Tech
Ex-directors of firm linked to Satoshi Nakamoto imposter sue over whistleblowing retaliation claims | Computer Weekly
Two former directors of nChain UK, the London blockchain company associated with a computer scientist who falsely claimed to be bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto, are bringing legal proceedings against their former employer.
Group finance officer Andrew Moody and general counsel David Brookes claim that they were dismissed in retaliation for blowing the whistle on an alleged attempt by an investor to acquire the company’s intellectual property without the knowledge of nChain’s directors.
The firm, together with three company officials, dispute the claims, which were made yesterday at a London employment tribunal. They argue that the directors had not made protected disclosures and were properly dismissed for gross misconduct.
The company was closely associated with Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist, who falsely claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of bitcoin. A high court judge found that Wright fabricated documents and repeatedly lied to justify his claims in a 2024 court case.
Brookes and Moody claimed in a written opening note that they made protected disclosures to their group CEO after learning of the existence of documents that had been created by others “behind the backs” of nChain’s directors which were not in the interests of the company.
The two directors claim that the documents, which consisted of three agreements with an investment company, contained a mechanism that could have stripped nChain of its entire portfolio of intellectual property and were an “existential threat” to the nChain group.
They claim they were led to believe that the documents were drawn up at the insistence of an investor in nChain to “hedge their bets” if litigation brought against Wright to overturn his claims of being Sakatoshi Nakamoto were successful.
Biggest fake ever
At a mock trial in September 2023, an attempt to “cajole” Wright to produce bitcoin keys to unequivocally demonstrate he was Nakamoto failed. Instead, he produced a memory stick purporting to prove his identity that turned out to be an “obvious forgery”.
The incident prompted the group CEO, Christen Ager-Hanssen, to send a WhatsApp message describing Wright as “the biggest fake ever”, the two directors claim.
Ager-Hanssen called a meeting of group executives on 26 September 2023, where he presented a report, setting out the disclosures previously made by Brooks and Moody about the alleged conspiracy to obtain nChain’s intellectual property for less than its value.
Their plan to gather further evidence by instructing the IT department to obtain emails of everyone involved in creating the “July documents” floundered, when the head of IT, who had been instructed to keep the matter confidential, alerted the company’s chair, who vetoed the plan.
Whistleblowing report
Ager-Hanssen emailed his report, dubbed the Fairway brief, under the headline, Whistleblowing report from the management of HEH holding AG/nCHain Group, along with minutes of the meeting to company executives the following day.
Brookes and Moody claim that an independent report subsequently commissioned to look into the allegations in the Fairway brief were a “whitewash”.
They also allege that one of the companies hired to investigate the claims had previously been engaged to produce “evidence” to support Wright’s claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto. One of the ideas considered was to publish a book that could be used as evidence in court, it was claimed.
Following a disciplinary procedure, the directors were suspended and later received letters informing them that they had lost their jobs because of “gross misconduct”.
They claim there is no contemporary evidence to show why they had been suspended and that the real reason for action was their involvement in the protected disclosures in the Fairway brief.
Brookes and Moody accused of ‘piggybacking’
Along with three other respondents in the case, nChain UK Limited contests the claims. They said in an opening note that if there were any whistleblowing disclosures, they were made by Ager-Hanssen, not the two directors. Brookes and Moody were seeking to “piggyback” on protected disclosures made by somebody else in a way that was legally flawed.
According to the respondents, the July documents had been examined by well-qualified lawyers in the UK, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, who found legitimate and lawful commercial agreements. They found no breaches of duty and concluded that none of the allegations in the Fairway brief were legally founded.
On any sensible reading of the July agreements, Wright’s loss in court “afforded no right of bail out/asset stripping”, and the claimants cannot credibly suggest that it did, they said in their opening note.
The respondents argue that the directors’ dismissals were not triggered by their disclosures, but a series of “extraordinary events” and improper conduct that took place in the office on 27 September 2023.
They claim that CCTV footage shows Ager-Hanssen engaged in allegedly “unhinged” conduct when he angrily asked one of the respondents to leave the office, used multiple expletives and claimed there was an illegal conspiracy to steal intellectual property from the company.
He is quoted as saying: “You don’t understand corporate governance, you don’t work here … Get out of this office, otherwise, I’m getting security to do it. I am a board member, and you are not. You don’t even work here.”
Moody and Brookes’ conduct on 27 September was also described “extraordinary and alarming”.
The respondents said in their opening note that numerous employees that were not involved in the Fairway brief were also suspended from work following the events of 27 September.
Ager-Hanssen previously brought an employment tribunal which was struck out on 18 October 2024, on the basis that it had not actively been pursued, according to the respondents written submissions. In separate legal proceedings, between nChain Holding, Ager-Hanssen was sentenced to 10 months imprisonment for contempt of court.
The case, which has backing from WhistleblowersUK, continues.
Tech
New US software designs resizable, repairable, restylable garments
The tool, developed by a team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Adobe, turns fashion ideas into a blueprint that outlines how to assemble each component into reconfigurable clothing.
Users draw shapes and place them together to develop an outline for adaptable fashion pieces. It’s a visual diagram that shows how to cut garments, providing a straightforward way to design things like a shirt with an attachable hood for rainy days, an MIT release said.
US researchers have developed a software called ‘Refashion’ that breaks down fashion design into modules by allowing users to draw, plan and visualise each element of a clothing item.
