Category Archives: Gangs and Crimes

Organized Crime in San Francisco Forces Retailers to Close

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It all escalated with Prop 47…you remember that right? Going back to 2019, in part from the Federalist:

Rachel Michelin, who currently serves as President of the California Retailers Association, explained to Fox News the crude savviness of the latest generation of shoplifters. “[Shoplifters] know what they’re doing. They will bring in calculators and get all the way up to the $950 limit.” She continued. “One person will go into a store, fill up their backpack, come out, dump it out and go right back in and do it all over again.”

Retailers tried to work through the shoplifting with higher training for employees and more security systems and officers…due to the volume, the retailers just lost the battle. Residents in the area of San Francisco and actually around the state live in lawlessness….

No one is above the law unless it is the woke crowd and there is a value threshold….

*** Slide 1 of 3: Walgreens throughout Sam Francisco have been hit hard during the pandemic.

© Lea Suzuki/The Chronicle 2020// Mallory Moench is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer

That changed in March when the Walgreens, ravaged by shoplifting, closed. Susoeff, 77, who sometimes uses a cane, now goes six blocks for medication and other necessities.

“It’s terrible,” he said. On his last visit before the store closed, even beef jerky was behind lock and key. A CVS nearby shuttered in 2019, with similar reports of rampant shoplifting.

“I don’t blame them for closing,” Susoeff said.

Last year, burglaries increased in most San Francisco neighborhoods. Shoplifting decreased under pandemic lockdown and dropped slightly the year before, but incidents are often underreported and have become more violent and brazen, police said.

Retailers attributed a majority of losses to professional thieves instead of opportunistic shoplifters who may be driven by poverty, with one CVS leader calling San Francisco a hub of organized retail crime. Losses have shuttered drugstores providing vital services, even more critical during the pandemic as some stores give out vaccines.

“This has been out of control,” said Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who held a hearing Thursday with retailers, police, the district attorney and probation departments. “People are scared to go into these stores — seniors, people with disabilities, children. It’s just happening brazenly. We can’t just as a city throw up our hands and say this is OK. We have to come up with solutions.”

The cost of business and shoplifting led Walgreens to shut 17 locations in San Francisco in the past five years — an “unpopular and difficult decision,” Jason Cunningham, regional vice president for pharmacy and retail operations in California and Hawaii, said at the hearing. The company still has 53 stores in the city.

Theft in Walgreens’ San Francisco stores is four times the average for stores elsewhere in the country, and the chain spends 35 times more on security guards in the city than elsewhere, Cunningham said.

At CVS, 42% of losses in the Bay Area came from 12 stores in San Francisco, which are only 8% of the market share, Brendan Dugan, director of organized retail crime and corporate investigations, said at the hearing.

CVS and Walgreens said they train employees to be engaged and visible to prevent theft, but to not confront thieves directly when it could turn violent. CVS security guards in San Francisco have been assaulted, especially at the now-closed Seventh and Market streets location, Dugan said. Some businesses instead hire costly off-duty police officers.

Although the majority of CVS shoplifting incidents in the city are by opportunists, Dugan said, professional crime accounts for 85% of the company’s dollar losses. He said San Francisco is one of the “epicenters” of organized retail crime, pointing to an $8 million state bust in the Bay Area last year.

Officials agreed that different responses were needed depending on why someone was committing a crime. San Francisco Deputy Public Defender Doug Welch called in to the hearing to say his clients charged with shoplifting are not part of organized crime, but are homeless or struggling with substance abuse and need more services.

The San Francisco police burglary unit focuses on investigating serial shoplifters, especially if they’re violent, police said. Beat officers patrol known shoplifting areas. Last year, around 31% of shoplifting incidents resulted in arrest, a percentage that declined over the past couple years, police said.

A statement from Safeway read at Thursday’s hearing blamed Proposition 47, which lowered penalties for thefts under $950, for “dramatic increases” in shoplifting losses. Safaí said he is proud of Prop. 47 and supports criminal justice reform and rehabilitation, but also urges prosecution for organized crime and community ambassadors to prevent opportunistic shoplifting.

Professional shoplifters can work the system by stealing items under the threshold from one store and hitting several retailers in the same day. To prosecute, the district attorney has pursued aggregated charges for multiple petty theft incidents by the same person, such as a recent case of stolen scooters. Police said a person could also be charged with possession of stolen property worth more than $950.

As officials try to stave off crime, San Franciscans suffer from shuttered stores. Residents tried to save the Walgreens at Bush and Larkin in March, circulating a petition and arguing that the next closest store was not handicapped-accessible.

