Original Story: thestreet.com
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Google (GOOGL - Get Report) shares are slumping 0.31% to $653.30 on Monday after Russia's antitrust regulator found that the search giant violated the country's antitrust rules, The Wall Street Journal reports. A Denver antitrust lawyer is following this story closely.
Google was guilty of "abusing its dominant market position," but not of "unfair competition practices," the regulator told the Journal.
This action comes after Russia's Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) started the probe back in February. Russia's Internet firm Yandex (YNDX) often called the "Google of Russia," had asked the country's regulator to look into whether or not the tech giant violated Russia's antitrust rules.
Yandex specifically pointed to Google's Android operating system and how the company bundles apps with the system, according to the Journal. A Charleston unfair competition attorney represents clients in matters involving deceptive trade practices, domain infringement issues, and in non-compete and non-disclosure agreements.
The regulator's decision will "help restore competition on the market," Yandex added.
Shares of Yandex are jumping 7.99% to $12.17 on heavy trading volume in Monday's afternoon trading session.
Based in Mountain View, CA, Google builds technology products and provides services to organize the information.
Separately, TheStreet Ratings team rates GOOGLE INC as a Buy with a ratings score of B. TheStreet Ratings Team has this to say about their recommendation:
"We rate GOOGLE INC (GOOGL) a BUY. This is driven by several positive factors, which we believe should have a greater impact than any weaknesses, and should give investors a better performance opportunity than most stocks we cover. The company's strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its revenue growth, largely solid financial position with reasonable debt levels by most measures, reasonable valuation levels, increase in net income and good cash flow from operations. We feel its strengths outweigh the fact that the company has had somewhat disappointing return on equity."
Highlights from the analysis by TheStreet Ratings Team goes as follows:
GOOGL's revenue growth has slightly outpaced the industry average of 6.9%. Since the same quarter one year prior, revenues rose by 11.1%. This growth in revenue does not appear to have trickled down to the company's bottom line, displayed by a decline in earnings per share. An Aiken unfair competition lawyer is reviewing the details of this case.
Although GOOGL's debt-to-equity ratio of 0.05 is very low, it is currently higher than that of the industry average. Along with this, the company maintains a quick ratio of 4.60, which clearly demonstrates the ability to cover short-term cash needs.
The company, on the basis of net income growth from the same quarter one year ago, has significantly outperformed against the S&P 500 and exceeded that of the Internet Software & Services industry average. The net income increased by 17.3% when compared to the same quarter one year prior, going from $3,351.00 million to $3,931.00 million.
Net operating cash flow has increased to $6,985.00 million or 24.13% when compared to the same quarter last year. In addition, GOOGLE INC has also modestly surpassed the industry average cash flow growth rate of 19.50%.
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Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Police Bust Russian Hacker Gang who made $30M in one Month
Russia Times
Russian police have detained ten people who managed to get one billion roubles, approximately $30 million, through a clever scheme involving a computer virus, blackmail and SMS billing.
Website Lifenews.ru reported on Tuesday that ten members of the criminal group had been detained in Moscow. Operatives of the city police directorate for fighting economic crimes have told journalists that the suspects created a computer virus that blocked all programs on the users’ computers and put a pornographic picture on the screen together with a demand to send an SMS to a certain number to receive a code that would supposedly unblock the computer. For the SMS the victims were billed about 300 roubles or $10. However, sending the SMS never led to any results and some users have sent it repeatedly.
According to the police, the suspects made about one billion roubles from the scam, or $33 million in just one month.
Although the virus extortion scheme is widespread in the world (it even has the special title of “ransomware”), Russians were probably first to invent the virus that blocks the Windows operating system completely.
Website Lifenews.ru reported on Tuesday that ten members of the criminal group had been detained in Moscow. Operatives of the city police directorate for fighting economic crimes have told journalists that the suspects created a computer virus that blocked all programs on the users’ computers and put a pornographic picture on the screen together with a demand to send an SMS to a certain number to receive a code that would supposedly unblock the computer. For the SMS the victims were billed about 300 roubles or $10. However, sending the SMS never led to any results and some users have sent it repeatedly.
