GOP Cries Censorship Over Spam Filters That Work

The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week sent a letter to Google’s CEO demanding to know why Gmail was blocking messages from Republican senders while allegedly failing to block similar missives supporting Democrats. The letter followed media reports accusing Gmail of disproportionately flagging messages from the GOP fundraising platform WinRed and sending them to the spam folder. But according to experts who track daily spam volumes worldwide, WinRed’s messages are getting blocked more because its methods of blasting email are increasingly way more spammy than that of ActBlue, the fundraising platform for Democrats.

On Aug. 13, The New York Post ran an “exclusive” story titled, “Google caught flagging GOP fundraiser emails as ‘suspicious’ — sending them directly to spam.” The story cited a memo from Targeted Victory – whose clients include the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), Rep. Steve Scalise and Sen. Marsha Blackburn – which said it observed that the “serious and troubling” trend was still going on as recently as June and July of this year.

“If Gmail is allowed to quietly suppress WinRed links while giving ActBlue a free pass, it will continue to tilt the playing field in ways that voters never see, but campaigns will feel every single day,” the memo reportedly said.

In an August 28 letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson cited the New York Post story and warned that Gmail’s parent Alphabet may be engaging in unfair or deceptive practices.

“Alphabet’s alleged partisan treatment of comparable messages or messengers in Gmail to achieve political objectives may violate both of these prohibitions under the FTC Act,” Ferguson wrote. “And the partisan treatment may cause harm to consumers.”

However, the situation looks very different when you ask spam experts what’s going on with WinRed’s recent messaging campaigns. Atro Tossavainen and Pekka Jalonen are co-founders at Koli-Lõks OÜ, an email intelligence company in Estonia. Koli-Lõks taps into real-time intelligence about daily spam volumes by monitoring large numbers of “spamtraps” — email addresses that are intentionally set up to catch unsolicited emails.

Spamtraps are generally not used for communication or account creation, but instead are created to identify senders exhibiting spammy behavior, such as scraping the Internet for email addresses or buying unmanaged distribution lists. As an email sender, blasting these spamtraps over and over with unsolicited email is the fastest way to ruin your domain’s reputation online. Such activity also virtually ensures that more of your messages are going to start getting listed on spam blocklists that are broadly shared within the global anti-abuse community.

Tossavainen told KrebsOnSecurity that WinRed’s emails hit its spamtraps in the .com, .net, and .org space far more frequently than do fundraising emails sent by ActBlue. Koli-Lõks published a graph of the stark disparity in spamtrap activity for WinRed versus ActBlue, showing a nearly fourfold increase in spamtrap hits from WinRed emails in the final week of July 2025.

“Many of our spamtraps are in repurposed legacy-TLD domains (.com, .org, .net) and therefore could be understood to have been involved with a U.S. entity in their pre-zombie life,” Tossavainen explained in the LinkedIn post.

Raymond Dijkxhoorn is the CEO and a founding member of SURBL, a widely-used blocklist that flags domains and IP addresses known to be used in unsolicited messages, phishing and malware distribution. Dijkxhoorn said their spamtrap data mirrors that of Koli-Lõks, and shows that WinRed has consistently been far more aggressive in sending email than ActBlue.

Dijkxhoorn said the fact that WinRed’s emails so often end up dinging the organization’s sender reputation is not a content issue but rather a technical one.

“On our end we don’t really care if the content is political or trying to sell viagra or penis enlargements,” Dijkxhoorn said. “It’s the mechanics, they should not end up in spamtraps. And that’s the reason the domain reputation is tempered. Not ‘because domain reputation firms have a political agenda.’ We really don’t care about the political situation anywhere. The same as we don’t mind people buying penis enlargements. But when either of those land in spamtraps it will impact sending experience.”

The FTC letter to Google’s CEO also referenced a debunked 2022 study (PDF) by political consultants who found Google caught more Republican emails in spam filters. Techdirt editor Mike Masnick notes that while the 2022 study also found that other email providers caught more Democratic emails as spam, “Republicans laser-focused on Gmail because it fit their victimization narrative better.”

Masnick said GOP lawmakers then filed both lawsuits and complaints with the Federal Election Commission (both of which failed easily), claiming this was somehow an “in-kind contribution” to Democrats.

“This is political posturing designed to keep the White House happy by appearing to ‘do something’ about conservative claims of ‘censorship,'” Masnick wrote of the FTC letter. “The FTC has never policed ‘political bias’ in private companies’ editorial decisions, and for good reason—the First Amendment prohibits exactly this kind of government interference.”

WinRed did not respond to a request for comment.

The WinRed website says it is an online fundraising platform supported by a united front of the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee (RNC), the NRSC, and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).

WinRed has recently come under fire for aggressive fundraising via text message as well. In June, 404 Media reported on a lawsuit filed by a family in Utah against the RNC for allegedly bombarding their mobile phones with text messages seeking donations after they’d tried to unsubscribe from the missives dozens of times.

One of the family members said they received 27 such messages from 25 numbers, even after sending 20 stop requests. The plaintiffs in that case allege the texts from WinRed and the RNC “knowingly disregard stop requests and purposefully use different phone numbers to make it impossible to block new messages.”

Dijkxhoorn said WinRed did inquire recently about why some of its assets had been marked as a risk by SURBL, but he said they appeared to have zero interest in investigating the likely causes he offered in reply.

“They only replied with, ‘You are interfering with U.S. elections,'” Dijkxhoorn said, noting that many of SURBL’s spamtrap domains are only publicly listed in the registration records for random domain names.

“They’re at best harvested by themselves but more likely [they] just went and bought lists,” he said. “It’s not like ‘Oh Google is filtering this and not the other,’ the reason isn’t the provider. The reason is the fundraising spammers and the lists they send to.”

The Ongoing Fallout from a Breach at AI Chatbot Maker Salesloft

The recent mass-theft of authentication tokens from Salesloft, whose AI chatbot is used by a broad swath of corporate America to convert customer interaction into Salesforce leads, has left many companies racing to invalidate the stolen credentials before hackers can exploit them. Now Google warns the breach goes far beyond access to Salesforce data, noting the hackers responsible also stole valid authentication tokens for hundreds of online services that customers can integrate with Salesloft, including Slack, Google Workspace, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and OpenAI.

Salesloft disclosed on August 20 that, “Today, we detected a security issue in the Drift application,” referring to the technology that powers an AI chatbot used by so many corporate websites. The alert urged customers to re-authenticate the connection between the Drift and Salesforce apps to invalidate their existing authentication tokens, but it said nothing then to indicate those tokens had already been stolen.

On August 26, the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) warned that unidentified hackers tracked as UNC6395 used the access tokens stolen from Salesloft to siphon large amounts of data from numerous corporate Salesforce instances. Google said the data theft began as early as Aug. 8, 2025 and lasted through at least Aug. 18, 2025, and that the incident did not involve any vulnerability in the Salesforce platform.

Google said the attackers have been sifting through the massive data haul for credential materials such as AWS keys, VPN credentials, and credentials to the cloud storage provider Snowflake.

“If successful, the right credentials could allow them to further compromise victim and client environments, as well as pivot to the victim’s clients or partner environments,” the GTIG report stated.

The GTIG updated its advisory on August 28 to acknowledge the attackers used the stolen tokens to access email from “a very small number of Google Workspace accounts” that were specially configured to integrate with Salesloft. More importantly, it warned organizations to immediately invalidate all tokens stored in or connected to their Salesloft integrations — regardless of the third-party service in question.

“Given GTIG’s observations of data exfiltration associated with the campaign, organizations using Salesloft Drift to integrate with third-party platforms (including but not limited to Salesforce) should consider their data compromised and are urged to take immediate remediation steps,” Google advised.

On August 28, Salesforce blocked Drift from integrating with its platform, and with its productivity platforms Slack and Pardot.

The Salesloft incident comes on the heels of a broad social engineering campaign that used voice phishing to trick targets into connecting a malicious app to their organization’s Salesforce portal. That campaign led to data breaches and extortion attacks affecting a number of companies including Adidas, Allianz Life and Qantas.

On August 5, Google disclosed that one of its corporate Salesforce instances was compromised by the attackers, which the GTIG has dubbed UNC6040 (“UNC” stands for “uncategorized threat group”). Google said the extortionists consistently claimed to be the threat group ShinyHunters, and that the group appeared to be preparing to escalate its extortion attacks by launching a data leak site.

ShinyHunters is an amorphous threat group known for using social engineering to break into cloud platforms and third-party IT providers, and for posting dozens of stolen databases to cybercrime communities like the now-defunct Breachforums.

The ShinyHunters brand dates back to 2020, and the group has been credited with or taken responsibility for dozens of data leaks that exposed hundreds of millions of breached records. The group’s member roster is thought to be somewhat fluid, drawing mainly from active denizens of the Com, a mostly English-language cybercrime community scattered across an ocean of Telegram and Discord servers.

Recorded Future’s Alan Liska told Bleeping Computer that the overlap in the “tools, techniques and procedures” used by ShinyHunters and the Scattered Spider extortion group likely indicate some crossover between the two groups.

To muddy the waters even further, on August 28 a Telegram channel that now has nearly 40,000 subscribers was launched under the intentionally confusing banner “Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters 4.0,” wherein participants have repeatedly claimed responsibility for the Salesloft hack without actually sharing any details to prove their claims.

The Telegram group has been trying to attract media attention by threatening security researchers at Google and other firms. It also is using the channel’s sudden popularity to promote a new cybercrime forum called “Breachstars,” which they claim will soon host data stolen from victim companies who refuse to negotiate a ransom payment.

But Austin Larsen, a principal threat analyst at Google’s threat intelligence group, said there is no compelling evidence to attribute the Salesloft activity to ShinyHunters or to other known groups at this time.

“Their understanding of the incident seems to come from public reporting alone,” Larsen told KrebsOnSecurity, referring to the most active participants in the Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters 4.0 Telegram channel.

Joshua Wright, a senior technical director at Counter Hack, is credited with coining the term “authorization sprawl” to describe one key reason that social engineering attacks from groups like Scattered Spider and ShinyHunters so often succeed: They abuse legitimate user access tokens to move seamlessly between on-premises and cloud systems.

Wright said this type of attack chain often goes undetected because the attacker sticks to the resources and access already allocated to the user.

“Instead of the conventional chain of initial access, privilege escalation and endpoint bypass, these threat actors are using centralized identity platforms that offer single sign-on (SSO) and integrated authentication and authorization schemes,” Wright wrote in a June 2025 column. “Rather than creating custom malware, attackers use the resources already available to them as authorized users.”

It remains unclear exactly how the attackers gained access to all Salesloft Drift authentication tokens. Salesloft announced on August 27 that it hired Mandiant, Google Cloud’s incident response division, to investigate the root cause(s).

“We are working with Salesloft Drift to investigate the root cause of what occurred and then it’ll be up to them to publish that,” Mandiant Consulting CTO Charles Carmakal told Cyberscoop. “There will be a lot more tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day.”

Affiliates Flock to ‘Soulless’ Scam Gambling Machine

Last month, KrebsOnSecurity tracked the sudden emergence of hundreds of polished online gaming and wagering websites that lure people with free credits and eventually abscond with any cryptocurrency funds deposited by players. We’ve since learned that these scam gambling sites have proliferated thanks to a new Russian affiliate program called “Gambler Panel” that bills itself as a “soulless project that is made for profit.”

The scam begins with deceptive ads posted on social media that claim the wagering sites are working in partnership with popular athletes or social media personalities. The ads invariably state that by using a supplied “promo code,” interested players can claim a $2,500 credit on the advertised gaming website.

The gaming sites ask visitors to create a free account to claim their $2,500 credit, which they can use to play any number of extremely polished video games that ask users to bet on each action. However, when users try to cash out any “winnings” the gaming site will reject the request and prompt the user to make a “verification deposit” of cryptocurrency — typically around $100 — before any money can be distributed.

Those who deposit cryptocurrency funds are soon pressed into more wagering and making additional deposits. And — shocker alert — all players eventually lose everything they’ve invested in the platform.

The number of scam gambling or “scambling” sites has skyrocketed in the past month, and now we know why: The sites all pull their gaming content and detailed strategies for fleecing players straight from the playbook created by Gambler Panel, a Russian-language affiliate program that promises affiliates up to 70 percent of the profits.

Gambler Panel’s website gambler-panel[.]com links to a helpful wiki that explains the scam from cradle to grave, offering affiliates advice on how best to entice visitors, keep them gambling, and extract maximum profits from each victim.

“We have a completely self-written from scratch FAKE CASINO engine that has no competitors,” Gambler Panel’s wiki enthuses. “Carefully thought-out casino design in every pixel, a lot of audits, surveys of real people and test traffic floods were conducted, which allowed us to create something that has no doubts about the legitimacy and trustworthiness even for an inveterate gambling addict with many years of experience.”

Gambler Panel explains that the one and only goal of affiliates is to drive traffic to these scambling sites by any and all means possible.

“Unlike white gambling affiliates, we accept absolutely any type of traffic, regardless of origin, the only limitation is the CIS countries,” the wiki continued, referring to a common prohibition against scamming people in Russia and former Soviet republics in the Commonwealth of Independent States.

The program’s website claims it has more than 20,000 affiliates, who earn a minimum of $10 for each verification deposit. Interested new affiliates must first get approval from the group’s Telegram channel, which currently has around 2,500 active users.

The Gambler Panel channel is replete with images of affiliate panels showing the daily revenue of top affiliates, scantily-clad young women promoting the Gambler logo, and fast cars that top affiliates claimed they bought with their earnings.

The apparent popularity of this scambling niche is a consequence of the program’s ease of use and detailed instructions for successfully reproducing virtually every facet of the scam. Indeed, much of the tutorial focuses on advice and ready-made templates to help even novice affiliates drive traffic via social media websites, particularly on Instagram and TikTok.

Gambler Panel also walks affiliates through a range of possible responses to questions from users who are trying to withdraw funds from the platform. This section, titled “Rules for working in Live chat,” urges scammers to respond quickly to user requests (1-7 minutes), and includes numerous strategies for keeping the conversation professional and the user on the platform as long as possible.

The connection between Gambler Panel and the explosion in the number of scambling websites was made by a 17-year-old developer who operates multiple Discord servers that have been flooded lately with misleading ads for these sites.

The researcher, who asked to be identified only by the nickname “Thereallo,” said Gambler Panel has built a scalable business product for other criminals.

“The wiki is kinda like a ‘how to scam 101’ for criminals written with the clarity you would expect from a legitimate company,” Thereallo said. “It’s clean, has step by step guides, and treats their scam platform like a real product. You could swap out the content, and it could be any documentation for startups.”

“They’ve minimized their own risk — spreading the links on Discord / Facebook / YT Shorts, etc. — and outsourced it to a hungry affiliate network, just like a franchise,” Thereallo wrote in response to questions.

“A centralized platform that can serve over 1,200 domains with a shared user base, IP tracking, and a custom API is not at all a trivial thing to build,” Thereallo said. “It’s a scalable system designed to be a resilient foundation for thousands of disposable scam sites.”

The security firm Silent Push has compiled a list of the latest domains associated with the Gambler Panel, available here (.csv).

DSLRoot, Proxies, and the Threat of ‘Legal Botnets’

The cybersecurity community on Reddit responded in disbelief this month when a self-described Air National Guard member with top secret security clearance began questioning the arrangement they’d made with company called DSLRoot, which was paying $250 a month to plug a pair of laptops into the Redditor’s high-speed Internet connection in the United States. This post examines the history and provenance of DSLRoot, one of the oldest “residential proxy” networks with origins in Russia and Eastern Europe.

The query about DSLRoot came from a Reddit user “Sacapoopie,” who did not respond to questions. This user has since deleted the original question from their post, although some of their replies to other Reddit cybersecurity enthusiasts remain in the thread. The original post was indexed here by archive.is, and it began with a question:

“I have been getting paid 250$ a month by a residential IP network provider named DSL root to host devices in my home,” Sacapoopie wrote. “They are on a separate network than what we use for personal use. They have dedicated DSL connections (one per host) to the ISP that provides the DSL coverage. My family used Starlink. Is this stupid for me to do? They just sit there and I get paid for it. The company pays the internet bill too.”

Many Redditors said they assumed Sacapoopie’s post was a joke, and that nobody with a cybersecurity background and top-secret (TS/SCI) clearance would agree to let some shady residential proxy company introduce hardware into their network. Other readers pointed to a slew of posts from Sacapoopie in the Cybersecurity subreddit over the past two years about their work on cybersecurity for the Air National Guard.

When pressed for more details by fellow Redditors, Sacapoopie described the equipment supplied by DSLRoot as “just two laptops hardwired into a modem, which then goes to a dsl port in the wall.”

“When I open the computer, it looks like [they] have some sort of custom application that runs and spawns several cmd prompts,” the Redditor explained. “All I can infer from what I see in them is they are making connections.”

When asked how they became acquainted with DSLRoot, Sacapoopie told another user they discovered the company and reached out after viewing an advertisement on a social media platform.

“This was probably 5-6 years ago,” Sacapoopie wrote. “Since then I just communicate with a technician from that company and I help trouble shoot connectivity issues when they arise.”

Reached for comment, DSLRoot said its brand has been unfairly maligned thanks to that Reddit discussion. The unsigned email said DSLRoot is fully transparent about its goals and operations, adding that it operates under full consent from its “regional agents,” the company’s term for U.S. residents like Sacapoopie.

“As although we support honest journalism, we’re against of all kinds of ‘low rank/misleading Yellow Journalism’ done for the sake of cheap hype,” DSLRoot wrote in reply. “It’s obvious to us that whoever is doing this, is either lacking a proper understanding of the subject or doing it intentionally to gain exposure by misleading those who lack proper understanding,” DSLRoot wrote in answer to questions about the company’s intentions.

“We monitor our clients and prohibit any illegal activity associated with our residential proxies,” DSLRoot continued. “We honestly didn’t know that the guy who made the Reddit post was a military guy. Be it an African-American granny trying to pay her rent or a white kid trying to get through college, as long as they can provide an Internet line or host phones for us — we’re good.”

WHAT IS DSLROOT?

DSLRoot is sold as a residential proxy service on the forum BlackHatWorld under the name DSLRoot and GlobalSolutions. The company is based in the Bahamas and was formed in 2012. The service is advertised to people who are not in the United States but who want to seem like they are. DSLRoot pays people in the United States to run the company’s hardware and software — including 5G mobile devices — and in return it rents those IP addresses as dedicated proxies to customers anywhere in the world — priced at $190 per month for unrestricted access to all locations.

The GlobalSolutions account on BlackHatWorld lists a Telegram account and a WhatsApp number in Mexico. DSLRoot’s profile on the marketing agency digitalpoint.com from 2010 shows their previous username on the forum was “Incorptoday.” GlobalSolutions user accounts at bitcointalk[.]org and roclub[.]com include the email clickdesk@instantvirtualcreditcards[.]com.

Passive DNS records from DomainTools.com show instantvirtualcreditcards[.]com shared a host back then — 208.85.1.164 — with just a handful of domains, including dslroot[.]com, regacard[.]com, 4groot[.]com, residential-ip[.]com, 4gemperor[.]com, ip-teleport[.]com, proxysource[.]net and proxyrental[.]net.

Cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 finds GlobalSolutions registered on BlackHatWorld in 2016 using the email address prepaidsolutions@yahoo.com. This user shared that their birthday is March 7, 1984.

Several negative reviews about DSLRoot on the forums noted that the service was operated by a BlackHatWorld user calling himself “USProxyKing.” Indeed, Intel 471 shows this user told fellow forum members in 2013 to contact him at the Skype username “dslroot.”

USProxyKing had a reputation for spamming the forums with ads for his residential proxy service, and he ran a “pay-per-install” program where he paid affiliates a small commission each time one of their websites resulted in the installation of his unspecified “adware” programs — presumably a program that turned host PCs into proxies. On the other end of the business, USProxyKing sold that pay-per-install access to others wishing to distribute questionable software — at $1 per installation.

Private messages indexed by Intel 471 show USProxyKing also raised money from nearly 20 different BlackHatWorld members who were promised shareholder positions in a new business that would offer robocalling services capable of placing 2,000 calls per minute.

Constella Intelligence, a platform that tracks data exposed in breaches, finds that same IP address GlobalSolutions used to register at BlackHatWorld was also used to create accounts at a handful of sites, including a GlobalSolutions user account at WebHostingTalk that supplied the email address incorptoday@gmail.com. Also registered to incorptoday@gmail.com are the domains dslbay[.]com, dslhub[.]net, localsim[.]com, rdslpro[.]com, virtualcards[.]biz/cc, and virtualvisa[.]cc.

Recall that DSLRoot’s profile on digitalpoint.com was previously named Incorptoday. DomainTools says incorptoday@gmail.com is associated with almost two dozen domains going back to 2008, including incorptoday[.]com, a website that offers to incorporate businesses in several states, including Delaware, Florida and Nevada, for prices ranging from $450 to $550.

As we can see in this archived copy of the site from 2013, IncorpToday also offered a premiere service for $750 that would allow the customer’s new company to have a retail checking account, with no questions asked.

Global Solutions is able to provide access to the U.S. banking system by offering customers prepaid cards that can be loaded with a variety of virtual payment instruments that were popular in Russian-speaking countries at the time, including WebMoney. The cards are limited to $500 balances, but non-Westerners can use them to anonymously pay for goods and services at a variety of Western companies. Cardnow[.]ru, another domain registered to incorptoday@gmail.com, demonstrates this in action.

WHO IS ANDREI HOLAS?

The oldest domain (2008) registered to incorptoday@gmail.com is andrei[.]me; another is called andreigolos[.]com. DomainTools says these and other domains registered to that email address include the registrant name Andrei Holas, from Huntsville, Ala.

Public records indicate Andrei Holas has lived with his brother — Aliaksandr Holas — at two different addresses in Alabama. Those records state that Andrei Holas’ birthday is in March 1984, and that his brother is slightly younger. The younger brother did not respond to a request for comment.

Andrei Holas maintained an account on the Russian social network Vkontakte under the email address ryzhik777@gmail.com, an address that shows up in numerous records hacked and leaked from Russian government entities over the past few years.

Those records indicate Andrei Holas and his brother are from Belarus and have maintained an address in Moscow for some time (that address is roughly three blocks away from the main headquarters of the Russian FSB, the successor intelligence agency to the KGB). Hacked Russian banking records show Andrei Holas’ birthday is March 7, 1984 — the same birth date listed by GlobalSolutions on BlackHatWorld.

A 2010 post by ryzhik777@gmail.com at the Russian-language forum Ulitka explains that the poster was having trouble getting his B1/B2 visa to visit his brother in the United States, even though he’d previously been approved for two separate guest visas and a student visa. It remains unclear if one, both, or neither of the Holas brothers still lives in the United States. Andrei explained in 2010 that his brother was an American citizen.

LEGAL BOTNETS

We can all wag our fingers at military personnel who should undoubtedly know better than to install Internet hardware from strangers, but in truth there is an endless supply of U.S. residents who will resell their Internet connection if it means they can make a few bucks out of it. And these days, there are plenty of residential proxy providers who will make it worth your while.

Traditionally, residential proxy networks have been constructed using malicious software that quietly turns infected systems into traffic relays that are then sold in shadowy online forums. Most often, this malware gets bundled with popular cracked software and video files that are uploaded to file-sharing networks and that secretly turn the host device into a traffic relay. In fact, USPRoxyKing bragged that he routinely achieved thousands of installs per week via this method alone.

There are a number of residential proxy networks that entice users to monetize their unused bandwidth (inviting you to violate the terms of service of your ISP in the process); others, like DSLRoot, act as a communal VPN, and by using the service you gain access to the connections of other proxies (users) by default, but you also agree to share your connection with others.

Indeed, Intel 471’s archives show the GlobalSolutions and DSLRoot accounts routinely received private messages from forum users who were college students or young people trying to make ends meet. Those messages show that many of DSLRoot’s “regional agents” often sought commissions to refer friends interested in reselling their home Internet connections (DSLRoot would offer to cover the monthly cost of the agent’s home Internet connection).

But in an era when North Korean hackers are relentlessly posing as Western IT workers by paying people to host laptop farms in the United States, letting strangers run laptops, mobile devices or any other hardware on your network seems like an awfully risky move regardless of your station in life. As several Redditors pointed out in Sacapoopie’s thread, an Arizona woman was sentenced in July 2025 to 102 months in prison for hosting a laptop farm that helped North Korean hackers secure jobs at more than 300 U.S. companies, including Fortune 500 firms.

Lloyd Davies is the founder of Infrawatch, a London-based security startup that tracks residential proxy networks. Davies said he reverse engineered the software that powers DSLRoot’s proxy service, and found it phones home to the aforementioned domain proxysource[.]net, which sells a service that promises to “get your ads live in multiple cities without getting banned, flagged or ghosted” (presumably a reference to CraigsList ads).

Davies said he found the DSLRoot installer had capabilities to remotely control residential networking equipment across multiple vendor brands.

“The software employs vendor-specific exploits and hardcoded administrative credentials, suggesting DSLRoot pre-configures equipment before deployment,” Davies wrote in an analysis published today. He said the software performs WiFi network enumeration to identify nearby wireless networks, thereby “potentially expanding targeting capabilities beyond the primary internet connection.”

It’s unclear exactly when the USProxyKing was usurped from his throne, but DSLRoot and its proxy offerings are not what they used to be. Davies said the entire DSLRoot network now has fewer than 300 nodes nationwide, mostly systems on DSL providers like CenturyLink and Frontier.

On Aug. 17, GlobalSolutions posted to BlackHatWorld saying, “We’re restructuring our business model by downgrading to ‘DSL only’ lines (no mobile or cable).” Asked via email about the changes, DSLRoot blamed the decline in his customers on the proliferation of residential proxy services.

“These days it has become almost impossible to compete in this niche as everyone is selling residential proxies and many companies want you to install a piece of software on your phone or desktop so they can resell your residential IPs on a much larger scale,” DSLRoot explained. “So-called ‘legal botnets’ as we see them.”

SIM-Swapper, Scattered Spider Hacker Gets 10 Years

A 20-year-old Florida man at the center of a prolific cybercrime group known as “Scattered Spider” was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison today, and ordered to pay roughly $13 million in restitution to victims.

Noah Michael Urban of Palm Coast, Fla. pleaded guilty in April 2025 to charges of wire fraud and conspiracy. Florida prosecutors alleged Urban conspired with others to steal at least $800,000 from five victims via SIM-swapping attacks that diverted their mobile phone calls and text messages to devices controlled by Urban and his co-conspirators.

Although prosecutors had asked for Urban to serve eight years, Jacksonville news outlet News4Jax.com reports the federal judge in the case today opted to sentence Urban to 120 months in federal prison, ordering him to pay $13 million in restitution and undergo three years of supervised release after his sentence is completed.

In November 2024 Urban was charged by federal prosecutors in Los Angeles as one of five members of Scattered Spider (a.k.a. “Oktapus,” “Scatter Swine” and “UNC3944”), which specialized in SMS and voice phishing attacks that tricked employees at victim companies into entering their credentials and one-time passcodes at phishing websites. Urban pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in the California case, and the $13 million in restitution is intended to cover victims from both cases.

The targeted SMS scams spanned several months during the summer of 2022, asking employees to click a link and log in at a website that mimicked their employer’s Okta authentication page. Some SMS phishing messages told employees their VPN credentials were expiring and needed to be changed; other missives advised employees about changes to their upcoming work schedule.

That phishing spree netted Urban and others access to more than 130 companies, including Twilio, LastPass, DoorDash, MailChimp, and Plex. The government says the group used that access to steal proprietary company data and customer information, and that members also phished people to steal millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency.

For many years, Urban’s online hacker aliases “King Bob” and “Sosa” were fixtures of the Com, a mostly Telegram and Discord-based community of English-speaking cybercriminals wherein hackers boast loudly about high-profile exploits and hacks that almost invariably begin with social engineering. King Bob constantly bragged on the Com about stealing unreleased rap music recordings from popular artists, presumably through SIM-swapping attacks. Many of those purloined tracks or “grails” he later sold or gave away on forums.

Sosa also was active in a particularly destructive group of accomplished criminal SIM-swappers known as “Star Fraud.” Cyberscoop’s AJ Vicens reported in 2023 that individuals within Star Fraud were likely involved in the high-profile Caesars Entertainment and MGM Resorts extortion attacks that same year.

The Star Fraud SIM-swapping group gained the ability to temporarily move targeted mobile numbers to devices they controlled by constantly phishing employees of the major mobile providers. In February 2023, KrebsOnSecurity published data taken from the Telegram channels for Star Fraud and two other SIM-swapping groups showing these crooks focused on SIM-swapping T-Mobile customers, and that they collectively claimed internal access to T-Mobile on 100 separate occasions over a 7-month period in 2022.

Reached via one of his King Bob accounts on Twitter/X, Urban called the sentence unjust, and said the judge in his case discounted his age as a factor.

“The judge purposefully ignored my age as a factor because of the fact another Scattered Spider member hacked him personally during the course of my case,” Urban said in reply to questions, noting that he was sending the messages from a Florida county jail. “He should have been removed as a judge much earlier on. But staying in county jail is torture.”

