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Louisiana sues Roblox for allegedly choosing “profits over child safety”, claiming “it’s basically open season for sex predators on this app”

by admin August 17, 2025

The U.S. state of Louisiana is suing Roblox, alleging it facilitates “the sexual exploitation of Louisiana’s children”.

In a statement, Louisiana Attorney General, Liz Murrill, claimed Roblox “endangers the safety of the children” of the state, writing: “Roblox is overrun with harmful content and child predators because it prioritises user growth, revenue, and profits over child safety.

“Every parent should be aware of the clear and present danger posed to their children by Roblox so they can prevent the unthinkable from ever happening in their own home.”

The legal papers then names several “highly inappropriate” Roblox mini games such as Escape to Epstein Island, Public Bathroom Simulator, and Diddy Party.

“These games and others are often filled with sexually explicit material and simulated sexual activity such as child gang rape. A recent report even revealed a group of 3,334 members openly traded child pornography and solicited sexual acts from minors,” the Louisiana announcement says, citing a 2024 report.

Roblox is violating Louisiana law – choosing profits over child safety. It’s basically open season for sex predators on this platform. pic.twitter.com/fGSQ8IFgWw

— Attorney General Liz Murrill (@AGLizMurrill) August 15, 2025

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The lawsuit claims that while Roblox requires children to have permission from their parents or guardians to open an account, the company “does nothing to confirm or document that parental permission has been given, no matter how young a child is. Nor does Defendant require a parent to confirm the age given when a child signs up to use Roblox”.

“[Roblox] has access to biometric age verification software that requires the user to take a photo of a government-issued ID along with a real-time selfie photo that is then verified through artificial intelligence,” the AG adds. “However, while Defendant utilises this software for other purposes, Defendant intentionally does not utilise this feature when new accounts are created.”

In a press conference announcing the lawsuit, Murrill said: “So [Roblox] have chosen profits over child safety. It’s basically open season for sex predators on this app. For this reason, and all of the others that we’ve talked about today, Roblox is violating Louisiana law, and that’s why we filed this lawsuit.”

Roblox said it does not comment on pending litigation, but stressed “it would like to address erroneous claims and misconceptions about our platform, our commitment to safety, and our overall safety track record”.

“Every day, tens of millions of people around the world use Roblox to learn STEM skills, play, and imagine, and have a safe experience on our platform. Any assertion that Roblox would intentionally put our users at risk of exploitation is simply untrue. No system is perfect, and bad actors adapt to evade detection, including efforts to take users to other platforms, where safety standards and moderation practices may differ. We continuously work to block those efforts and to enhance our moderation approaches to promote a safe and enjoyable environment for all users.”

It added that it is constantly innovating safety tools and launching new safeguards, has taken an industry-leading stance on age-based communication, and serves players of which 64 percent are aged 13 or over. It also dedicates substantial resources to help detect and prevent inappropriate content and behaviour, and collaborates with law enforcement and government agencies, as well as mental health organisations, child safety organisations, and parental advocacy groups “to keep users safe on the platform”.

“We know safety is critically important to families, and we strive to empower our community of parents and caregivers to help ensure a safe online experience for their children. This includes a suite of easy-to-use parental controls to provide parents with more control and clarity on what their kids and teens are doing on Roblox,” the statement concludes.

“We aim to create one of the safest online environments for users, a goal not only core to our founding values but contrary to certain assertions, one we believe is critical to our long-term vision and success. We understand there is always more work to be done, and we are committed to making Roblox a safe and positive environment for all users.”

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August 17, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Minnesota Shooting Suspect Allegedly Used Data Broker Sites to Find Targets’ Addresses

by admin June 17, 2025

The man who allegedly assassinated a Democratic Minnesota state representative, murdered her husband, and shot a state senator and his wife at their homes in a violent spree early Saturday morning may have gotten their addresses or other personal details from online data broker services, according to court documents.

