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A British man who helped steal information from several companies as a key member of The Dark Overlord hacking group has been jailed for five years in the US.
Nathan Francis Wyatt pleaded guilty in federal court in St Louis, Missouri, to conspiring to commit aggravated identity theft and computer fraud.

The 39-year-old, of Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, was also ordered to pay around $1.5m (£1.17m) in restitution.

Image: Wyatt’s actions helped the other hackers to remain anonymous, the court heard
In an unrelated case in 2016, Wyatt was arrested by UK police investigating the hacking of an iCloud account belonging to the Duchess of Cambridge’s sister, Pippa Matthews.
The father-of-three was released with no further action in relation to that case in September 2017.

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Federal prosecutors said The Dark Overlord stole medical records, client files and personal information from the US companies, then demanded between $75,000 and $300,000 (£58,000-£234,000) worth of Bitcoin to return the information.

While none of the companies paid the ransom, the conspiracy cost them due to the intrusion and release of data, according to federal prosecutor Laura Kathleen Berstein.

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She told the hearing that Wyatt set up a phone account and Twitter and PayPal accounts that were used to communicate and receive money.
Wyatt apologised during the hearing – which was held via Zoom – and said he was on medication for mental issues that led him to make bad decisions, the St Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
“I can promise you that I’m out of that world,” he said.
“I don’t want to see another computer for the rest of my life.”
His lawyer Brocca Morrison noted that Wyatt did not orchestrate the hacks and is the only hacker of the group that has been identified.
Ms Bernstein said Wyatt’s actions helped the other hackers to remain anonymous and that his phone account was used to send threatening text messages to relatives of victims.
Wyatt lost his appeal at the High Court to avoid extradition to the US for trial last year.
He had been serving time in prison since 2017 for separate blackmail and fraud convictions.

A deal to prevent TikTok from being banned in the US has been plunged into peril.
The Chinese company ByteDance had reached an agreement with Oracle and Walmart that was designed to allay national security concerns, but Global Times, a newspaper backed by the Chinese state, has suggested Beijing is unlikely to give its approval.

Under the plans, a new US subsidiary would be tasked with running TikTok, a video streaming app that is immensely popular with teenagers.

What data does TikTok collect on its users?

But the newspaper’s editorial denounced a requirement that four of the five board seats of this company must be held by Americans, with only one reserved for a Chinese national.
“It is clear that these [terms] extensively show Washington’s bullying style and hooligan logic. They hurt China’s national security, interests and dignity,” the article warned.

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Another paragraph added: “If the reorganisation of TikTok under US manipulation becomes a model, it means once any successful Chinese company expands its business to the US and becomes competitive, it will be targeted by the US and turned into a US-controlled company via trickery and coercion.”

This isn’t the only threat to the TikTok deal, which requires approval from regulators in both Beijing and Washington.

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While ByteDance says it will continue to own 80% of the TikTok Global subsidiary, Oracle has said that the Chinese company won’t have a direct stake in the business.

Image: The app is especially popular among US teenagers
US President Donald Trump has said that he won’t approve the deal unless he is satisfied that Oracle and Walmart have “total control” over TikTok – and warned he is prepared to scrap it.
“If we can save it, we’ll save it, and if we can’t we’ll cut if off,” he told reporters. “We have to have total security. That’s the only thing, very important, we have to have total security.”
The US Commerce Department had proposed to ban all downloads of the TikTok app in the US from last Sunday, but this measure was delayed by one week to give the companies time to finalise the deal.

Twitter has launched an investigation after users claimed that its image cropping feature favours the faces of white people.
An automatic tool on the social network’s mobile app automatically crops pictures that are too big to fit on the screen – and selects which parts of an image should be cut off.

But an experiment from a graduate programmer appeared to show racial bias.

Image: Twitter has vowed to investigate
To see what Twitter’s algorithm would pick, Tony Arcieri posted a long image featuring headshots of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell at the top and former US president Barack Obama at the bottom – separated by white space.
In a second image, Mr Obama’s headshot was placed at the top, with Mr McConnell’s at the bottom.

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Both times, the former president was cropped out altogether.