A court transcript (PDF) from a status hearing in February 2025 shows Urban was telling the truth about the hacking incident that happened while he was in federal custody. It involved an intrusion into a magistrate judge’s email account, where a copy of Urban’s sealed indictment was stolen. The judge told attorneys for both sides that a co-defendant in the California case was trying to find out about Mr. Urban’s activity in the Florida case.

“What it ultimately turned into a was a big faux pas,” Judge Harvey E. Schlesinger said. “The Court’s password…business is handled by an outside contractor. And somebody called the outside contractor representing Judge Toomey saying, ‘I need a password change.’ And they gave out the password change. That’s how whoever was making the phone call got into the court.”

Oregon Man Charged in ‘Rapper Bot’ DDoS Service

A 22-year-old Oregon man has been arrested on suspicion of operating “Rapper Bot,” a massive botnet used to power a service for launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against targets — including a March 2025 DDoS that knocked Twitter/X offline. The Justice Department asserts the suspect and an unidentified co-conspirator rented out the botnet to online extortionists, and tried to stay off the radar of law enforcement by ensuring that their botnet was never pointed at KrebsOnSecurity.

On August 6, 2025, federal agents arrested Ethan J. Foltz of Springfield, Ore. on suspicion of operating Rapper Bot, a globally dispersed collection of tens of thousands of hacked Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

The complaint against Foltz explains the attacks usually clocked in at more than two terabits of junk data per second (a terabit is one trillion bits of data), which is more than enough traffic to cause serious problems for all but the most well-defended targets. The government says Rapper Bot consistently launched attacks that were “hundreds of times larger than the expected capacity of a typical server located in a data center,” and that some of its biggest attacks exceeded six terabits per second.

Indeed, Rapper Bot was reportedly responsible for the March 10, 2025 attack that caused intermittent outages on Twitter/X. The government says Rapper Bot’s most lucrative and frequent customers were involved in extorting online businesses — including numerous gambling operations based in China.

The criminal complaint was written by Elliott Peterson, an investigator with the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS), the criminal investigative division of the Department of Defense (DoD) Office of Inspector General. The complaint notes the DCIS got involved because several Internet addresses maintained by the DoD were the target of Rapper Bot attacks.

Peterson said he tracked Rapper Bot to Foltz after a subpoena to an ISP in Arizona that was hosting one of the botnet’s control servers showed the account was paid for via PayPal. More legal process to PayPal revealed Foltz’s Gmail account and previously used IP addresses. A subpoena to Google showed the defendant searched security blogs constantly for news about Rapper Bot, and for updates about competing DDoS-for-hire botnets.

According to the complaint, after having a search warrant served on his residence the defendant admitted to building and operating Rapper Bot, sharing the profits 50/50 with a person he claimed to know only by the hacker handle “Slaykings.” Foltz also shared with investigators the logs from his Telegram chats, wherein Foltz and Slaykings discussed how best to stay off the radar of law enforcement investigators while their competitors were getting busted.

Specifically, the two hackers chatted about a May 20 attack against KrebsOnSecurity.com that clocked in at more than 6.3 terabits of data per second. The brief attack was notable because at the time it was the largest DDoS that Google had ever mitigated (KrebsOnSecurity sits behind the protection of Project Shield, a free DDoS defense service that Google provides to websites offering news, human rights, and election-related content).

The May 2025 DDoS was launched by an IoT botnet called Aisuru, which I discovered was operated by a 21-year-old man in Brazil named Kaike Southier Leite. This individual was more commonly known online as “Forky,” and Forky told me he wasn’t afraid of me or U.S. federal investigators. Nevertheless, the complaint against Foltz notes that Forky’s botnet seemed to diminish in size and firepower at the same time that Rapper Bot’s infection numbers were on the upswing.

“Both FOLTZ and Slaykings were very dismissive of attention seeking activities, the most extreme of which, in their view, was to launch DDoS attacks against the website of the prominent cyber security journalist Brian Krebs,” Peterson wrote in the criminal complaint.

“You see, they’ll get themselves [expletive],” Slaykings wrote in response to Foltz’s comments about Forky and Aisuru bringing too much heat on themselves.

“Prob cuz [redacted] hit krebs,” Foltz wrote in reply.

“Going against Krebs isn’t a good move,” Slaykings concurred. “It isn’t about being a [expletive] or afraid, you just get a lot of problems for zero money. Childish, but good. Let them die.”

“Ye, it’s good tho, they will die,” Foltz replied.

The government states that just prior to Foltz’s arrest, Rapper Bot had enslaved an estimated 65,000 devices globally. That may sound like a lot, but the complaint notes the defendants weren’t interested in making headlines for building the world’s largest or most powerful botnet.

Quite the contrary: The complaint asserts that the accused took care to maintain their botnet in a “Goldilocks” size — ensuring that “the number of devices afforded powerful attacks while still being manageable to control and, in the hopes of Foltz and his partners, small enough to not be detected.”

The complaint states that several days later, Foltz and Slaykings returned to discussing what that they expected to befall their rival group, with Slaykings stating, “Krebs is very revenge. He won’t stop until they are [expletive] to the bone.”

“Surprised they have any bots left,” Foltz answered.

“Krebs is not the one you want to have on your back. Not because he is scary or something, just because he will not give up UNTIL you are [expletive] [expletive]. Proved it with Mirai and many other cases.”

[Unknown expletives aside, that may well be the highest compliment I’ve ever been paid by a cybercriminal. I might even have part of that quote made into a t-shirt or mug or something. It’s also nice that they didn’t let any of their customers attack my site — if even only out of a paranoid sense of self-preservation.]

Foltz admitted to wiping the user and attack logs for the botnet approximately once a week, so investigators were unable to tally the total number of attacks, customers and targets of this vast crime machine. But the data that was still available showed that from April 2025 to early August, Rapper Bot conducted over 370,000 attacks, targeting 18,000 unique victims across 1,000 networks, with the bulk of victims residing in China, Japan, the United States, Ireland and Hong Kong (in that order).

According to the government, Rapper Bot borrows much of its code from fBot, a DDoS malware strain also known as Satori. In 2020, authorities in Northern Ireland charged a then 20-year-old man named Aaron “Vamp” Sterritt with operating fBot with a co-conspirator. U.S. prosecutors are still seeking Sterritt’s extradition to the United States. fBot is itself a variation of the Mirai IoT botnet that has ravaged the Internet with DDoS attacks since its source code was leaked back in 2016.

The complaint says Foltz and his partner did not allow most customers to launch attacks that were more than 60 seconds in duration — another way they tried to keep public attention to the botnet at a minimum. However, the government says the proprietors also had special arrangements with certain high-paying clients that allowed much larger and longer attacks.

Most people who have never been on the receiving end of a monster DDoS attack have no idea of the cost and disruption that such sieges can bring. The DCIS’s Peterson wrote that he was able to test the botnet’s capabilities while interviewing Foltz, and that found that “if this had been a server upon which I was running a website, using services such as load balancers, and paying for both outgoing and incoming data, at estimated industry average rates the attack (2+ Terabits per second times 30 seconds) might have cost the victim anywhere from $500 to $10,000.”

“DDoS attacks at this scale often expose victims to devastating financial impact, and a potential alternative, network engineering solutions that mitigate the expected attacks such as overprovisioning, i.e. increasing potential Internet capacity, or DDoS defense technologies, can themselves be prohibitively expensive,” the complaint continues. “This ‘rock and a hard place’ reality for many victims can leave them acutely exposed to extortion demands – ‘pay X dollars and the DDoS attacks stop’.”

The Telegram chat records show that the day before Peterson and other federal agents raided Foltz’s residence, Foltz allegedly told his partner he’d found 32,000 new devices that were vulnerable to a previously unknown exploit.

Shortly before the search warrant was served on his residence, Foltz allegedly told his partner that “Once again we have the biggest botnet in the community.” The following day, Foltz told his partner that it was going to be a great day — the biggest so far in terms of income generated by Rapper Bot.

“I sat next to Foltz while the messages poured in — promises of $800, then $1,000, the proceeds ticking up as the day went on,” Peterson wrote. “Noticing a change in Foltz’ behavior and concerned that Foltz was making changes to the botnet configuration in real time, Slaykings asked him ‘What’s up?’ Foltz deftly typed out some quick responses. Reassured by Foltz’ answer, Slaykings responded, ‘Ok, I’m the paranoid one.”

The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Adam Alexander in the District of Alaska (at least some of the devices found to be infected with Rapper Bot were located there, and it is where Peterson is stationed). Foltz faces one count of aiding and abetting computer intrusions. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, although a federal judge is unlikely to award anywhere near that kind of sentence for a first-time conviction.

Mobile Phishers Target Brokerage Accounts in ‘Ramp and Dump’ Cashout Scheme

Cybercriminal groups peddling sophisticated phishing kits that convert stolen card data into mobile wallets have recently shifted their focus to targeting customers of brokerage services, new research shows. Undeterred by security controls at these trading platforms that block users from wiring funds directly out of accounts, the phishers have pivoted to using multiple compromised brokerage accounts in unison to manipulate the prices of foreign stocks.

This so-called ‘ramp and dump‘ scheme borrows its name from age-old “pump and dump” scams, wherein fraudsters purchase a large number of shares in some penny stock, and then promote the company in a frenzied social media blitz to build up interest from other investors. The fraudsters dump their shares after the price of the penny stock increases to some degree, which usually then causes a sharp drop in the value of the shares for legitimate investors.

With ramp and dump, the scammers do not need to rely on ginning up interest in the targeted stock on social media. Rather, they will preposition themselves in the stock that they wish to inflate, using compromised accounts to purchase large volumes of it and then dumping the shares after the stock price reaches a certain value. In February 2025, the FBI said it was seeking information from victims of this scheme.

“In this variation, the price manipulation is primarily the result of controlled trading activity conducted by the bad actors behind the scam,” reads an advisory from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a private, non-profit organization that regulates member brokerage firms. “Ultimately, the outcome for unsuspecting investors is the same—a catastrophic collapse in share price that leaves investors with unrecoverable losses.”

Ford Merrill is a security researcher at SecAlliance, a CSIS Security Group company. Merrill said he has tracked recent ramp-and-dump activity to a bustling Chinese-language community that is quite openly selling advanced mobile phishing kits on Telegram.

“They will often coordinate with other actors and will wait until a certain time to buy a particular Chinese IPO [initial public offering] stock or penny stock,” said Merrill, who has been chronicling the rapid maturation and growth of the China-based phishing community over the past three years.

“They’ll use all these victim brokerage accounts, and if needed they’ll liquidate the account’s current positions, and will preposition themselves in that instrument in some account they control, and then sell everything when the price goes up,” he said. “The victim will be left with worthless shares of that equity in their account, and the brokerage may not be happy either.”

Merrill said the early days of these phishing groups — between 2022 and 2024 — were typified by phishing kits that used text messages to spoof the U.S. Postal Service or some local toll road operator, warning about a delinquent shipping or toll fee that needed paying. Recipients who clicked the link and provided their payment information at a fake USPS or toll operator site were then asked to verify the transaction by sharing a one-time code sent via text message.

In reality, the victim’s bank is sending that code to the mobile number on file for their customer because the fraudsters have just attempted to enroll that victim’s card details into a mobile wallet. If the visitor supplies that one-time code, their payment card is then added to a new mobile wallet on an Apple or Google device that is physically controlled by the phishers.

The phishing gangs typically load multiple stolen cards to digital wallets on a single Apple or Android device, and then sell those phones in bulk to scammers who use them for fraudulent e-commerce and tap-to-pay transactions.

This China-based phishing collective exposed a major weakness common to many U.S.-based financial institutions that already require multi-factor authentication: The reliance on a single, phishable one-time token for provisioning mobile wallets. Happily, Merrill said many financial institutions that were caught flat-footed on this scam two years ago have since strengthened authentication requirements for onboarding new mobile wallets (such as requiring the card to be enrolled via the bank’s mobile app).

But just as squeezing one part of a balloon merely forces the air trapped inside to bulge into another area, fraudsters don’t go away when you make their current enterprise less profitable: They just shift their focus to a less-guarded area. And lately, that gaze has settled squarely on customers of the major brokerage platforms, Merrill said.

THE OUTSIDER

Merrill pointed to several Telegram channels operated by some of the more accomplished phishing kit sellers, which are full of videos demonstrating how every feature in their kits can be tailored to the attacker’s target. The video snippet below comes from the Telegram channel of “Outsider,” a popular Mandarin-speaking phishing kit vendor whose latest offering includes a number of ready-made templates for using text messages to phish brokerage account credentials and one-time codes.

According to Merrill, Outsider is a woman who previously went by the handle “Chenlun.” KrebsOnSecurity profiled Chenlun’s phishing empire in an October 2023 story about a China-based group that was phishing mobile customers of more than a dozen postal services around the globe. In that case, the phishing sites were using a Telegram bot that sent stolen credentials to the “@chenlun” Telegram account.

Chenlun’s phishing lures are sent via Apple’s iMessage and Google’s RCS service and spoof one of the major brokerage platforms, warning that the account has been suspended for suspicious activity and that recipients should log in and verify some information. The missives include a link to a phishing page that collects the customer’s username and password, and then asks the user to enter a one-time code that will arrive via SMS.

The new phish kit videos on Outsider’s Telegram channel only feature templates for Schwab customers, but Merrill said the kit can easily be adapted to target other brokerage platforms. One reason the fraudsters are picking on brokerage firms, he said, has to do with the way they handle multi-factor authentication.

Schwab clients are presented with two options for second factor authentication when they open an account. Users who select the option to only prompt for a code on untrusted devices can choose to receive it via text message, an automated inbound phone call, or an outbound call to Schwab. With the “always at login” option selected, users can choose to receive the code through the Schwab app, a text message, or a Symantec VIP mobile app.

In response to questions, Schwab said it regularly updates clients on emerging fraud trends, including this specific type, which the company addressed in communications sent to clients earlier this year.

“That message focused on trading-related fraud, highlighting both account intrusions and scams conducted through social media or messaging apps that deceive individuals into executing trades themselves,” Schwab said in a written statement. “We are aware and tracking this trend across several channels, as well as others like it, which attempt to exploit SMS-based verification with stolen credentials. We actively monitor for suspicious patterns and take steps to disrupt them. This activity is part of a broader, industry-wide threat, and we take a multi-layered approach to address and mitigate it.”

Other popular brokerage platforms allow similar methods for multi-factor authentication. Fidelity requires a username and password on initial login, and offers the ability to receive a one-time token via SMS, an automated phone call, or by approving a push notification sent through the Fidelity mobile app. However, all three of these methods for sending one-time tokens are phishable; even with the brokerage firm’s app, the phishers could prompt the user to approve a login request that they initiated in the app with the phished credentials.

Vanguard offers customers a range of multi-factor authentication choices, including the option to require a physical security key in addition to one’s credentials on each login. A security key implements a robust form of multi-factor authentication known as Universal 2nd Factor (U2F), which allows the user to complete the login process simply by connecting an enrolled USB or Bluetooth device and pressing a button. The key works without the need for any special software drivers, and the nice thing about it is your second factor cannot be phished.

THE PERFECT CRIME?

Merrill said that in many ways the ramp-and-dump scheme is the perfect crime because it leaves precious few connections between the victim brokerage accounts and the fraudsters.

“It’s really genius because it decouples so many things,” he said. “They can buy shares [in the stock to be pumped] in their personal account on the Chinese exchanges, and the price happens to go up. The Chinese or Hong Kong brokerages aren’t going to see anything funky.”

Merrill said it’s unclear exactly how those perpetrating these ramp-and-dump schemes coordinate their activities, such as whether the accounts are phished well in advance or shortly before being used to inflate the stock price of Chinese companies. The latter possibility would fit nicely with the existing human infrastructure these criminal groups already have in place.

For example, KrebsOnSecurity recently wrote about research from Merrill and other researchers showing the phishers behind these slick mobile phishing kits employed people to sit for hours at a time in front of large banks of mobile phones being used to send the text message lures. These technicians were needed to respond in real time to victims who were supplying the one-time code sent from their financial institution.

“You can get access to a victim’s brokerage with a one-time passcode, but then you sort of have to use it right away if you can’t set new security settings so you can come back to that account later,” Merrill said.

The rapid pace of innovations produced by these China-based phishing vendors is due in part to their use of artificial intelligence and large language models to help develop the mobile phishing kits, he added.

“These guys are vibe coding stuff together and using LLMs to translate things or help put the user interface together,” Merrill said. “It’s only a matter of time before they start to integrate the LLMs into their development cycle to make it more rapid. The technologies they are building definitely have helped lower the barrier of entry for everyone.”

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, August 2025 Edition

Microsoft today released updates to fix more than 100 security flaws in its Windows operating systems and other software. At least 13 of the bugs received Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating, meaning they could be abused by malware or malcontents to gain remote access to a Windows system with little or no help from users.

August’s patch batch from Redmond includes an update for CVE-2025-53786, a vulnerability that allows an attacker to pivot from a compromised Microsoft Exchange Server directly into an organization’s cloud environment, potentially gaining control over Exchange Online and other connected Microsoft Office 365 services. Microsoft first warned about this bug on Aug. 6, saying it affects Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2019, as well as its flagship Exchange Server Subscription Edition.

Ben McCarthy, lead cyber security engineer at Immersive, said a rough search reveals approximately 29,000 Exchange servers publicly facing on the internet that are vulnerable to this issue, with many of them likely to have even older vulnerabilities.

McCarthy said the fix for CVE-2025-53786 requires more than just installing a patch, such as following Microsoft’s manual instructions for creating a dedicated service to oversee and lock down the hybrid connection.

“In effect, this vulnerability turns a significant on-premise Exchange breach into a full-blown, difficult-to-detect cloud compromise with effectively living off the land techniques which are always harder to detect for defensive teams,” McCarthy said.

CVE-2025-53779 is a weakness in the Windows Kerberos authentication system that allows an unauthenticated attacker to gain domain administrator privileges. Microsoft credits the discovery of the flaw to Akamai researcher Yuval Gordon, who dubbed it “BadSuccessor” in a May 2025 blog post. The attack exploits a weakness in “delegated Managed Service Account” or dMSA — a feature that was introduced in Windows Server 2025.

Some of the critical flaws addressed this month with the highest severity (between 9.0 and 9.9 CVSS scores) include a remote code execution bug in the Windows GDI+ component that handles graphics rendering (CVE-2025-53766) and CVE-2025-50165, another graphics rendering weakness. Another critical patch involves CVE-2025-53733, a vulnerability in Microsoft Word that can be exploited without user interaction and triggered through the Preview Pane.

One final critical bug tackled this month deserves attention: CVE-2025-53778, a bug in Windows NTLM, a core function of how Windows systems handle network authentication. According to Microsoft, the flaw could allow an attacker with low-level network access and basic user privileges to exploit NTLM and elevate to SYSTEM-level access — the highest level of privilege in Windows. Microsoft rates the exploitation of this bug as “more likely,” although there is no evidence the vulnerability is being exploited at the moment.

Feel free to holler in the comments if you experience problems installing any of these updates. As ever, the SANS Internet Storm Center has its useful breakdown of the Microsoft patches indexed by severity and CVSS score, and AskWoody.com is keeping an eye out for Windows patches that may cause problems for enterprises and end users.

GOOD MIGRATIONS

Windows 10 users out there likely have noticed by now that Microsoft really wants you to upgrade to Windows 11. The reason is that after the Patch Tuesday on October 14, 2025, Microsoft will stop shipping free security updates for Windows 10 computers. The trouble is, many PCs running Windows 10 do not meet the hardware specifications required to install Windows 11 (or they do, but just barely).

If the experience with Windows XP is any indicator, many of these older computers will wind up in landfills or else will be left running in an unpatched state. But if your Windows 10 PC doesn’t have the hardware chops to run Windows 11 and you’d still like to get some use out of it safely, consider installing a newbie-friendly version of Linux, like Linux Mint.

Like most modern Linux versions, Mint will run on anything with a 64-bit CPU that has at least 2GB of memory, although 4GB is recommended. In other words, it will run on almost any computer produced in the last decade.

There are many versions of Linux available, but Linux Mint is likely to be the most intuitive interface for regular Windows users, and it is largely configurable without any fuss at the text-only command-line prompt. Mint and other flavors of Linux come with LibreOffice, which is an open source suite of tools that includes applications similar to Microsoft Office, and it can open, edit and save documents as Microsoft Office files.

If you’d prefer to give Linux a test drive before installing it on a Windows PC, you can always just download it to a removable USB drive. From there, reboot the computer (with the removable drive plugged in) and select the option at startup to run the operating system from the external USB drive. If you don’t see an option for that after restarting, try restarting again and hitting the F8 button, which should open a list of bootable drives. Here’s a fairly thorough tutorial that walks through exactly how to do all this.

And if this is your first time trying out Linux, relax and have fun: The nice thing about a “live” version of Linux (as it’s called when the operating system is run from a removable drive such as a CD or a USB stick) is that none of your changes persist after a reboot. Even if you somehow manage to break something, a restart will return the system back to its original state.

KrebsOnSecurity in New ‘Most Wanted’ HBO Max Series

A new documentary series about cybercrime airing next month on HBO Max features interviews with Yours Truly. The four-part series follows the exploits of Julius Kivimäki, a prolific Finnish hacker recently convicted of leaking tens of thousands of patient records from an online psychotherapy practice while attempting to extort the clinic and its patients.

The documentary, “Most Wanted: Teen Hacker,” explores the 27-year-old Kivimäki’s lengthy and increasingly destructive career, one that was marked by cyber attacks designed to result in real-world physical impacts on their targets.

By the age of 14, Kivimäki had fallen in with a group of criminal hackers who were mass-compromising websites and milking them for customer payment card data. Kivimäki and his friends enjoyed harassing and terrorizing others by “swatting” their homes — calling in fake hostage situations or bomb threats at a target’s address in the hopes of triggering a heavily-armed police response to that location.

On Dec. 26, 2014, Kivimäki and fellow members of a group of online hooligans calling themselves the Lizard Squad launched a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against the Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox Live platforms, preventing millions of users from playing with their shiny new gaming rigs the day after Christmas. The Lizard Squad later acknowledged that the stunt was planned to call attention to their new DDoS-for-hire service, which came online and started selling subscriptions shortly after the attack.

Finnish investigators said Kivimäki also was responsible for a 2014 bomb threat against former Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley that grounded an American Airlines plane. That incident was widely reported to have started with a Twitter post from the Lizard Squad, after Smedley mentioned some upcoming travel plans online. But according to Smedley and Finnish investigators, the bomb threat started with a phone call from Kivimäki.

The creaky wheels of justice seemed to be catching up with Kivimäki in mid-2015, when a Finnish court found him guilty of more than 50,000 cybercrimes, including data breaches, payment fraud, and operating a global botnet of hacked computers. Unfortunately, the defendant was 17 at the time, and received little more than a slap on the wrist: A two-year suspended sentence and a small fine.

Kivimäki immediately bragged online about the lenient sentencing, posting on Twitter that he was an “untouchable hacker god.” I wrote a column in 2015 lamenting his laughable punishment because it was clear even then that this was a person who enjoyed watching other people suffer, and who seemed utterly incapable of remorse about any of it. It was also abundantly clear to everyone who investigated his crimes that he wasn’t going to quit unless someone made him stop.

In response to some of my early reporting that mentioned Kivimäki, one reader shared that they had been dealing with non-stop harassment and abuse from Kivimäki for years, including swatting incidents, unwanted deliveries and subscriptions, emails to her friends and co-workers, as well as threatening phonecalls and texts at all hours of the night. The reader, who spoke on condition of anonymity, shared that Kivimäki at one point confided that he had no reason whatsoever for harassing her — that she was picked at random and that it was just something he did for laughs.

Five years after Kivimäki’s conviction, the Vastaamo Psychotherapy Center in Finland became the target of blackmail when a tormentor identified as “ransom_man” demanded payment of 40 bitcoins (~450,000 euros at the time) in return for a promise not to publish highly sensitive therapy session notes Vastaamo had exposed online.

Ransom_man, a.k.a. Kivimäki, announced on the dark web that he would start publishing 100 patient profiles every 24 hours. When Vastaamo declined to pay, ransom_man shifted to extorting individual patients. According to Finnish police, some 22,000 victims reported extortion attempts targeting them personally, targeted emails that threatened to publish their therapy notes online unless paid a 500 euro ransom.

In October 2022, Finnish authorities charged Kivimäki with extorting Vastaamo and its patients. But by that time he was on the run from the law and living it up across Europe, spending lavishly on fancy cars, apartments and a hard-partying lifestyle.

In February 2023, Kivimäki was arrested in France after authorities there responded to a domestic disturbance call and found the defendant sleeping off a hangover on the couch of a woman he’d met the night before. The French police grew suspicious when the 6′ 3″ blonde, green-eyed man presented an ID that stated he was of Romanian nationality.

In April 2024, Kivimäki was sentenced to more than six years in prison after being convicted of extorting Vastaamo and its patients.

The documentary is directed by the award-winning Finnish producer and director Sami Kieski and co-written by Joni Soila. According to an August 6 press release, the four 43-minute episodes will drop weekly on Fridays throughout September across Europe, the U.S, Latin America, Australia and South-East Asia.

Who Got Arrested in the Raid on the XSS Crime Forum?

On July 22, 2025, the European police agency Europol said a long-running investigation led by the French Police resulted in the arrest of a 38-year-old administrator of XSS, a Russian-language cybercrime forum with more than 50,000 members. The action has triggered an ongoing frenzy of speculation and panic among XSS denizens about the identity of the unnamed suspect, but the consensus is that he is a pivotal figure in the crime forum scene who goes by the hacker handle “Toha.” Here’s a deep dive on what’s knowable about Toha, and a short stab at who got nabbed.

Europol did not name the accused, but published partially obscured photos of him from the raid on his residence in Kiev. The police agency said the suspect acted as a trusted third party — arbitrating disputes between criminals — and guaranteeing the security of transactions on XSS. A statement from Ukraine’s SBU security service said XSS counted among its members many cybercriminals from various ransomware groups, including REvil, LockBit, Conti, and Qiliin.

Since the Europol announcement, the XSS forum resurfaced at a new address on the deep web (reachable only via the anonymity network Tor). But from reviewing the recent posts, there appears to be little consensus among longtime members about the identity of the now-detained XSS administrator.

The most frequent comment regarding the arrest was a message of solidarity and support for Toha, the handle chosen by the longtime administrator of XSS and several other major Russian forums. Toha’s accounts on other forums have been silent since the raid.

Europol said the suspect has enjoyed a nearly 20-year career in cybercrime, which roughly lines up with Toha’s history. In 2005, Toha was a founding member of the Russian-speaking forum Hack-All. That is, until it got massively hacked a few months after its debut. In 2006, Toha rebranded the forum to exploit[.]in, which would go on to draw tens of thousands of members, including an eventual Who’s-Who of wanted cybercriminals.

Toha announced in 2018 that he was selling the Exploit forum, prompting rampant speculation on the forums that the buyer was secretly a Russian or Ukrainian government entity or front person. However, those suspicions were unsupported by evidence, and Toha vehemently denied the forum had been given over to authorities.

One of the oldest Russian-language cybercrime forums was DaMaGeLaB, which operated from 2004 to 2017, when its administrator “Ar3s” was arrested. In 2018, a partial backup of the DaMaGeLaB forum was reincarnated as xss[.]is, with Toha as its stated administrator.

CROSS-SITE GRIFTING

Clues about Toha’s early presence on the Internet — from ~2004 to 2010 — are available in the archives of Intel 471, a cyber intelligence firm that tracks forum activity. Intel 471 shows Toha used the same email address across multiple forum accounts, including at Exploit, Antichat, Carder[.]su and inattack[.]ru.

DomainTools.com finds Toha’s email address — toschka2003@yandex.ru — was used to register at least a dozen domain names — most of them from the mid- to late 2000s. Apart from exploit[.]in and a domain called ixyq[.]com, the other domains registered to that email address end in .ua, the top-level domain for Ukraine (e.g. deleted.org[.]ua, lj.com[.]ua, and blogspot.org[.]ua).

Nearly all of the domains registered to toschka2003@yandex.ru contain the name Anton Medvedovskiy in the registration records, except for the aforementioned ixyq[.]com, which is registered to the name Yuriy Avdeev in Moscow.

This Avdeev surname came up in a lengthy conversation with Lockbitsupp, the leader of the rapacious and destructive ransomware affiliate group Lockbit. The conversation took place in February 2024, when Lockbitsupp asked for help identifying Toha’s real-life identity.

Lockbitsupp didn’t share why he wanted Toha’s details, but he maintained that Toha’s real name was Anton Avdeev. I declined to help Lockbitsupp in whatever revenge he was planning on Toha, but his question made me curious to look deeper.

It appears Lockbitsupp’s query was based on a now-deleted Twitter post from 2022, when a user by the name “3xp0rt” asserted that Toha was a Russian man named Anton Viktorovich Avdeev, born October 27, 1983.

Searching the web for Toha’s email address toschka2003@yandex.ru reveals a 2010 sales thread on the forum bmwclub.ru where a user named Honeypo was selling a 2007 BMW X5. The ad listed the contact person as Anton Avdeev and gave the contact phone number 9588693.

A search on the phone number 9588693 in the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence finds plenty of official Russian government records with this number, date of birth and the name Anton Viktorovich Avdeev. For example, hacked Russian government records show this person has a Russian tax ID and SIN (Social Security number), and that they were flagged for traffic violations on several occasions by Moscow police; in 2004, 2006, 2009, and 2014.

