrupt Berlin TC Hackathon. Start reviewing your options and planning your design strategy now — and get ready to impress.

TomTom

Location technology can add so much to the services we use every day. Whether it is to locate people, track assets and vehicles, visualize location information or display routes, maps are an essential component to any web or mobile application. With TomTom’s Maps API, developers can easily integrate highly detailed and customizable maps in their application with only a few lines of code.

Your challenge, should you accept it, is to use the TomTom Maps APIs (and combine it with other services) to build an innovative on-demand service. Build the next Uber for delivering food, parcels or groceries — or for getting someone to come and fix your bike.

Prize one: Up to four Nintendo Switches for the winning team.

Prize two: Diversity Heroes Award. We’re giving a prize to the team that leverages its diversity to complete the hackathon challenge, and they’ll receive up to five Lego sets of heroes that leveraged diversity to succeed at a complex challenge.

And we will have another prize or two up our sleeve so stay tuned! The TechCrunch Hackathon takes place at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. Good luck to all the plucky participants. As for the rest of you, come join us for the thrilling competition and see what determined hackers can build in 24 hours!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.