The tool turns fashion ideas into a blueprint that outlines how to assemble each component into reconfigurable clothing.
It helps design garments that can be easily resized, repaired or restyled into different outfits.
One can, for example, create a skirt that can then be reconfigured into a dress for a formal dinner, or maternity wear that fits during different stages of pregnancy, it said.
Refashion helps design garments that can be easily resized, repaired or restyled into different outfits.
Its interface first presents a simple grid in its ‘Pattern Editor’ mode, where users can connect dots to outline the boundaries of a clothing item.
Users can customise the shape of each component, create a straight design for garments or perhaps tinker with one of Refashion’s templates. A user can edit pre-designed blueprints for garments like a T-shirt, blouse or trousers.
As a user designs a clothing piece, the system automatically creates a simplified diagram of how it can be assembled. The pattern is divided into numbered blocks, which is dragged onto different parts of a 2D mannequin to specify the position of each component. The user can then simulate how their sustainable clothing will look on 3D models of a range of body types.
Finally, a digital blueprint for sustainable clothing can extend, shorten, or combine with other pieces. Instead of buying new clothes every time, consumers can simply reconfigure existing ones.
Fibre2Fashion News Desk (DS)
Tech
Top Newegg Promo Codes and Coupons for March 2026
Listen up, nerds. Newegg currently has promo codes and deals on gently used, refurbished, new and hard-to-find electronics, gaming products and more. Remaining one of the biggest online-only retailers in the US for the last 20 years, Newegg is a leading global online retailer for PC hardware, home appliances and all things tech, as well as providing help with businesses’ e-commerce needs. In the last decade, Newegg has expanded its online retail presence, selling everything from PC parts to refurbished vacuum cleaners. So, whether you’re wanting to build your own PC or just looking to upgrade your laptop, Newegg has something for every type of tech lover. Plus, WIRED has found several Newegg discount codes (and other deals) for new and existing customers. Don’t wait too long—save big money on those big (and small) tech purchases in 2026.
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Tech
US Takes Down Botnets Used in Record-Breaking Cyberattacks
The collection of millions of hacked computers known as Aisuru and Kimwolf have been used to launch some of the biggest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks ever seen. Now United States law enforcement agencies have wiped both of them off the internet along with two of the other hordes of hijacked computers—known as botnets—in a single broad takedown.
On Thursday, the US Department of Justice, working with the cybercrime-fighting agency within the US Department of Defense known as the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, announced that it had dismantled four massive botnets in a single operation, removing the command-and-control servers used to commandeer the hacker-run armies of compromised devices known by the names JackSkid, Mossad, Aisuru, and Kimwolf. Together, operators of the four botnets had amassed more than 3 million devices, the Justice Department said, and often sold access to those devices to other criminal hackers as well as using them to target victims with overwhelming floods of attack traffic to knock websites and internet services offline.
Aisuru and Kimwolf, a distinct but Aisuru-related botnet, had together comprised more than a million devices, according to DDoS defense firm Cloudflare, with Aisuru infecting a variety of devices ranging from DVRs to network appliances to webcams, and its Kimwolf offshoot infecting Android devices including smart TVs and set-top boxes. Cloudflare says the two botnets, working in conjunction, carried out a cyberattack against a Cloudflare customer last November that reached more than 30 terabits of data per second, nearly three times the size of the previous biggest such attack.
No arrests were immediately announced along with the takedowns, but a Justice Department statement noted that the US government was collaborating with Canadian and German authorities, “which targeted individuals who operated these botnets.”
“The United States is steadfast in our commitment to safeguarding critical internet infrastructure and fighting the cybercriminals who jeopardize its security, wherever they might live,” US attorney Michael J. Heyman wrote in a statement.
Of the four botnets taken out in the operation, Aisuru had gained the most notoriety, thanks to a series of record-breaking or near-record cyberattacks it carried out last fall. The botnet, whose use was rented out like many such “booter” services offering their brute-force disruptive capabilities to anyone willing to pay, has been most visibly against gaming services like Minecraft and independent cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs. Krebs, who has extensively investigated the botnet underground and Aisuru in particular, came under repeated attack from the botnet last year.
Then in November, Cloudflare absorbed a recording-breaking combined attack from Aisuru and Kimwolf that lasted only 35 seconds but reached 31.4 terabits per second, a volume of attack traffic close to triple the size of any seen before. (The company hasn’t revealed which of its customers was hit with that attack.)
In a report on the state of the DDoS ecosystem, Cloudflare described the maximum attack traffic of the combined Aisuru and Kimwolf botnets as equivalent to “the combined populations of the UK, Germany, and Spain all simultaneously typing a website address and then hitting ‘enter’ at the same second.” The botnet was capable, Cloudflare’s analysts wrote, of “launching DDoS attacks that can cripple critical infrastructure, crash most legacy cloud-based DDoS protection solutions, and even disrupt the connectivity of entire nations.”
In fact, all four botnets disrupted by the US operation were variants of Mirai, an internet-of-things botnet that first appeared in 2016, broke records at the time for the size of the cyberattacks it enabled, and eventually was used in an attack on the domain-name service provider Dyn that took down 175,000 websites simultaneously for much of the United States. Mirai’s code base has since served as the starting point for a decade of other internet-of-things botnets.
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