Astute readers may have noticed by now that the ages of Mr. Avdeev (41) and the XSS admin arrested this month (38) are a bit off. This would seem to suggest that the person arrested is someone other than Mr. Avdeev, who did not respond to requests for comment.

A FLY ON THE WALL

For further insight on this question, KrebsOnSecurity sought comments from Sergeii Vovnenko, a former cybercriminal from Ukraine who now works at the security startup paranoidlab.com. I reached out to Vovnenko because for several years beginning around 2010 he was the owner and operator of thesecure[.]biz, an encrypted “Jabber” instant messaging server that Europol said was operated by the suspect arrested in Kiev. Thesecure[.]biz grew quite popular among many of the top Russian-speaking cybercriminals because it scrupulously kept few records of its users’ activity, and its administrator was always a trusted member of the community.

The reason I know this historic tidbit is that in 2013, Vovnenko — using the hacker nicknames “Fly,” and “Flycracker” — hatched a plan to have a gram of heroin purchased off of the Silk Road darknet market and shipped to our home in Northern Virginia. The scheme was to spoof a call from one of our neighbors to the local police, saying this guy Krebs down the street was a druggie who was having narcotics delivered to his home.

I happened to be lurking on Flycracker’s private cybercrime forum when his heroin-framing plan was carried out, and called the police myself before the smack eventually arrived in the U.S. Mail. Vovnenko was later arrested for unrelated cybercrime activities, extradited to the United States, convicted, and deported after a 16-month stay in the U.S. prison system [on several occasions, he has expressed heartfelt apologies for the incident, and we have since buried the hatchet].

Vovnenko said he purchased a device for cloning credit cards from Toha in 2009, and that Toha shipped the item from Russia. Vovnenko explained that he (Flycracker) was the owner and operator of thesecure[.]biz from 2010 until his arrest in 2014.

Vovnenko believes thesecure[.]biz was stolen while he was in jail, either by Toha and/or an XSS administrator who went by the nicknames N0klos and Sonic.

“When I was in jail, [the] admin of xss.is stole that domain, or probably N0klos bought XSS from Toha or vice versa,” Vovnenko said of the Jabber domain. “Nobody from [the forums] spoke with me after my jailtime, so I can only guess what really happened.”

N0klos was the owner and administrator of an early Russian-language cybercrime forum known as Darklife[.]ws. However, N0kl0s also appears to be a lifelong Russian resident, and in any case seems to have vanished from Russian cybercrime forums several years ago.

Asked whether he believes Toha was the XSS administrator who was arrested this month in Ukraine, Vovnenko maintained that Toha is Russian, and that “the French cops took the wrong guy.”

WHO IS TOHA?

So who did the Ukrainian police arrest in response to the investigation by the French authorities? It seems plausible that the BMW ad invoking Toha’s email address and the name and phone number of a Russian citizen was simply misdirection on Toha’s part — intended to confuse and throw off investigators. Perhaps this even explains the Avdeev surname surfacing in the registration records from one of Toha’s domains.

But sometimes the simplest answer is the correct one. “Toha” is a common Slavic nickname for someone with the first name “Anton,” and that matches the name in the registration records for more than a dozen domains tied to Toha’s toschka2003@yandex.ru email address: Anton Medvedovskiy.

Constella Intelligence finds there is an Anton Gannadievich Medvedovskiy living in Kiev who will be 38 years old in December. This individual owns the email address itsmail@i.ua, as well an an Airbnb account featuring a profile photo of a man with roughly the same hairline as the suspect in the blurred photos released by the Ukrainian police. Mr. Medvedovskiy did not respond to a request for comment.

My take on the takedown is that the Ukrainian authorities likely arrested Medvedovskiy. Toha shared on DaMaGeLab in 2005 that he had recently finished the 11th grade and was studying at a university — a time when Mevedovskiy would have been around 18 years old. On Dec. 11, 2006, fellow Exploit members wished Toha a happy birthday. Records exposed in a 2022 hack at the Ukrainian public services portal diia.gov.ua show that Mr. Medvedovskiy’s birthday is Dec. 11, 1987.

The law enforcement action and resulting confusion about the identity of the detained has thrown the Russian cybercrime forum scene into disarray in recent weeks, with lengthy and heated arguments about XSS’s future spooling out across the forums.

XSS relaunched on a new Tor address shortly after the authorities plastered their seizure notice on the forum’s  homepage, but all of the trusted moderators from the old forum were dismissed without explanation. Existing members saw their forum account balances drop to zero, and were asked to plunk down a deposit to register at the new forum. The new XSS “admin” said they were in contact with the previous owners and that the changes were to help rebuild security and trust within the community.

However, the new admin’s assurances appear to have done little to assuage the worst fears of the forum’s erstwhile members, most of whom seem to be keeping their distance from the relaunched site for now.

Indeed, if there is one common understanding amid all of these discussions about the seizure of XSS, it is that Ukrainian and French authorities now have several years worth of private messages between XSS forum users, as well as contact rosters and other user data linked to the seized Jabber server.

“The myth of the ‘trusted person’ is shattered,” the user “GordonBellford” cautioned on Aug. 3 in an Exploit forum thread about the XSS admin arrest. “The forum is run by strangers. They got everything. Two years of Jabber server logs. Full backup and forum database.”

GordonBellford continued:

And the scariest thing is: this data array is not just an archive. It is material for analysis that has ALREADY BEEN DONE . With the help of modern tools, they see everything:

Graphs of your contacts and activity.
Relationships between nicknames, emails, password hashes and Jabber ID.
Timestamps, IP addresses and digital fingerprints.
Your unique writing style, phraseology, punctuation, consistency of grammatical errors, and even typical typos that will link your accounts on different platforms.

They are not looking for a needle in a haystack. They simply sifted the haystack through the AI sieve and got ready-made dossiers.

Scammers Unleash Flood of Slick Online Gaming Sites

Fraudsters are flooding Discord and other social media platforms with ads for hundreds of polished online gaming and wagering websites that lure people with free credits and eventually abscond with any cryptocurrency funds deposited by players. Here’s a closer look at the social engineering tactics and remarkable traits of this sprawling network of more than 1,200 scam sites.

The scam begins with deceptive ads posted on social media that claim the wagering sites are working in partnership with popular social media personalities, such as Mr. Beast, who recently launched a gaming business called Beast Games. The ads invariably state that by using a supplied “promo code,” interested players can claim a $2,500 credit on the advertised gaming website.

The gaming sites all require users to create a free account to claim their $2,500 credit, which they can use to play any number of extremely polished video games that ask users to bet on each action. At the scam website gamblerbeast[.]com, for example, visitors can pick from dozens of games like B-Ball Blitz, in which you play a basketball pro who is taking shots from the free throw line against a single opponent, and you bet on your ability to sink each shot.

The financial part of this scam begins when users try to cash out any “winnings.” At that point, the gaming site will reject the request and prompt the user to make a “verification deposit” of cryptocurrency — typically around $100 — before any money can be distributed. Those who deposit cryptocurrency funds are soon asked for additional payments.

However, any “winnings” displayed by these gaming sites are a complete fantasy, and players who deposit cryptocurrency funds will never see that money again. Compounding the problem, victims likely will soon be peppered with come-ons from “recovery experts” who peddle dubious claims on social media networks about being able to retrieve funds lost to such scams.

KrebsOnSecurity first learned about this network of phony betting sites from a Discord user who asked to be identified only by their screen name: “Thereallo” is a 17-year-old developer who operates multiple Discord servers and said they began digging deeper after users started complaining of being inundated with misleading spam messages promoting the sites.

“We were being spammed relentlessly by these scam posts from compromised or purchased [Discord] accounts,” Thereallo said. “I got frustrated with just banning and deleting, so I started to investigate the infrastructure behind the scam messages. This is not a one-off site, it’s a scalable criminal enterprise with a clear playbook, technical fingerprints, and financial infrastructure.”

After comparing the code on the gaming sites promoted via spam messages, Thereallo found they all invoked the same API key for an online chatbot that appears to be in limited use or else is custom-made. Indeed, a scan for that API key at the threat hunting platform Silent Push reveals at least 1,270 recently-registered and active domains whose names all invoke some type of gaming or wagering theme.

Thereallo said the operators of this scam empire appear to generate a unique Bitcoin wallet for each gaming domain they deploy.

“This is a decoy wallet,” Thereallo explained. “Once the victim deposits funds, they are never able to withdraw any money. Any attempts to contact the ‘Live Support’ are handled by a combination of AI and human operators who eventually block the user. The chat system is self-hosted, making it difficult to report to third-party service providers.”

Thereallo discovered another feature common to all of these scam gambling sites [hereafter referred to simply as “scambling” sites]: If you register at one of them and then very quickly try to register at a sister property of theirs from the same Internet address and device, the registration request is denied at the second site.

“I registered on one site, then hopped to another to register again,” Thereallo said. Instead, the second site returned an error stating that a new account couldn’t be created for another 10 minutes.

“They’re tracking my VPN IP across their entire network,” Thereallo explained. “My password manager also proved it. It tried to use my dummy email on a site I had never visited, and the site told me the account already existed. So it’s definitely one entity running a single platform with 1,200+ different domain names as front-ends. This explains how their support works, a central pool of agents handling all the sites. It also explains why they’re so strict about not giving out wallet addresses; it’s a network-wide policy.”

In many ways, these scambling sites borrow from the playbook of “pig butchering” schemes, a rampant and far more elaborate crime in which people are gradually lured by flirtatious strangers online into investing in fraudulent cryptocurrency trading platforms.

Pig butchering scams are typically powered by people in Asia who have been kidnapped and threatened with physical harm or worse unless they sit in a cubicle and scam Westerners on the Internet all day. In contrast, these scambling sites tend to steal far less money from individual victims, but their cookie-cutter nature and automated support components may enable their operators to extract payments from a large number of people in far less time, and with considerably less risk and up-front investment.

Silent Push’s Zach Edwards said the proprietors of this scambling empire are spending big money to make the sites look and feel like some fancy new type of casino.

“That’s a very odd type of pig butchering network and not like what we typically see, with much lower investments in the sites and lures,” Edwards said.

Here is a list of all domains that Silent Push found were using the scambling network’s chat API.

Phishers Target Aviation Execs to Scam Customers

KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from a reader whose boss’s email account got phished and was used to trick one of the company’s customers into sending a large payment to scammers. An investigation into the attacker’s infrastructure points to a long-running Nigerian cybercrime ring that is actively targeting established companies in the transportation and aviation industries.

A reader who works in the transportation industry sent a tip about a recent successful phishing campaign that tricked an executive at the company into entering their credentials at a fake Microsoft 365 login page. From there, the attackers quickly mined the executive’s inbox for past communications about invoices, copying and modifying some of those messages with new invoice demands that were sent to some of the company’s customers and partners.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the reader said the resulting phishing emails to customers came from a newly registered domain name that was remarkably similar to their employer’s domain, and that at least one of their customers fell for the ruse and paid a phony invoice. They said the attackers had spun up a look-alike domain just a few hours after the executive’s inbox credentials were phished, and that the scam resulted in a customer suffering a six-figure financial loss.

The reader also shared that the email addresses in the registration records for the imposter domain — roomservice801@gmail.com — is tied to many such phishing domains. Indeed, a search on this email address at DomainTools.com finds it is associated with at least 240 domains registered in 2024 or 2025. Virtually all of them mimic legitimate domains for companies in the aerospace and transportation industries worldwide.

An Internet search for this email address reveals a humorous blog post from 2020 on the Russian forum hackware[.]ru, which found roomservice801@gmail.com was tied to a phishing attack that used the lure of phony invoices to trick the recipient into logging in at a fake Microsoft login page. We’ll come back to this research in a moment.

JUSTY JOHN

DomainTools shows that some of the early domains registered to roomservice801@gmail.com in 2016 include other useful information. For example, the WHOIS records for alhhomaidhicentre[.]biz reference the technical contact of “Justy John” and the email address justyjohn50@yahoo.com.

A search at DomainTools found justyjohn50@yahoo.com has been registering one-off phishing domains since at least 2012. At this point, I was convinced that some security company surely had already published an analysis of this particular threat group, but I didn’t yet have enough information to draw any solid conclusions.

DomainTools says the Justy John email address is tied to more than two dozen domains registered since 2012, but we can find hundreds more phishing domains and related email addresses simply by pivoting on details in the registration records for these Justy John domains. For example, the street address used by the Justy John domain axisupdate[.]net — 7902 Pelleaux Road in Knoxville, TN — also appears in the registration records for accountauthenticate[.]com, acctlogin[.]biz, and loginaccount[.]biz, all of which at one point included the email address rsmith60646@gmail.com.

That Rsmith Gmail address is connected to the 2012 phishing domain alibala[.]biz (one character off of the Chinese e-commerce giant alibaba.com, with a different top-level domain of .biz). A search in DomainTools on the phone number in those domain records — 1.7736491613 — reveals even more phishing domains as well as the Nigerian phone number “2348062918302” and the email address michsmith59@gmail.com.

DomainTools shows michsmith59@gmail.com appears in the registration records for the domain seltrock[.]com, which was used in the phishing attack documented in the 2020 Russian blog post mentioned earlier. At this point, we are just two steps away from identifying the threat actor group.

The same Nigerian phone number shows up in dozens of domain registrations that reference the email address sebastinekelly69@gmail.com, including 26i3[.]net, costamere[.]com, danagruop[.]us, and dividrilling[.]com. A Web search on any of those domains finds they were indexed in an “indicator of compromise” list on GitHub maintained by Palo Alto Networks‘ Unit 42 research team.

SILVERTERRIER

According to Unit 42, the domains are the handiwork of a vast cybercrime group based in Nigeria that it dubbed “SilverTerrier” back in 2014. In an October 2021 report, Palo Alto said SilverTerrier excels at so-called “business e-mail compromise” or BEC scams, which target legitimate business email accounts through social engineering or computer intrusion activities. BEC criminals use that access to initiate or redirect the transfer of business funds for personal gain.

Palo Alto says SilverTerrier encompasses hundreds of BEC fraudsters, some of whom have been arrested in various international law enforcement operations by Interpol. In 2022, Interpol and the Nigeria Police Force arrested 11 alleged SilverTerrier members, including a prominent SilverTerrier leader who’d been flaunting his wealth on social media for years. Unfortunately, the lure of easy money, endemic poverty and corruption, and low barriers to entry for cybercrime in Nigeria conspire to provide a constant stream of new recruits.

BEC scams were the 7th most reported crime tracked by the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) in 2024, generating more than 21,000 complaints. However, BEC scams were the second most costly form of cybercrime reported to the feds last year, with nearly $2.8 billion in claimed losses. In its 2025 Fraud and Control Survey Report, the Association for Financial Professionals found 63 percent of organizations experienced a BEC last year.

Poking at some of the email addresses that spool out from this research reveals a number of Facebook accounts for people residing in Nigeria or in the United Arab Emirates, many of whom do not appear to have tried to mask their real-life identities. Palo Alto’s Unit 42 researchers reached a similar conclusion, noting that although a small subset of these crooks went to great lengths to conceal their identities, it was usually simple to learn their identities on social media accounts and the major messaging services.

Palo Alto said BEC actors have become far more organized over time, and that while it remains easy to find actors working as a group, the practice of using one phone number, email address or alias to register malicious infrastructure in support of multiple actors has made it far more time consuming (but not impossible) for cybersecurity and law enforcement organizations to sort out which actors committed specific crimes.

“We continue to find that SilverTerrier actors, regardless of geographical location, are often connected through only a few degrees of separation on social media platforms,” the researchers wrote.

FINANCIAL FRAUD KILL CHAIN

Palo Alto has published a useful list of recommendations that organizations can adopt to minimize the incidence and impact of BEC attacks. Many of those tips are prophylactic, such as conducting regular employee security training and reviewing network security policies.

But one recommendation — getting familiar with a process known as the “financial fraud kill chain” or FFKC — bears specific mention because it offers the single best hope for BEC victims who are seeking to claw back payments made to fraudsters, and yet far too many victims don’t know it exists until it is too late.

As explained in this FBI primer, the International Financial Fraud Kill Chain is a partnership between federal law enforcement and financial entities whose purpose is to freeze fraudulent funds wired by victims. According to the FBI, viable victim complaints filed with ic3.gov promptly after a fraudulent transfer (generally less than 72 hours) will be automatically triaged by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

The FBI noted in its IC3 annual report (PDF) that the FFKC had a 66 percent success rate in 2024. Viable ic3.gov complaints involve losses of at least $50,000, and include all records from the victim or victim bank, as well as a completed FFKC form (provided by FinCEN) containing victim information, recipient information, bank names, account numbers, location, SWIFT, and any additional information.

Microsoft Fix Targets Attacks on SharePoint Zero-Day

On Sunday, July 20, Microsoft Corp. issued an emergency security update for a vulnerability in SharePoint Server that is actively being exploited to compromise vulnerable organizations. The patch comes amid reports that malicious hackers have used the SharePoint flaw to breach U.S. federal and state agencies, universities, and energy companies.

In an advisory about the SharePoint security hole, a.k.a. CVE-2025-53770, Microsoft said it is aware of active attacks targeting on-premises SharePoint Server customers and exploiting vulnerabilities that were only partially addressed by the July 8, 2025 security update.

The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) concurred, saying CVE-2025-53770 is a variant on a flaw Microsoft patched earlier this month (CVE-2025-49706). Microsoft notes the weakness applies only to SharePoint Servers that organizations use in-house, and that SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 are not affected.

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that the U.S. government and partners in Canada and Australia are investigating the hack of SharePoint servers, which provide a platform for sharing and managing documents. The Post reports at least two U.S. federal agencies have seen their servers breached via the SharePoint vulnerability.

According to CISA, attackers exploiting the newly-discovered flaw are retrofitting compromised servers with a backdoor dubbed “ToolShell” that provides unauthenticated, remote access to systems. CISA said ToolShell enables attackers to fully access SharePoint content — including file systems and internal configurations — and execute code over the network.

Researchers at Eye Security said they first spotted large-scale exploitation of the SharePoint flaw on July 18, 2025, and soon found dozens of separate servers compromised by the bug and infected with ToolShell. In a blog post, the researchers said the attacks sought to steal SharePoint server ASP.NET machine keys.

“These keys can be used to facilitate further attacks, even at a later date,” Eye Security warned. “It is critical that affected servers rotate SharePoint server ASP.NET machine keys and restart IIS on all SharePoint servers. Patching alone is not enough. We strongly advise defenders not to wait for a vendor fix before taking action. This threat is already operational and spreading rapidly.”

Microsoft’s advisory says the company has issued updates for SharePoint Server Subscription Edition and SharePoint Server 2019, but that it is still working on updates for supported versions of SharePoint 2019 and SharePoint 2016.

CISA advises vulnerable organizations to enable the anti-malware scan interface (AMSI) in SharePoint, to deploy Microsoft Defender AV on all SharePoint servers, and to disconnect affected products from the public-facing Internet until an official patch is available.

The security firm Rapid7 notes that Microsoft has described CVE-2025-53770 as related to a previous vulnerability — CVE-2025-49704, patched earlier this month — and that CVE-2025-49704 was part of an exploit chain demonstrated at the Pwn2Own hacking competition in May 2025. That exploit chain invoked a second SharePoint weakness — CVE-2025-49706 — which Microsoft unsuccessfully tried to fix in this month’s Patch Tuesday.

Microsoft also has issued a patch for a related SharePoint vulnerability — CVE-2025-53771; Microsoft says there are no signs of active attacks on CVE-2025-53771, and that the patch is to provide more robust protections than the update for CVE-2025-49706.

This is a rapidly developing story. Any updates will be noted with timestamps.

Poor Passwords Tattle on AI Hiring Bot Maker Paradox.ai

Security researchers recently revealed that the personal information of millions of people who applied for jobs at McDonald’s was exposed after they guessed the password (“123456”) for the fast food chain’s account at Paradox.ai, a company that makes artificial intelligence based hiring chatbots used by many Fortune 500 firms. Paradox.ai said the security oversight was an isolated incident that did not affect its other customers, but recent security breaches involving its employees in Vietnam tell a more nuanced story.

Earlier this month, security researchers Ian Carroll and Sam Curry wrote about simple methods they found to access the backend of the AI chatbot platform on McHire.com, the McDonald’s website that many of its franchisees use to screen job applicants. As first reported by Wired, the researchers discovered that the weak password used by Paradox exposed 64 million records, including applicants’ names, email addresses and phone numbers.

Paradox.ai acknowledged the researchers’ findings but said the company’s other client instances were not affected, and that no sensitive information — such as Social Security numbers — was exposed.

“We are confident, based on our records, this test account was not accessed by any third party other than the security researchers,” the company wrote in a July 9 blog post. “It had not been logged into since 2019 and frankly, should have been decommissioned. We want to be very clear that while the researchers may have briefly had access to the system containing all chat interactions (NOT job applications), they only viewed and downloaded five chats in total that had candidate information within. Again, at no point was any data leaked online or made public.”

However, a review of stolen password data gathered by multiple breach-tracking services shows that at the end of June 2025, a Paradox.ai administrator in Vietnam suffered a malware compromise on their device that stole usernames and passwords for a variety of internal and third-party online services. The results were not pretty.

The password data from the Paradox.ai developer was stolen by a malware strain known as “Nexus Stealer,” a form grabber and password stealer that is sold on cybercrime forums. The information snarfed by stealers like Nexus is often recovered and indexed by data leak aggregator services like Intelligence X, which reports that the malware on the Paradox.ai developer’s device exposed hundreds of mostly poor and recycled passwords (using the same base password but slightly different characters at the end).

Those purloined credentials show the developer in question at one point used the same seven-digit password to log in to Paradox.ai accounts for a number of Fortune 500 firms listed as customers on the company’s website, including Aramark, Lockheed Martin, Lowes, and Pepsi.

Seven-character passwords, particularly those consisting entirely of numerals, are highly vulnerable to “brute-force” attacks that can try a large number of possible password combinations in quick succession. According to a much-referenced password strength guide maintained by Hive Systems, modern password-cracking systems can work out a seven number password more or less instantly.

In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, Paradox.ai confirmed that the password data was recently stolen by a malware infection on the personal device of a longtime Paradox developer based in Vietnam, and said the company was made aware of the compromise shortly after it happened. Paradox maintains that few of the exposed passwords were still valid, and that a majority of them were present on the employee’s personal device only because he had migrated the contents of a password manager from an old computer.

Paradox also pointed out that it has been requiring single sign-on (SSO) authentication since 2020 that enforces multi-factor authentication for its partners. Still, a review of the exposed passwords shows they included the Vietnamese administrator’s credentials to the company’s SSO platform — paradoxai.okta.com. The password for that account ended in 202506 — possibly a reference to the month of June 2025 — and the digital cookie left behind after a successful Okta login with those credentials says it was valid until December 2025.

Also exposed were the administrator’s credentials and authentication cookies for an account at Atlassian, a platform made for software development and project management. The expiration date for that authentication token likewise was December 2025.

Infostealer infections are among the leading causes of data breaches and ransomware attacks today, and they result in the theft of stored passwords and any credentials the victim types into a browser. Most infostealer malware also will siphon authentication cookies stored on the victim’s device, and depending on how those tokens are configured thieves may be able to use them to bypass login prompts and/or multi-factor authentication.

Quite often these infostealer infections will open a backdoor on the victim’s device that allows attackers to access the infected machine remotely. Indeed, it appears that remote access to the Paradox administrator’s compromised device was offered for sale recently.

In February 2019, Paradox.ai announced it had successfully completed audits for two fairly comprehensive security standards (ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II). Meanwhile, the company’s security disclosure this month says the test account with the atrocious 123456 username and password was last accessed in 2019, but somehow missed in their annual penetration tests. So how did it manage to pass such stringent security audits with these practices in place?

Paradox.ai told KrebsOnSecurity that at the time of the 2019 audit, the company’s various contractors were not held to the same security standards the company practices internally. Paradox emphasized that this has changed, and that it has updated its security and password requirements multiple times since then.

It is unclear how the Paradox developer in Vietnam infected his computer with malware, but a closer review finds a Windows device for another Paradox.ai employee from Vietnam was compromised by similar data-stealing malware at the end of 2024 (that compromise included the victim’s GitHub credentials). In the case of both employees, the stolen credential data includes Web browser logs that indicate the victims repeatedly downloaded pirated movies and television shows, which are often bundled with malware disguised as a video codec needed to view the pirated content.

DOGE Denizen Marko Elez Leaked API Key for xAI

Marko Elez, a 25-year-old employee at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been granted access to sensitive databases at the U.S. Social Security Administration, the Treasury and Justice departments, and the Department of Homeland Security. So it should fill all Americans with a deep sense of confidence to learn that Mr. Elez over the weekend inadvertently published a private key that allowed anyone to interact directly with more than four dozen large language models (LLMs) developed by Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI.

On July 13, Mr. Elez committed a code script to GitHub called “agent.py” that included a private application programming interface (API) key for xAI. The inclusion of the private key was first flagged by GitGuardian, a company that specializes in detecting and remediating exposed secrets in public and proprietary environments. GitGuardian’s systems constantly scan GitHub and other code repositories for exposed API keys, and fire off automated alerts to affected users.

Philippe Caturegli, “chief hacking officer” at the security consultancy Seralys, said the exposed API key allowed access to at least 52 different LLMs used by xAI. The most recent LLM in the list was called “grok-4-0709” and was created on July 9, 2025.

Grok, the generative AI chatbot developed by xAI and integrated into Twitter/X, relies on these and other LLMs (a query to Grok before publication shows Grok currently uses Grok-3, which was launched in Feburary 2025). Earlier today, xAI announced that the Department of Defense will begin using Grok as part of a contract worth up to $200 million. The contract award came less than a week after Grok began spewing antisemitic rants and invoking Adolf Hitler.

Mr. Elez did not respond to a request for comment. The code repository containing the private xAI key was removed shortly after Caturegli notified Elez via email. However, Caturegli said the exposed API key still works and has not yet been revoked.

“If a developer can’t keep an API key private, it raises questions about how they’re handling far more sensitive government information behind closed doors,” Caturegli told KrebsOnSecurity.

Prior to joining DOGE, Marko Elez worked for a number of Musk’s companies. His DOGE career began at the Department of the Treasury, and a legal battle over DOGE’s access to Treasury databases showed Elez was sending unencrypted personal information in violation of the agency’s policies.

While still at Treasury, Elez resigned after The Wall Street Journal linked him to social media posts that advocated racism and eugenics. When Vice President J.D. Vance lobbied for Elez to be rehired, President Trump agreed and Musk reinstated him.

Since his re-hiring as a DOGE employee, Elez has been granted access to databases at one federal agency after another. TechCrunch reported in February 2025 that he was working at the Social Security Administration. In March, Business Insider found Elez was part of a DOGE detachment assigned to the Department of Labor.

In April, The New York Times reported that Elez held positions at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) bureaus, as well as the Department of Homeland Security. The Washington Post later reported that Elez, while serving as a DOGE advisor at the Department of Justice, had gained access to the Executive Office for Immigration Review’s Courts and Appeals System (EACS).

Elez is not the first DOGE worker to publish internal API keys for xAI: In May, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how another DOGE employee leaked a private xAI key on GitHub for two months, exposing LLMs that were custom made for working with internal data from Musk’s companies, including SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter/X.

Caturegli said it’s difficult to trust someone with access to confidential government systems when they can’t even manage the basics of operational security.

“One leak is a mistake,” he said. “But when the same type of sensitive key gets exposed again and again, it’s not just bad luck, it’s a sign of deeper negligence and a broken security culture.”

UK Arrests Four in ‘Scattered Spider’ Ransom Group

Authorities in the United Kingdom this week arrested four people aged 17 to 20 in connection with recent data theft and extortion attacks against the retailers Marks & Spencer and Harrods, and the British food retailer Co-op Group. The breaches have been linked to a prolific but loosely-affiliated cybercrime group dubbed “Scattered Spider,” whose other recent victims include multiple airlines.

The U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) declined verify the names of those arrested, saying only that they included two males aged 19, another aged 17, and 20-year-old female.

Scattered Spider is the name given to an English-speaking cybercrime group known for using social engineering tactics to break into companies and steal data for ransom, often impersonating employees or contractors to deceive IT help desks into granting access. The FBI warned last month that Scattered Spider had recently shifted to targeting companies in the retail and airline sectors.

KrebsOnSecurity has learned the identities of two of the suspects. Multiple sources close to the investigation said those arrested include Owen David Flowers, a U.K. man alleged to have been involved in the cyber intrusion and ransomware attack that shut down several MGM Casino properties in September 2023. Those same sources said the woman arrested is or recently was in a relationship with Flowers.

Sources told KrebsOnSecurity that Flowers, who allegedly went by the hacker handles “bo764,” “Holy,” and “Nazi,” was the group member who anonymously gave interviews to the media in the days after the MGM hack. His real name was omitted from a September 2024 story about the group because he was not yet charged in that incident.

The bigger fish arrested this week is 19-year-old Thalha Jubair, a U.K. man whose alleged exploits under various monikers have been well-documented in stories on this site. Jubair is believed to have used the nickname “Earth2Star,” which corresponds to a founding member of the cybercrime-focused Telegram channel “Star Fraud Chat.”

