Hong Kong police bust love scam that duped victims out of $46 million using deepfakes

TechCrunch Feds arrest man who allegedly participated in hack of the SEC's X account, boosting Bitcoin's price Federal authorities announced Thursday the arrest of a man in Alabama, accusing him of participating in the hack of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission X account earlier this year. Eric Council Jr. was indicted in connection with the SEC X account hack, which happened on January 9, when the account published a post falsely announcing that the Commission had approved Bitcoin ETFs to be listed in securities exchanges in the country, a post that increased the price of Bitcoin by $1,000, according to a press release by the U.S. Attorney's Office in the District of Columbia. According to the indictment against Council, he worked with other unnamed co-conspirators to perform a SIM swap on the phone account of a person who had access to the SEC X account, only identified as "C.L.".

The 14 biggest take-private PE acquisitions so far this year in tech The private equity realm has been pretty active so far in 2024, serving as a powerful "alternative" source of liquidity for technology startups and scale-ups in search of an exit. In August, TechCrunch reported that EQT had picked up a majority stake in cybersecurity firm Acronis at a valuation of around $4 billion, following in the footsteps of another exit, in which EQT snapped up enterprise middleware company WSO2 for $600 million. According to PitchBook, there were 136 take-private deals led by private equity firms in 2023, up 15% on the previous year.

With $11.9 million in funding, Dottxt tells AI models how to answer As we've reported before, enterprise CIOs are taking generative AI slow. For instance, LLMs (aka large language models) require a lot of cajoling to deliver valid JSON. The company is led by the team behind the open-source project Outlines, which helps developers get what they need from ChatGPT and other generative AI models without having to resort to crude tactics like injecting emotional blackmail into prompts ('write the code or the kitten gets it!').

Hyperspectral imagery startup Wyvern looks to raise US presence with $6M raise The Alberta-based company, which collects what it says is the highest-resolution hyperspectral imagery on the market, has raised $6 million to, among other things, expand into U.S. commercial and defense markets. The new funding was led by Squadra Ventures, a firm squarely focused on investing in companies in the cyber and national security spaces. Wyvern has already established an American subsidiary, and co-founder Kurtis Broda told TechCrunch that working with Squadra was a "natural fit" for growing in that market.

Hackers are extorting Globe Life with stolen customer data Insurance giant Globe Life, which provides life and health insurance policies to millions of Americans, says it is being extorted by a hacker that has stolen customers' sensitive data. In a regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, the Texas-based conglomerate said it has "recently received communications" from an unknown threat actor who is seeking to extort money from the company in exchange for not disclosing data stolen from its systems. The compromised data, which Globe Life has traced back to its American Income Life Insurance Company subsidiary (AIL), includes personally identifiable information, such as customer names, postal addresses, and phone numbers.