Following the “horrible experiment” – which came after an image he posted cropped out a black colleague – Mr Arcieri wrote: “Twitter is just one example of racism manifesting in machine learning algorithms.”

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At the time of writing, his experiment has been retweeted 78,000 times.

Twitter has vowed to look into the issue, but said in a statement: “Our team did test for bias before shipping the model and did not find evidence of racial or gender bias in our testing.
“It’s clear from these examples that we’ve got more analysis to do. We’ll continue to share what we learn, what actions we take, and will open source our analysis so others can review and replicate.”
A Twitter representative also pointed to research from a Carnegie Mellon University scientist who analysed 92 images. In that experiment, the algorithm favoured black faces 52 times.
Back in 2018, the company said the tool was based on a “neural network” that uses artificial intelligence to predict which part of a photo would be interesting to a user.
Meredith Whittaker, the co-founder of the AI Now Institute, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation: “This is another in a long and weary litany of examples that show automated systems encoding racism, misogyny and histories of discrimination.”

Microsoft has agreed to buy the company behind hit games such as Fallout, Doom and The Elder Scrolls in a $7.5bn (£5.8bn) deal.
The acquisition of ZeniMax will help Microsoft strengthen its Xbox video game offering as competition with rival Sony heats up ahead of Christmas.

Gaming has been boosted by growing demand at a time when consumers have been stuck at home due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Image: The new Xbox models will hit shelves on 10 November. Pic: Microsoft
Microsoft and PlayStation 5 maker Sony are launching their next-generation gaming devices in November, with pre-orders for the Xbox going live on Tuesday.
ZeniMax is the parent company of Bethesda Softworks, whose titles include Wolfenstein and Dishonored.

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Microsoft plans to make Bethesda’s future games available on its monthly Xbox Game Pass subscription service – which currently has more than 15 million subscribers.

Its latest acquisition will mean it has more hit titles in its gaming library – a key selling point for gamers choosing a console.

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Microsoft said gaming was the “largest and fastest-growing form of entertainment in the world”, expected to be worth more than $200bn (£154bn) in annual revenue in 2021.
Chief executive Satya Nadella said: “Gaming is the most expansive category in the entertainment industry, as people everywhere turn to gaming to connect, socialise and play with their friends

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“Quality differentiated content is the engine behind the growth and value of Xbox Game Pass – from Minecraft to Flight Simulator.
“As a proven game developer and publisher, Bethesda has seen success across every category of games and, together, we will further our ambition to empower the more than three billion gamers worldwide.”
The ZeniMax deal comes shortly after Microsoft’s bid to take over the US operations of TikTok was rejected by the video app’s Chinese owner ByteDance.
TikTok is instead looking to enter into a partnership with Oracle and Walmart.

Donald Trump’s plan to block downloads of the Chinese messaging and payment app WeChat has been blocked by a federal judge in California on first amendment grounds.
The ruling put a temporary block on the president’s executive order which would have effectively banned the app on Sunday, despite Mr Trump and his administration describing it as a national security threat.

Judge Laurel Beeler said the government’s actions would affect WeChat users’ first amendment rights – as a ban on the app removes their platform for communication.

Image: Donald Trump had sought to ban WeChat through an executive order
WeChat is popular with many Chinese-speaking Americans and serves as a lifeline to friends, family, customers and business contacts in China.
It is owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent.

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A preliminary injunction against the US government’s ban was brought by a non-profit organisation called the US WeChat Users Alliance, which says it has no connection to Tencent.

The group, which features prominent Chinese-American lawyers, said the executive order risked infringing the constitutional rights of the app’s 19 million regular users in the country.

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According to the US government, WeChat posed a national security threat by providing the Chinese Communist Party with the ability to maliciously collect data on American citizens.
The Department of Justice claimed this data included “network activity, location data, and browsing and search histories”, data which social media apps typically collect on their users, although they are not typically based in China.
Tencent denies the allegations, and says that messages on its app are private.

TikTok: What data does it collect on its users, and how do other apps compare?