In 2023, KrebsOnSecurity published an investigation into the work of three different SIM-swapping groups that phished credentials from T-Mobile employees and used that access to offer a service whereby any T-Mobile phone number could be swapped to a new device. Star Chat was by far the most active and consequential of the three SIM-swapping groups, who collectively broke into T-Mobile’s network more than 100 times in the second half of 2022.

Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that Jubair also was a core member of the LAPSUS$ cybercrime group that broke into dozens of technology companies in 2022, stealing source code and other internal data from tech giants including Microsoft, Nvidia, Okta, Rockstar Games, Samsung, T-Mobile, and Uber.

In April 2022, KrebsOnSecurity published internal chat records from LAPSUS$, and those chats indicated Jubair was using the nicknames Amtrak and Asyntax. At one point in the chats, Amtrak told the LAPSUS$ group leader not to share T-Mobile’s logo in images sent to the group because he’d been previously busted for SIM-swapping and his parents would suspect he was back at it again.

As shown in those chats, the leader of LAPSUS$ eventually decided to betray Amtrak by posting his real name, phone number, and other hacker handles into a public chat room on Telegram.

That story about the leaked LAPSUS$ chats connected Amtrak/Asyntax/Jubair to the identity “Everlynn,” the founder of a cybercriminal service that sold fraudulent “emergency data requests” targeting the major social media and email providers. In such schemes, the hackers compromise email accounts tied to police departments and government agencies, and then send unauthorized demands for subscriber data while claiming the information being requested can’t wait for a court order because it relates to an urgent matter of life and death.

Sources say Jubair also used the nickname “Operator,” and that until recently he was the administrator of the Doxbin, a long-running and highly toxic online community that is used to “dox” or post deeply personal information on people. In May 2024, several popular cybercrime channels on Telegram ridiculed Operator after it was revealed that he’d staged his own kidnapping in a botched plan to throw off law enforcement investigators.

In November 2024, U.S. authorities charged five men aged 20 to 25 in connection with the Scattered Spider group, which has long relied on recruiting minors to carry out its most risky activities. Indeed, many of the group’s core members were recruited from online gaming platforms like Roblox and Minecraft in their early teens, and have been perfecting their social engineering tactics for years.

“There is a clear pattern that some of the most depraved threat actors first joined cybercrime gangs at an exceptionally young age,” said Allison Nixon, chief research officer at the New York based security firm Unit 221B. “Cybercriminals arrested at 15 or younger need serious intervention and monitoring to prevent a years long massive escalation.”

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, July 2025 Edition

Microsoft today released updates to fix at least 137 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software. None of the weaknesses addressed this month are known to be actively exploited, but 14 of the flaws earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating, meaning they could be exploited to seize control over vulnerable Windows PCs with little or no help from users.

While not listed as critical, CVE-2025-49719 is a publicly disclosed information disclosure vulnerability, with all versions as far back as SQL Server 2016 receiving patches. Microsoft rates CVE-2025-49719 as less likely to be exploited, but the availability of proof-of-concept code for this flaw means its patch should probably be a priority for affected enterprises.

Mike Walters, co-founder of Action1, said CVE-2025-49719 can be exploited without authentication, and that many third-party applications depend on SQL server and the affected drivers — potentially introducing a supply-chain risk that extends beyond direct SQL Server users.

“The potential exposure of sensitive information makes this a high-priority concern for organizations handling valuable or regulated data,” Walters said. “The comprehensive nature of the affected versions, spanning multiple SQL Server releases from 2016 through 2022, indicates a fundamental issue in how SQL Server handles memory management and input validation.”

Adam Barnett at Rapid7 notes that today is the end of the road for SQL Server 2012, meaning there will be no future security patches even for critical vulnerabilities, even if you’re willing to pay Microsoft for the privilege.

Barnett also called attention to CVE-2025-47981, a vulnerability with a CVSS score of 9.8 (10 being the worst), a remote code execution bug in the way Windows servers and clients negotiate to discover mutually supported authentication mechanisms. This pre-authentication vulnerability affects any Windows client machine running Windows 10 1607 or above, and all current versions of Windows Server. Microsoft considers it more likely that attackers will exploit this flaw.

Microsoft also patched at least four critical, remote code execution flaws in Office (CVE-2025-49695, CVE-2025-49696, CVE-2025-49697, CVE-2025-49702). The first two are both rated by Microsoft as having a higher likelihood of exploitation, do not require user interaction, and can be triggered through the Preview Pane.

Two more high severity bugs include CVE-2025-49740 (CVSS 8.8) and CVE-2025-47178 (CVSS 8.0); the former is a weakness that could allow malicious files to bypass screening by Microsoft Defender SmartScreen, a built-in feature of Windows that tries to block untrusted downloads and malicious sites.

CVE-2025-47178 involves a remote code execution flaw in Microsoft Configuration Manager, an enterprise tool for managing, deploying, and securing computers, servers, and devices across a network. Ben Hopkins at Immersive said this bug requires very low privileges to exploit, and that it is possible for a user or attacker with a read-only access role to exploit it.

“Exploiting this vulnerability allows an attacker to execute arbitrary SQL queries as the privileged SMS service account in Microsoft Configuration Manager,” Hopkins said. “This access can be used to manipulate deployments, push malicious software or scripts to all managed devices, alter configurations, steal sensitive data, and potentially escalate to full operating system code execution across the enterprise, giving the attacker broad control over the entire IT environment.”

Separately, Adobe has released security updates for a broad range of software, including After Effects, Adobe Audition, Illustrator, FrameMaker, and ColdFusion.

The SANS Internet Storm Center has a breakdown of each individual patch, indexed by severity. If you’re responsible for administering a number of Windows systems, it may be worth keeping an eye on AskWoody for the lowdown on any potentially wonky updates (considering the large number of vulnerabilities and Windows components addressed this month).

If you’re a Windows home user, please consider backing up your data and/or drive before installing any patches, and drop a note in the comments if you encounter any problems with these updates.

Big Tech’s Mixed Response to U.S. Treasury Sanctions

In May 2025, the U.S. government sanctioned a Chinese national for operating a cloud provider linked to the majority of virtual currency investment scam websites reported to the FBI. But a new report finds the accused continues to operate a slew of established accounts at American tech companies — including Facebook, Github, PayPal and Twitter/X.

On May 29, the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced economic sanctions against Funnull Technology Inc., a Philippines-based company alleged to provide infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of websites involved in virtual currency investment scams known as “pig butchering.” In January 2025, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how Funnull was designed as a content delivery network that catered to foreign cybercriminals seeking to route their traffic through U.S.-based cloud providers.

The Treasury also sanctioned Funnull’s alleged operator, a 40-year-old Chinese national named Liu “Steve” Lizhi. The government says Funnull directly facilitated financial schemes resulting in more than $200 million in financial losses by Americans, and that the company’s operations were linked to the majority of pig butchering scams reported to the FBI.

It is generally illegal for U.S. companies or individuals to transact with people sanctioned by the Treasury. However, as Mr. Lizhi’s case makes clear, just because someone is sanctioned doesn’t necessarily mean big tech companies are going to suspend their online accounts.

The government says Lizhi was born November 13, 1984, and used the nicknames “XXL4” and “Nice Lizhi.” Nevertheless, Steve Liu’s 17-year-old account on LinkedIn (in the name “Liulizhi”) had hundreds of followers (Lizhi’s LinkedIn profile helpfully confirms his birthday) until quite recently: The account was deleted this morning, just hours after KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from LinkedIn.

In an emailed response, a LinkedIn spokesperson said the company’s “Prohibited countries policy” states that LinkedIn “does not sell, license, support or otherwise make available its Premium accounts or other paid products and services to individuals and companies sanctioned by the U.S. government.” LinkedIn declined to say whether the profile in question was a premium or free account.

Mr. Lizhi also maintains a working PayPal account under the name Liu Lizhi and username “@nicelizhi,” another nickname listed in the Treasury sanctions. A 15-year-old Twitter/X account named “Lizhi” that links to Mr. Lizhi’s personal domain remains active, although it has few followers and hasn’t posted in years.

These accounts and many others were flagged by the security firm Silent Push, which has been tracking Funnull’s operations for the past year and calling out U.S. cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft for failing to more quickly sever ties with the company.

In a report released today, Silent Push found Lizhi still operates numerous Facebook accounts and groups, including a private Facebook account under the name Liu Lizhi. Another Facebook account clearly connected to Lizhi is a tourism page for Ganzhou, China called “EnjoyGanzhou” that was named in the Treasury Department sanctions.

“This guy is the technical administrator for the infrastructure that is hosting a majority of scams targeting people in the United States, and hundreds of millions have been lost based on the websites he’s been hosting,” said Zach Edwards, senior threat researcher at Silent Push. “It’s crazy that the vast majority of big tech companies haven’t done anything to cut ties with this guy.”

The FBI says it received nearly 150,000 complaints last year involving digital assets and $9.3 billion in losses — a 66 percent increase from the previous year. Investment scams were the top crypto-related crimes reported, with $5.8 billion in losses.

In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said the company continuously takes steps to meet its legal obligations, but that sanctions laws are complex and varied. They explained that sanctions are often targeted in nature and don’t always prohibit people from having a presence on its platform. Nevertheless, Meta confirmed it had removed the account, unpublished Pages, and removed Groups and events associated with the user for violating its policies.

Attempts to reach Mr. Lizhi via his primary email addresses at Hotmail and Gmail bounced as undeliverable. Likewise, his 14-year-old YouTube channel appears to have been taken down recently.

However, anyone interested in viewing or using Mr. Lizhi’s 146 computer code repositories will have no problem finding GitHub accounts for him, including one registered under the NiceLizhi and XXL4 nicknames mentioned in the Treasury sanctions.

Mr. Lizhi also operates a GitHub page for an open source e-commerce platform called NexaMerchant, which advertises itself as a payment gateway working with numerous American financial institutions. Interestingly, this profile’s “followers” page shows several other accounts that appear to be Mr. Lizhi’s. All of the account’s followers are tagged as “suspended,” even though that suspended message does not display when one visits those individual profiles.

In response to questions, GitHub said it has a process in place to identify when users and customers are Specially Designated Nationals or other denied or blocked parties, but that it locks those accounts instead of removing them. According to its policy, GitHub takes care that users and customers aren’t impacted beyond what is required by law.

“This includes keeping public repositories, including those for open source projects, available and accessible to support personal communications involving developers in sanctioned regions,” the policy states. “This also means GitHub will advocate for developers in sanctioned regions to enjoy greater access to the platform and full access to the global open source community.”

Edwards said it’s great that GitHub has a process for handling sanctioned accounts, but that the process doesn’t seem to communicate risk in a transparent way, noting that the only indicator on the locked accounts is the message, “This repository has been archived by the owner. It is not read-only.”

“It’s an odd message that doesn’t communicate, ‘This is a sanctioned entity, don’t fork this code or use it in a production environment’,” Edwards said.

Mark Rasch is a former federal cybercrime prosecutor who now serves as counsel for the New York City based security consulting firm Unit 221B. Rasch said when Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions a person or entity, it then becomes illegal for businesses or organizations to transact with the sanctioned party.

Rasch said financial institutions have very mature systems for severing accounts tied to people who become subject to OFAC sanctions, but that tech companies may be far less proactive — particularly with free accounts.

“Banks have established ways of checking [U.S. government sanctions lists] for sanctioned entities, but tech companies don’t necessarily do a good job with that, especially for services that you can just click and sign up for,” Rasch said. “It’s potentially a risk and liability for the tech companies involved, but only to the extent OFAC is willing to enforce it.”

In July 2024, Funnull purchased the domain polyfill[.]io, the longtime home of a legitimate open source project that allowed websites to ensure that devices using legacy browsers could still render content in newer formats. After the Polyfill domain changed hands, at least 384,000 websites were caught in a supply-chain attack that redirected visitors to malicious sites. According to the Treasury, Funnull used the code to redirect people to scam websites and online gambling sites, some of which were linked to Chinese criminal money laundering operations.

The U.S. government says Funnull provides domain names for websites on its purchased IP addresses, using domain generation algorithms (DGAs) — programs that generate large numbers of similar but unique names for websites — and that it sells web design templates to cybercriminals.

“These services not only make it easier for cybercriminals to impersonate trusted brands when creating scam websites, but also allow them to quickly change to different domain names and IP addresses when legitimate providers attempt to take the websites down,” reads a Treasury statement.

Meanwhile, Funnull appears to be morphing nearly all aspects of its business in the wake of the sanctions, Edwards said.

“Whereas before they might have used 60 DGA domains to hide and bounce their traffic, we’re seeing far more now,” he said. “They’re trying to make their infrastructure harder to track and more complicated, so for now they’re not going away but more just changing what they’re doing. And a lot more organizations should be holding their feet to the fire.”

Update, 2:48 PM ET: Added response from Meta, which confirmed it has closed the accounts and groups connected to Mr. Lizhi.

Update, July 7, 6:56 p.m. ET: In a written statement, PayPal said it continually works to combat and prevent the illicit use of its services.

“We devote significant resources globally to financial crime compliance, and we proactively refer cases to and assist law enforcement officials around the world in their efforts to identify, investigate and stop illegal activity,” the statement reads.

Senator Chides FBI for Weak Advice on Mobile Security

Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) briefed Capitol Hill staff recently on hardening the security of their mobile devices, after a contacts list stolen from the personal phone of the White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was reportedly used to fuel a series of text messages and phone calls impersonating her to U.S. lawmakers. But in a letter this week to the FBI, one of the Senate’s most tech-savvy lawmakers says the feds aren’t doing enough to recommend more appropriate security protections that are already built into most consumer mobile devices.

On May 29, The Wall Street Journal reported that federal authorities were investigating a clandestine effort to impersonate Ms. Wiles via text messages and in phone calls that may have used AI to spoof her voice. According to The Journal, Wiles told associates her cellphone contacts were hacked, giving the impersonator access to the private phone numbers of some of the country’s most influential people.

The execution of this phishing and impersonation campaign — whatever its goals may have been — suggested the attackers were financially motivated, and not particularly sophisticated.

“It became clear to some of the lawmakers that the requests were suspicious when the impersonator began asking questions about Trump that Wiles should have known the answers to—and in one case, when the impersonator asked for a cash transfer, some of the people said,” the Journal wrote. “In many cases, the impersonator’s grammar was broken and the messages were more formal than the way Wiles typically communicates, people who have received the messages said. The calls and text messages also didn’t come from Wiles’s phone number.”

Sophisticated or not, the impersonation campaign was soon punctuated by the murder of Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the shooting of Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman and his wife. So when FBI agents offered in mid-June to brief U.S. Senate staff on mobile threats, more than 140 staffers took them up on that invitation (a remarkably high number considering that no food was offered at the event).

But according to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the advice the FBI provided to Senate staffers was largely limited to remedial tips, such as not clicking on suspicious links or attachments, not using public wifi networks, turning off bluetooth, keeping phone software up to date, and rebooting regularly.

“This is insufficient to protect Senate employees and other high-value targets against foreign spies using advanced cyber tools,” Wyden wrote in a letter sent today to FBI Director Kash Patel. “Well-funded foreign intelligence agencies do not have to rely on phishing messages and malicious attachments to infect unsuspecting victims with spyware. Cyber mercenary companies sell their government customers advanced ‘zero-click’ capabilities to deliver spyware that do not require any action by the victim.”

Wyden stressed that to help counter sophisticated attacks, the FBI should be encouraging lawmakers and their staff to enable anti-spyware defenses that are built into Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android phone software.

These include Apple’s Lockdown Mode, which is designed for users who are worried they may be subject to targeted attacks. Lockdown Mode restricts non-essential iOS features to reduce the device’s overall attack surface. Google Android devices carry a similar feature called Advanced Protection Mode.

Wyden also urged the FBI to update its training to recommend a number of other steps that people can take to make their mobile devices less trackable, including the use of ad blockers to guard against malicious advertisements, disabling ad tracking IDs in mobile devices, and opting out of commercial data brokers (the suspect charged in the Minnesota shootings reportedly used multiple people-search services to find the home addresses of his targets).

The senator’s letter notes that while the FBI has recommended all of the above precautions in various advisories issued over the years, the advice the agency is giving now to the nation’s leaders needs to be more comprehensive, actionable and urgent.

“In spite of the seriousness of the threat, the FBI has yet to provide effective defensive guidance,” Wyden said.

Nicholas Weaver is a researcher with the International Computer Science Institute, a nonprofit in Berkeley, Calif. Weaver said Lockdown Mode or Advanced Protection will mitigate many vulnerabilities, and should be the default setting for all members of Congress and their staff.

“Lawmakers are at exceptional risk and need to be exceptionally protected,” Weaver said. “Their computers should be locked down and well administered, etc. And the same applies to staffers.”

Weaver noted that Apple’s Lockdown Mode has a track record of blocking zero-day attacks on iOS applications; in September 2023, Citizen Lab documented how Lockdown Mode foiled a zero-click flaw capable of installing spyware on iOS devices without any interaction from the victim.

Earlier this month, Citizen Lab researchers documented a zero-click attack used to infect the iOS devices of two journalists with Paragon’s Graphite spyware. The vulnerability could be exploited merely by sending the target a booby-trapped media file delivered via iMessage. Apple also recently updated its advisory for the zero-click flaw (CVE-2025-43200), noting that it was mitigated as of iOS 18.3.1, which was released in February 2025.

Apple has not commented on whether CVE-2025-43200 could be exploited on devices with Lockdown Mode turned on. But HelpNetSecurity observed that at the same time Apple addressed CVE-2025-43200 back in February, the company fixed another vulnerability flagged by Citizen Lab researcher Bill Marczak: CVE-2025-24200, which Apple said was used in an extremely sophisticated physical attack against specific targeted individuals that allowed attackers to disable USB Restricted Mode on a locked device.

In other words, the flaw could apparently be exploited only if the attacker had physical access to the targeted vulnerable device. And as the old infosec industry adage goes, if an adversary has physical access to your device, it’s most likely not your device anymore.

I can’t speak to Google’s Advanced Protection Mode personally, because I don’t use Google or Android devices. But I have had Apple’s Lockdown Mode enabled on all of my Apple devices since it was first made available in September 2022. I can only think of a single occasion when one of my apps failed to work properly with Lockdown Mode turned on, and in that case I was able to add a temporary exception for that app in Lockdown Mode’s settings.

My main gripe with Lockdown Mode was captured in a March 2025 column by TechCrunch’s Lorenzo Francheschi-Bicchierai, who wrote about its penchant for periodically sending mystifying notifications that someone has been blocked from contacting you, even though nothing then prevents you from contacting that person directly. This has happened to me at least twice, and in both cases the person in question was already an approved contact, and said they had not attempted to reach out.

Although it would be nice if Apple’s Lockdown Mode sent fewer, less alarming and more informative alerts, the occasional baffling warning message is hardly enough to make me turn it off.

Inside a Dark Adtech Empire Fed by Fake CAPTCHAs

Late last year, security researchers made a startling discovery: Kremlin-backed disinformation campaigns were bypassing moderation on social media platforms by leveraging the same malicious advertising technology that powers a sprawling ecosystem of online hucksters and website hackers. A new report on the fallout from that investigation finds this dark ad tech industry is far more resilient and incestuous than previously known.

In November 2024, researchers at the security firm Qurium published an investigation into “Doppelganger,” a disinformation network that promotes pro-Russian narratives and infiltrates Europe’s media landscape by pushing fake news through a network of cloned websites.

Doppelganger campaigns use specialized links that bounce the visitor’s browser through a long series of domains before the fake news content is served. Qurium found Doppelganger relies on a sophisticated “domain cloaking” service, a technology that allows websites to present different content to search engines compared to what regular visitors see. The use of cloaking services helps the disinformation sites remain online longer than they otherwise would, while ensuring that only the targeted audience gets to view the intended content.

Qurium discovered that Doppelganger’s cloaking service also promoted online dating sites, and shared much of the same infrastructure with VexTrio, which is thought to be the oldest malicious traffic distribution system (TDS) in existence. While TDSs are commonly used by legitimate advertising networks to manage traffic from disparate sources and to track who or what is behind each click, VexTrio’s TDS largely manages web traffic from victims of phishing, malware, and social engineering scams.

BREAKING BAD

Digging deeper, Qurium noticed Doppelganger’s cloaking service used an Internet provider in Switzerland as the first entry point in a chain of domain redirections. They also noticed the same infrastructure hosted a pair of co-branded affiliate marketing services that were driving traffic to sketchy adult dating sites: LosPollos[.]com and TacoLoco[.]co.

The LosPollos ad network incorporates many elements and references from the hit series “Breaking Bad,” mirroring the fictional “Los Pollos Hermanos” restaurant chain that served as a money laundering operation for a violent methamphetamine cartel.

Affiliates who sign up with LosPollos are given JavaScript-heavy “smartlinks” that drive traffic into the VexTrio TDS, which in turn distributes the traffic among a variety of advertising partners, including dating services, sweepstakes offers, bait-and-switch mobile apps, financial scams and malware download sites.

LosPollos affiliates typically stitch these smart links into WordPress websites that have been hacked via known vulnerabilities, and those affiliates will earn a small commission each time an Internet user referred by any of their hacked sites falls for one of these lures.

According to Qurium, TacoLoco is a traffic monetization network that uses deceptive tactics to trick Internet users into enabling “push notifications,” a cross-platform browser standard that allows websites to show pop-up messages which appear outside of the browser. For example, on Microsoft Windows systems these notifications typically show up in the bottom right corner of the screen — just above the system clock.

In the case of VexTrio and TacoLoco, the notification approval requests themselves are deceptive — disguised as “CAPTCHA” challenges designed to distinguish automated bot traffic from real visitors. For years, VexTrio and its partners have successfully tricked countless users into enabling these site notifications, which are then used to continuously pepper the victim’s device with a variety of phony virus alerts and misleading pop-up messages.

According to a December 2024 annual report from GoDaddy, nearly 40 percent of compromised websites in 2024 redirected visitors to VexTrio via LosPollos smartlinks.

ADSPRO AND TEKNOLOGY

On November 14, 2024, Qurium published research to support its findings that LosPollos and TacoLoco were services operated by Adspro Group, a company registered in the Czech Republic and Russia, and that Adspro runs its infrastructure at the Swiss hosting providers C41 and Teknology SA.

Qurium noted the LosPollos and TacoLoco sites state that their content is copyrighted by ByteCore AG and SkyForge Digital AG, both Swiss firms that are run by the owner of Teknology SA, Giulio Vitorrio Leonardo Cerutti. Further investigation revealed LosPollos and TacoLoco were apps developed by a company called Holacode, which lists Cerutti as its CEO.

The apps marketed by Holacode include numerous VPN services, as well as one called Spamshield that claims to stop unwanted push notifications. But in January, Infoblox said they tested the app on their own mobile devices, and found it hides the user’s notifications, and then after 24 hours stops hiding them and demands payment. Spamshield subsequently changed its developer name from Holacode to ApLabz, although Infoblox noted that the Terms of Service for several of the rebranded ApLabz apps still referenced Holacode in their terms of service.

Incredibly, Cerutti threatened to sue me for defamation before I’d even uttered his name or sent him a request for comment (Cerutti sent the unsolicited legal threat back in January after his company and my name were merely tagged in an Infoblox post on LinkedIn about VexTrio).

Asked to comment on the findings by Qurium and Infoblox, Cerutti vehemently denied being associated with VexTrio. Cerutti asserted that his companies all strictly adhere to the regulations of the countries in which they operate, and that they have been completely transparent about all of their operations.

“We are a group operating in the advertising and marketing space, with an affiliate network program,” Cerutti responded. “I am not [going] to say we are perfect, but I strongly declare we have no connection with VexTrio at all.”

“Unfortunately, as a big player in this space we also get to deal with plenty of publisher fraud, sketchy traffic, fake clicks, bots, hacked, listed and resold publisher accounts, etc, etc.,” Cerutti continued. “We bleed lots of money to such malpractices and conduct regular internal screenings and audits in a constant battle to remove bad traffic sources. It is also a highly competitive space, where some upstarts will often play dirty against more established mainstream players like us.”

Working with Qurium, researchers at the security firm Infoblox released details about VexTrio’s infrastructure to their industry partners. Just four days after Qurium published its findings, LosPollos announced it was suspending its push monetization service. Less than a month later, Adspro had rebranded to Aimed Global.

A REVEALING PIVOT

In March 2025, researchers at GoDaddy chronicled how DollyWay — a malware strain that has consistently redirected victims to VexTrio throughout its eight years of activity — suddenly stopped doing that on November 20, 2024. Virtually overnight, DollyWay and several other malware families that had previously used VexTrio began pushing their traffic through another TDS called Help TDS.

Digging further into historical DNS records and the unique code scripts used by the Help TDS, Infoblox determined it has long enjoyed an exclusive relationship with VexTrio (at least until LosPollos ended its push monetization service in November).

In a report released today, Infoblox said an exhaustive analysis of the JavaScript code, website lures, smartlinks and DNS patterns used by VexTrio and Help TDS linked them with at least four other TDS operators (not counting TacoLoco). Those four entities — Partners House, BroPush, RichAds and RexPush — are all Russia-based push monetization programs that pay affiliates to drive signups for a variety of schemes, but mostly online dating services.

“As Los Pollos push monetization ended, we’ve seen an increase in fake CAPTCHAs that drive user acceptance of push notifications, particularly from Partners House,” the Infoblox report reads. “The relationship of these commercial entities remains a mystery; while they are certainly long-time partners redirecting traffic to one another, and they all have a Russian nexus, there is no overt common ownership.”

Renee Burton, vice president of threat intelligence at Infoblox, said the security industry generally treats the deceptive methods used by VexTrio and other malicious TDSs as a kind of legally grey area that is mostly associated with less dangerous security threats, such as adware and scareware.

But Burton argues that this view is myopic, and helps perpetuate a dark adtech industry that also pushes plenty of straight-up malware, noting that hundreds of thousands of compromised websites around the world every year redirect victims to the tangled web of VexTrio and VexTrio-affiliate TDSs.

“These TDSs are a nefarious threat, because they’re the ones you can connect to the delivery of things like information stealers and scams that cost consumers billions of dollars a year,” Burton said. “From a larger strategic perspective, my takeaway is that Russian organized crime has control of malicious adtech, and these are just some of the many groups involved.”

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

As KrebsOnSecurity warned way back in 2020, it’s a good idea to be very sparing in approving notifications when browsing the Web. In many cases these notifications are benign, but as we’ve seen there are numerous dodgy firms that are paying site owners to install their notification scripts, and then reselling that communications pathway to scammers and online hucksters.

If you’d like to prevent sites from ever presenting notification requests, all of the major browser makers let you do this — either across the board or on a per-website basis. While it is true that blocking notifications entirely can break the functionality of some websites, doing this for any devices you manage on behalf of your less tech-savvy friends or family members might end up saving everyone a lot of headache down the road.

To modify site notification settings in Mozilla Firefox, navigate to Settings, Privacy & Security, Permissions, and click the “Settings” tab next to “Notifications.” That page will display any notifications already permitted and allow you to edit or delete any entries. Tick the box next to “Block new requests asking to allow notifications” to stop them altogether.

In Google Chrome, click the icon with the three dots to the right of the address bar, scroll all the way down to Settings, Privacy and Security, Site Settings, and Notifications. Select the “Don’t allow sites to send notifications” button if you want to banish notification requests forever.

In Apple’s Safari browser, go to Settings, Websites, and click on Notifications in the sidebar. Uncheck the option to “allow websites to ask for permission to send notifications” if you wish to turn off notification requests entirely.

Patch Tuesday, June 2025 Edition

Microsoft today released security updates to fix at least 67 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and software. Redmond warns that one of the flaws is already under active attack, and that software blueprints showing how to exploit a pervasive Windows bug patched this month are now public.

The sole zero-day flaw this month is CVE-2025-33053, a remote code execution flaw in the Windows implementation of WebDAV — an HTTP extension that lets users remotely manage files and directories on a server. While WebDAV isn’t enabled by default in Windows, its presence in legacy or specialized systems still makes it a relevant target, said Seth Hoyt, senior security engineer at Automox.

Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7, said Microsoft’s advisory for CVE-2025-33053 does not mention that the Windows implementation of WebDAV is listed as deprecated since November 2023, which in practical terms means that the WebClient service no longer starts by default.

“The advisory also has attack complexity as low, which means that exploitation does not require preparation of the target environment in any way that is beyond the attacker’s control,” Barnett said. “Exploitation relies on the user clicking a malicious link. It’s not clear how an asset would be immediately vulnerable if the service isn’t running, but all versions of Windows receive a patch, including those released since the deprecation of WebClient, like Server 2025 and Windows 11 24H2.”

Microsoft warns that an “elevation of privilege” vulnerability in the Windows Server Message Block (SMB) client (CVE-2025-33073) is likely to be exploited, given that proof-of-concept code for this bug is now public. CVE-2025-33073 has a CVSS risk score of 8.8 (out of 10), and exploitation of the flaw leads to the attacker gaining “SYSTEM” level control over a vulnerable PC.

“What makes this especially dangerous is that no further user interaction is required after the initial connection—something attackers can often trigger without the user realizing it,” said Alex Vovk, co-founder and CEO of Action1. “Given the high privilege level and ease of exploitation, this flaw poses a significant risk to Windows environments. The scope of affected systems is extensive, as SMB is a core Windows protocol used for file and printer sharing and inter-process communication.”