“This has become a lifeline for many seniors, people with disabilities, and low income residents who cannot go further out to other stores to get what they need,” the petition said.

The store still wound up closing.

 

 

Looks Like Law Enforcement Actually Shutdown DarkSide

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A big hat tip to the work of law enforcement but which agency remains unknown at this point.

Shutting down the servers of DarkSide is a great achievement but not before there were other victims such as Toshiba.

A Toshiba Corp (6502.T) unit said it was hacked by the DarkSide ransomware group, overshadowing an announcement of a strategic review for the Japanese conglomerate under pressure from activist shareholders to seek out suitors.

Toshiba Tec Corp (6588.T), which makes products such as bar code printers and is valued at $2.3 billion, was hacked by DarkSide – the group widely believed to be behind the recent Colonial Pipeline attack, its French subsidiary said.

From Krebs:

The DarkSide ransomware affiliate program responsible for the six-day outage at Colonial Pipeline this week that led to fuel shortages and price spikes across the country is running for the hills. The crime gang announced it was closing up shop after its servers were seized and someone drained the cryptocurrency from an account the group uses to pay affiliates.

“Servers were seized (country not named), money of advertisers and founders was transferred to an unknown account,” reads a message from a cybercrime forum reposted to the Russian OSINT Telegram channel.

“A few hours ago, we lost access to the public part of our infrastructure,” the message continues, explaining the outage affected its victim shaming blog where stolen data is published from victims who refuse to pay a ransom.

“Hosting support, apart from information ‘at the request of law enforcement agencies,’ does not provide any other information,” the DarkSide admin says. “Also, a few hours after the withdrawal, funds from the payment server (ours and clients’) were withdrawn to an unknown address.”

DarkSide organizers also said they were releasing decryption tools for all of the companies that have been ransomed but which haven’t yet paid.

“After that, you will be free to communicate with them wherever you want in any way you want,” the instructions read.

The DarkSide message includes passages apparently penned by a leader of the REvil ransomware-as-a-service platform. This is interesting because security experts have posited that many of DarkSide’s core members are closely tied to the REvil gang.

The REvil representative said its program was introducing new restrictions on the kinds of organizations that affiliates could hold for ransom, and that henceforth it would be forbidden to attack those in the “social sector” (defined as healthcare and educational institutions) and organizations in the “gov-sector” (state) of any country. Affiliates also will be required to get approval before infecting victims.

The new restrictions came as some Russian cybercrime forums began distancing themselves from ransomware operations altogether. On Thursday, the administrator of the popular Russian forum XSS announced the community would no longer allow discussion threads about ransomware moneymaking programs.

“There’s too much publicity,” the XSS administrator explained. “Ransomware has gathered a critical mass of nonsense, bullshit, hype, and fuss around it. The word ‘ransomware’ has been put on a par with a number of unpleasant phenomena, such as geopolitical tensions, extortion, and government-backed hacks. This word has become dangerous and toxic.”

In a blog post on the DarkSide closure, cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 said it believes all of these actions can be tied directly to the reaction related to the high-profile ransomware attacks covered by the media this week.

“However, a strong caveat should be applied to these developments: it’s likely that these ransomware operators are trying to retreat from the spotlight more than suddenly discovering the error of their ways,” Intel 471 wrote. “A number of the operators will most likely operate in their own closed-knit groups, resurfacing under new names and updated ransomware variants. Additionally, the operators will have to find a new way to ‘wash’ the cryptocurrency they earn from ransoms. Intel 471 has observed that BitMix, a popular cryptocurrency mixing service used by Avaddon, DarkSide and REvil has allegedly ceased operations. Several apparent customers of the service reported they were unable to access BitMix in the last week.”

***

“The funds, which the Darkside gang was supposed to split between itself and its affiliates (the threat actors who breach networks and deploy the ransomware), were transferred to an unknown wallet, Darksupp said.” reported TheRecord.

The news was revealed by a member of REvil ransomware gang, known as ‘UNKN,’ in a forum post on the Exploit hacking forum. The post was first spotted by Recorded Future researcher Dmitry Smilyanets, it includes a message allegedly from DarkSide explaining how the gang lost access to their blog, payment servers, and DDoS servers as a result of an action conducted by law enforcement action. source

Darkside

“Since the first version, we have promised to speak honestly and openly about problems. A few hours ago, we lost access to the public part of our infrastructure, namely:

  • Blog.
  • Payment server.
  • DOS servers.”

reads the post from UNKN. “Now these servers are unavailable via SSH, the hosting panels are blocked. Hosting support, apart from information “at the request of law enfocement agencies”, does not provide any other information.”