The ruling follows Donald Trump saying he has given his “blessing” to a proposed deal that could prevent another Chinese-owned app, TikTok, from being banned by the same executive order.
He told reporters at the White House he is backing a deal with Oracle and Walmart that would create a new company to oversee TikTok’s US operations.
Mr Trump said the new company would be “totally controlled by Oracle and Walmart”.
People in the US had been set to be banned from downloading the video-sharing app on Sunday, following White House concerns about the security of user data.
An earlier statement from the US commerce department said: “The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has demonstrated the means and motives to use these apps to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and the economy of the US.”
It added that the apps posed “unacceptable risks” to national security.
But the president has now said he approves the deal “in concept” and the security will be “100%”, adding: “I have given the deal my blessing.”

Tens of thousands of people marched through the Belarusian capital Minsk on Sunday, calling for the resignation of president Alexander Lukashenko in the sixth straight weekend of protests.
It comes as hackers leaked the personal details of more than 2,000 senior police officers in two batches, pledging that “no one will remain anonymous, even under a balaclava”, amid reports of violent crackdowns targeting demonstrators.

At least 10 people were detained on Sunday, according to the Russian news agency TASS, which quoted a police spokesperson. Human rights group Spring-96 said at least 196 people were detained across the whole of the county.

Arrests after anti-Lukashenko protests in Belarus

Local media organisations shared videos showing the security forces wearing helmets and balaclavas dragging demonstrators off the streets.
On Saturday, more than 390 women demonstrating in Minsk were arrested, including an elderly woman who has become a symbol of the protests.

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The unrest began following the 9 August presidential election which many Belarusians believe Mr Lukashenko, a former Soviet collective farm manager, fraudulently won.

Mr Lukashenko has been president of Belarus for 26 years, during which time he has consistently suppressed political opposition.

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He has resisted calls to resign, sometimes appearing carrying an automatic rifle, and buoyed by support from the Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Weeks ago, the European Union vowed to impose sanctions on Minsk for alleged election fraud and human rights abuses, but it is now expected to miss its Monday deadline for action.

Image: Police have arrested at least 10 people on Sunday, according to reports
Thousands of people have been detained during the protests, many of whom have reported being beaten and tortured while detained – although the government denies these claims.
“As the arrests continue, we will continue to publish data on a massive scale,” the hackers told opposition news channel Nexta.

Image: A placard depicts the Belarusian president as Kim Jong Un, stating ‘washed-up’
The details include the names of the senior officers, as well their surnames, patronyms – common in Russian-speaking countries – as well as their dates of birth, parent units, ranks and positions.
A second batch of more than 1,000 names was released on Sunday evening, this time naming officers in the western Belarusian city of Brest where the leakers claimed the policer were particularly heavy-handed.
The government said it would find and punish whoever was responsible for leaking the data on police officers, which was distributed over the popular chat app Telegram on Saturday.
“The forces, means and technologies at the disposal of the internal affairs bodies make it possible to identify and prosecute the overwhelming majority of those guilty of leaking personal data on the internet,” said Olga Chemodanova, a spokesperson for the Belarusian minister of internal affairs.

Image: Security forces have detained people in the capital Minsk
Opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya praised the women’s march in a video statement from Lithuania, where she fled after being held inside a government electoral office following the election.
Speaking to Sky News, Mrs Tikhanovskaya said she was not yet ready to talk about what happened to her during the time she was held in custody.
It is thought she was threatened with being separated from her two young children, whom she had already moved to Lithuania.
“They have frightened and put pressure on women for the second month, but despite this, Belarusians are continuing their peaceful protest and showing their amazing fortitude,” Mrs Tikhanovskaya said of Saturday’s march.

‘There were blood smears on the walls’: Belarus protesters traumatised by brutal treatment

The Belarusian government reacted angrily to reports that Mrs Tikhanovskaya could soon meet EU foreign ministers.
Foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova criticised the EU, accusing Brussels of attempting to “rock the boat” in Belarus – seen by Moscow as a strategic buffer against the EU and NATO.
Russia has accused the US of fomenting revolution in Minsk, and agreed to give a $1.5bn (£1.16bn) loan to prop up Mr Lukashenko’s government following a meeting with Mr Putin.
Belarus will spend $330m (£255m) of the money it has received to cover its outstanding debt to the Russian gas giant Gazprom, according to Russian finance minister Anton Siluanov.