Beyond these highlights, 10 of the vulnerabilities fixed this month were rated “critical” by Microsoft, including eight remote code execution flaws.

Notably absent from this month’s patch batch is a fix for a newly discovered weakness in Windows Server 2025 that allows attackers to act with the privileges of any user in Active Directory. The bug, dubbed “BadSuccessor,” was publicly disclosed by researchers at Akamai on May 21, and several public proof-of-concepts are now available. Tenable’s Satnam Narang said organizations that have at least one Windows Server 2025 domain controller should review permissions for principals and limit those permissions as much as possible.

Adobe has released updates for Acrobat Reader and six other products addressing at least 259 vulnerabilities, most of them in an update for Experience Manager. Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome both recently released security updates that require a restart of the browser to take effect. The latest Chrome update fixes two zero-day exploits in the browser (CVE-2025-5419 and CVE-2025-4664).

For a detailed breakdown on the individual security updates released by Microsoft today, check out the Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. Action 1 has a breakdown of patches from Microsoft and a raft of other software vendors releasing fixes this month. As always, please back up your system and/or data before patching, and feel free to drop a note in the comments if you run into any problems applying these updates.

Proxy Services Feast on Ukraine’s IP Address Exodus

Ukraine has seen nearly one-fifth of its Internet space come under Russian control or sold to Internet address brokers since February 2022, a new study finds. The analysis indicates large chunks of Ukrainian Internet address space are now in the hands of shadowy proxy and anonymity services that are nested at some of America’s largest Internet service providers (ISPs).

The findings come in a report examining how the Russian invasion has affected Ukraine’s domestic supply of Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) addresses. Researchers at Kentik, a company that measures the performance of Internet networks, found that while a majority of ISPs in Ukraine haven’t changed their infrastructure much since the war began in 2022, others have resorted to selling swathes of their valuable IPv4 address space just to keep the lights on.

For example, Ukraine’s incumbent ISP Ukrtelecom is now routing just 29 percent of the IPv4 address ranges that the company controlled at the start of the war, Kentik found. Although much of that former IP space remains dormant, Ukrtelecom told Kentik’s Doug Madory they were forced to sell many of their address blocks “to secure financial stability and continue delivering essential services.”

“Leasing out a portion of our IPv4 resources allowed us to mitigate some of the extraordinary challenges we have been facing since the full-scale invasion began,” Ukrtelecom told Madory.

Madory found much of the IPv4 space previously allocated to Ukrtelecom is now scattered to more than 100 providers globally, particularly at three large American ISPs — Amazon (AS16509), AT&T (AS7018), and Cogent (AS174).

Another Ukrainian Internet provider — LVS (AS43310) — in 2022 was routing approximately 6,000 IPv4 addresses across the nation. Kentik learned that by November 2022, much of that address space had been parceled out to over a dozen different locations, with the bulk of it being announced at AT&T.

Ditto for the Ukrainian ISP TVCOM, which currently routes nearly 15,000 fewer IPv4 addresses than it did at the start of the war. Madory said most of those addresses have been scattered to 37 other networks outside of Eastern Europe, including Amazon, AT&T, and Microsoft.

The Ukrainian ISP Trinity (AS43554) went offline in early March 2022 during the bloody siege of Mariupol, but its address space eventually began showing up in more than 50 different networks worldwide. Madory found more than 1,000 of Trinity’s IPv4 addresses suddenly appeared on AT&T’s network.

Why are all these former Ukrainian IP addresses being routed by U.S.-based networks like AT&T? According to spur.us, a company that tracks VPN and proxy services, nearly all of the address ranges identified by Kentik now map to commercial proxy services that allow customers to anonymously route their Internet traffic through someone else’s computer.

From a website’s perspective, the traffic from a proxy network user appears to originate from the rented IP address, not from the proxy service customer. These services can be used for several business purposes, such as price comparisons, sales intelligence, web crawlers and content-scraping bots. However, proxy services also are massively abused for hiding cybercrime activity because they can make it difficult to trace malicious traffic to its original source.

IPv4 address ranges are always in high demand, which means they are also quite valuable. There are now multiple companies that will pay ISPs to lease out their unwanted or unused IPv4 address space. Madory said these IPv4 brokers will pay between $100-$500 per month to lease a block of 256 IPv4 addresses, and very often the entities most willing to pay those rental rates are proxy and VPN providers.

A cursory review of all Internet address blocks currently routed through AT&T — as seen in public records maintained by the Internet backbone provider Hurricane Electric — shows a preponderance of country flags other than the United States, including networks originating in Hungary, Lithuania, Moldova, Mauritius, Palestine, Seychelles, Slovenia, and Ukraine.

Asked about the apparent high incidence of proxy services routing foreign address blocks through AT&T, the telecommunications giant said it recently changed its policy about originating routes for network blocks that are not owned and managed by AT&T. That new policy, spelled out in a February 2025 update to AT&T’s terms of service, gives those customers until Sept. 1, 2025 to originate their own IP space from their own autonomous system number (ASN), a unique number assigned to each ISP (AT&T’s is AS7018).

“To ensure our customers receive the best quality of service, we changed our terms for dedicated internet in February 2025,” an AT&T spokesperson said in an emailed reply. “We no longer permit static routes with IP addresses that we have not provided. We have been in the process of identifying and notifying affected customers that they have 90 days to transition to Border Gateway Protocol routing using their own autonomous system number.”

Ironically, the co-mingling of Ukrainian IP address space with proxy providers has resulted in many of these addresses being used in cyberattacks against Ukraine and other enemies of Russia. Earlier this month, the European Union sanctioned Stark Industries Solutions Inc., an ISP that surfaced two weeks before the Russian invasion and quickly became the source of large-scale DDoS attacks and spear-phishing attempts by Russian state-sponsored hacking groups. A deep dive into Stark’s considerable address space showed some of it was sourced from Ukrainian ISPs, and most of it was connected to Russia-based proxy and anonymity services.

Spur’s Chief Technology Officer Riley Kilmer said AT&T’s policy change will likely force many proxy services to migrate to other U.S. providers that have less stringent policies.

“AT&T is the first one of the big ISPs that seems to be actually doing something about this,” Kilmer said. “We track several services that explicitly sell AT&T IP addresses, and it will be very interesting to see what happens to those services come September.”

Still, Kilmer said, there are several other large U.S. ISPs that continue to make it easy for proxy services to bring their own IP addresses and host them in ranges that give the appearance of residential customers. For example, Kentik’s report identified former Ukrainian IP ranges showing up as proxy services routed by Cogent Communications (AS174), a tier-one Internet backbone provider based in Washington, D.C.

Kilmer said Cogent has become an attractive home base for proxy services because it is relatively easy to get Cogent to route an address block.

“In fairness, they transit a lot of traffic,” Kilmer said of Cogent. “But there’s a reason a lot of this proxy stuff shows up as Cogent: Because it’s super easy to get something routed there.”

Cogent declined a request to comment on Kentik’s findings.

U.S. Sanctions Cloud Provider ‘Funnull’ as Top Source of ‘Pig Butchering’ Scams

The U.S. government today imposed economic sanctions on Funnull Technology Inc., a Philippines-based company that provides computer infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of websites involved in virtual currency investment scams known as “pig butchering.” In January 2025, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how Funnull was being used as a content delivery network that catered to cybercriminals seeking to route their traffic through U.S.-based cloud providers.

“Americans lose billions of dollars annually to these cyber scams, with revenues generated from these crimes rising to record levels in 2024,” reads a statement from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which sanctioned Funnull and its 40-year-old Chinese administrator Liu Lizhi. “Funnull has directly facilitated several of these schemes, resulting in over $200 million in U.S. victim-reported losses.”

The Treasury Department said Funnull’s operations are linked to the majority of virtual currency investment scam websites reported to the FBI. The agency said Funnull directly facilitated pig butchering and other schemes that resulted in more than $200 million in financial losses by Americans.

Pig butchering is a rampant form of fraud wherein people are lured by flirtatious strangers online into investing in fraudulent cryptocurrency trading platforms. Victims are coached to invest more and more money into what appears to be an extremely profitable trading platform, only to find their money is gone when they wish to cash out.

The scammers often insist that investors pay additional “taxes” on their crypto “earnings” before they can see their invested funds again (spoiler: they never do), and a shocking number of people have lost six figures or more through these pig butchering scams.

KrebsOnSecurity’s January story on Funnull was based on research from the security firm Silent Push, which discovered in October 2024 that a vast number of domains hosted via Funnull were promoting gambling sites that bore the logo of the Suncity Group, a Chinese entity named in a 2024 UN report (PDF) for laundering millions of dollars for the North Korean state-sponsored hacking group Lazarus.

Silent Push found Funnull was a criminal content delivery network (CDN) that carried a great deal of traffic tied to scam websites, funneling the traffic through a dizzying chain of auto-generated domain names and U.S.-based cloud providers before redirecting to malicious or phishous websites. The FBI has released a technical writeup (PDF) of the infrastructure used to manage the malicious Funnull domains between October 2023 and April 2025.

Silent Push revisited Funnull’s infrastructure in January 2025 and found Funnull was still using many of the same Amazon and Microsoft cloud Internet addresses identified as malicious in its October report. Both Amazon and Microsoft pledged to rid their networks of Funnull’s presence following that story, but according to Silent Push’s Zach Edwards only one of those companies has followed through.

Edwards said Silent Push no longer sees Microsoft Internet addresses showing up in Funnull’s infrastructure, while Amazon continues to struggle with removing Funnull servers, including one that appears to have first materialized in 2023.

“Amazon is doing a terrible job — every day since they made those claims to you and us in our public blog they have had IPs still mapped to Funnull, including some that have stayed mapped for inexplicable periods of time,” Edwards said.

Amazon said its Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosting platform actively counters abuse attempts.

“We have stopped hundreds of attempts this year related to this group and we are looking into the information you shared earlier today,” reads a statement shared by Amazon. “If anyone suspects that AWS resources are being used for abusive activity, they can report it to AWS Trust & Safety using the report abuse form here.”

U.S. based cloud providers remain an attractive home base for cybercriminal organizations because many organizations will not be overly aggressive in blocking traffic from U.S.-based cloud networks, as doing so can result in blocking access to many legitimate web destinations that are also on that same shared network segment or host.

What’s more, funneling their bad traffic so that it appears to be coming out of U.S. cloud Internet providers allows cybercriminals to connect to websites from web addresses that are geographically close(r) to their targets and victims (to sidestep location-based security controls by your bank, for example).

Funnull is not the only cybercriminal infrastructure-as-a-service provider that was sanctioned this month: On May 20, 2025, the European Union imposed sanctions on Stark Industries Solutions, an ISP that materialized at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and has been used as a global proxy network that conceals the true source of cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns against enemies of Russia.

In May 2024, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive on Stark Industries Solutions that found much of the malicious traffic traversing Stark’s network (e.g. vulnerability scanning and password brute force attacks) was being bounced through U.S.-based cloud providers. My reporting showed how deeply Stark had penetrated U.S. ISPs, and that its co-founder for many years sold “bulletproof” hosting services that told Russian cybercrime forum customers they would proudly ignore any abuse complaints or police inquiries.

That story examined the history of Stark’s co-founders, Moldovan brothers Ivan and Yuri Neculiti, who each denied past involvement in cybercrime or any current involvement in assisting Russian disinformation efforts or cyberattacks. Nevertheless, the EU sanctioned both brothers as well.

The EU said Stark and the Neculti brothers “enabled various Russian state-sponsored and state-affiliated actors to conduct destabilising activities including coordinated information manipulation and interference and cyber-attacks against the Union and third countries by providing services intended to hide these activities from European law enforcement and security agencies.”

Pakistan Arrests 21 in ‘Heartsender’ Malware Service

Authorities in Pakistan have arrested 21 individuals accused of operating “Heartsender,” a once popular spam and malware dissemination service that operated for more than a decade. The main clientele for HeartSender were organized crime groups that tried to trick victim companies into making payments to a third party, and its alleged proprietors were publicly identified by KrebsOnSecurity in 2021 after they inadvertently infected their computers with malware.

A report from the Pakistani media outlet Dawn states that authorities there arrested 21 people alleged to have operated Heartsender, a spam delivery service whose homepage openly advertised phishing kits targeting users of various Internet companies, including Microsoft 365, Yahoo, AOL, Intuit, iCloud and ID.me. Pakistan’s National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) reportedly conducted raids in Lahore’s Bahria Town and Multan on May 15 and 16.

The NCCIA told reporters the group’s tools were connected to more than $50m in losses in the United States alone, with European authorities investigating 63 additional cases.

“This wasn’t just a scam operation – it was essentially a cybercrime university that empowered fraudsters globally,” NCCIA Director Abdul Ghaffar said at a press briefing.

In January 2025, the FBI and the Dutch Police seized the technical infrastructure for the cybercrime service, which was marketed under the brands Heartsender, Fudpage and Fudtools (and many other “fud” variations). The “fud” bit stands for “Fully Un-Detectable,” and it refers to cybercrime resources that will evade detection by security tools like antivirus software or anti-spam appliances.

The FBI says transnational organized crime groups that purchased these services primarily used them to run business email compromise (BEC) schemes, wherein the cybercrime actors tricked victim companies into making payments to a third party.

Dawn reported that those arrested included Rameez Shahzad, the alleged ringleader of the Heartsender cybercrime business, which most recently operated under the Pakistani front company WeCodeSolutions. Mr. Shahzad was named and pictured in a 2021 KrebsOnSecurity story about a series of remarkable operational security mistakes that exposed their identities and Facebook pages showing employees posing for group photos and socializing at work-related outings.

Prior to folding their operations behind WeCodeSolutions, Shahzad and others arrested this month operated as a web hosting group calling itself The Manipulaters. KrebsOnSecurity first wrote about The Manipulaters in May 2015, mainly because their ads at the time were blanketing a number of popular cybercrime forums, and because they were fairly open and brazen about what they were doing — even who they were in real life.

Sometime in 2019, The Manipulaters failed to renew their core domain name — manipulaters[.]com — the same one tied to so many of the company’s business operations. That domain was quickly scooped up by Scylla Intel, a cyber intelligence firm that specializes in connecting cybercriminals to their real-life identities. Soon after, Scylla started receiving large amounts of email correspondence intended for the group’s owners.

In 2024, DomainTools.com found the web-hosted version of Heartsender leaked an extraordinary amount of user information to unauthenticated users, including customer credentials and email records from Heartsender employees. DomainTools says the malware infections on Manipulaters PCs exposed “vast swaths of account-related data along with an outline of the group’s membership, operations, and position in the broader underground economy.”

Shahzad allegedly used the alias “Saim Raza,” an identity which has contacted KrebsOnSecurity multiple times over the past decade with demands to remove stories published about the group. The Saim Raza identity most recently contacted this author in November 2024, asserting they had quit the cybercrime industry and turned over a new leaf after a brush with the Pakistani police.

The arrested suspects include Rameez Shahzad, Muhammad Aslam (Rameez’s father), Atif Hussain, Muhammad Umar Irshad, Yasir Ali, Syed Saim Ali Shah, Muhammad Nowsherwan, Burhanul Haq, Adnan Munawar, Abdul Moiz, Hussnain Haider, Bilal Ahmad, Dilbar Hussain, Muhammad Adeel Akram, Awais Rasool, Usama Farooq, Usama Mehmood and Hamad Nawaz.

Oops: DanaBot Malware Devs Infected Their Own PCs

The U.S. government today unsealed criminal charges against 16 individuals accused of operating and selling DanaBot, a prolific strain of information-stealing malware that has been sold on Russian cybercrime forums since 2018. The FBI says a newer version of DanaBot was used for espionage, and that many of the defendants exposed their real-life identities after accidentally infecting their own systems with the malware.

Initially spotted in May 2018 by researchers at the email security firm Proofpoint, DanaBot is a malware-as-a-service platform that specializes in credential theft and banking fraud.

Today, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed a criminal complaint and indictment from 2022, which said the FBI identified at least 40 affiliates who were paying between $3,000 and $4,000 a month for access to the information stealer platform.

The government says the malware infected more than 300,000 systems globally, causing estimated losses of more than $50 million. The ringleaders of the DanaBot conspiracy are named as Aleksandr Stepanov, 39, a.k.a. “JimmBee,” and Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin, 34, a.k.a. “Onix”, both of Novosibirsk, Russia. Kalinkin is an IT engineer for the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. His Facebook profile name is “Maffiozi.”

According to the FBI, there were at least two major versions of DanaBot; the first was sold between 2018 and June 2020, when the malware stopped being offered on Russian cybercrime forums. The government alleges that the second version of DanaBot — emerging in January 2021 — was provided to co-conspirators for use in targeting military, diplomatic and non-governmental organization computers in several countries, including the United States, Belarus, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Russia.

“Unindicted co-conspirators would use the Espionage Variant to compromise computers around the world and steal sensitive diplomatic communications, credentials, and other data from these targeted victims,” reads a grand jury indictment dated Sept. 20, 2022. “This stolen data included financial transactions by diplomatic staff, correspondence concerning day-to-day diplomatic activity, as well as summaries of a particular country’s interactions with the United States.”

The indictment says the FBI in 2022 seized servers used by the DanaBot authors to control their malware, as well as the servers that stored stolen victim data. The government said the server data also show numerous instances in which the DanaBot defendants infected their own PCs, resulting in their credential data being uploaded to stolen data repositories that were seized by the feds.

“In some cases, such self-infections appeared to be deliberately done in order to test, analyze, or improve the malware,” the criminal complaint reads. “In other cases, the infections seemed to be inadvertent – one of the hazards of committing cybercrime is that criminals will sometimes infect themselves with their own malware by mistake.”

A statement from the DOJ says that as part of today’s operation, agents with the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) seized the DanaBot control servers, including dozens of virtual servers hosted in the United States. The government says it is now working with industry partners to notify DanaBot victims and help remediate infections. The statement credits a number of security firms with providing assistance to the government, including ESET, Flashpoint, Google, Intel 471, Lumen, PayPal, Proofpoint, Team CYMRU, and ZScaler.

It’s not unheard of for financially-oriented malicious software to be repurposed for espionage. A variant of the ZeuS Trojan, which was used in countless online banking attacks against companies in the United States and Europe between 2007 and at least 2015, was for a time diverted to espionage tasks by its author.

As detailed in this 2015 story, the author of the ZeuS trojan created a custom version of the malware to serve purely as a spying machine, which scoured infected systems in Ukraine for specific keywords in emails and documents that would likely only be found in classified documents.

The public charging of the 16 DanaBot defendants comes a day after Microsoft joined a slew of tech companies in disrupting the IT infrastructure for another malware-as-a-service offering — Lumma Stealer, which is likewise offered to affiliates under tiered subscription prices ranging from $250 to $1,000 per month. Separately, Microsoft filed a civil lawsuit to seize control over 2,300 domain names used by Lumma Stealer and its affiliates.

Further reading:

Danabot: Analyzing a Fallen Empire

ZScaler blog: DanaBot Launches DDoS Attack Against the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense

Flashpoint: Operation Endgame DanaBot Malware

Team CYMRU: Inside DanaBot’s Infrastructure: In Support of Operation Endgame II

March 2022 criminal complaint v. Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin

September 2022 grand jury indictment naming the 16 defendants

KrebsOnSecurity Hit With Near-Record 6.3 Tbps DDoS

KrebsOnSecurity last week was hit by a near record distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that clocked in at more than 6.3 terabits of data per second (a terabit is one trillion bits of data). The brief attack appears to have been a test run for a massive new Internet of Things (IoT) botnet capable of launching crippling digital assaults that few web destinations can withstand. Read on for more about the botnet, the attack, and the apparent creator of this global menace.

For reference, the 6.3 Tbps attack last week was ten times the size of the assault launched against this site in 2016 by the Mirai IoT botnet, which held KrebsOnSecurity offline for nearly four days. The 2016 assault was so large that Akamai – which was providing pro-bono DDoS protection for KrebsOnSecurity at the time — asked me to leave their service because the attack was causing problems for their paying customers.

Since the Mirai attack, KrebsOnSecurity.com has been behind the protection of Project Shield, a free DDoS defense service that Google provides to websites offering news, human rights, and election-related content. Google Security Engineer Damian Menscher told KrebsOnSecurity the May 12 attack was the largest Google has ever handled. In terms of sheer size, it is second only to a very similar attack that Cloudflare mitigated and wrote about in April.

After comparing notes with Cloudflare, Menscher said the botnet that launched both attacks bears the fingerprints of Aisuru, a digital siege machine that first surfaced less than a year ago. Menscher said the attack on KrebsOnSecurity lasted less than a minute, hurling large UDP data packets at random ports at a rate of approximately 585 million data packets per second.

“It was the type of attack normally designed to overwhelm network links,” Menscher said, referring to the throughput connections between and among various Internet service providers (ISPs). “For most companies, this size of attack would kill them.”

The Aisuru botnet comprises a globally-dispersed collection of hacked IoT devices, including routers, digital video recorders and other systems that are commandeered via default passwords or software vulnerabilities. As documented by researchers at QiAnXin XLab, the botnet was first identified in an August 2024 attack on a large gaming platform.

Aisuru reportedly went quiet after that exposure, only to reappear in November with even more firepower and software exploits. In a January 2025 report, XLab found the new and improved Aisuru (a.k.a. “Airashi“) had incorporated a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability in Cambium Networks cnPilot routers.

NOT FORKING AROUND

The people behind the Aisuru botnet have been peddling access to their DDoS machine in public Telegram chat channels that are closely monitored by multiple security firms. In August 2024, the botnet was rented out in subscription tiers ranging from $150 per day to $600 per week, offering attacks of up to two terabits per second.

“You may not attack any measurement walls, healthcare facilities, schools or government sites,” read a notice posted on Telegram by the Aisuru botnet owners in August 2024.

Interested parties were told to contact the Telegram handle “@yfork” to purchase a subscription. The account @yfork previously used the nickname “Forky,” an identity that has been posting to public DDoS-focused Telegram channels since 2021.

According to the FBI, Forky’s DDoS-for-hire domains have been seized in multiple law enforcement operations over the years. Last year, Forky said on Telegram he was selling the domain stresser[.]best, which saw its servers seized by the FBI in 2022 as part of an ongoing international law enforcement effort aimed at diminishing the supply of and demand for DDoS-for-hire services.

“The operator of this service, who calls himself ‘Forky,’ operates a Telegram channel to advertise features and communicate with current and prospective DDoS customers,” reads an FBI seizure warrant (PDF) issued for stresser[.]best. The FBI warrant stated that on the same day the seizures were announced, Forky posted a link to a story on this blog that detailed the domain seizure operation, adding the comment, “We are buying our new domains right now.”

Approximately ten hours later, Forky posted again, including a screenshot of the stresser[.]best user dashboard, instructing customers to use their saved passwords for the old website on the new one.

A review of Forky’s posts to public Telegram channels — as indexed by the cyber intelligence firms Unit 221B and Flashpoint — reveals a 21-year-old individual who claims to reside in Brazil [full disclosure: Flashpoint is currently an advertiser on this blog].

Since late 2022, Forky’s posts have frequently promoted a DDoS mitigation company and ISP that he operates called botshield[.]io. The Botshield website is connected to a business entity registered in the United Kingdom called Botshield LTD, which lists a 21-year-old woman from Sao Paulo, Brazil as the director. Internet routing records indicate Botshield (AS213613) currently controls several hundred Internet addresses that were allocated to the company earlier this year.

Domaintools.com reports that botshield[.]io was registered in July 2022 to a Kaike Southier Leite in Sao Paulo. A LinkedIn profile by the same name says this individual is a network specialist from Brazil who works in “the planning and implementation of robust network infrastructures, with a focus on security, DDoS mitigation, colocation and cloud server services.”

MEET FORKY

In his posts to public Telegram chat channels, Forky has hardly attempted to conceal his whereabouts or identity. In countless chat conversations indexed by Unit 221B, Forky could be seen talking about everyday life in Brazil, often remarking on the extremely low or high prices in Brazil for a range of goods, from computer and networking gear to narcotics and food.

Reached via Telegram, Forky claimed he was “not involved in this type of illegal actions for years now,” and that the project had been taken over by other unspecified developers. Forky initially told KrebsOnSecurity he had been out of the botnet scene for years, only to concede this wasn’t true when presented with public posts on Telegram from late last year that clearly showed otherwise.

Forky denied being involved in the attack on KrebsOnSecurity, but acknowledged that he helped to develop and market the Aisuru botnet. Forky claims he is now merely a staff member for the Aisuru botnet team, and that he stopped running the botnet roughly two months ago after starting a family. Forky also said the woman named as director of Botshield is related to him.

Forky offered equivocal, evasive responses to a number of questions about the Aisuru botnet and his business endeavors. But on one point he was crystal clear:

“I have zero fear about you, the FBI, or Interpol,” Forky said, asserting that he is now almost entirely focused on their hosting business — Botshield.

Forky declined to discuss the makeup of his ISP’s clientele, or to clarify whether Botshield was more of a hosting provider or a DDoS mitigation firm. However, Forky has posted on Telegram about Botshield successfully mitigating large DDoS attacks launched against other DDoS-for-hire services.

DomainTools finds the same Sao Paulo street address in the registration records for botshield[.]io was used to register several other domains, including cant-mitigate[.]us. The email address in the WHOIS records for that domain is forkcontato@gmail.com, which DomainTools says was used to register the domain for the now-defunct DDoS-for-hire service stresser[.]us, one of the domains seized in the FBI’s 2023 crackdown.

On May 8, 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the seizure of stresser[.]us, along with a dozen other domains offering DDoS services. The DOJ said ten of the 13 domains were reincarnations of services that were seized during a prior sweep in December, which targeted 48 top stresser services (also known as “booters”).

Forky claimed he could find out who attacked my site with Aisuru. But when pressed a day later on the question, Forky said he’d come up empty-handed.

“I tried to ask around, all the big guys are not retarded enough to attack you,” Forky explained in an interview on Telegram. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. But you are welcome to write the story and try to put the blame on me.”

THE GHOST OF MIRAI

The 6.3 Tbps attack last week caused no visible disruption to this site, in part because it was so brief — lasting approximately 45 seconds. DDoS attacks of such magnitude and brevity typically are produced when botnet operators wish to test or demonstrate their firepower for the benefit of potential buyers. Indeed, Google’s Menscher said it is likely that both the May 12 attack and the slightly larger 6.5 Tbps attack against Cloudflare last month were simply tests of the same botnet’s capabilities.

In many ways, the threat posed by the Aisuru/Airashi botnet is reminiscent of Mirai, an innovative IoT malware strain that emerged in the summer of 2016 and successfully out-competed virtually all other IoT malware strains in existence at the time.

As first revealed by KrebsOnSecurity in January 2017, the Mirai authors were two U.S. men who co-ran a DDoS mitigation service — even as they were selling far more lucrative DDoS-for-hire services using the most powerful botnet on the planet.

Less than a week after the Mirai botnet was used in a days-long DDoS against KrebsOnSecurity, the Mirai authors published the source code to their botnet so that they would not be the only ones in possession of it in the event of their arrest by federal investigators.

Ironically, the leaking of the Mirai source is precisely what led to the eventual unmasking and arrest of the Mirai authors, who went on to serve probation sentences that required them to consult with FBI investigators on DDoS investigations. But that leak also rapidly led to the creation of dozens of Mirai botnet clones, many of which were harnessed to fuel their own powerful DDoS-for-hire services.

Menscher told KrebsOnSecurity that as counterintuitive as it may sound, the Internet as a whole would probably be better off if the source code for Aisuru became public knowledge. After all, he said, the people behind Aisuru are in constant competition with other IoT botnet operators who are all striving to commandeer a finite number of vulnerable IoT devices globally.

Such a development would almost certainly cause a proliferation of Aisuru botnet clones, he said, but at least then the overall firepower from each individual botnet would be greatly diminished — or at least within range of the mitigation capabilities of most DDoS protection providers.

Barring a source code leak, Menscher said, it would be nice if someone published the full list of software exploits being used by the Aisuru operators to grow their botnet so quickly.

“Part of the reason Mirai was so dangerous was that it effectively took out competing botnets,” he said. “This attack somehow managed to compromise all these boxes that nobody else knows about. Ideally, we’d want to see that fragmented out, so that no [individual botnet operator] controls too much.”

Breachforums Boss to Pay $700k in Healthcare Breach

In what experts are calling a novel legal outcome, the 22-year-old former administrator of the cybercrime community Breachforums will forfeit nearly $700,000 to settle a civil lawsuit from a health insurance company whose customer data was posted for sale on the forum in 2023. Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, a.k.a. “Pompompurin,” is slated for resentencing next month after pleading guilty to access device fraud and possession of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

On January 18, 2023, denizens of Breachforums posted for sale tens of thousands of records — including Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, and phone numbers  — stolen from Nonstop Health, an insurance provider based in Concord, Calif.

Class-action attorneys sued Nonstop Health, which added Fitzpatrick as a third-party defendant to the civil litigation in November 2023, several months after he was arrested by the FBI and criminally charged with access device fraud and CSAM possession. In January 2025, Nonstop agreed to pay $1.5 million to settle the class action.

