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The Securities and Exchange Commission today secured emergency relief in which all the defendants in its litigation against Binance Holdings Limited, BAM Management US Holdings Inc., BAM Trading Services Inc., and Changpeng Zhao agreed to repatriate to the United States assets held for the benefit of customers of the Binance.US crypto trading platform. The order from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia also prohibits defendants BAM Trading Services Inc. and BAM Management US Holdings, Inc. (together, “BAM”) from spending corporate assets other than in the ordinary course of business. The order helps ensure that Binance.US customers are permitted to withdraw their assets from the platform and that those assets that remain on the platform are protected and remain in the United States through the resolution of the SEC’s pending litigation against Binance Holdings Ltd., BAM, and their founder, Zhao.

“Given that Changpeng Zhao and Binance have control of the platforms’ customers’ assets and have been able to commingle customer assets or divert customer assets as they please, as we have alleged, these prohibitions are essential to protecting investor assets,” said Gurbir S. Grewal, Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. “Further, we ensured that U.S. customers will be able to withdraw their assets from the platform while we work to resolve the alleged underlying misconduct and hold Zhao and the Binance entities accountable for their alleged securities law violations.”

Specifically, the order
(1) requires all of the defendants to repatriate to the United States assets held for the benefit of BAM’s U.S. customers
(2) requires BAM to maintain U.S. customer assets in the United States for the duration of the litigation and to facilitate customer withdrawals
(3) expressly prohibits BAM from transferring any assets or funds, or from providing control over such assets or funds to co-defendants Binance Holdings Limited, Changpeng Zhao, or their affiliates
(4) restricts BAM from spending assets or funds except for ordinary course business expenses and requires BAM to provide the SEC with oversight over such expenses
(5) prohibits all of the defendants from destroying records
(6) requires all of the defendants to submit expedited sworn accountings of certain assets to the SEC
(7) requires all of the defendants to submit to expedited discovery by the SEC on the custody and security of customer assets.

Ten members of a criminal organization that engaged in the smuggling of gold and other precious goods as well as money laundering activities were detained in the early hours of June 15, 2023, as a result of a joint operation by law enforcement agencies in Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. A complex money laundering scheme across Europe is allegedly used by the network to launder over 15 million euros in total. The operation, which took place in Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, involved over 150 police officers.

Foundry for gold that is illegal has been found.
The ROS Carabinieri in Florence launched the operation's investigation in 2019, and it was conducted in close collaboration with Swiss and German law enforcement. The initial focus of the investigation was on a Greek national who had connections to an Iranian businessman engaged in international gold smuggling and money laundering schemes in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Turkey. Ten criminals from Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Iran operated in the gold industry as the network as a whole. Through intricate money laundering schemes, they used shell companies to conceal assets obtained illegally.

Members of the criminal organization procured gold and other precious goods on the black market, created fake documentation for them, and then used couriers to ship them to Türkiye, their final destination. Investigators in Zurich came across a room that had been transformed into an illegal foundry where gold was melted to conceal its illicit origin.

international law enforcement and judicial cooperation that is close.
In a joint investigation team led by Eurojust, this investigation was carried out with close judicial and police cooperation. Europol assisted the investigation by providing intelligence, carrying out numerous cross-checks and creating cross-match reports, hosting operational and coordination meetings, and facilitating information sharing via SIENA. Additionally, the joint operation was supported by the EU-funded Project ISF4 @ON, an Italian-led initiative to combat organized crime groups with mafia-like characteristics that operate in Europe.

authorities that are taking part:.

• In Italy, there are two public prosecutors' offices: the Procura della Repubblica presso il Tribunale di Milano and the ROS Carabinieri Florence (Raggruppamento Operativo Speciale Carabinieri Firenze).
• Germany: Landeskriminalamt Nordrhein-Westfalen (German State Criminal Police Office North Rhine-Westphalia).
• Switzerland: Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland; Federal Office of Police fedpol (Federal Criminal Investigation Police).

A third vulnerability affecting Progress Software's MOVEit Transfer application was disclosed on Thursday as the Cl0p cybercrime gang used extortion against the affected businesses.

A SQL injection vulnerability that "could result in escalated privileges and potential unauthorized access to the environment" is also a part of the newly discovered flaw, which has not yet been given a CVE number. ".

To protect their environments while a fix to the weakness is being developed, the company is advising its clients to turn off all HTTP and HTTPs traffic to MOVEit Transfer on ports 80 and 443. The cloud-managed file transfer program has received all necessary patches.

The information was made public a week after Progress disclosed another set of SQL injection flaws (CVE-2023-35036), which the company claimed could be exploited to gain access to the database content of the application.

The flaws join CVE-2023-34362, a zero-day exploit used in data theft attacks by the Clop ransomware gang. Kroll claimed to have discovered proof that the group, known by Microsoft as Lace Tempest, had been testing the exploit as early as July 2021.

Use the MOVEit Transfer App.
The development also takes place at the same time that the Cl0p actors publish a list of 27 companies on their darknet leak portal that they claim were compromised by the MOVEit Transfer flaw. This also includes numerous U., claims a CNN report. S. the Department of Energy, among other federal agencies.

a weakness in the MOVEit Transfer App.
According to ReliaQuest, "the number of potentially compromised organizations to date is significantly higher than the initial number named as part of Clop's last MFT exploitation: the Fortra GoAnywhere MFT campaign.".

Nearly 31% of the over 1,400 exposed hosts running MOVEit, according to Censys, a web-based search platform for evaluating attack surfaces for internet-connected devices, are in the financial services sector, followed by healthcare (16%), information technology (9%), and the government and military (8%) sectors. Nearly 80% of the servers are located in the United States. S.

According to Kaspersky's analysis of 97 families of malware that were distributed using the malware-as-a-service (MaaS) business model between 2015 and 2022, ransomware has a 58 percent market share, followed by information stealers (24 percent), botnets, loaders, and backdoors (18 percent), and then information thieves.

"Money is the root of all evil, including cybercrime," the Russian cybersecurity firm asserted, adding that MaaS schemes enable less technically skilled attackers to participate in the fight, lowering the bar for carrying out such attacks.