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A transnational criminal ring smuggling migrants from Cuba to the European Union has been dismantled by law enforcement in five different countries. 25 of the 62 people arrested as a result of the investigation—which was coordinated by Europol and INTERPOL—were Cuban citizens. Members of the migrant smuggling network advertised their illegal services to vulnerable Cuban clients using a popular messaging app. They would plan the trip, arrange transfers, and give false documentation in exchange for a payment of about EUR 9 000. Because Serbia at the time did not require a visa for entry, the criminals flew people in from Cuba. After that, migrants would be flown into Spain via Greece after being smuggled there. The criminal organization is thought to have successfully smuggled about 5,000 Cuban nationals into the EU, earning them a profit of about EUR 45 million.

The investigation turned up a sophisticated criminal infrastructure that had been set up in numerous cities throughout Serbia, Greece, and Spain. This infrastructure was nimble and adaptable, allowing the criminals to continue operating their illegal enterprises despite shifting conditions. On the action day in June 2023, law enforcement officials from all three nations seized a range of illegal items, including forgery tools and hundreds of fake documents. In total, 144 bank accounts, 18 pieces of real estate, 33 vehicles, and enormous sums of money in different currencies were seized.

unusually expensive and long smuggling route.
The investigation was started in October 2021 after Serbian, Greek, North Macedonian, and Finnish authorities alerted authorities to an increase in Cuban citizens trying to enter Europe with forged documents. Europol, the European Union Agency for Asylum, and Frontex all released Joint Intelligence Notifications in January 2023 that showed this pattern. Russian aggression in Ukraine had an impact on migrant smuggling routes, according to the notification with the subject "Cuban nationals smuggled into the EU: shifting routes and modi operandi in a changed geo-political landscape.".

Initially, Cuban nationals flew commercially from Cuba to Russia. Smugglers there gave them the choice of flying to Serbia to continue their journey through the Western Balkans into Central or Southern Europe, or crossing the Finnish-Russian border illegally to enter EU territory. The path was altered ever since Russia started its war against Ukraine. A flight from Frankfurt Airport in Germany to Serbia carried Cuban nationals. The criminal network would help the Cuban nationals enter North Macedonia and Greece illegally after they arrived in Serbia. The smugglers would lead large groups of migrants along a variety of routes, forcing them to walk for hours in the dark without supplies. Along with these difficult circumstances, the criminals would prey on the most defenseless migrants, including children, and subject them to scams, robberies, and extortion. In some instances, women were moved to other criminal organizations for sexual exploitation.

The migrants would use further transportation to other EU nations arranged by the criminals, such as flights to Spain or sea transport to Italy, after arriving in Greece. The criminal network used the so-called "lookalike method," in which real travel documents are stolen and given to a migrant who closely resembles the real passport holder, to provide migrants with forged documents so they could travel within the EU.

Position of Europol.
Numerous operational gatherings were organized by Europol, which also made it easier for its partners to collaborate, coordinate, and exchange personnel. Three Europol analysts and a specialist were sent to Spain, Greece, and Serbia on the activity day. The specialist and analysts offered on-the-spot assistance with cross-match reports and intelligence analysis. Additionally, a group of Europol investigators from the organization's headquarters in The Hague supported the action day by coordinating with and advising the personnel who had been deployed.

Information about an OpenSSH vulnerability that has since been patched has become available. Under certain circumstances, this vulnerability may be used to remotely execute arbitrary commands on compromised hosts.

Saeed Abbasi, manager of vulnerability research at Qualys, stated in an analysis last week that "this vulnerability enables a remote attacker to potentially execute arbitrary commands on vulnerable OpenSSH's forwarded ssh-agent.".

With a CVSS score of N/A, the vulnerability is being tracked as CVE-2023-38408.
Prior to 9.3p2, it affects all releases of OpenSSH.