Jill Fertel is a former prosecutor who runs the cyber litigation practice at Cipriani & Werner, the law firm that represented Nonstop Health. Fertel told KrebsOnSecurity this is the first and only case where a cybercriminal or anyone related to the security incident was actually named in civil litigation.

“Civil plaintiffs are not at all likely to see money seized from threat actors involved in the incident to be made available to people impacted by the breach,” Fertel said. “The best we could do was make this money available to the class, but it’s still incumbent on the members of the class who are impacted to make that claim.”

Mark Rasch is a former federal prosecutor who now represents Unit 221B, a cybersecurity firm based in New York City. Rasch said he doesn’t doubt that the civil settlement involving Fitzpatrick’s criminal activity is a novel legal development.

“It is rare in these civil cases that you know the threat actor involved in the breach, and it’s also rare that you catch them with sufficient resources to be able to pay a claim,” Rasch said.

Despite admitting to possessing more than 600 CSAM images and personally operating Breachforums, Fitzpatrick was sentenced in January 2024 to time served and 20 years of supervised release. Federal prosecutors objected, arguing that his punishment failed to adequately reflect the seriousness of his crimes or serve as a deterrent.

Indeed, the same month he was sentenced Fitzpatrick was rearrested (PDF) for violating the terms of his release, which forbade him from using a computer that didn’t have court-required monitoring software installed.

Federal prosecutors said Fitzpatrick went on Discord following his guilty plea and professed innocence to the very crimes to which he’d pleaded guilty, stating that his plea deal was “so BS” and that he had “wanted to fight it.” The feds said Fitzpatrick also joked with his friends about selling data to foreign governments, exhorting one user to “become a foreign asset to china or russia,” and to “sell government secrets.”

In January 2025, a federal appeals court agreed with the government’s assessment, vacating Fitzpatrick’s sentence and ordering him to be resentenced on June 3, 2025.

Fitzpatrick launched BreachForums in March 2022 to replace RaidForums, a similarly popular crime forum that was infiltrated and shut down by the FBI the previous month. As administrator, his alter ego Pompompurin served as the middleman, personally reviewing all databases for sale on the forum and offering an escrow service to those interested in buying stolen data.

The new site quickly attracted more than 300,000 users, and facilitated the sale of databases stolen from hundreds of hacking victims, including some of the largest consumer data breaches in recent history. In May 2024, a reincarnation of Breachforums was seized by the FBI and international partners. Still more relaunches of the forum occurred after that, with the most recent disruption last month.

As KrebsOnSecurity reported last year in The Dark Nexus Between Harm Groups and The Com, it is increasingly common for federal investigators to find CSAM material when searching devices seized from cybercriminal suspects. While the mere possession of CSAM is a serious federal crime, not all of those caught with CSAM are necessarily creators or distributors of it. Fertel said some cybercriminal communities have been known to require new entrants to share CSAM material as a way of proving that they are not a federal investigator.

“If you’re going to the darkest corners of Internet, that’s how you prove you’re not law enforcement,” Fertel said. “Law enforcement would never share that material. It would be criminal for me as a prosecutor, if I obtained and possessed those types of images.”

Further reading: The settlement between Fitzpatrick and Nonstop (PDF).

Patch Tuesday, May 2025 Edition

Microsoft on Tuesday released software updates to fix at least 70 vulnerabilities in Windows and related products, including five zero-day flaws that are already seeing active exploitation. Adding to the sense of urgency with this month’s patch batch from Redmond are fixes for two other weaknesses that now have public proof-of-concept exploits available.

Microsoft and several security firms have disclosed that attackers are exploiting a pair of bugs in the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) driver that allow attackers to elevate their privileges on a vulnerable device. The Windows CLFS is a critical Windows component responsible for logging services, and is widely used by Windows system services and third-party applications for logging. Tracked as CVE-2025-32701 & CVE-2025-32706, these flaws are present in all supported versions of Windows 10 and 11, as well as their server versions.

Kev Breen, senior director of threat research at Immersive Labs, said privilege escalation bugs assume an attacker already has initial access to a compromised host, typically through a phishing attack or by using stolen credentials. But if that access already exists, Breen said, attackers can gain access to the much more powerful Windows SYSTEM account, which can disable security tooling or even gain domain administration level permissions using credential harvesting tools.

“The patch notes don’t provide technical details on how this is being exploited, and no Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) are shared, meaning the only mitigation security teams have is to apply these patches immediately,” he said. “The average time from public disclosure to exploitation at scale is less than five days, with threat actors, ransomware groups, and affiliates quick to leverage these vulnerabilities.”

Two other zero-days patched by Microsoft today also were elevation of privilege flaws: CVE-2025-32709, which concerns afd.sys, the Windows Ancillary Function Driver that enables Windows applications to connect to the Internet; and CVE-2025-30400, a weakness in the Desktop Window Manager (DWM) library for Windows. As Adam Barnett at Rapid7 notes, tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of CVE-2024-30051, a previous zero-day elevation of privilege vulnerability in this same DWM component.

The fifth zero-day patched today is CVE-2025-30397, a flaw in the Microsoft Scripting Engine, a key component used by Internet Explorer and Internet Explorer mode in Microsoft Edge.

Chris Goettl at Ivanti points out that the Windows 11 and Server 2025 updates include some new AI features that carry a lot of baggage and weigh in at around 4 gigabytes. Said baggage includes new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, including the controversial Recall feature, which constantly takes screenshots of what users are doing on Windows CoPilot-enabled computers.

Microsoft went back to the drawing board on Recall after a fountain of negative feedback from security experts, who warned it would present an attractive target and a potential gold mine for attackers. Microsoft appears to have made some efforts to prevent Recall from scooping up sensitive financial information, but privacy and security concerns still linger. Former Microsoftie Kevin Beaumont has a good teardown on Microsoft’s updates to Recall.

In any case, windowslatest.com reports that Windows 11 version 24H2 shows up ready for downloads, even if you don’t want it.

“It will now show up for ‘download and install’ automatically if you go to Settings > Windows Update and click Check for updates, but only when your device does not have a compatibility hold,” the publication reported. “Even if you don’t check for updates, Windows 11 24H2 will automatically download at some point.”

Apple users likely have their own patching to do. On May 12 Apple released security updates to fix at least 30 vulnerabilities in iOS and iPadOS (the updated version is 18.5). TechCrunch writes that iOS 18.5 also expands emergency satellite capabilities to iPhone 13 owners for the first time (previously it was only available on iPhone 14 or later).

Apple also released updates for macOS Sequoia, macOS Sonoma, macOS Ventura, WatchOS, tvOS and visionOS. Apple said there is no indication of active exploitation for any of the vulnerabilities fixed this month.

As always, please back up your device and/or important data before attempting any updates. And please feel free to sound off in the comments if you run into any problems applying any of these fixes.

Pakistani Firm Shipped Fentanyl Analogs, Scams to US

A Texas firm recently charged with conspiring to distribute synthetic opioids in the United States is at the center of a vast network of companies in the U.S. and Pakistan whose employees are accused of using online ads to scam westerners seeking help with trademarks, book writing, mobile app development and logo designs, a new investigation reveals.

In an indictment (PDF) unsealed last month, the U.S. Department of Justice said Dallas-based eWorldTrade “operated an online business-to-business marketplace that facilitated the distribution of synthetic opioids such as isotonitazene and carfentanyl, both significantly more potent than fentanyl.”

Launched in 2017, eWorldTrade[.]com now features a seizure notice from the DOJ. eWorldTrade operated as a wholesale seller of consumer goods, including clothes, machinery, chemicals, automobiles and appliances. The DOJ’s indictment includes no additional details about eWorldTrade’s business, origins or other activity, and at first glance the website might appear to be a legitimate e-commerce platform that also just happened to sell some restricted chemicals.

However, an investigation into the company’s founders reveals they are connected to a sprawling network of websites that have a history of extortionate scams involving trademark registration, book publishing, exam preparation, and the design of logos, mobile applications and websites.

Records from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) show the eWorldTrade mark is owned by an Azneem Bilwani in Karachi (this name also is in the registration records for the now-seized eWorldTrade domain). Mr. Bilwani is perhaps better known as the director of the Pakistan-based IT provider Abtach Ltd., which has been singled out by the USPTO and Google for operating trademark registration scams (the main offices for eWorldtrade and Abtach share the same address in Pakistan).

In November 2021, the USPTO accused Abtach of perpetrating “an egregious scheme to deceive and defraud applicants for federal trademark registrations by improperly altering official USPTO correspondence, overcharging application filing fees, misappropriating the USPTO’s trademarks, and impersonating the USPTO.”

Abtach offered trademark registration at suspiciously low prices compared to legitimate costs of over USD $1,500, and claimed they could register a trademark in 24 hours. Abtach reportedly rebranded to Intersys Limited after the USPTO banned Abtach from filing any more trademark applications.

FROM AXACT TO ABTACH

Many of Abtach’s employees are former associates of a similar company in Pakistan called Axact that was targeted by Pakistani authorities in a 2015 fraud investigation. Axact came under law enforcement scrutiny after The New York Times ran a front-page story about the company’s most lucrative scam business: Hundreds of sites peddling fake college degrees and diplomas.

People who purchased fake certifications were subsequently blackmailed by Axact employees posing as government officials, who would demand additional payments under threats of prosecution or imprisonment for having bought fraudulent “unauthorized” academic degrees. This practice created a continuous cycle of extortion, internally referred to as “upselling.”

“Axact took money from at least 215,000 people in 197 countries — one-third of them from the United States,” The Times reported. “Sales agents wielded threats and false promises and impersonated government officials, earning the company at least $89 million in its final year of operation.”

Dozens of top Axact employees were arrested, jailed, held for months, tried and sentenced to seven years for various fraud violations. But a 2019 research brief on Axact’s diploma mills found none of those convicted had started their prison sentence, and that several had fled Pakistan and never returned.

“In October 2016, a Pakistan district judge acquitted 24 Axact officials at trial due to ‘not enough evidence’ and then later admitted he had accepted a bribe (of $35,209) from Axact,” reads a history (PDF) published by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

In 2021, Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) charged Bilwani and nearly four dozen others — many of them Abtach employees — with running an elaborate trademark scam. The authorities called it “the biggest money laundering case in the history of Pakistan,” and named a number of businesses based in Texas that allegedly helped move the proceeds of cybercrime.

The FIA said the defendants operated a large number of websites offering low-cost trademark services to customers, before then “ignoring them after getting the funds and later demanding more funds from clients/victims in the name of up-sale (extortion).” The Pakistani law enforcement agency said that about 75 percent of customers received fake or fabricated trademarks as a result of the scams.

The FIA found Abtach operates in conjunction with a Karachi firm called Digitonics Labs, which earned a monthly revenue of around $2.5 million through the “extortion of international clients in the name of up-selling, the sale of fake/fabricated USPTO certificates, and the maintaining of phishing websites.”

According the Pakistani authorities, the accused also ran countless scams involving ebook publication and logo creation, wherein customers are subjected to advance-fee fraud and extortion — with the scammers demanding more money for supposed “copyright release” and threatening to release the trademark.

Also charged by the FIA was Junaid Mansoor, the owner of Digitonics Labs in Karachi. Mansoor’s U.K.-registered company Maple Solutions Direct Limited has run at least 700 ads for logo design websites since 2015, the Google Ads Transparency page reports. The company has approximately 88 ads running on Google as of today. 

Mr. Mansoor is actively involved with and promoting a Quran study business called quranmasteronline[.]com, which was founded by Junaid’s brother Qasim Mansoor (Qasim is also named in the FIA criminal investigation). The Google ads promoting quranmasteronline[.]com were paid for by the same account advertising a number of scam websites selling logo and web design services. 

Junaid Mansoor did not respond to requests for comment. An address in Teaneck, New Jersey where Mr. Mansoor previously lived is listed as an official address of exporthub[.]com, a Pakistan-based e-commerce website that appears remarkably similar to eWorldTrade (Exporthub says its offices are in Texas). Interestingly, a search in Google for this domain shows ExportHub currently features multiple listings for fentanyl citrate from suppliers in China and elsewhere.

The CEO of Digitonics Labs is Muhammad Burhan Mirza, a former Axact official who was arrested by the FIA as part of its money laundering and trademark fraud investigation in 2021. In 2023, prosecutors in Pakistan charged Mirza, Mansoor and 14 other Digitonics employees with fraud, impersonating government officials, phishing, cheating and extortion. Mirza’s LinkedIn profile says he currently runs an educational technology/life coach enterprise called TheCoach360, which purports to help young kids “achieve financial independence.”

Reached via LinkedIn, Mr. Mirza denied having anything to do with eWorldTrade or any of its sister companies in Texas.

“Moreover, I have no knowledge as to the companies you have mentioned,” said Mr. Mirza, who did not respond to follow-up questions.

The current disposition of the FIA’s fraud case against the defendants is unclear. The investigation was marred early on by allegations of corruption and bribery. In 2021, Pakistani authorities alleged Bilwani paid a six-figure bribe to FIA investigators. Meanwhile, attorneys for Mr. Bilwani have argued that although their client did pay a bribe, the payment was solicited by government officials. Mr. Bilwani did not respond to requests for comment.

THE TEXAS NEXUS

KrebsOnSecurity has learned that the people and entities at the center of the FIA investigations have built a significant presence in the United States, with a strong concentration in Texas. The Texas businesses promote websites that sell logo and web design, ghostwriting, and academic cheating services. Many of these entities have recently been sued for fraud and breach of contract by angry former customers, who claimed the companies relentlessly upsold them while failing to produce the work as promised.

For example, the FIA complaints named Retrocube LLC and 360 Digital Marketing LLC, two entities that share a street address with eWorldTrade: 1910 Pacific Avenue, Suite 8025, Dallas, Texas. Also incorporated at that Pacific Avenue address is abtach[.]ae, a web design and marketing firm based in Dubai; and intersyslimited[.]com, the new name of Abtach after they were banned by the USPTO. Other businesses registered at this address market services for logo design, mobile app development, and ghostwriting.

360 Digital Marketing’s website 360digimarketing[.]com is owned by an Abtach front company called Abtech LTD. Meanwhile, business records show 360 Digi Marketing LTD is a U.K. company whose officers include former Abtach director Bilwani; Muhammad Saad Iqbal, formerly Abtach, now CEO of Intersys Ltd; Niaz Ahmed, a former Abtach associate; and Muhammad Salman Yousuf, formerly a vice president at Axact, Abtach, and Digitonics Labs.

Google’s Ads Transparency Center finds 360 Digital Marketing LLC ran at least 500 ads promoting various websites selling ghostwriting services . Another entity tied to Junaid Mansoor — a company called Octa Group Technologies AU — has run approximately 300 Google ads for book publishing services, promoting confusingly named websites like amazonlistinghub[.]com and barnesnoblepublishing[.]co.

Rameez Moiz is a Texas resident and former Abtach product manager who has represented 360 Digital Marketing LLC and RetroCube. Moiz told KrebsOnSecurity he stopped working for 360 Digital Marketing in the summer of 2023. Mr. Moiz did not respond to follow-up questions, but an Upwork profile for him states that as of April 2025 he is employed by Dallas-based Vertical Minds LLC.

In April 2025, California resident Melinda Will sued the Texas firm Majestic Ghostwriting — which is doing business as ghostwritingsquad[.]com —  alleging they scammed her out of $100,000 after she hired them to help write her book. Google’s ad transparency page shows Moiz’s employer Vertical Minds LLC paid to run approximately 55 ads for ghostwritingsquad[.]com and related sites.

VICTIMS SPEAK OUT

Ms. Will’s lawsuit is just one of more than two dozen complaints over the past four years wherein plaintiffs sued one of this group’s web design, wiki editing or ghostwriting services. In 2021, a New Jersey man sued Octagroup Technologies, alleging they ripped him off when he paid a total of more than $26,000 for the design and marketing of a web-based mapping service.

The plaintiff in that case did not respond to requests for comment, but his complaint alleges Octagroup and a myriad other companies it contracted with produced minimal work product despite subjecting him to relentless upselling. That case was decided in favor of the plaintiff because the defendants never contested the matter in court.

In 2023, 360 Digital Marketing LLC and Retrocube LLC were sued by a woman who said they scammed her out of $40,000 over a book she wanted help writing. That lawsuit helpfully showed an image of the office front door at 1910 Pacific Ave Suite 8025, which featured the logos of 360 Digital Marketing, Retrocube, and eWorldTrade.

The lawsuit was filed pro se by Leigh Riley, a 64-year-old career IT professional who paid 360 Digital Marketing to have a company called Talented Ghostwriter co-author and promote a series of books she’d outlined on spirituality and healing.

“The main reason I hired them was because I didn’t understand what I call the formula for writing a book, and I know there’s a lot of marketing that goes into publishing,” Riley explained in an interview. “I know nothing about that stuff, and these guys were convincing that they could handle all aspects of it. Until I discovered they couldn’t write a damn sentence in English properly.”

Riley’s well-documented lawsuit (not linked here because it features a great deal of personal information) includes screenshots of conversations with the ghostwriting team, which was constantly assigning her to new writers and editors, and ghosting her on scheduled conference calls about progress on the project. Riley said she ended up writing most of the book herself because the work they produced was unusable.

“Finally after months of promising the books were printed and on their way, they show up at my doorstep with the wrong title on the book,” Riley said. When she demanded her money back, she said the people helping her with the website to promote the book locked her out of the site.

Riley decided to sue, naming 360 Digital Marketing LLC and Retrocube LLC, among others.  The companies offered to settle the matter for $20,000, which she accepted. “I didn’t have money to hire a lawyer, and I figured it was time to cut my losses,” she said.

Riley said she could have saved herself a great deal of headache by doing some basic research on Talented Ghostwriter, whose website claims the company is based in Los Angeles. According to the California Secretary of State, however, there is no registered entity by that name. Rather, the address claimed by talentedghostwriter[.]com is a vacant office building with a “space available” sign in the window.

California resident Walter Horsting discovered something similar when he sued 360 Digital Marketing in small claims court last year, after hiring a company called Vox Ghostwriting to help write, edit and promote a spy novel he’d been working on. Horsting said he paid Vox $3,300 to ghostwrite a 280-page book, and was upsold an Amazon marketing and publishing package for $7,500.

In an interview, Horsting said the prose that Vox Ghostwriting produced was “juvenile at best,” forcing him to rewrite and edit the work himself, and to partner with a graphical artist to produce illustrations. Horsting said that when it came time to begin marketing the novel, Vox Ghostwriting tried to further upsell him on marketing packages, while dodging scheduled meetings with no follow-up.

“They have a money back guarantee, and when they wouldn’t refund my money I said I’m taking you to court,” Horsting recounted. “I tried to serve them in Los Angeles but found no such office exists. I talked to a salon next door and they said someone else had recently shown up desperately looking for where the ghostwriting company went, and it appears there are a trail of corpses on this. I finally tracked down where they are in Texas.”

It was the same office that Ms. Riley served her lawsuit against. Horsting said he has a court hearing scheduled later this month, but he’s under no illusions that winning the case means he’ll be able to collect.

“At this point, I’m doing it out of pride more than actually expecting anything to come to good fortune for me,” he said.

The following mind map was helpful in piecing together key events, individuals and connections mentioned above. It’s important to note that this graphic only scratches the surface of the operations tied to this group. For example, in Case 2 we can see mention of academic cheating services, wherein people can be hired to take online proctored exams on one’s behalf. Those who hire these services soon find themselves subject to impersonation and blackmail attempts for larger and larger sums of money, with the threat of publicly exposing their unethical academic cheating activity.

GOOGLE RESPONDS

KrebsOnSecurity reviewed the Google Ad Transparency links for nearly 500 different websites tied to this network of ghostwriting, logo, app and web development businesses. Those website names were then fed into spyfu.com, a competitive intelligence company that tracks the reach and performance of advertising keywords. Spyfu estimates that between April 2023 and April 2025, those websites spent more than $10 million on Google ads.

Reached for comment, Google said in a written statement that it is constantly policing its ad network for bad actors, pointing to an ads safety report (PDF) showing Google blocked or removed 5.1 billion bad ads last year — including more than 500 million ads related to trademarks.

“Our policy against Enabling Dishonest Behavior prohibits products or services that help users mislead others, including ads for paper-writing or exam-taking services,” the statement reads. “When we identify ads or advertisers that violate our policies, we take action, including by suspending advertiser accounts, disapproving ads, and restricting ads to specific domains when appropriate.”

Google did not respond to specific questions about the advertising entities mentioned in this story, saying only that “we are actively investigating this matter and addressing any policy violations, including suspending advertiser accounts when appropriate.”

From reviewing the ad accounts that have been promoting these scam websites, it appears Google has very recently acted to remove a large number of the offending ads. Prior to my notifying Google about the extent of this ad network on April 28, the Google Ad Transparency network listed over 500 ads for 360 Digital Marketing; as of this publication, that number had dwindled to 10.

On April 30, Google announced that starting this month its ads transparency page will display the payment profile name as the payer name for verified advertisers, if that name differs from their verified advertiser name. Searchengineland.com writes the changes are aimed at increasing accountability in digital advertising.

This spreadsheet lists the domain names, advertiser names, and Google Ad Transparency links for more than 350 entities offering ghostwriting, publishing, web design and academic cheating services.

KrebsOnSecurity would like to thank the anonymous security researcher NatInfoSec for their assistance in this investigation.

For further reading on Abtach and its myriad companies in all of the above-mentioned verticals (ghostwriting, logo design, etc.), see this Wikiwand entry.

xAI Dev Leaks API Key for Private SpaceX, Tesla LLMs

An employee at Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI leaked a private key on GitHub that for the past two months could have allowed anyone to query private xAI large language models (LLMs) which appear to have been custom made for working with internal data from Musk’s companies, including SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter/X, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

Philippe Caturegli, “chief hacking officer” at the security consultancy Seralys, was the first to publicize the leak of credentials for an x.ai application programming interface (API) exposed in the GitHub code repository of a technical staff member at xAI.

Caturegli’s post on LinkedIn caught the attention of researchers at GitGuardian, a company that specializes in detecting and remediating exposed secrets in public and proprietary environments. GitGuardian’s systems constantly scan GitHub and other code repositories for exposed API keys, and fire off automated alerts to affected users.

GitGuardian’s Eric Fourrier told KrebsOnSecurity the exposed API key had access to several unreleased models of Grok, the AI chatbot developed by xAI. In total, GitGuardian found the key had access to at least 60 fine-tuned and private LLMs.

“The credentials can be used to access the X.ai API with the identity of the user,” GitGuardian wrote in an email explaining their findings to xAI. “The associated account not only has access to public Grok models (grok-2-1212, etc) but also to what appears to be unreleased (grok-2.5V), development (research-grok-2p5v-1018), and private models (tweet-rejector, grok-spacex-2024-11-04).”

Fourrier found GitGuardian had alerted the xAI employee about the exposed API key nearly two months ago — on March 2. But as of April 30, when GitGuardian directly alerted xAI’s security team to the exposure, the key was still valid and usable. xAI told GitGuardian to report the matter through its bug bounty program at HackerOne, but just a few hours later the repository containing the API key was removed from GitHub.

“It looks like some of these internal LLMs were fine-tuned on SpaceX data, and some were fine-tuned with Tesla data,” Fourrier said. “I definitely don’t think a Grok model that’s fine-tuned on SpaceX data is intended to be exposed publicly.”

xAI did not respond to a request for comment. Nor did the 28-year-old xAI technical staff member whose key was exposed.

Carole Winqwist, chief marketing officer at GitGuardian, said giving potentially hostile users free access to private LLMs is a recipe for disaster.

“If you’re an attacker and you have direct access to the model and the back end interface for things like Grok, it’s definitely something you can use for further attacking,” she said. “An attacker could it use for prompt injection, to tweak the (LLM) model to serve their purposes, or try to implant code into the supply chain.”

The inadvertent exposure of internal LLMs for xAI comes as Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been feeding sensitive government records into artificial intelligence tools. In February, The Washington Post reported DOGE officials were feeding data from across the Education Department into AI tools to probe the agency’s programs and spending.

The Post said DOGE plans to replicate this process across many departments and agencies, accessing the back-end software at different parts of the government and then using AI technology to extract and sift through information about spending on employees and programs.

“Feeding sensitive data into AI software puts it into the possession of a system’s operator, increasing the chances it will be leaked or swept up in cyberattacks,” Post reporters wrote.

Wired reported in March that DOGE has deployed a proprietary chatbot called GSAi to 1,500 federal workers at the General Services Administration, part of an effort to automate tasks previously done by humans as DOGE continues its purge of the federal workforce.

A Reuters report last month said Trump administration officials told some U.S. government employees that DOGE is using AI to surveil at least one federal agency’s communications for hostility to President Trump and his agenda. Reuters wrote that the DOGE team has heavily deployed Musk’s Grok AI chatbot as part of their work slashing the federal government, although Reuters said it could not establish exactly how Grok was being used.

Caturegli said while there is no indication that federal government or user data could be accessed through the exposed x.ai API key, these private models are likely trained on proprietary data and may unintentionally expose details related to internal development efforts at xAI, Twitter, or SpaceX.

“The fact that this key was publicly exposed for two months and granted access to internal models is concerning,” Caturegli said. “This kind of long-lived credential exposure highlights weak key management and insufficient internal monitoring, raising questions about safeguards around developer access and broader operational security.”

Alleged ‘Scattered Spider’ Member Extradited to U.S.

A 23-year-old Scottish man thought to be a member of the prolific Scattered Spider cybercrime group was extradited last week from Spain to the United States, where he is facing charges of wire fraud, conspiracy and identity theft. U.S. prosecutors allege Tyler Robert Buchanan and co-conspirators hacked into dozens of companies in the United States and abroad, and that he personally controlled more than $26 million stolen from victims.

Scattered Spider is a loosely affiliated criminal hacking group whose members have broken into and stolen data from some of the world’s largest technology companies. Buchanan was arrested in Spain last year on a warrant from the FBI, which wanted him in connection with a series of SMS-based phishing attacks in the summer of 2022 that led to intrusions at Twilio, LastPass, DoorDash, Mailchimp, and many other tech firms.

As first reported by KrebsOnSecurity, Buchanan (a.k.a. “tylerb”) fled the United Kingdom in February 2023, after a rival cybercrime gang hired thugs to invade his home, assault his mother, and threaten to burn him with a blowtorch unless he gave up the keys to his cryptocurrency wallet. Buchanan was arrested in June 2024 at the airport in Palma de Mallorca while trying to board a flight to Italy. His extradition to the United States was first reported last week by Bloomberg.

Members of Scattered Spider have been tied to the 2023 ransomware attacks against MGM and Caesars casinos in Las Vegas, but it remains unclear whether Buchanan was implicated in that incident. The Justice Department’s complaint against Buchanan makes no mention of the 2023 ransomware attack.

Rather, the investigation into Buchanan appears to center on the SMS phishing campaigns from 2022, and on SIM-swapping attacks that siphoned funds from individual cryptocurrency investors. In a SIM-swapping attack, crooks transfer the target’s phone number to a device they control and intercept any text messages or phone calls to the victim’s device — including one-time passcodes for authentication and password reset links sent via SMS.

In August 2022, KrebsOnSecurity reviewed data harvested in a months-long cybercrime campaign by Scattered Spider involving countless SMS-based phishing attacks against employees at major corporations. The security firm Group-IB called them by a different name — 0ktapus, because the group typically spoofed the identity provider Okta in their phishing messages to employees at targeted firms.

The complaint against Buchanan (PDF) says the FBI tied him to the 2022 SMS phishing attacks after discovering the same username and email address was used to register numerous Okta-themed phishing domains seen in the campaign. The domain registrar NameCheap found that less than a month before the phishing spree, the account that registered those domains logged in from an Internet address in the U.K. FBI investigators said the Scottish police told them the address was leased to Buchanan from January 26, 2022 to November 7, 2022.

Authorities seized at least 20 digital devices when they raided Buchanan’s residence, and on one of those devices they found usernames and passwords for employees of three different companies targeted in the phishing campaign.

“The FBI’s investigation to date has gathered evidence showing that Buchanan and his co-conspirators targeted at least 45 companies in the United States and abroad, including Canada, India, and the United Kingdom,” the FBI complaint reads. “One of Buchanan’s devices contained a screenshot of Telegram messages between an account known to be used by Buchanan and other unidentified co-conspirators discussing dividing up the proceeds of SIM swapping.”

U.S. prosecutors allege that records obtained from Discord showed the same U.K. Internet address was used to operate a Discord account that specified a cryptocurrency wallet when asking another user to send funds. The complaint says the publicly available transaction history for that payment address shows approximately 391 bitcoin was transferred in and out of this address between October 2022 and
February 2023; 391 bitcoin is presently worth more than $26 million.

In November 2024, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles unsealed criminal charges against Buchanan and four other alleged Scattered Spider members, including Ahmed Elbadawy, 23, of College Station, Texas; Joel Evans, 25, of Jacksonville, North Carolina; Evans Osiebo, 20, of Dallas; and Noah Urban, 20, of Palm Coast, Florida. KrebsOnSecurity reported last year that another suspected Scattered Spider member — a 17-year-old from the United Kingdom — was arrested as part of a joint investigation with the FBI into the MGM hack.

Mr. Buchanan’s court-appointed attorney did not respond to a request for comment. The accused faces charges of wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to obtain information by computer for private financial gain, and aggravated identity theft. Convictions on the latter charge carry a minimum sentence of two years in prison.