Suspect Vance Boelter, 57, is accused of shooting Minnesota representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, in their home on Saturday. The couple died from their injuries. Authorities claim the suspect also shot state senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette Hoffman in their home earlier that night. The pair are currently recovering and are “incredibly lucky to be alive,” according to a statement from their family.

According to an FBI affidavit, police searched the SUV believed to be the suspect’s and found notebooks that included handwritten lists of “more than 45 Minnesota state and federal public officials, including Representative Hortman’s, whose home address was written next to her name.” According to the same affidavit, one notebook also listed 11 mainstream search platforms for finding people’s home addresses and other personal information, like phone numbers and relatives.

The addresses for both lawmakers targeted on Saturday were readily available. Representative Hortman’s campaign website listed her home address, while Senator Hoffman’s appeared on his legislative webpage, The New York Times reports.

“Boelter stalked his victims like prey,” acting US attorney Joseph Thompson alleged at a press conference on Monday. “He researched his victims and their families. He used the internet and other tools to find their addresses and names, the names of their family members.” Thompson also alleged that the suspect surveilled victims’ homes.

The suspect faces several charges of second-degree murder.

Privacy and public safety advocates have long argued that the US should regulate data brokers to guarantee that people have better control over the sensitive information available about them. The US has no comprehensive data privacy legislation, and efforts to regulate data brokers from within federal agencies have largely been quashed.

“The accused Minneapolis assassin allegedly used data brokers as a key part of his plot to track down and murder Democratic lawmakers,” Ron Wyden, the US senator from Oregon, tells WIRED. “Congress doesn’t need any more proof that people are being killed based on data for sale to anyone with a credit card. Every single American’s safety is at risk until Congress cracks down on this sleazy industry.”

In many cases, basic information like home addresses can be found through public records, including voter registration data (which is public in some states) and political donations data, says Gary Warner, a longtime digital scams researcher and director of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm DarkTower. Anything that isn’t readily available through public records is almost always easy to find using popular “people search” services.

“Finding a home address, especially if someone has lived in the same place for many years is trivial,” Warner says. He adds that for “younger people, non-homeowners, and less political people, there are other favorite sites” for finding personal information.

For many in the general public as well as in politics, Saturday’s violent crime spree brings new urgency to the long-standing question of how to protect sensitive personal data online.

“These are not the first murders that have been abetted by the data broker industry. But most of the previous targets were relatively unknown victims of stalking and abuse,” alleges Evan Greer, deputy director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future. “Lawmakers need to act before they have more blood on their hands.”

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June 17, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Feds Charge 16 Russians Allegedly Tied to Botnets Used in Ransomware, Cyberattacks, and Spying

by admin May 22, 2025

The hacker ecosystem in Russia, more than perhaps anywhere else in the world, has long blurred the lines between cybercrime, state-sponsored cyberwarfare, and espionage. Now an indictment of a group of Russian nationals and the takedown of their sprawling botnet offers the clearest example in years of how a single malware operation allegedly enabled hacking operations as varied as ransomware, wartime cyberattacks in Ukraine, and spying against foreign governments.

The US Department of Justice today announced criminal charges today against 16 individuals law enforcement authorities have linked to a malware operation known as DanaBot, which according to a complaint infected at least 300,000 machines around the world. The DOJ’s announcement of the charges describes the group as “Russia-based,” and names two of the suspects, Aleksandr Stepanov and Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin, as living in Novosibirsk, Russia. Five other suspects are named in the indictment, while another nine are identified only by their pseudonyms. In addition to those charges, the Justice Department says the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS)—a criminal investigation arm of the Department of Defense—carried out seizures of DanaBot infrastructure around the world, including in the US.

Aside from alleging how DanaBot was used in for-profit criminal hacking, the indictment also makes a rarer claim—it describes how a second variant of the malware it says was used in espionage against military, government, and NGO targets. “Pervasive malware like DanaBot harms hundreds of thousands of victims around the world, including sensitive military, diplomatic, and government entities, and causes many millions of dollars in losses,” US attorney Bill Essayli wrote in a statement.