With the SSH protocol, OpenSSH is a well-liked connectivity tool for remote login that encrypts all traffic to prevent listening in, connection hijacking, and other attacks.

The victim system must have specific libraries installed, and the SSH authentication agent must be forwarded to an attacker-controlled system for the exploitation to be successful. SSH agent is a background program that keeps users' keys in memory and enables remote logins to a server without requiring them to enter their passphrase again.

When looking through the ssh-agent source code, Qualys discovered that, if ENABLE_PKCS11 was used during compilation, a remote attacker with access to the remote server where Alice's ssh-agent is forwarded could load (dlopen()) and immediately unload (dlclose()) any shared library in /usr/lib* on Alice's workstation (via her forwarded ssh-agent), Qualys said.

The cybersecurity company claimed that its proof-of-concept (PoC) attack against the default Ubuntu Desktop 22.04 and 21.10 installations was successful, though other Linux distributions are anticipated to be equally vulnerable.

Users of OpenSSH are strongly encouraged to update to the most recent version in order to protect themselves from potential online threats.

Early in February, the OpenSSH developers released a patch to address a medium-severity security hole (CVE-2023-25136, CVSS score: 6.5) that could have allowed an unauthenticated remote attacker to change unexpected memory locations and potentially execute code.

Another security flaw that could be exploited by using a carefully crafted DNS response to read adjacent stack data outside of its bounds and deny service to the SSH client was fixed in a later release in March.

As a top supplier of privacy-focused solutions, Utopia P2P works to allay worries about privacy in the online environment.
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In response to recent proposals that aim to give state intelligence agencies more digital surveillance authority, Apple has issued a warning, saying that it would prefer to stop providing iMessage and FaceTime services in the UK than to give in to pressure from the government.

In light of the latest development, which was first reported by BBC News, the iPhone manufacturer is the latest to voice their opposition to upcoming legislative changes to the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) 2016 that would effectively render encryption protections useless.

The Online Safety Bill specifically mandates that businesses implement technology to check encrypted messaging apps and other services for content related to terrorism and child sex exploitation and abuse (CSEA). Additionally, it requires messaging services to check security features with the Home Office before releasing them and to act quickly to disable them if necessary without disclosing their existence to the general public.

Although the fact does not specifically call for the removal of end-to-end encryption, it would de facto amount to its weakening because the companies providing the services would have to scan all messages to identify and remove them. This action has been criticized as being excessive because it enables widespread government surveillance and interception.

A clause like that would pose a serious and immediate threat to data security and information privacy, Apple informed the British broadcaster. ".

The UK government was urged in an open letter published earlier this month to reconsider its position and "encourage companies to offer more privacy and security to its residents" by a number of messaging apps that currently provide encrypted chats, including Element, Signal, Threema, Viber, Meta-owned WhatsApp, and Wire. ".

The letter stated that the bill "provides no explicit protection for encryption and, if implemented as written, could empower OFCOM to try to force the proactive scanning of private messages on end-to-end encrypted communication services—nullifying the purpose of end-to-end encryption as a result and jeopardizing the privacy of all users.".

After facing opposition from digital rights organizations who were concerned that the feature could be misused to compromise users' privacy and security, Apple, which had previously announced its own plans to flag potentially problematic and abusive content in iCloud Photos, abandoned them last year.

This is not the first time that end-to-end encryption and the need to combat serious online crimes have come into conflict.

WhatsApp filed a lawsuit against the Indian government in May 2021 to prevent the government from enacting internet rules that would force the messaging service to disable encryption by implementing a traceability mechanism to locate the "first originator of information" or risk facing legal repercussions. The case is still open.

Apple's refusal to cooperate is consistent with its public stance on privacy, which enables it to position itself as a "privacy hero" among other businesses that rely on gathering user data to deliver customized advertisements.

But it also seems hollow in light of the fact that SMS does not support end-to-end encryption, making all messages sent to or received from non-Apple devices unencrypted and potentially susceptible to government eavesdropping.