According to the police, the suspects made about one billion roubles from the scam, or $33 million in just one month.
Although the virus extortion scheme is widespread in the world (it even has the special title of “ransomware”), Russians were probably first to invent the virus that blocks the Windows operating system completely.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Hacker’s Arrest Offers Glimpse Into Crime in Russia
NY Times
On the Internet, he was known as BadB, a disembodied criminal flitting from one server to another selling stolen credit card numbers despite being pursued by the United States Secret Service.
And in real life, he was nearly as untouchable — because he lived in Russia.
BadB’s real name is Vladislav A. Horohorin, according to a statement released last week by the United States Justice Department, and he was a resident of Moscow before his arrest by the police in France during a trip to that country earlier this month.
He is expected to appear soon before a French court that will decide on his potential extradition to the United States, where Mr. Horohorin could face up to 12 years in prison and a fine of $500,000 if he is convicted on charges of fraud and identity theft.
For at least nine months, however, he lived openly in Moscow as one of the world’s most wanted computer criminals.
The seizing of BadB provides a lens onto the shadowy world of Russian hackers, the often well-educated and sometimes darkly ingenious programmers who pose a recognized security threat to online commerce — besides being global spam nuisances — who often seem to operate with relative impunity.
Law enforcement groups in Russia have been reluctant to pursue these talented authors of Internet fraud, for reasons, security experts say, of incompetence, corruption or national pride.
In this environment, BadB’s network arose as “one of the most sophisticated organizations of online financial criminals in the world,” according to a statement issued by Michael P. Merritt, the assistant director of investigations for the Secret Service, which pursues counterfeiting and some electronic financial fraud.
As long ago as November 2009, the United States attorney’s office in Washington, in a sealed indictment, identified BadB as Mr. Horohorin, a 27-year-old residing in Moscow with dual Ukrainian and Israeli citizenship.
But it was not until Aug. 7 this year that Mr. Horohorin, who was traveling from Russia to France, was detained on a warrant from the United States as he boarded a plane to return to Russia at an airport in Nice, in southern France.
The Secret Service released a statement on Aug. 11, when the indictment was unsealed. Max Milien, a Secret Service spokesman in Washington, said the agency could not comment about the decision to arrest Mr. Horohorin in France.
Olga K. Shklyarova, spokeswoman for the Russian bureau of Interpol, said no American law enforcement agency had requested Mr. Horohorin’s arrest in her country. “We never received such a request,” she said by telephone.
According to the Secret Service statement, Mr. Horohorin managed Web sites for hackers who were able to steal large numbers of credit card numbers that were sold online anonymously around the globe.
Those buyers would do the more dangerous work of running up fraudulent bills.
The numbers were exchanged on Web sites called CarderPlanet — carder.su and badb.biz — according to the Secret Service, and payment was made indirectly through accounts at a Russian online settlement system known as Webmoney, an analogue to PayPal.
Underscoring the nationalistic tone of much of Russian computer crime, one site featured a cartoon of the Russian prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, awarding medals to Russian hackers.
“We awaiting you to fight the imperialism of the U.S.A.” the site said, in approximate English.
Mr. Horohorin lived openly in Moscow. As a foreign citizen, he registered with the police, according to Dmitri Zakharov, a spokesman for the Russian Association of Electronic Communication, an industry lobby for legitimate Russian Internet businesses, who cited a database of such registries.
A phone number for Mr. Horohorin was out of service Thursday.
Arrests in Russia for computer crimes are rare, even when hackers living in Russia have been publicly identified by outside groups, like Spamhaus, a nonprofit group in Geneva and in London that tracks sources of spam.
The F.B.I. in 2002 resorted to luring a Russian suspect, Vasily Gorshkov, to the United States with a fake offer of a job interview (with a fictitious Internet company called Invita), rather than ask the Russian police for help.