 

The Harbinger of the Colonial Pipeline Ransomware

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The harbinger is what protections against hacks and ransomware are underway? Stopping oil and gas flow and delivery is how to stop life and economies. Apply some critical thinking here…it goes way beyond cost as supply is crucial. If the FBI was well aware of the DarkSide in 2020….we need to rethink the Bureau completely.

PC Magazine provides this update in part:

The FBI today confirmed that the cyberattack that forced Colonial Pipeline to take its network offline over the weekend is due to ransomware known as DarkSide.

“The FBI confirms that the DarkSide ransomware is responsible for the compromise of the Colonial Pipeline networks,” the agency says. “We continue to work with the company and our government partners on the investigation.”

During a Monday White House press briefing, Anne Neuberger, Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology, said the FBI has been investigating the DarkSide variant since October 2020, and has determined that it’s a ransomware-as-a-service attack, meaning “criminal affiliates conduct attacks and then share the proceeds with ransomware developers,” she said.

Though news reports have tied DarkSide to Russian operatives, President Biden said Monday that “so far, there’s no evidence…from our intelligence people that Russia is involved, although there is evidence that the actors [behind the ransomware are] in Russia, [so] they have some responsibility to deal with this.”

Colonial Pipeline cyberattack shuts down pipeline that ...

The Chicago Tribune along with other media sources post the notion that this should not last long:

The operator of a major U.S. pipeline hit by a cyberattack said Monday it hopes to have service mostly restored by the end of the week.

Colonial Pipeline offered the update after revealing that it had halted operations because of a ransomware attack the FBI has linked to a criminal gang.

The ransomware attack on the pipeline, which the company says delivers roughly 45% of fuel consumed on the U.S. East Coast, raised concerns that supplies of gasoline, jet fuel and diesel could be disrupted in parts of the region if the disruption continues.

At the moment, though, officials said there is no fuel shortage.

The Colonial Pipeline transports gasoline and other fuel through 10 states between Texas and New Jersey, according to the company.

Colonial is in the process of restarting portions of its network. It said Sunday that its main pipeline remained offline, but that some smaller lines were operational. The company has not said when it would completely restart the pipeline.

“The time of the outage is now approaching critical levels and if it continues to remain down we do expect an increase in East Coast gasoline and diesel prices,” said Debnil Chowdhury, IHS Markit Executive Director. The last time there was an outage of this magnitude was in 2016, he said, when gas prices rose 15 to 20 cents per gallon. But the Northeast had significantly more local refining capacity at that time, potentially intensifying any impact.

The FBI and others got the attribution right on this one and did so very quickly.

The group behind the ransomware that took down Colonial Pipeline late last week has apologized for the “social consequences,” claiming that its goal is to make money, not cause societal problems.

According to Vice, the group’s apology was posted to its dark web site. It reads:

We are apolitical, we do not participate in geopolitics, do not need to tie us with a defined government and look for other our motives.

Our goal is to make money and not creating problems for society.

From today, we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences in the future.

According to NYT cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth, DarkSide isn’t necessarily associated with a specific nationstate, but it does tend to avoid holding victims for ransom if their systems are running in certain Russian and Eastern European languages (see embedded tweet below). Bloomberg reports that the group is known to speak Russian.

Source:

Imagine the other worldwide pipeline systems and their respective responses such as all of Europe.

Natural gas pipelines of Europe and surrounding regions ...

 

Meet David Chipman, Biden’s New ATF Director

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Biden announced his gun czar at a presser on April 8, 2021. Who is he?
Well, this cat wrote an opinion piece a few weeks ago. In part noted by Newsweek:

(…) declaring that the Constitution’s Second Amendment envisions firearms as being “well regulated.”

Chipman’s article, printed in The Roanoke Times, criticized local governments in Virginia that responded to state legislative firearm reform efforts by declaring themselves as “Second Amendment sanctuary” counties. These counties’ sheriffs and local officials claimed that the Constitution allowed them to block any laws that violated gun owners’ freedoms. “The Second Amendment envisions firearms as being ‘well regulated,’ and individual sheriffs aren’t entitled to decide whether a particular regulation is constitutional—that’s the job of the courts,” Chipman wrote. He also accused local sheriffs and officials of stoking fears, spreading lies and valuing “unregulated access to guns above the lives of their neighbors.”

Chipman studied justice as an American University undergraduate and studied management as a Johns Hopkins University master’s student.

A year after graduating from American University, he began a nearly 23-year career at the ATF. During that time, he worked as a special agent in charge of ATF’s firearms programs and also as a member of the ATF division bearing similarity to special weapons and tactics (SWAT) teams in police departments. He also reportedly disrupted a Virginia firearms trafficking operation that supplied illegal guns to New York City while working at the ATF.

