Rhino looks to replace renters’ security deposits with a small monthly fee

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Rhino, the insurtech startup incubated by Kairos and co-founded by Kairos CEO Ankur Jain, has today announced the close of a $21 million Series A round led by Kairos and Lakestar.

Rhino was founded in 2017 with the goal of getting back to renters the billions of dollars that are locked up in cash security deposits, all while protecting landlords and their property. As it stands now, landlords usually take one month’s rent to cover any damage that might be done to the apartment during the lease. This is piled on top of first and sometimes last month’s rent, and even at times a broker’s fee of one month’s rent, which adds up to an incredibly steep cost of moving.

Because of certain regulations, this money is held in an individual escrow account and can’t really generate interest, which results in billions of dollars zapped out of the economy and instead sitting dead in some account.

Rhino is looking to give renters the option to pay a small monthly fee (as low as $3) to cover an insurance policy for the landlord. Rhino is itself a managing general agent, allowing the company to both sell and create policy plans for landlords through partnerships with carriers.

Thus far the startup has saved renters upwards of $60 million in 2019, with users in more than 300,000 rental units across the country.

“The greatest challenge is working against legacy and industry norms,” said Rhino CEO and co-founder Paraag Sarva. “That start has begun, but there is a huge amount of inertia behind the status quo and that is far and away what we are most challenged by day in and day out.”

To help speed up the process, Rhino is working alongside policymakers to enact change on a federal level.

Alongside the funding announcement, the company is announcing its new policy proposal that was created in collaboration with federal, state and local government officials. The policy essentially allows for renters to be given a choice when it comes to cash deposits, including allowing residents to cover security deposits in installments or use insurtech products like Rhino to cover deposits.

Rhino says it will be sharing the policy proposal with 2020 presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle.

Rhino is one of a handful of companies that has been incubated by Kairos, a startup studio led by Ankur Jain with the goal of solving the biggest problems faced by everyday Americans. The studio focuses on housing and healthcare, with companies such as Rhino, June Homes, Little Spoon, Cera and a couple of startups still in stealth.

Salesforce is building an office tower in Sydney, pledging 1000 new jobs in next five years

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Salesforce announced this week that it’s building another shiny tower. This one will be in Sydney with views of the harbor and the iconic Sydney Opera House. The company has also committed to adding 1000 new jobs in the next five years and to building the tower in a sustainable fashion.

In fact, Salesforce is pledging the new tower will be one of the greenest buildings in the country when they are finished. “The building has achieved Sydney’s first-ever WELL core and shell Platinum pre-certification, the highest obtainable pre-certification, and will achieve a 6 Star Green Star Design and As-Built rating, representing world excellence in sustainable design,” Salesforce’s Elizabeth Pinkham wrote in a blog post announcing the project.

As is Salesforce’s way, it’s going to be the tallest building in the city when it’s done, and will sit in the Circular Quay, part of the central business district in the city, and will house shops and restaurants on the main floor. As with all of its modern towers, it’s going to dedicate the top floor to allow for flexible use for employees, customers and partners. The building will also boast a variety of spaces including a Salesforce Innovation Center for customers along with social lounges, mindfulness areas and a variety of spaces for employees to collaborate.

Salesforce has had a presence in Sydney for over 15 years, according to the company, and this tower is an attempt to consolidate that presence into a single, modern space with room to expand over the next five years and add hundreds of new employees.

The announcement comes on the heels of the one earlier this year that the company was building a similarly grand project in Dublin to centralize operations in that city where it has had a presence since 2001.

Salesforce is building new tower in Dublin and adding hundreds of jobs

Mariposa Botnet Author, Darkcode Crime Forum Admin Arrested in Germany

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A Slovenian man convicted of authoring the destructive and once-prolific Mariposa botnet and running the infamous Darkode cybercrime forum has been arrested in Germany on request from prosecutors in the United States, who’ve recently re-indicted him on related charges.