To obtain evidence in the case, F.B.I. computer experts had hacked into Mr. Gorshkov’s computer in Russia. When this was revealed, Russian authorities expressed anger that the F.B.I. had resorted to a cross-border tactic.
Online fraud is not a high priority for the Russian police, Mr. Zakharov said, because most of it is aimed at computer users in Europe or the United States. “This is a main reason why spammers are not arrested,” he said.
Politics may also play a role.
Vladimir Sokolov, deputy director of the Institute of Information Security, a Russian research organization, said the United States and Russia were still at odds on basic issues of computer security, although the differences were narrowing.
The United States tends to view computer security as a law enforcement matter. Russia has pushed for an international treaty that would regulate the use of online weapons by military or espionage agencies.
Last year the United States opened talks on a treaty, but it has continued to press for closer law enforcement cooperation, Mr. Sokolov said.
Computer security researchers have raised a more sinister prospect: that criminal spamming gangs have been co-opted by the intelligence agencies in Russia, which provide cover for their activities in exchange for the criminals’ expertise or for allowing their networks of virus-infected computers to be used for political purposes — to crash dissident Web sites, perhaps.
Sometimes, the collateral damage for online business is immediate.
A year ago, for example, hackers used a network of infected computers to direct huge amounts of junk traffic at the social networking accounts of a 34-year-old political blogger in Georgia, a country that fought a war with Russia in 2008.
The attack, though, spun out of control and briefly crashed the global service of Twitter and slowed Facebook and LiveJournal, affecting tens of millions of computer users worldwide. The Russian authorities have repeatedly denied that the state has any connection to such attacks.
Spamhaus says 7 of the top 10 spammers in the world are based in the former Soviet Union, in Ukraine, Russia and Estonia.
More ominously, Western law enforcement agencies have traced a code intended for breaking into banking sites to Russian programming.
In 2007, Swedish experts identified a Russian hacker known only by his colorful sobriquet — the Corpse — as the author of a virus that logged keystrokes on personal computers to capture passwords for Nordea, a Swedish bank, and the accounts were drained of about $1 million.
For a time, these rogue programs were openly for sale on a Russian Web site. The home page displayed an illustration of Lenin making a rude gesture.
Since Mr. Horohorin’s arrest, the badb.biz Web site has gone dark.
But through Monday, at least, its CarderPlanet counterpart, the Russian site carder.su, was still open for business.
And in real life, he was nearly as untouchable — because he lived in Russia.
BadB’s real name is Vladislav A. Horohorin, according to a statement released last week by the United States Justice Department, and he was a resident of Moscow before his arrest by the police in France during a trip to that country earlier this month.
He is expected to appear soon before a French court that will decide on his potential extradition to the United States, where Mr. Horohorin could face up to 12 years in prison and a fine of $500,000 if he is convicted on charges of fraud and identity theft.
For at least nine months, however, he lived openly in Moscow as one of the world’s most wanted computer criminals.
The seizing of BadB provides a lens onto the shadowy world of Russian hackers, the often well-educated and sometimes darkly ingenious programmers who pose a recognized security threat to online commerce — besides being global spam nuisances — who often seem to operate with relative impunity.
Law enforcement groups in Russia have been reluctant to pursue these talented authors of Internet fraud, for reasons, security experts say, of incompetence, corruption or national pride.
In this environment, BadB’s network arose as “one of the most sophisticated organizations of online financial criminals in the world,” according to a statement issued by Michael P. Merritt, the assistant director of investigations for the Secret Service, which pursues counterfeiting and some electronic financial fraud.
As long ago as November 2009, the United States attorney’s office in Washington, in a sealed indictment, identified BadB as Mr. Horohorin, a 27-year-old residing in Moscow with dual Ukrainian and Israeli citizenship.
But it was not until Aug. 7 this year that Mr. Horohorin, who was traveling from Russia to France, was detained on a warrant from the United States as he boarded a plane to return to Russia at an airport in Nice, in southern France.
The Secret Service released a statement on Aug. 11, when the indictment was unsealed. Max Milien, a Secret Service spokesman in Washington, said the agency could not comment about the decision to arrest Mr. Horohorin in France.
