What happened
New Mexico yesterday filed a federal civil lawsuit against Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime attorney Darren Indyke and accountant Richard Kahn, alleging they knowingly helped finance and hide Epstein’s sex trafficking at his Zorro Ranch near Santa Fe. The suit seeks to distribute Epstein’s assets among his victims while blocking Indyke and Kahn from accepting any payments from his $107 million estate, for which they serve as executors.

Who said what
None of Epstein’s crimes “could be done by just one man,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said at a press conference. “This was something that was facilitated” and “made possible” by lawyers, accountants and “others who have yet to face real consequences.” According to the lawsuit, Indyke and Kahn arranged payments to Epstein’s victims to “purchase their silence and leave them indebted to Epstein,” monitored their spending and “prepared tax returns for some survivors.” Indyke and Kahn, through a lawyer, denied the allegations and any knowledge of Epstein’s abuse.

What next?
Federal prosecutors in New York are also investigating Indyke and Kahn, according to The Wall Street Journal. Torrez in February reopened a state criminal investigation into Epstein’s alleged sex crimes at Zorro Ranch and then sued the Justice Department and Attorney General Todd Blanche in August, accusing them of blocking the investigation. 

What happened
Security agencies and internet researchers yesterday revealed critical security vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language that powers an estimated 70% of the world’s websites, and released a patch to fix them, triggering a rush by countries and companies to protect their sites from hackers. Researchers first uncovered the flaws in August, using OpenAI’s advanced models. Some governments and commercial services, on advice from NSA and FBI cyber units, preemptively took down their sites yesterday.

Who said what
“The potential impact is enormous,” putting a “significant portion” of the internet at risk, Ismael Valenzuela at cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf said to The Associated Press. AI allowed researchers to uncover the vulnerabilities, PHP2Shell, but it also lets a broad range of bad actors find decade-old “weaknesses and turn them into working exploits.” Hackers could exploit PHP2Shell “in many ways, some requiring just a few seconds,” The Wall Street Journal said. On any system running PHP, attackers could “steal information or launch a cyberattack on anyone visiting a hacked website.” 

What next?
Yesterday’s security fix release “marks the starting shot in a race between defenders and hackers,” the Journal said. Hackers could use the rescue software as a “kind of road map” to “easily reverse engineer” the patch, The New York Times said, and “initiate attacks” before systems are protected. 

An obscure island in the Indian Ocean has become an unlikely titan in the global online gambling industry. With its lack of corporate taxes and “minimal red tape,” Anjouan is now home to a “thriving industry” of gambling websites tied to the black market, and banks, brokers and cryptocurrency exchanges are among its virtual residents, according to Australia’s ABC News.

But “there's just one problem: none of the licenses — financial or gambling — are worth the (virtual) paper they are written on,” ABC News said. Local officials have called Anjouan’s licensing regulators “fictitious entities” operating “illegally.” Still, the industry continues to draw operators and gamblers from around the world into its ever-expanding orbit.

Traditionally, Anjouan — one of the semi-autonomous islands that make up the Comoros archipelago — has been best known for its exports of ylang-ylang oil and vanilla. But it has  more recently “stumbled” into the “dangerous but highly lucrative” business of underground online gambling, said The Guardian. There are now 1,500 registered gaming licence holders on the books in Anjouan.

This is far from a state-sponsored endeavour to create a low-regulation haven, however. In fact, the island is “fighting back” to regain its reputation from the “small cadre of mostly British businessmen flogging unofficial ‘licences’” to online casinos, as well as banking and cryptocurrency platforms, said The Guardian. The government of the Comoros Union has made a “direct request” to the British government for assistance to help unravel the “unauthorised licensing regime” once and for all.