Documents from the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California indicate Buchanan is being held without bail pending trial. A preliminary hearing in the case is slated for May 6.

DOGE Worker’s Code Supports NLRB Whistleblower

A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleged last week that denizens of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) siphoned gigabytes of data from the agency’s sensitive case files in early March. The whistleblower said accounts created for DOGE at the NLRB downloaded three code repositories from GitHub. Further investigation into one of those code bundles shows it is remarkably similar to a program published in January 2025 by Marko Elez, a 25-year-old DOGE employee who has worked at a number of Musk’s companies.

According to a whistleblower complaint filed last week by Daniel J. Berulis, a 38-year-old security architect at the NLRB, officials from DOGE met with NLRB leaders on March 3 and demanded the creation of several all-powerful “tenant admin” accounts that were to be exempted from network logging activity that would otherwise keep a detailed record of all actions taken by those accounts.

Berulis said the new DOGE accounts had unrestricted permission to read, copy, and alter information contained in NLRB databases. The new accounts also could restrict log visibility, delay retention, route logs elsewhere, or even remove them entirely — top-tier user privileges that neither Berulis nor his boss possessed.

Berulis said he discovered one of the DOGE accounts had downloaded three external code libraries from GitHub that neither NLRB nor its contractors ever used. A “readme” file in one of the code bundles explained it was created to rotate connections through a large pool of cloud Internet addresses that serve “as a proxy to generate pseudo-infinite IPs for web scraping and brute forcing.” Brute force attacks involve automated login attempts that try many credential combinations in rapid sequence.

A search on that description in Google brings up a code repository at GitHub for a user with the account name “Ge0rg3” who published a program roughly four years ago called “requests-ip-rotator,” described as a library that will allow the user “to bypass IP-based rate-limits for sites and services.”

“A Python library to utilize AWS API Gateway’s large IP pool as a proxy to generate pseudo-infinite IPs for web scraping and brute forcing,” the description reads.

Ge0rg3’s code is “open source,” in that anyone can copy it and reuse it non-commercially. As it happens, there is a newer version of this project that was derived or “forked” from Ge0rg3’s code — called “async-ip-rotator” — and it was committed to GitHub in January 2025 by DOGE captain Marko Elez.

A key DOGE staff member who gained access to the Treasury Department’s central payments system, Elez has worked for a number of Musk companies, including X, SpaceX, and xAI. Elez was among the first DOGE employees to face public scrutiny, after The Wall Street Journal linked him to social media posts that advocated racism and eugenics.

Elez resigned after that brief scandal, but was rehired after President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance expressed support for him. Politico reports Elez is now a Labor Department aide detailed to multiple agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services.

“During Elez’s initial stint at Treasury, he violated the agency’s information security policies by sending a spreadsheet containing names and payments information to officials at the General Services Administration,” Politico wrote, citing court filings.

KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from both the NLRB and DOGE, and will update this story if either responds.

The NLRB has been effectively hobbled since President Trump fired three board members, leaving the agency without the quorum it needs to function. Both Amazon and Musk’s SpaceX have been suing the NLRB over complaints the agency filed in disputes about workers’ rights and union organizing, arguing that the NLRB’s very existence is unconstitutional. On March 5, a U.S. appeals court unanimously rejected Musk’s claim that the NLRB’s structure somehow violates the Constitution.

Berulis’s complaint alleges the DOGE accounts at NLRB downloaded more than 10 gigabytes of data from the agency’s case files, a database that includes reams of sensitive records including information about employees who want to form unions and proprietary business documents. Berulis said he went public after higher-ups at the agency told him not to report the matter to the US-CERT, as they’d previously agreed.

Berulis told KrebsOnSecurity he worried the unauthorized data transfer by DOGE could unfairly advantage defendants in a number of ongoing labor disputes before the agency.

“If any company got the case data that would be an unfair advantage,” Berulis said. “They could identify and fire employees and union organizers without saying why.”

Berulis said the other two GitHub archives that DOGE employees downloaded to NLRB systems included Integuru, a software framework designed to reverse engineer application programming interfaces (APIs) that websites use to fetch data; and a “headless” browser called Browserless, which is made for automating web-based tasks that require a pool of browsers, such as web scraping and automated testing.

On February 6, someone posted a lengthy and detailed critique of Elez’s code on the GitHub “issues” page for async-ip-rotator, calling it “insecure, unscalable and a fundamental engineering failure.”

“If this were a side project, it would just be bad code,” the reviewer wrote. “But if this is representative of how you build production systems, then there are much larger concerns. This implementation is fundamentally broken, and if anything similar to this is deployed in an environment handling sensitive data, it should be audited immediately.”

Further reading: Berulis’s complaint (PDF).

Update 7:06 p.m. ET: Elez’s code repo was deleted after this story was published. An archived version of it is here.

Whistleblower: DOGE Siphoned NLRB Case Data

A security architect with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleges that employees from Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) transferred gigabytes of sensitive data from agency case files in early March, using short-lived accounts configured to leave few traces of network activity. The NLRB whistleblower said the unusual large data outflows coincided with multiple blocked login attempts from an Internet address in Russia that tried to use valid credentials for a newly-created DOGE user account.

The allegations came in an April 14 letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, signed by Daniel J. Berulis, a 38-year-old security architect at the NLRB.

NPR, which was the first to report on Berulis’s whistleblower complaint, says NLRB is a small, independent federal agency that investigates and adjudicates complaints about unfair labor practices, and stores “reams of potentially sensitive data, from confidential information about employees who want to form unions to proprietary business information.”

The complaint documents a one-month period beginning March 3, during which DOGE officials reportedly demanded the creation of all-powerful “tenant admin” accounts in NLRB systems that were to be exempted from network logging activity that would otherwise keep a detailed record of all actions taken by those accounts.

Berulis said the new DOGE accounts had unrestricted permission to read, copy, and alter information contained in NLRB databases. The new accounts also could restrict log visibility, delay retention, route logs elsewhere, or even remove them entirely — top-tier user privileges that neither Berulis nor his boss possessed.

Berulis writes that on March 3, a black SUV accompanied by a police escort arrived at his building — the NLRB headquarters in Southeast Washington, D.C. The DOGE staffers did not speak with Berulis or anyone else in NLRB’s IT staff, but instead met with the agency leadership.

“Our acting chief information officer told us not to adhere to standard operating procedure with the DOGE account creation, and there was to be no logs or records made of the accounts created for DOGE employees, who required the highest level of access,” Berulis wrote of their instructions after that meeting.

“We have built in roles that auditors can use and have used extensively in the past but would not give the ability to make changes or access subsystems without approval,” he continued. “The suggestion that they use these accounts was not open to discussion.”

Berulis found that on March 3 one of the DOGE accounts created an opaque, virtual environment known as a “container,” which can be used to build and run programs or scripts without revealing its activities to the rest of the world. Berulis said the container caught his attention because he polled his colleagues and found none of them had ever used containers within the NLRB network.

Berulis said he also noticed that early the next morning — between approximately 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. EST on Tuesday, March 4  — there was a large increase in outgoing traffic from the agency. He said it took several days of investigating with his colleagues to determine that one of the new accounts had transferred approximately 10 gigabytes worth of data from the NLRB’s NxGen case management system.

Berulis said neither he nor his co-workers had the necessary network access rights to review which files were touched or transferred — or even where they went. But his complaint notes the NxGen database contains sensitive information on unions, ongoing legal cases, and corporate secrets.

“I also don’t know if the data was only 10gb in total or whether or not they were consolidated and compressed prior,” Berulis told the senators. “This opens up the possibility that even more data was exfiltrated. Regardless, that kind of spike is extremely unusual because data almost never directly leaves NLRB’s databases.”

Berulis said he and his colleagues grew even more alarmed when they noticed nearly two dozen login attempts from a Russian Internet address (83.149.30,186) that presented valid login credentials for a DOGE employee account — one that had been created just minutes earlier. Berulis said those attempts were all blocked thanks to rules in place that prohibit logins from non-U.S. locations.

“Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created accounts that were used in the other DOGE related activities and it appeared they had the correct username and password due to the authentication flow only stopping them due to our no-out-of-country logins policy activating,” Berulis wrote. “There were more than 20 such attempts, and what is particularly concerning is that many of these login attempts occurred within 15 minutes of the accounts being created by DOGE engineers.”

According to Berulis, the naming structure of one Microsoft user account connected to the suspicious activity suggested it had been created and later deleted for DOGE use in the NLRB’s cloud systems: “DogeSA_2d5c3e0446f9@nlrb.microsoft.com.” He also found other new Microsoft cloud administrator accounts with nonstandard usernames, including “Whitesox, Chicago M.” and “Dancehall, Jamaica R.”

On March 5, Berulis documented that a large section of logs for recently created network resources were missing, and a network watcher in Microsoft Azure was set to the “off” state, meaning it was no longer collecting and recording data like it should have.

Berulis said he discovered someone had downloaded three external code libraries from GitHub that neither NLRB nor its contractors ever use. A “readme” file in one of the code bundles explained it was created to rotate connections through a large pool of cloud Internet addresses that serve “as a proxy to generate pseudo-infinite IPs for web scraping and brute forcing.” Brute force attacks involve automated login attempts that try many credential combinations in rapid sequence.

The complaint alleges that by March 17 it became clear the NLRB no longer had the resources or network access needed to fully investigate the odd activity from the DOGE accounts, and that on March 24, the agency’s associate chief information officer had agreed the matter should be reported to US-CERT. Operated by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), US-CERT provides on-site cyber incident response capabilities to federal and state agencies.

But Berulis said that between April 3 and 4, he and the associate CIO were informed that “instructions had come down to drop the US-CERT reporting and investigation and we were directed not to move forward or create an official report.” Berulis said it was at this point he decided to go public with his findings.

Tim Bearese, the NLRB’s acting press secretary, told NPR that DOGE neither requested nor received access to its systems, and that “the agency conducted an investigation after Berulis raised his concerns but ‘determined that no breach of agency systems occurred.'” The NLRB did not respond to questions from KrebsOnSecurity.

Nevertheless, Berulis has shared a number of supporting screenshots showing agency email discussions about the unexplained account activity attributed to the DOGE accounts, as well as NLRB security alerts from Microsoft about network anomalies observed during the timeframes described.

As CNN reported last month, the NLRB has been effectively hobbled since President Trump fired three board members, leaving the agency without the quorum it needs to function.

“Despite its limitations, the agency had become a thorn in the side of some of the richest and most powerful people in the nation — notably Elon Musk, Trump’s key supporter both financially and arguably politically,” CNN wrote.

Both Amazon and Musk’s SpaceX have been suing the NLRB over complaints the agency filed in disputes about workers’ rights and union organizing, arguing that the NLRB’s very existence is unconstitutional. On March 5, a U.S. appeals court unanimously rejected Musk’s claim that the NLRB’s structure somehow violates the Constitution.

Berulis shared screenshots with KrebsOnSecurity showing that on the day the NPR published its story about his claims (April 14), the deputy CIO at NLRB sent an email stating that administrative control had been removed from all employee accounts. Meaning, suddenly none of the IT employees at the agency could do their jobs properly anymore, Berulis said.

Berulis shared a screenshot of an agency-wide email dated April 16 from NLRB director Lasharn Hamilton saying DOGE officials had requested a meeting, and reiterating claims that the agency had no prior “official” contact with any DOGE personnel. The message informed NLRB employees that two DOGE representatives would be detailed to the agency part-time for several months.

Berulis told KrebsOnSecurity he was in the process of filing a support ticket with Microsoft to request more information about the DOGE accounts when his network administrator access was restricted. Now, he’s hoping lawmakers will ask Microsoft to provide more information about what really happened with the accounts.

“That would give us way more insight,” he said. “Microsoft has to be able to see the picture better than we can. That’s my goal, anyway.”

Berulis’s attorney told lawmakers that on April 7, while his client and legal team were preparing the whistleblower complaint, someone physically taped a threatening note to Mr. Berulis’s home door with photographs — taken via drone — of him walking in his neighborhood.

“The threatening note made clear reference to this very disclosure he was preparing for you, as the proper oversight authority,” reads a preface by Berulis’s attorney Andrew P. Bakaj. “While we do not know specifically who did this, we can only speculate that it involved someone with the ability to access NLRB systems.”

Berulis said the response from friends, colleagues and even the public has been largely supportive, and that he doesn’t regret his decision to come forward.

“I didn’t expect the letter on my door or the pushback from [agency] leaders,” he said. “If I had to do it over, would I do it again? Yes, because it wasn’t really even a choice the first time.”

For now, Mr. Berulis is taking some paid family leave from the NLRB. Which is just as well, he said, considering he was stripped of the tools needed to do his job at the agency.

“They came in and took full administrative control and locked everyone out, and said limited permission will be assigned on a need basis going forward” Berulis said of the DOGE employees. “We can’t really do anything, so we’re literally getting paid to count ceiling tiles.”

Further reading: Berulis’s complaint (PDF).

Funding Expires for Key Cyber Vulnerability Database

A critical resource that cybersecurity professionals worldwide rely on to identify, mitigate and fix security vulnerabilities in software and hardware is in danger of breaking down. The federally funded, non-profit research and development organization MITRE warned today that its contract to maintain the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program — which is traditionally funded each year by the Department of Homeland Security — expires on April 16.

Tens of thousands of security flaws in software are found and reported every year, and these vulnerabilities are eventually assigned their own unique CVE tracking number (e.g. CVE-2024-43573, which is a Microsoft Windows bug that Redmond patched last year).

There are hundreds of organizations — known as CVE Numbering Authorities (CNAs) — that are authorized by MITRE to bestow these CVE numbers on newly reported flaws. Many of these CNAs are country and government-specific, or tied to individual software vendors or vulnerability disclosure platforms (a.k.a. bug bounty programs).

Put simply, MITRE is a critical, widely-used resource for centralizing and standardizing information on software vulnerabilities. That means the pipeline of information it supplies is plugged into an array of cybersecurity tools and services that help organizations identify and patch security holes — ideally before malware or malcontents can wriggle through them.

“What the CVE lists really provide is a standardized way to describe the severity of that defect, and a centralized repository listing which versions of which products are defective and need to be updated,” said Matt Tait, chief operating officer of Corellium, a cybersecurity firm that sells phone-virtualization software for finding security flaws.

In a letter sent today to the CVE board, MITRE Vice President Yosry Barsoum warned that on April 16, 2025, “the current contracting pathway for MITRE to develop, operate and modernize CVE and several other related programs will expire.”

“If a break in service were to occur, we anticipate multiple impacts to CVE, including deterioration of national vulnerability databases and advisories, tool vendors, incident response operations, and all manner of critical infrastructure,” Barsoum wrote.

MITRE told KrebsOnSecurity the CVE website listing vulnerabilities will remain up after the funding expires, but that new CVEs won’t be added after April 16.

DHS officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The program is funded through DHS’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is currently facing deep budget and staffing cuts by the Trump administration. The CVE contract available at USAspending.gov says the project was awarded approximately $40 million last year.

Former CISA Director Jen Easterly said the CVE program is a bit like the Dewey Decimal System, but for cybersecurity.

“It’s the global catalog that helps everyone—security teams, software vendors, researchers, governments—organize and talk about vulnerabilities using the same reference system,” Easterly said in a post on LinkedIn. “Without it, everyone is using a different catalog or no catalog at all, no one knows if they’re talking about the same problem, defenders waste precious time figuring out what’s wrong, and worst of all, threat actors take advantage of the confusion.”

John Hammond, principal security researcher at the managed security firm Huntress, told Reuters he swore out loud when he heard the news that CVE’s funding was in jeopardy, and that losing the CVE program would be like losing “the language and lingo we used to address problems in cybersecurity.”

“I really can’t help but think this is just going to hurt,” said Hammond, who posted a Youtube video to vent about the situation and alert others.

Several people close to the matter told KrebsOnSecurity this is not the first time the CVE program’s budget has been left in funding limbo until the last minute. Barsoum’s letter, which was apparently leaked, sounded a hopeful note, saying the government is making “considerable efforts to continue MITRE’s role in support of the program.”

Tait said that without the CVE program, risk managers inside companies would need to continuously monitor many other places for information about new vulnerabilities that may jeopardize the security of their IT networks. Meaning, it may become more common that software updates get mis-prioritized, with companies having hackable software deployed for longer than they otherwise would, he said.

“Hopefully they will resolve this, but otherwise the list will rapidly fall out of date and stop being useful,” he said.

Update, April 16, 11:00 a.m. ET: The CVE board today announced the creation of non-profit entity called The CVE Foundation that will continue the program’s work under a new, unspecified funding mechanism and organizational structure.

“Since its inception, the CVE Program has operated as a U.S. government-funded initiative, with oversight and management provided under contract,” the press release reads. “While this structure has supported the program’s growth, it has also raised longstanding concerns among members of the CVE Board about the sustainability and neutrality of a globally relied-upon resource being tied to a single government sponsor.”

The organization’s website, thecvefoundation.org, is less than a day old and currently hosts no content other than the press release heralding its creation. The announcement said the foundation would release more information about its structure and transition planning in the coming days.

Update, April 16, 4:26 p.m. ET: MITRE issued a statement today saying it “identified incremental funding to keep the programs operational. We appreciate the overwhelming support for these programs that have been expressed by the global cyber community, industry and government over the last 24 hours. The government continues to make considerable efforts to support MITRE’s role in the program and MITRE remains committed to CVE and CWE as global resources.”

Trump Revenge Tour Targets Cyber Leaders, Elections

President Trump last week revoked security clearances for Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) who was fired by Trump after declaring the 2020 election the most secure in U.S. history. The White House memo, which also suspended clearances for other security professionals at Krebs’s employer SentinelOne, comes as CISA is facing huge funding and staffing cuts.

The extraordinary April 9 memo directs the attorney general to investigate Chris Krebs (no relation), calling him “a significant bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his government authority.”

The memo said the inquiry will include “a comprehensive evaluation of all of CISA’s activities over the last 6 years and will identify any instances where Krebs’ or CISA’s conduct appears to be contrary to the administration’s commitment to free speech and ending federal censorship, including whether Krebs’ conduct was contrary to suitability standards for federal employees or involved the unauthorized dissemination of classified information.”

CISA was created in 2018 during Trump’s first term, with Krebs installed as its first director. In 2020, CISA launched Rumor Control, a website that sought to rebut disinformation swirling around the 2020 election.

That effort ran directly counter to Trump’s claims that he lost the election because it was somehow hacked and stolen. The Trump campaign and its supporters filed at least 62 lawsuits contesting the election, vote counting, and vote certification in nine states, and nearly all of those cases were dismissed or dropped for lack of evidence or standing.

When the Justice Department began prosecuting people who violently attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, President Trump and Republican leaders shifted the narrative, claiming that Trump lost the election because the previous administration had censored conservative voices on social media.

Incredibly, the president’s memo seeking to ostracize Krebs stands reality on its head, accusing Krebs of promoting the censorship of election information, “including known risks associated with certain voting practices.” Trump also alleged that Krebs “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines” [emphasis added].

Krebs did not respond to a request for comment. SentinelOne issued a statement saying it would cooperate in any review of security clearances held by its personnel, which is currently fewer than 10 employees.

Krebs’s former agency is now facing steep budget and staff reductions. The Record reports that CISA is looking to remove some 1,300 people by cutting about half its full-time staff and another 40% of its contractors.

“The agency’s National Risk Management Center, which serves as a hub analyzing risks to cyber and critical infrastructure, is expected to see significant cuts, said two sources familiar with the plans,” The Record’s Suzanne Smalley wrote. “Some of the office’s systematic risk responsibilities will potentially be moved to the agency’s Cybersecurity Division, according to one of the sources.”

CNN reports the Trump administration is also advancing plans to strip civil service protections from 80% of the remaining CISA employees, potentially allowing them to be fired for political reasons.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged professionals in the cybersecurity community to defend Krebs and SentinelOne, noting that other security companies and professionals could be the next victims of Trump’s efforts to politicize cybersecurity.

“The White House must not be given free reign to turn cybersecurity professionals into political scapegoats,” the EFF wrote. “It is critical that the cybersecurity community now join together to denounce this chilling attack on free speech and rally behind Krebs and SentinelOne rather than cowering because they fear they will be next.”

However, Reuters said it found little sign of industry support for Krebs or SentinelOne, and that many security professionals are concerned about potentially being targeted if they speak out.

“Reuters contacted 33 of the largest U.S. cybersecurity companies, including tech companies and professional services firms with large cybersecurity practices, and three industry groups, for comment on Trump’s action against SentinelOne,” wrote Raphael Satter and A.J. Vicens. “Only one offered comment on Trump’s action. The rest declined, did not respond or did not answer questions.”

CYBERCOM-PLICATIONS

On April 3, President Trump fired Gen. Timothy Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the U.S. Cyber Command, as well as Haugh’s deputy, Wendy Noble. The president did so immediately after meeting in the Oval Office with far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who reportedly urged their dismissal. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One after news of the firings broke, Trump questioned Haugh’s loyalty.

Virginia Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called it inexplicable that the administration would remove the senior leaders of NSA-CYBERCOM without cause or warning, and risk disrupting critical ongoing intelligence operations.

“It is astonishing, too, that President Trump would fire the nonpartisan, experienced leader of the National Security Agency while still failing to hold any member of his team accountable for leaking classified information on a commercial messaging app – even as he apparently takes staffing direction on national security from a discredited conspiracy theorist in the Oval Office,” Warner said in a statement.

On Feb. 28, The Record’s Martin Matishak cited three sources saying Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions. The following day, The Guardian reported that analysts at CISA were verbally informed that they were not to follow or report on Russian threats, even though this had previously been a main focus for the agency.

A follow-up story from The Washington Post cited officials saying Cyber Command had received an order to halt active operations against Russia, but that the pause was intended to last only as long as negotiations with Russia continue.

The Department of Defense responded on Twitter/X that Hegseth had “neither canceled nor delayed any cyber operations directed against malicious Russian targets and there has been no stand-down order whatsoever from that priority.”

But on March 19, Reuters reported several U.S. national security agencies have halted work on a coordinated effort to counter Russian sabotage, disinformation and cyberattacks.

“Regular meetings between the National Security Council and European national security officials have gone unscheduled, and the NSC has also stopped formally coordinating efforts across U.S. agencies, including with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department,” Reuters reported, citing current and former officials.

TARIFFS VS TYPHOONS

President’s Trump’s institution of 125% tariffs on goods from China has seen Beijing strike back with 84 percent tariffs on U.S. imports. Now, some security experts are warning that the trade war could spill over into a cyber conflict, given China’s successful efforts to burrow into America’s critical infrastructure networks.

Over the past year, a number of Chinese government-backed digital intrusions have come into focus, including a sprawling espionage campaign involving the compromise of at least nine U.S. telecommunications providers. Dubbed “Salt Typhoon” by Microsoft, these telecom intrusions were pervasive enough that CISA and the FBI in December 2024 warned Americans against communicating sensitive information over phone networks, urging people instead to use encrypted messaging apps (like Signal).

The other broad ranging China-backed campaign is known as “Volt Typhoon,” which CISA described as “state-sponsored cyber actors seeking to pre-position themselves on IT networks for disruptive or destructive cyberattacks against U.S. critical infrastructure in the event of a major crisis or conflict with the United States.”

Responsibility for determining the root causes of the Salt Typhoon security debacle fell to the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB), a nonpartisan government entity established in February 2022 with a mandate to investigate the security failures behind major cybersecurity events. But on his first full day back in the White House, President Trump dismissed all 15 CSRB advisory committee members — likely because those advisers included Chris Krebs.

Last week, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) placed a hold on Trump’s nominee to lead CISA, saying the hold would continue unless the agency published a report on the telecom industry hacks, as promised.

China-based SMS Phishing Triad Pivots to Banks

China-based purveyors of SMS phishing kits are enjoying remarkable success converting phished payment card data into mobile wallets from Apple and Google. Until recently, the so-called “Smishing Triad” mainly impersonated toll road operators and shipping companies. But experts say these groups are now directly targeting customers of international financial institutions, while dramatically expanding their cybercrime infrastructure and support staff.

If you own a mobile device, the chances are excellent that at some point in the past two years you’ve received at least one instant message that warns of a delinquent toll road fee, or a wayward package from the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). Those who click the promoted link are brought to a website that spoofs the USPS or a local toll road operator and asks for payment card information.

The site will then complain that the visitor’s bank needs to “verify” the transaction by sending a one-time code via SMS. In reality, the bank is sending that code to the mobile number on file for their customer because the fraudsters have just attempted to enroll that victim’s card details into a mobile wallet.

If the visitor supplies that one-time code, their payment card is then added to a new mobile wallet on an Apple or Google device that is physically controlled by the phishers. The phishing gangs typically load multiple stolen cards to digital wallets on a single Apple or Android device, and then sell those phones in bulk to scammers who use them for fraudulent e-commerce and tap-to-pay transactions.

The moniker “Smishing Triad” comes from Resecurity, which was among the first to report in August 2023 on the emergence of three distinct mobile phishing groups based in China that appeared to share some infrastructure and innovative phishing techniques. But it is a bit of a misnomer because the phishing lures blasted out by these groups are not SMS or text messages in the conventional sense.

Rather, they are sent via iMessage to Apple device users, and via RCS on Google Android devices. Thus, the missives bypass the mobile phone networks entirely and enjoy near 100 percent delivery rate (at least until Apple and Google suspend the spammy accounts).

In a report published on March 24, the Swiss threat intelligence firm Prodaft detailed the rapid pace of innovation coming from the Smishing Triad, which it characterizes as a loosely federated group of Chinese phishing-as-a-service operators with names like Darcula, Lighthouse, and the Xinxin Group.

Prodaft said they’re seeing a significant shift in the underground economy, particularly among Chinese-speaking threat actors who have historically operated in the shadows compared to their Russian-speaking counterparts.

“Chinese-speaking actors are introducing innovative and cost-effective systems, enabling them to target larger user bases with sophisticated services,” Prodaft wrote. “Their approach marks a new era in underground business practices, emphasizing scalability and efficiency in cybercriminal operations.”

A new report from researchers at the security firm SilentPush finds the Smishing Triad members have expanded into selling mobile phishing kits targeting customers of global financial institutions like CitiGroup, MasterCard, PayPal, Stripe, and Visa, as well as banks in Canada, Latin America, Australia and the broader Asia-Pacific region.

SilentPush found the Smishing Triad now spoofs recognizable brands in a variety of industry verticals across at least 121 countries and a vast number of industries, including the postal, logistics, telecommunications, transportation, finance, retail and public sectors.

According to SilentPush, the domains used by the Smishing Triad are rotated frequently, with approximately 25,000 phishing domains active during any 8-day period and a majority of them sitting at two Chinese hosting companies: Tencent (AS132203) and Alibaba (AS45102).

“With nearly two-thirds of all countries in the world targeted by [the] Smishing Triad, it’s safe to say they are essentially targeting every country with modern infrastructure outside of Iran, North Korea, and Russia,” SilentPush wrote. “Our team has observed some potential targeting in Russia (such as domains that mentioned their country codes), but nothing definitive enough to indicate Russia is a persistent target. Interestingly, even though these are Chinese threat actors, we have seen instances of targeting aimed at Macau and Hong Kong, both special administrative regions of China.”

SilentPush’s Zach Edwards said his team found a vulnerability that exposed data from one of the Smishing Triad’s phishing pages, which revealed the number of visits each site received each day across thousands of phishing domains that were active at the time. Based on that data, SilentPush estimates those phishing pages received well more than a million visits within a 20-day time span.

The report notes the Smishing Triad boasts it has “300+ front desk staff worldwide” involved in one of their more popular phishing kits — Lighthouse — staff that is mainly used to support various aspects of the group’s fraud and cash-out schemes.

The Smishing Triad members maintain their own Chinese-language sales channels on Telegram, which frequently offer videos and photos of their staff hard at work. Some of those images include massive walls of phones used to send phishing messages, with human operators seated directly in front of them ready to receive any time-sensitive one-time codes.

As noted in February’s story How Phished Data Turns Into Apple and Google Wallets, one of those cash-out schemes involves an Android app called Z-NFC, which can relay a valid NFC transaction from one of these compromised digital wallets to anywhere in the world. For a $500 month subscription, the customer can wave their phone at any payment terminal that accepts Apple or Google pay, and the app will relay an NFC transaction over the Internet from a stolen wallet on a phone in China.

Chinese nationals were recently busted trying to use these NFC apps to buy high-end electronics in Singapore. And in the United States, authorities in California and Tennessee arrested Chinese nationals accused of using NFC apps to fraudulently purchase gift cards from retailers.

The Prodaft researchers said they were able to find a previously undocumented backend management panel for Lucid, a smishing-as-a-service operation tied to the XinXin Group. The panel included victim figures that suggest the smishing campaigns maintain an average success rate of approximately five percent, with some domains receiving over 500 visits per week.

“In one observed instance, a single phishing website captured 30 credit card records from 550 victim interactions over a 7-day period,” Prodaft wrote.

Prodaft’s report details how the Smishing Triad has achieved such success in sending their spam messages. For example, one phishing vendor appears to send out messages using dozens of Android device emulators running in parallel on a single machine.

