Jeffrey Epstein had a ‘personal hacker’, informant claims

As confrontation Relations between the U.S. government and Minnesota are heating up this week over immigration enforcement operations that have essentially occupied the Twin Cities and other parts of the state, and a federal judge delayed a decision this week and ordered a new briefing on whether the Department of Homeland Security was using armed raids to pressure Minnesota to abandon its sanctuary policies for immigrants.

Meanwhile, minutes after a federal immigration officer shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Peretti in Minneapolis last Saturday, Trump administration officials and right-wing influencers were already launching a smear campaign, calling Peretti a “terrorist” and “crazy.”

As part of its surveillance network, ICE has been using Palantir’s AI-powered system since last spring to summarize tips sent to its tip line, according to a newly released Homeland Security document. Immigration agents at the Department of Homeland Security also use the notorious facial recognition app Mobile Fortify to scan the faces of countless people in the United States, including many citizens. The new ICE filing offers insights into how the government is increasingly considering commercial tools, including advertising technology and big data analysis, for law enforcement and surveillance purposes. An active military officer analyzed federal immigration enforcement actions in Minneapolis and across the United States for WIRED and concluded that ICE masquerades as a military force, but actually uses immature tactics that would result in the deaths of real soldiers.

WIRED published extensive internal details this week about the inner workings of a fraud complex in Laos’ Golden Triangle region after a human trafficking victim who called himself Red Bull communicated with a WIRED reporter for months and leaked a massive trove of internal documents from the complex where he was being held. More importantly, WIRED also chronicled his own experiences as a forced laborer at the compound and his attempts to escape.

Deepfake technology and the tools that produce sexual deepfakes are becoming increasingly sophisticated, capable, and accessible, posing a growing risk to the millions of people who are being abused using this technology. Additionally, research this week found that AI stuffed animal toy Bondu had its web console almost completely unprotected, exposing 50,000 records of chats with children 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 titles to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

According to a document released by the Justice Department on Friday, 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 trove of materials the Justice Department is legally required to release in connection with the investigation into the late sex offender. The document does not provide an identity for the alleged hacker, but it does include some details: They were allegedly born in Italy in the southern Calabria region, and their hacking operation 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 exploiting unknown and/or unpatched vulnerabilities and allegedly sold them to several countries, including the unnamed Central African government, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The informant even told the FBI that the hacker sold the exploit to Hezbollah and received a “cash box” in exchange for payment. It is unclear whether the informant’s account is accurate or whether the FBI has verified the report.

The viral AI assistant OpenClaw — formerly called Clawdbot and then briefly Moltbot — made a storm in Silicon Valley this week. Techs allow the assistant to control their digital lives: linking it to online accounts and letting it complete tasks for them. The assistant, as WIRED reported, runs on a personal computer, connects to other AI models, and can be granted permission to access Gmail, Amazon, and dozens of other accounts. “I could basically automate anything,” one entrepreneur told WIRED. “It was magical.”

They weren’t the only ones interested in the capable AI assistant. OpenClaw’s creators say more than two million people have visited the project over the past week. However, its proxy capabilities come with potential security and privacy trade-offs – starting with the need to provide access to online accounts – that potentially make it impractical for many people to operate securely. As OpenClaw’s popularity has grown, security researchers have identified “hundreds” of cases in which users have exposed their systems on the web, The Register reported. Many of them did not include any authentication and provided full access to the users’ system.