NiceHash CTO Matjaž “Iserdo” Škorjanc, as pictured on the front page of a recent edition of the Slovenian daily Delo.si, is being held by German authorities on a US arrest warrant for operating the destructive “Mariposa” botnet and founding the infamous Darkode cybercrime forum.

The Slovenian Press Agency reported today that German police arrested Matjaž “Iserdo” Škorjanc last week, in response to a U.S.-issued international arrest warrant for his extradition.

In December 2013, a Slovenian court sentenced Škorjanc to four years and ten months in prison for creating the malware that powered the ‘Mariposa‘ botnet. Spanish for “Butterfly,” Mariposa was a potent crime machine first spotted in 2008. Very soon after its inception, Mariposa was estimated to have infected more than 1 million hacked computers — making it one of the largest botnets ever created.

An advertisement for the ButterFly Bot.

Škorjanc and his hacker handle Iserdo were initially named in a Justice Department indictment from 2011 (PDF) along with two other men who allegedly wrote and sold the Mariposa botnet code. But in June 2019, the DOJ unsealed an updated indictment (PDF) naming Škorjanc, the original two other defendants, and a fourth man (from the United States) in a conspiracy to make and market Mariposa and to run the Darkode crime forum.

More recently, Škorjanc served as chief technology officer at NiceHash, a Slovenian company that lets users sell their computing power to help others mine virtual currencies like bitcoin. In December 2017, approximately USD $52 million worth of bitcoin mysteriously disappeared from the coffers of NiceHash. Slovenian police are reportedly still investigating that incident.

The “sellers” page on the Darkode cybercrime forum, circa 2013.

It will be interesting to see what happens with the fourth and sole U.S.-based defendant added in the latest DOJ charges — Thomas K. McCormick, a.k.a “fubar” — allegedly one of the last administrators of Darkode. Prosecutors say McCormick also was a reseller of the Mariposa botnet, the ZeuS banking trojan, and a bot malware he allegedly helped create called “Ngrbot.”

Between 2010 and 2013, Fubar would randomly chat me up on instant messenger apropos of nothing to trade information about the latest goings-on in the malware and cybercrime forum scene.

Fubar frequently knew before anyone else about upcoming improvements to or new features of ZeuS, and discussed at length his interactions with Iserdo/Škorjanc. Every so often, I would reach out to Fubar to see if he could convince one of his forum members to call off an attack against KrebsOnSecurity.com, an activity that had become something of a rite of passage for new Darkode members.

On Dec. 5, 2013, federal investigators visited McCormick at his University of Massachusetts dorm room. According to a memo filed by FBI agents investigating the case, in that interview McCormick acknowledged using the “fubar” identity on Darkode, but said he’d quit the whole forum scene years ago, and that he’d even interned at Microsoft for several summers and at Cisco for one summer.

A subsequent search warrant executed on his dorm room revealed multiple removable drives that held tens of thousands of stolen credit card records. For whatever reason, however, McCormick wasn’t arrested or charged until December 2018.

According to the FBI, back in that December 2013 interview McCormick voluntarily told them a great deal about his various businesses and online personas. He also apparently told investigators he talked with KrebsOnSecurity quite a bit, and that he’d tipped me off to some important developments in the malware scene. For example:

“TM had found the email address of the Spyeye author in an old fake antivirus affiliate program database and that TM was able to find the true name of the Spyeye author from searching online for an individual that used the email address,” the memo states. “TM passed this information on to Brian Krebs.”

Read more of the FBI’s interview with McCormick here (PDF).

News of Škorjanc’s arrest comes amid other cybercrime takedowns in Germany this past week. On Friday, German authorities announced they’d arrested seven people and were investigating six more in connection with the raid of a Dark Web hosting operation that allegedly supported multiple child porn, cybercrime and drug markets with hundreds of servers buried inside a heavily fortified military bunker.