Since 2018, DanaBot—described in the criminal complaint as “incredibly invasive malware”—has infected millions of computers around the world, initially as a banking trojan designed to steal directly from those PCs’ owners with modular features designed for credit card and cryptocurrency theft. Because its creators allegedly sold it in an “affiliate” model that made it available to other hacker groups for $3,000 to $4,000 a month, however, it was soon used as a tool to install different forms of malware in a broad array of operations, including ransomware. Its targets, too, quickly spread from initial victims in Ukraine, Poland, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Australia to US and Canadian financial institutions, according to an analysis of the operation by cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike.

At one point in 2021, according to Crowdstrike, Danabot was used in a software supply-chain attack that hid the malware in a javascript coding tool called NPM with millions of weekly downloads. Crowdstrike found victims of that compromised tool across the financial service, transportation, technology, and media industries.

That scale and the wide variety of its criminal uses made DanaBot “a juggernaut of the e-crime landscape,” according to Selena Larson, a staff threat researcher at cybersecurity firm Proofpoint.

More uniquely, though, DanaBot has also been used at times for hacking campaigns that appear to be state-sponsored or linked to Russian government agency interests. In 2019 and 2020, it was used to target a handful of Western government officials in apparent espionage operations, according to the DOJ’s indictment. According to Proofpoint, the malware in those instances was delivered in phishing messages that impersonated the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and a Kazakhstan government entity.

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May 22, 2025 0 comments

GameFi Guides

Sui LP provider Cetus allegedly drained of $11m SUI, hack or bug?

by admin May 22, 2025

Traders descended into a panic after LP provider Cetus appeared to be drained of $11 million worth of SUI from its liquidity pool. The team claimed it was an oracle bug, not an exploit.

According to its most recent post, the Cetus team has temporarily halted their smart contracts to prevent any more losses after it detected an incident on its liquidity platform. The team claims that it is currently investigating the root cause of the alleged breach.

“A further investigation statement will be made soon. We are grateful for your patience,” said the protocol.

🚨Alert Announcement 🚨

There was an incident detected on our protocol and our smart contract has been paused temporarily for safety. The team is investigating the incident at the moment. A further investigation statement will be made soon. We are grateful for your patience.

— Cetus🐳 (@CetusProtocol) May 22, 2025

At around 11:00 UTC, traders noticed that the liquidity pool for the liquidity provider Cetus was being drained of tokens, bringing the token supply count to zero. Based on the screenshot circulating online, tokens on the protocol’s leaderboard, including AXOL, SUIRI, HIPPO, among others, plummeted as low as 92% to at least 75% below the initial prices.

At the moment, the platform remains dormant after smart contracts were paused, with all liquidity pools showing no numbers for its trading pairs.

The Cetus team has halted SUI smart contracts temporarily following an incident, May 22, 2025 | Source: app.cetus.zone

Despite news of the liquidity drain and the panic related to it circulating online, the SUI (SUI) token still saw modest gains. In the past 24 hours, it has gone up by 3.15%, reaching $4 per token. Its daily trading volume has increased by 112% compared to the previous trading day, reaching nearly $2.5 billion.

In the past month, the token has been on an ongoing rally, going up by nearly 75%.

Some traders who are members of the Discord server for Cetus have shared screenshots of messages from Cetus admins and developers. One of the members, Figure.Cetus, told traders to remain calm and that the team will publish an announcement soon.

Figure.Cetus claimed that the liquidity provider was not hacked, instead the liquidity drain was due to a bug within the liquidity provider’s oracle.

In crypto liquidity pools, oracles serve to connect the pool’s smart contracts to external data sources, such as real-world asset prices or market conditions. This allows the pool to provide accurate pricing, trade execution, and other features based on the external information it receives.

At press time, the Cetus protocol team has yet to publish an official statement regarding its investigations. In addition, smart contracts are still temporarily paused.

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May 22, 2025 0 comments