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Cryptocurrency has always made a ripe target for theft—and not just hacking, but the old-fashioned, up-close-and-personal kind, too. Given that it can be irreversibly transferred in seconds with little more than a password, it's perhaps no surprise that thieves have occasionally sought to steal crypto in home-invasion burglaries and even kidnappings. But rarely do those thieves leave a trail of violence in their wake as disturbing as that of one recent, ruthless, and particularly prolific gang of crypto extortionists.

The United States Justice Department earlier this week announced the conviction of Remy Ra St. Felix, a 24-year-old Florida man who led a group of men behind a violent crime spree designed to compel victims to hand over access to their cryptocurrency savings. That announcement and the criminal complaint laying out charges against St. Felix focused largely on a single theft of cryptocurrency from an elderly North Carolina couple, whose home St. Felix and one of his accomplices broke into before physically assaulting the two victims—both in their seventies—and forcing them to transfer more than $150,000 in bitcoin and ether to the thieves' crypto wallets.

In fact, that six-figure sum appears to have been the gang’s only confirmed haul from its physical crypto thefts—although the burglars and their associates made millions in total, mostly through more traditional crypto hacking as well as stealing other assets. A deeper look into court documents from the St. Felix case, however, reveals that the relatively small profit St. Felix’s gang made from its burglaries doesn’t capture the full scope of the harm they inflicted: In total, those court filings and DOJ officials describe how more than a dozen convicted and alleged members of the crypto-focused gang broke into the homes of 11 victims, carrying out a brutal spree of armed robberies, death threats, beatings, torture sessions, and even one kidnapping in a campaign that spanned four US states.

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Hackers who stole terabytes of data from Ticketmaster and other customers of the cloud storage firm Snowflake claim they obtained access to some of the Snowflake accounts by first breaching a Belarusian-founded contractor that works with those customers.

About 165 customer accounts were potentially affected in the recent hacking campaign targeting Snowflake’s customers, but only a few of these have been identified so far. In addition to Ticketmaster, the banking firm Santander has also acknowledged that their data was stolen but declined to identify the account from which it was stolen. Wired, however, has independently confirmed that it was a Snowflake account; the stolen data included bank account details for 30 million customers, including 6 million account numbers and balances, 28 million credit card numbers, and human resources information about staff, according to a post published by the hackers. Lending Tree and Advance Auto Parts have also said they might be victims as well.

Snowflake has not revealed details about how the hackers accessed the accounts, saying only that the intruders did not directly breach Snowflake’s network. This week, Google-owned security firm Mandiant, one of the companies engaged by Snowflake to investigate the breaches, revealed in a blog post that in some cases the hackers first obtained access through third-party contractors, without identifying the contractors or stating how this access aided the hackers in breaching the Snowflake accounts.

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Victor Miller is running for mayor of Cheyenne, Wyoming, with an unusual campaign promise: If elected, he will not be calling the shots—an AI bot will. VIC, the Virtual Integrated Citizen, is a ChatGPT-based chatbot that Miller created. And Miller says the bot has better ideas—and a better grasp of the law—than many people currently serving in government.

“I realized that this entity is way smarter than me, and more importantly, way better than some of the outward-facing public servants I see,” he says. According to Miller, VIC will make the decisions, and Miller will be its “meat puppet,” attending meetings, signing documents, and otherwise doing the corporeal job of running the city.

But whether VIC—and Victor—will be allowed to run at all is still an open question.

Enlarge / A logo on equipment stored near the OceanGate Inc. offices in Everett, Washington, US, on Thursday, June 22, 2023. (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The Ocean Sciences Building at the University of Washington in Seattle is a brightly modern, four-story structure, with large glass windows reflecting the bay across the street.

On the afternoon of July 7, 2016, it was being slowly locked down.

Red lights began flashing at the entrances as students and faculty filed out under overcast skies. Eventually, just a handful of people remained inside, preparing to unleash one of the most destructive forces in the natural world: the crushing weight of about 2½ miles of ocean water.

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Today, people around the world will head to school, doctor’s appointments, and pharmacies, only to be told, “Sorry, our computer systems are down.” The frequent culprit is a cybercrime gang operating on the other side of the world, demanding payment for system access or the safe return of stolen data.

The ransomware epidemic shows no signs of slowing down in 2024—despite increasing police crackdowns—and experts worry that it could soon enter a more violent phase.

“We’re definitely not winning the fight against ransomware right now,” Allan Liska, a threat intelligence analyst at Recorded Future, tells WIRED.

Enlarge / Fungus samples are seen on display inside the Fungarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, west London in 2023. The Fungarium was founded in 1879 and holds an estimated 380,000 specimens from the UK. (credit: Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images)

It’s hard to miss the headliners at Kew Gardens. The botanical collection in London is home to towering redwoods and giant Amazonian water lilies capable of holding up a small child. Each spring, its huge greenhouses pop with the Technicolor displays of multiple orchid species.

But for the really good stuff at Kew, you have to look below the ground. Tucked underneath a laboratory at the garden’s eastern edge is the fungarium: the largest collection of fungi anywhere in the world. Nestled inside a series of green cardboard boxes are some 1.3 million specimens of fruiting bodies—the parts of the fungi that appear above ground and release spores.