Emerging Threat

Medical technology company Stryker was hit by a cyberattack that caused a global outage across its systems, with staff and contractors reporting that the logo of the Iran-linked hacking group Handala appeared on login pages.

West Africa has become a major and expanding logistics, warehousing, and redistribution hub in the global cocaine trade, with the market in the region larger than ever and increasingly damaging to public health, governance, and security.

Gaps in the international oversight of offshore virtual-asset firms have made it possible for criminals to commit large-scale fraud, money laundering, and terrorism financing beyond the reach of most supervisory bodies, according to FATF.

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating Iran’s use of Binance to evade U.S. sanctions, according to new reporting by The Wall Street Journal. 

Signs of hospice fraud in Los Angeles County are worsening despite a state crackdown, with more than 700 of roughly 1,800 licensed hospices in the county showing multiple warning indicators identified by California auditors.

Cambodia’s crackdown on cyber scam compounds has disrupted operations in Phnom Penh and elsewhere, but the multibillion-dollar industry is already showing signs of revival.

Guyana’s rapid economic expansion and new port development could make the country a more important cocaine transshipment point as U.S. military strikes in and near Venezuela disrupt established trafficking routes.

Banks and investors are failing to adequately screen for illegal mining risks even when operating in sectors highly exposed to the trade, according to a report by the World Wide Fund for Nature and financial-crime risk platform Themis.

Russian military veterans, including former Wagner mercenaries and men linked to the GRU, have been deployed aboard tankers in Moscow’s “shadow fleet” moving sanctioned oil through the Baltic Sea.

Artificial intelligence is making sanctions and export-control evasion schemes harder to detect by enabling the creation of realistic fake companies and phony documentation used to obviate international trade restrictions.