Former ATF Special Agent David Chipman delivers remarks ...

After leaving the agency, he worked for a year and a month as a senior advisor for the municipal firearm reform advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety. He also worked nearly three years as senior vice president of public safety solutions for ShotSpotter, a gunshot detection system.

***

Chipman, an ATF veteran, works also for the former Rep. Gabby Giffords team on gun control issues.

Reforms, rules and regulations, otherwise called initiatives include:

 

Beware…more to come.

 

Biden Ends Remain in Mexico, 25,000 Migrants Coming to U.S.

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The plan offers one of the fastest pathways to citizenship of any proposed measure in recent years, it does so without offering any enhanced border security, which past immigration negotiations have used as a way to win Republican votes. Without enhanced security, it faces tough odds in a closely divided Congress.

The migrants are first in line to receive the Covid vaccine and the Biden immigration plan has no real chance to pass but in a comprehensive form but the president’s Executive Orders on immigration are forcing other other measures. ICE is not prepared and neither is Border Patrol. Further, schools, the medical systems along with housing, transportation, general employment are not prepared either. So, big taxpayer money will go to refugee resettlement along with free legal assistance to the migrant population. The plan includes $4 billion spread over four years to try to boost economic development and tackle corruption in Latin American countries.

Joe Biden's immigration reform plans must address enforcement

 

While the number of 11 million illegals has been broadcasted for years, that is hardly the real number. No one really knows how many are here, but various estimates from studies and agency reviews report the real number is closer to 20 million and could be as high as 30 million.

Meanwhile, there is no foreign policy discussions or plans to solve the issues in the failing countries such as Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico or Guatemala to list a few, just throwing money at those countries.

Biden's work cut out for him in plan to undo Trump ...

 

The first real mission is to challenge the exact number of how many illegals are in the United States and what the cost will be to taxpayers before any immigration legislation can move through Congress.

Biden’s plan includes the following:

  • An 8 year pathway to citizenship
  • Immediate green cards for agriculture workers
  • Green cards for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)
  • No additional money for Border Patrol
  • $ billion over 4 years to confront corruption and foster prosperity (whatever that is)
  • Three 3 years to apply for citizenship
  • Re-unify children separated from parents (about 400 and most entered with mules and not parents as proven by DNA)
  • Reduce the time for citizenship from 13 years to 8 years.
  • For domestic arrests of illegals for criminal activity will require a phone call to Washington to get approval before the arrest.
  • Green cards for family members, how far within the family unit is unclear.
  • Changing word use including no more applying ‘alien’.
  • No consideration for visa over-stays or for E-Verify.
  • Increase diversity visas.

The Biden White House has posted a Immigration Bill Fact sheet

In part it includes:

  • Promote immigrant and refugee integration and citizenship. The bill provides new funding to state and local governments, private organizations, educational institutions, community-based organizations, and not-for-profit organizations to expand programs to promote integration and inclusion, increase English-language instruction, and provide assistance to individuals seeking to become citizens.
  • Grow our economy. This bill clears employment-based visa backlogs, recaptures unused visas, reduces lengthy wait times, and eliminates per-country visa caps. The bill makes it easier for graduates of U.S. universities with advanced STEM degrees to stay in the United States; improves access to green cards for workers in lower-wage sectors; and eliminates other unnecessary hurdles for employment-based green cards. The bill provides dependents of H-1B visa holders work authorization, and children are prevented from “aging out” of the system. The bill also creates a pilot program to stimulate regional economic development, gives DHS the authority to adjust green cards based on macroeconomic conditions, and incentivizes higher wages for non-immigrant, high-skilled visas to prevent unfair competition with American workers.

Grow the economy? Overload schools where many of them are not open?

  • Manage the border and protect border communities.  The bill provides funding for training and continuing education to promote agent and officer safety and professionalism. It also creates a Border Community Stakeholder Advisory Committee, provides more special agents at the DHS Office of Professional Responsibility to investigate criminal and administrative misconduct, and requires the issuance of department-wide policies governing the use of force. The bill directs the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to study the impact of DHS’s authority to waive environmental and state and federal laws to expedite the construction of barriers and roads near U.S. borders and provides for additional rescue beacons to prevent needless deaths along the border. The bill authorizes and provides funding for DHS, in coordination with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and nongovernmental experts, to develop guidelines and protocols for standards of care for individuals, families, and children in CBP custody.

Manage Border Patrol? The real brain trust is already in the Border Patrol. Has President Joe even visited the border?