Olga K. Shklyarova, spokeswoman for the Russian bureau of Interpol, said no American law enforcement agency had requested Mr. Horohorin’s arrest in her country. “We never received such a request,” she said by telephone.
According to the Secret Service statement, Mr. Horohorin managed Web sites for hackers who were able to steal large numbers of credit card numbers that were sold online anonymously around the globe.
Those buyers would do the more dangerous work of running up fraudulent bills.
The numbers were exchanged on Web sites called CarderPlanet — carder.su and badb.biz — according to the Secret Service, and payment was made indirectly through accounts at a Russian online settlement system known as Webmoney, an analogue to PayPal.
Underscoring the nationalistic tone of much of Russian computer crime, one site featured a cartoon of the Russian prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin, awarding medals to Russian hackers.
“We awaiting you to fight the imperialism of the U.S.A.” the site said, in approximate English.
Mr. Horohorin lived openly in Moscow. As a foreign citizen, he registered with the police, according to Dmitri Zakharov, a spokesman for the Russian Association of Electronic Communication, an industry lobby for legitimate Russian Internet businesses, who cited a database of such registries.
A phone number for Mr. Horohorin was out of service Thursday.
Arrests in Russia for computer crimes are rare, even when hackers living in Russia have been publicly identified by outside groups, like Spamhaus, a nonprofit group in Geneva and in London that tracks sources of spam.
The F.B.I. in 2002 resorted to luring a Russian suspect, Vasily Gorshkov, to the United States with a fake offer of a job interview (with a fictitious Internet company called Invita), rather than ask the Russian police for help.
To obtain evidence in the case, F.B.I. computer experts had hacked into Mr. Gorshkov’s computer in Russia. When this was revealed, Russian authorities expressed anger that the F.B.I. had resorted to a cross-border tactic.
Online fraud is not a high priority for the Russian police, Mr. Zakharov said, because most of it is aimed at computer users in Europe or the United States. “This is a main reason why spammers are not arrested,” he said.
Politics may also play a role.
Vladimir Sokolov, deputy director of the Institute of Information Security, a Russian research organization, said the United States and Russia were still at odds on basic issues of computer security, although the differences were narrowing.
The United States tends to view computer security as a law enforcement matter. Russia has pushed for an international treaty that would regulate the use of online weapons by military or espionage agencies.
Last year the United States opened talks on a treaty, but it has continued to press for closer law enforcement cooperation, Mr. Sokolov said.
Computer security researchers have raised a more sinister prospect: that criminal spamming gangs have been co-opted by the intelligence agencies in Russia, which provide cover for their activities in exchange for the criminals’ expertise or for allowing their networks of virus-infected computers to be used for political purposes — to crash dissident Web sites, perhaps.
Sometimes, the collateral damage for online business is immediate.
A year ago, for example, hackers used a network of infected computers to direct huge amounts of junk traffic at the social networking accounts of a 34-year-old political blogger in Georgia, a country that fought a war with Russia in 2008.
The attack, though, spun out of control and briefly crashed the global service of Twitter and slowed Facebook and LiveJournal, affecting tens of millions of computer users worldwide. The Russian authorities have repeatedly denied that the state has any connection to such attacks.
Spamhaus says 7 of the top 10 spammers in the world are based in the former Soviet Union, in Ukraine, Russia and Estonia.
More ominously, Western law enforcement agencies have traced a code intended for breaking into banking sites to Russian programming.
In 2007, Swedish experts identified a Russian hacker known only by his colorful sobriquet — the Corpse — as the author of a virus that logged keystrokes on personal computers to capture passwords for Nordea, a Swedish bank, and the accounts were drained of about $1 million.
For a time, these rogue programs were openly for sale on a Russian Web site. The home page displayed an illustration of Lenin making a rude gesture.
Since Mr. Horohorin’s arrest, the badb.biz Web site has gone dark.
But through Monday, at least, its CarderPlanet counterpart, the Russian site carder.su, was still open for business.
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