Michigan restaurant owner in jail for defying virus orders Russian man admits ransomware plot against Tesla in Nevada
DETROIT – A western Michigan restaurant owner was arrested before dawn Friday and hauled to jail, a dramatic turn in a monthslong dispute over her persistent refusal to comply with orders and restrictions tied to the coronavirus.
Marlena Pavlos-hackney, 55, will remain in jail until she pays $7,500 and authorities confirm that Marlena’s Bistro and Pizzeria in Holland is closed, a judge said.
“She has put the community at risk. We are in the middle of a pandemic,” Ingham County Judge Rosemarie Aquilina said.
State investigators said Pavloshackney had allowed indoor dining when it was banned, wasn’t enforcing mask rules and was ignoring capacity limits. Her food license was suspended Jan. 20, but the business remained open.
A different judge on March 4 declared
Pavlos-hackney in contempt of court and ordered an arrest unless the restaurant was closed.
RENO, Nev. – A Russian man has pleaded guilty in the U.S. to offering a Tesla employee $1 million to cripple the electric car company’s massive electric battery plant in Nevada with ransomware and steal company secrets for extortion, prosecutors and court records said.
In a case that cybersecurity experts called exceptional for the risks he took, Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov pleaded guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court in Reno. His court-appointed federal public defender, Chris Frey, declined Friday to comment.
Prosecutors alleged that Kriuchkov acted on behalf of co-conspirators abroad and attempted to use face-toface bribery to recruit an insider to physically plant ransomware, which scrambles data on targeted networks and can be unlocked only with a software key provided by the attackers.
Typically, ransomware gangs operating from safe havens hack into victim networks over the internet and download data before activating the ransomware.