According to Prodaft, the threat actors first acquire phone numbers through various means including data breaches, open-source intelligence, or purchased lists from underground markets. They then exploit technical gaps in sender ID validation within both messaging platforms.

“For iMessage, this involves creating temporary Apple IDs with impersonated display names, while RCS exploitation leverages carrier implementation inconsistencies in sender verification,” Prodaft wrote. “Message delivery occurs through automated platforms using VoIP numbers or compromised credentials, often deployed in precisely timed multi-wave campaigns to maximize effectiveness.

In addition, the phishing links embedded in these messages use time-limited single-use URLs that expire or redirect based on device fingerprinting to evade security analysis, they found.

“The economics strongly favor the attackers, as neither RCS nor iMessage messages incur per-message costs like traditional SMS, enabling high-volume campaigns at minimal operational expense,” Prodaft continued. “The overlap in templates, target pools, and tactics among these platforms underscores a unified threat landscape, with Chinese-speaking actors driving innovation in the underground economy. Their ability to scale operations globally and evasion techniques pose significant challenges to cybersecurity defenses.”

Ford Merrill works in security research at SecAlliance, a CSIS Security Group company. Merrill said he’s observed at least one video of a Windows binary that wraps a Chrome executable and can be used to load in target phone numbers and blast messages via RCS, iMessage, Amazon, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.

“The evidence we’ve observed suggests the ability for a single device to send approximately 100 messages per second,” Merrill said. “We also believe that there is capability to source country specific SIM cards in volume that allow them to register different online accounts that require validation with specific country codes, and even make those SIM cards available to the physical devices long-term so that services that rely on checks of the validity of the phone number or SIM card presence on a mobile network are thwarted.”

Experts say this fast-growing wave of card fraud persists because far too many financial institutions still default to sending one-time codes via SMS for validating card enrollment in mobile wallets from Apple or Google. KrebsOnSecurity interviewed multiple security executives at non-U.S. financial institutions who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. Those banks have since done away with SMS-based one-time codes and are now requiring customers to log in to the bank’s mobile app before they can link their card to a digital wallet.

Patch Tuesday, April 2025 Edition

Microsoft today released updates to plug at least 121 security holes in its Windows operating systems and software, including one vulnerability that is already being exploited in the wild. Eleven of those flaws earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating, meaning malware or malcontents could exploit them with little to no interaction from Windows users.

The zero-day flaw already seeing exploitation is CVE-2025-29824, a local elevation of privilege bug in the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) driver.  Microsoft rates it as “important,” but as Chris Goettl from Ivanti points out, risk-based prioritization warrants treating it as critical.

This CLFS component of Windows is no stranger to Patch Tuesday: According to Tenable’s Satnam Narang, since 2022 Microsoft has patched 32 CLFS vulnerabilities — averaging 10 per year — with six of them exploited in the wild. The last CLFS zero-day was patched in December 2024.

Narang notes that while flaws allowing attackers to install arbitrary code are consistently top overall Patch Tuesday features, the data is reversed for zero-day exploitation.

“For the past two years, elevation of privilege flaws have led the pack and, so far in 2025, account for over half of all zero-days exploited,” Narang wrote.

Rapid7’s Adam Barnett warns that any Windows defenders responsible for an LDAP server — which means almost any organization with a non-trivial Microsoft footprint — should add patching for the critical flaw CVE-2025-26663 to their to-do list.

“With no privileges required, no need for user interaction, and code execution presumably in the context of the LDAP server itself, successful exploitation would be an attractive shortcut to any attacker,” Barnett said. “Anyone wondering if today is a re-run of December 2024 Patch Tuesday can take some small solace in the fact that the worst of the trio of LDAP critical RCEs published at the end of last year was likely easier to exploit than today’s example, since today’s CVE-2025-26663 requires that an attacker win a race condition. Despite that, Microsoft still expects that exploitation is more likely.”

Among the critical updates Microsoft patched this month are remote code execution flaws in Windows Remote Desktop services (RDP), including CVE-2025-26671, CVE-2025-27480 and CVE-2025-27482; only the latter two are rated “critical,” and Microsoft marked both of them as “Exploitation More Likely.”

Perhaps the most widespread vulnerabilities fixed this month were in web browsers. Google Chrome updated to fix 13 flaws this week, and Mozilla Firefox fixed eight bugs, with possibly more updates coming later this week for Microsoft Edge.

As it tends to do on Patch Tuesdays, Adobe has released 12 updates resolving 54 security holes across a range of products, including ColdFusion, Adobe Commerce, Experience Manager Forms, After Effects, Media Encoder, Bridge, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Animate, AEM Screens, and FrameMaker.

Apple users may need to patch as well. On March 31, Apple released a huge security update (more than three gigabytes in size) to fix issues in a range of their products, including at least one zero-day flaw.

And in case you missed it, on March 31, 2025 Apple released a rather large batch of security updates for a wide range of their products, from macOS to the iOS operating systems on iPhones and iPads.

Earlier today, Microsoft included a note saying Windows 10 security updates weren’t available but would be released as soon as possible. It appears from browsing askwoody.com that this snafu has since been rectified. Either way, if you run into complications applying any of these updates please leave a note about it in the comments below, because the chances are good that someone else had the same problem.

As ever, please consider backing up your data and or devices prior to updating, which makes it far less complicated to undo a software update gone awry. For more granular details on today’s Patch Tuesday, check out the SANS Internet Storm Center’s roundup. Microsoft’s update guide for April 2025 is here.

For more details on Patch Tuesday, check out the write-ups from Action1 and Automox.

Cyber Forensic Expert in 2,000+ Cases Faces FBI Probe

A Minnesota cybersecurity and computer forensics expert whose testimony has featured in thousands of courtroom trials over the past 30 years is facing questions about his credentials and an inquiry from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Legal experts say the inquiry could be grounds to reopen a number of adjudicated cases in which the expert’s testimony may have been pivotal.

Mark Lanterman is a former investigator for the U.S. Secret Service Electronics Crimes Task Force who founded the Minneapolis consulting firm Computer Forensic Services (CFS). The CFS website says Lanterman’s 30-year career has seen him testify as an expert in more than 2,000 cases, with experience in cases involving sexual harassment and workplace claims, theft of intellectual property and trade secrets, white-collar crime, and class action lawsuits.

Or at least it did until last month, when Lanterman’s profile and work history were quietly removed from the CFS website. The removal came after Hennepin County Attorney’s Office said it was notifying parties to ten pending cases that they were unable to verify Lanterman’s educational and employment background. The county attorney also said the FBI is now investigating the allegations.

Those allegations were raised by Sean Harrington, an attorney and forensics examiner based in Prescott, Wisconsin. Harrington alleged that Lanterman lied under oath in court on multiple occasions when he testified that he has a Bachelor of Science and a Master’s degree in computer science from the now-defunct Upsala College, and that he completed his postgraduate work in cybersecurity at Harvard University.

Harrington’s claims gained steam thanks to digging by the law firm Perkins Coie LLP, which is defending a case wherein a client’s laptop was forensically reviewed by Lanterman. On March 14, Perkins Coie attorneys asked the judge (PDF) to strike Lanterman’s testimony because neither he nor they could substantiate claims about his educational background.

Upsala College, located in East Orange, N.J., operated for 102 years until it closed in 1995 after a period of declining enrollment and financial difficulties. Perkins Coie told the court that they’d visited Felician University, which holds the transcripts for Upsala College during the years Lanterman claimed to have earned undergraduate and graduate degrees. The law firm said Felician had no record of transcripts for Lanterman (PDF), and that his name was absent from all of the Upsala College student yearbooks and commencement programs during that period.

Reached for comment, Lanterman acknowledged he had no way to prove he attended Upsala College, and that his “postgraduate work” at Harvard was in fact an eight-week online cybersecurity class called HarvardX, which cautions that its certificates should not be considered equivalent to a Harvard degree or a certificate earned through traditional, in-person programs at Harvard University.

Lanterman has testified that his first job after college was serving as a police officer in Springfield Township, Pennsylvania, although the Perkins Coie attorneys noted that this role was omitted from his resume. The attorneys said when they tried to verify Lanterman’s work history, “the police department responded with a story that would be almost impossible to believe if it was not corroborated by Lanterman’s own email communications.”

As recounted in the March 14 filing, Lanterman was deposed on Feb. 11, and the following day he emailed the Springfield Township Police Department to see if he could have a peek at his old personnel file. On Feb. 14, Lanterman visited the Springfield Township PD and asked to borrow his employment record. He told the officer he spoke with on the phone that he’d recently been instructed to “get his affairs in order” after being diagnosed with a grave heart condition, and that he wanted his old file to show his family about his early career.

According to Perkins Coie, Lanterman left the Springfield Township PD with his personnel file, and has not returned it as promised.

“It is shocking that an expert from Minnesota would travel to suburban Philadelphia and abscond with his decades-old personnel file to obscure his background,” the law firm wrote. “That appears to be the worst and most egregious form of spoliation, and the deception alone is reason enough to exclude Lanterman and consider sanctions.”

Harrington initially contacted KrebsOnSecurity about his concerns in late 2023, fuming after sitting through a conference speech in which Lanterman shared documents from a ransomware victim and told attendees it was because they’d refused to hire his company to perform a forensic investigation on a recent breach.

“He claims he was involved in the Martha Stewart investigation, the Bernie Madoff trial, Paul McCartney’s divorce, the Tom Petters investigation, the Denny Hecker investigation, and many others,” Harrington said. “He claims to have been invited to speak to the Supreme Court, claims to train the ‘entire federal judiciary’ on cybersecurity annually, and is a faculty member of the United States Judicial Conference and the Judicial College — positions which he obtained, in part, on a house of fraudulent cards.”

In an interview this week, Harrington said court documents reveal that at least two of Lanterman’s previous clients complained CFS had held their data for ransom over billing disputes. In a declaration (PDF) dated August 2022, the co-founder of the law firm MoreLaw Minneapolis LLC said she hired Lanterman in 2014 to examine several electronic devices after learning that one of their paralegals had a criminal fraud history.

But the law firm said when it pushed back on a consulting bill that was far higher than expected, Lanterman told them CFS would “escalate” its collection efforts if they didn’t pay, including “a claim and lien against the data which will result in a public auction of your data.”

“All of us were flabbergasted by Mr. Lanterman’s email,” wrote MoreLaw co-founder Kimberly Hanlon. “I had never heard of any legitimate forensic company threatening to ‘auction’ off an attorney’s data, particularly knowing that the data is comprised of confidential client data, much of which is sensitive in nature.”

In 2009, a Wisconsin-based manufacturing company that had hired Lanterman for computer forensics balked at paying an $86,000 invoice from CFS, calling it “excessive and unsubstantiated.” The company told a Hennepin County court that on April 15, 2009, CFS conducted an auction of its trade secret information in violation of their confidentiality agreement.

“CFS noticed and conducted a Public Sale of electronic information that was entrusted to them pursuant to the terms of the engagement agreement,” the company wrote. “CFS submitted the highest bid at the Public Sale in the amount of $10,000.”

Lanterman briefly responded to a list of questions about his background (and recent heart diagnosis) on March 24, saying he would send detailed replies the following day. Those replies never materialized. Instead, Lanterman forwarded a recent memo he wrote to the court that attacked Harrington and said his accuser was only trying to take out a competitor. He has not responded to further requests for comment.

“When I attended Upsala, I was a commuter student who lived with my grandparents in Morristown, New Jersey approximately 30 minutes away from Upsala College,” Lanterman explained to the judge (PDF) overseeing a separate ongoing case (PDF) in which he has testified. “With limited resources, I did not participate in campus social events, nor did I attend graduation ceremonies. In 2023, I confirmed with Felician University — which maintains Upsala College’s records — that they could not locate my transcripts or diploma, a situation that they indicated was possibly due to unresolved money-related issues.”

Lanterman was ordered to appear in court on April 3 in the case defended by Perkins Coie, but he did not show up. Instead, he sent a message to the judge withdrawing from the case.

“I am 60 years old,” Lanterman told the judge. “I created my business from nothing. I am done dealing with the likes of individuals like Sean Harrington. And quite frankly, I have been planning at turning over my business to my children for years. That time has arrived.”

Lanterman’s letter leaves the impression that it was his decision to retire. But according to an affidavit (PDF) filed in a Florida case on March 28, Mark Lanterman’s son Sean said he’d made the difficult decision to ask his dad to step down given all the negative media attention.

Mark Rasch, a former federal cybercrime prosecutor who now serves as counsel to the New York cybersecurity intelligence firm Unit 221B, said that if an expert witness is discredited, any defendants who lost cases that were strongly influenced by that expert’s conclusions at trial could have grounds for appeal.

Rasch said law firms who propose an expert witness have a duty in good faith to vet that expert’s qualifications, knowing that those credentials will be subject to cross-examination.

“Federal rules of civil procedure and evidence both require experts to list every case they have testified in as an expert for the past few years,” Rasch said. “Part of that due diligence is pulling up the results of those cases and seeing what the nature of their testimony has been.”

Perhaps the most well-publicized case involving significant forensic findings from Lanterman was the 2018 conviction of Stephen Allwine, who was found guilty of killing his wife two years earlier after attempts at hiring a hitman on the dark net fell through. Allwine is serving a sentence of life in prison, and continues to maintain that he was framed, casting doubt on computer forensic evidence found on 64 electronic devices taken from his home.

On March 24, Allwine petitioned a Minnesota court (PDF) to revisit his case, citing the accusations against Lanterman and his role as a key witness for the prosecution.

How Each Pillar of the 1st Amendment is Under Attack

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” -U.S. Constitution, First Amendment.

In an address to Congress this month, President Trump claimed he had “brought free speech back to America.” But barely two months into his second term, the president has waged an unprecedented attack on the First Amendment rights of journalists, students, universities, government workers, lawyers and judges.

This story explores a slew of recent actions by the Trump administration that threaten to undermine all five pillars of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees freedoms concerning speech, religion, the media, the right to assembly, and the right to petition the government and seek redress for wrongs.

THE RIGHT TO PETITION

The right to petition allows citizens to communicate with the government, whether to complain, request action, or share viewpoints — without fear of reprisal. But that right is being assaulted by this administration on multiple levels. For starters, many GOP lawmakers are now heeding their leadership’s advice to stay away from local town hall meetings and avoid the wrath of constituents affected by the administration’s many federal budget and workforce cuts.

Another example: President Trump recently fired most of the people involved in processing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for government agencies. FOIA is an indispensable tool used by journalists and the public to request government records, and to hold leaders accountable.

The biggest story by far this week was the bombshell from The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who recounted how he was inadvertently added to a Signal group chat with National Security Advisor Michael Waltz and 16 other Trump administration officials discussing plans for an upcoming attack on Yemen.

One overlooked aspect of Goldberg’s incredible account is that by planning and coordinating the attack on Signal — which features messages that can auto-delete after a short time — administration officials were evidently seeking a way to avoid creating a lasting (and potentially FOIA-able) record of their deliberations.

“Intentional or not, use of Signal in this context was an act of erasure—because without Jeffrey Goldberg being accidentally added to the list, the general public would never have any record of these communications or any way to know they even occurred,” Tony Bradley wrote this week at Forbes.

Petitioning the government, particularly when it ignores your requests, often requires challenging federal agencies in court. But that becomes far more difficult if the most competent law firms start to shy away from cases that may involve crossing the president and his administration.

On March 22, the president issued a memorandum that directs heads of the Justice and Homeland Security Departments to “seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable and vexatious litigation against the United States,” or in matters that come before federal agencies.

The POTUS recently issued several executive orders railing against specific law firms with attorneys who worked legal cases against him. On Friday, the president announced that the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meager & Flom had agreed to provide $100 million in pro bono work on issues that he supports.

Trump issued another order naming the firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, which ultimately agreed to pledge $40 million in pro bono legal services to the president’s causes.

Other Trump executive orders targeted law firms Jenner & Block and WilmerHale, both of which have attorneys that worked with special counsel Robert Mueller on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. But this week, two federal judges in separate rulings froze parts of those orders.

“There is no doubt this retaliatory action chills speech and legal advocacy, and that is qualified as a constitutional harm,” wrote Judge Richard Leon, who ruled against the executive order targeting WilmerHale.

President Trump recently took the extraordinary step of calling for the impeachment of federal judges who rule against the administration. Trump called U.S. District Judge James Boasberg a “Radical Left Lunatic” and urged he be removed from office for blocking deportation of Venezuelan alleged gang members under a rarely invoked wartime legal authority.

In a rare public rebuke to a sitting president, U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts issued a statement on March 18 pointing out that “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”

The U.S. Constitution provides that judges can be removed from office only through impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction by the Senate. The Constitution also states that judges’ salaries cannot be reduced while they are in office.

Undeterred, House Speaker Mike Johnson this week suggested the administration could still use the power of its purse to keep courts in line, and even floated the idea of wholesale eliminating federal courts.

“We do have authority over the federal courts as you know,” Johnson said. “We can eliminate an entire district court. We have power of funding over the courts, and all these other things. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and Congress is going to act, so stay tuned for that.”

FREEDOM OF ASSEMBLY

President Trump has taken a number of actions to discourage lawful demonstrations at universities and colleges across the country, threatening to cut federal funding for any college that supports protests he deems “illegal.”

A Trump executive order in January outlined a broad federal crackdown on what he called “the explosion of antisemitism” on U.S. college campuses. This administration has asserted that foreign students who are lawfully in the United States on visas do not enjoy the same free speech or due process rights as citizens.

Reuters reports that the acting civil rights director at the Department of Education on March 10 sent letters to 60 educational institutions warning they could lose federal funding if they don’t do more to combat anti-semitism. On March 20, Trump issued an order calling for the closure of the Education Department.

Meanwhile, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been detaining and trying to deport pro-Palestinian students who are legally in the United States. The administration is targeting students and academics who spoke out against Israel’s attacks on Gaza, or who were active in campus protests against U.S. support for the attacks. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Thursday that at least 300 foreign students have seen their visas revoked under President Trump, a far higher number than was previously known.

In his first term, Trump threatened to use the national guard or the U.S. military to deal with protesters, and in campaigning for re-election he promised to revisit the idea.

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump told Fox News in October 2024. “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

This term, Trump acted swiftly to remove the top judicial advocates in the armed forces who would almost certainly push back on any request by the president to use U.S. soldiers in an effort to quell public protests, or to arrest and detain immigrants. In late February, the president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the top legal officers for the military services — those responsible for ensuring the Uniform Code of Military Justice is followed by commanders.

Military.com warns that the purge “sets an alarming precedent for a crucial job in the military, as President Donald Trump has mused about using the military in unorthodox and potentially illegal ways.” Hegseth told reporters the removals were necessary because he didn’t want them to pose any “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.”

FREEDOM OF THE PRESS

President Trump has sued a number of U.S. news outlets, including 60 Minutes, CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other smaller media organizations for unflattering coverage.

In a $10 billion lawsuit against 60 Minutes and its parent Paramount, Trump claims they selectively edited an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris prior to the 2024 election. The TV news show last month published transcripts of the interview at the heart of the dispute, but Paramount is reportedly considering a settlement to avoid potentially damaging its chances of winning the administration’s approval for a pending multibillion-dollar merger.

The president sued The Des Moines Register and its parent company, Gannett, for publishing a poll showing Trump trailing Harris in the 2024 presidential election in Iowa (a state that went for Trump). The POTUS also is suing the Pulitzer Prize board over 2018 awards given to The New York Times and The Washington Post for their coverage of purported Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Whether or not any of the president’s lawsuits against news organizations have merit or succeed is almost beside the point. The strategy behind suing the media is to make reporters and newsrooms think twice about criticizing or challenging the president and his administration. The president also knows some media outlets will find it more expedient to settle.

Trump also sued ABC News and George Stephanopoulos for stating that the president had been found liable for “rape” in a civil case [Trump was found liable of sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll]. ABC parent Disney settled that claim by agreeing to donate $15 million to the Trump Presidential Library.

Following the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Facebook blocked President Trump’s account. Trump sued Meta, and after the president’s victory in 2024 Meta settled and agreed to pay Trump $25 million: $22 million would go to his presidential library, and the rest to legal fees. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also announced Facebook and Instagram would get rid of fact-checkers and rely instead on reader-submitted “community notes” to debunk disinformation on the social media platform.

Brendan Carr, the president’s pick to run the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has pledged to “dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.” But on January 22, 2025, the FCC reopened complaints against ABC, CBS and NBC over their coverage of the 2024 election. The previous FCC chair had dismissed the complaints as attacks on the First Amendment and an attempt to weaponize the agency for political purposes.

According to Reuters, the complaints call for an investigation into how ABC News moderated the pre-election TV debate between Trump and Biden, and appearances of then-Vice President Harris on 60 Minutes and on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”

Since then, the FCC has opened investigations into NPR and PBS, alleging that they are breaking sponsorship rules. The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), a think tank based in Washington, D.C., noted that the FCC is also investigating KCBS in San Francisco for reporting on the location of federal immigration authorities.

“Even if these investigations are ultimately closed without action, the mere fact of opening them – and the implicit threat to the news stations’ license to operate – can have the effect of deterring the press from news coverage that the Administration dislikes,” the CDT’s Kate Ruane observed.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to “open up” libel laws, with the goal of making it easier to sue media organizations for unfavorable coverage. But this week, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge brought by Trump donor and Las Vegas casino magnate Steve Wynn to overturn the landmark 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, which insulates the press from libel suits over good-faith criticism of public figures.

The president also has insisted on picking which reporters and news outlets should be allowed to cover White House events and participate in the press pool that trails the president. He barred the Associated Press from the White House and Air Force One over their refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico by another name.

And the Defense Department has ordered a number of top media outlets to vacate their spots at the Pentagon, including CNN, The Hill, The Washington Post, The New York Times, NBC News, Politico and National Public Radio.

“Incoming media outlets include the New York Post, Breitbart, the Washington Examiner, the Free Press, the Daily Caller, Newsmax, the Huffington Post and One America News Network, most of whom are seen as conservative or favoring Republican President Donald Trump,” Reuters reported.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH

Shortly after Trump took office again in January 2025, the administration began circulating lists of hundreds of words that government staff and agencies shall not use in their reports and communications.

The Brookings Institution notes that in moving to comply with this anti-speech directive, federal agencies have purged countless taxpayer-funded data sets from a swathe of government websites, including data on crime, sexual orientation, gender, education, climate, and global development.

The New York Times reports that in the past two months, hundreds of terabytes of digital resources analyzing data have been taken off government websites.

“While in many cases the underlying data still exists, the tools that make it possible for the public and researchers to use that data have been removed,” The Times wrote.

On Jan. 27, Trump issued a memo (PDF) that paused all federally funded programs pending a review of those programs for alignment with the administration’s priorities. Among those was ensuring that no funding goes toward advancing “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.”

According to the CDT, this order is a blatant attempt to force government grantees to cease engaging in speech that the current administration dislikes, including speech about the benefits of diversity, climate change, and LGBTQ issues.

“The First Amendment does not permit the government to discriminate against grantees because it does not like some of the viewpoints they espouse,” the CDT’s Ruane wrote. “Indeed, those groups that are challenging the constitutionality of the order argued as much in their complaint, and have won an injunction blocking its implementation.”

On January 20, the same day Trump issued an executive order on free speech, the president also issued an executive order titled “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid,” which froze funding for programs run by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Among those were programs designed to empower civil society and human rights groups, journalists and others responding to digital repression and Internet shutdowns.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), this includes many freedom technologies that use cryptography, fight censorship, protect freedom of speech, privacy and anonymity for millions of people around the world.

“While the State Department has issued some limited waivers, so far those waivers do not seem to cover the open source internet freedom technologies,” the EFF wrote about the USAID disruptions. “As a result, many of these projects have to stop or severely curtail their work, lay off talented workers, and stop or slow further development.”

On March 14, the president signed another executive order that effectively gutted the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which oversees or funds media outlets including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America (VOA). The USAGM also oversees Radio Free Asia, which supporters say has been one of the most reliable tools used by the government to combat Chinese propaganda.

But this week, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, temporarily blocked USAGM’s closure by the administration.

“RFE/RL has, for decades, operated as one of the organizations that Congress has statutorily designated to carry out this policy,” Lamberth wrote in a 10-page opinion. “The leadership of USAGM cannot, with one sentence of reasoning offering virtually no explanation, force RFE/RL to shut down — even if the President has told them to do so.”

FREEDOM OF RELIGION

The Trump administration rescinded a decades-old policy that instructed officers not to take immigration enforcement actions in or near “sensitive” or “protected” places, such as churches, schools, and hospitals.

That directive was immediately challenged in a case brought by a group of Quakers, Baptists and Sikhs, who argued the policy reversal was keeping people from attending services for fear of being arrested on civil immigration violations. On Feb. 24, a federal judge agreed and blocked ICE agents from entering churches or targeting migrants nearby.

The president’s executive order allegedly addressing antisemitism came with a fact sheet that described college campuses as “infested” with “terrorists” and “jihadists.” Multiple faith groups expressed alarm over the order, saying it attempts to weaponize antisemitism and promote “dehumanizing anti-immigrant policies.”

The president also announced the creation of a “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias,” to be led by Attorney General Pam Bondi. Never mind that Christianity is easily the largest faith in America and that Christians are well-represented in Congress.

The Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, a Baptist minister and head of the progressive Interfaith Alliance, issued a statement accusing Trump of hypocrisy in claiming to champion religion by creating the task force.

“From allowing immigration raids in churches, to targeting faith-based charities, to suppressing religious diversity, the Trump Administration’s aggressive government overreach is infringing on religious freedom in a way we haven’t seen for generations,” Raushenbush said.

A statement from Americans United for Separation of Church and State said the task force could lead to religious persecution of those with other faiths.

“Rather than protecting religious beliefs, this task force will misuse religious freedom to justify bigotry, discrimination, and the subversion of our civil rights laws,” said Rachel Laser, the group’s president and CEO.

Where is President Trump going with all these blatant attacks on the First Amendment? The president has made no secret of his affection for autocratic leaders and “strongmen” around the world, and he is particularly enamored with Hungary’s far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort twice in the past year.

A March 15 essay in The Atlantic by Hungarian investigative journalist András Pethő recounts how Orbán rose to power by consolidating control over the courts, and by building his own media universe while simultaneously placing a stranglehold on the independent press.

“As I watch from afar what’s happening to the free press in the United States during the first weeks of Trump’s second presidency — the verbal bullying, the legal harassment, the buckling by media owners in the face of threats — it all looks very familiar,” Pethő wrote. “The MAGA authorities have learned Orbán’s lessons well.”

When Getting Phished Puts You in Mortal Danger

Many successful phishing attacks result in a financial loss or malware infection. But falling for some phishing scams, like those currently targeting Russians searching online for organizations that are fighting the Kremlin war machine, can cost you your freedom or your life.

Researchers at the security firm Silent Push mapped a network of several dozen phishing domains that spoof the recruitment websites of Ukrainian paramilitary groups, as well as Ukrainian government intelligence sites.

The website legiohliberty[.]army features a carbon copy of the homepage for the Freedom of Russia Legion (a.k.a. “Free Russia Legion”), a three-year-old Ukraine-based paramilitary unit made up of Russian citizens who oppose Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine.

The phony version of that website copies the legitimate site — legionliberty[.]army — providing an interactive Google Form where interested applicants can share their contact and personal details. The form asks visitors to provide their name, gender, age, email address and/or Telegram handle, country, citizenship, experience in the armed forces; political views; motivations for joining; and any bad habits.

“Participation in such anti-war actions is considered illegal in the Russian Federation, and participating citizens are regularly charged and arrested,” Silent Push wrote in a report released today. “All observed campaigns had similar traits and shared a common objective: collecting personal information from site-visiting victims. Our team believes it is likely that this campaign is the work of either Russian Intelligence Services or a threat actor with similarly aligned motives.”

Silent Push’s Zach Edwards said the fake Legion Liberty site shared multiple connections with rusvolcorps[.]net. That domain mimics the recruitment page for a Ukrainian far-right paramilitary group called the Russian Volunteer Corps (rusvolcorps[.]com), and uses a similar Google Forms page to collect information from would-be members.

Other domains Silent Push connected to the phishing scheme include: ciagov[.]icu, which mirrors the content on the official website of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency; and hochuzhitlife[.]com, which spoofs the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine & General Directorate of Intelligence (whose actual domain is hochuzhit[.]com).

According to Edwards, there are no signs that these phishing sites are being advertised via email. Rather, it appears those responsible are promoting them by manipulating the search engine results shown when someone searches for one of these anti-Putin organizations.

In August 2024, security researcher Artem Tamoian posted on Twitter/X about how he received startlingly different results when he searched for “Freedom of Russia legion” in Russia’s largest domestic search engine Yandex versus Google.com. The top result returned by Google was the legion’s actual website, while the first result on Yandex was a phishing page targeting the group.

“I think at least some of them are surely promoted via search,” Tamoian said of the phishing domains. “My first thread on that accuses Yandex, but apart from Yandex those websites are consistently ranked above legitimate in DuckDuckGo and Bing. Initially, I didn’t realize the scale of it. They keep appearing to this day.”

Tamoian, a native Russian who left the country in 2019, is the founder of the cyber investigation platform malfors.com. He recently discovered two other sites impersonating the Ukrainian paramilitary groups — legionliberty[.]world and rusvolcorps[.]ru — and reported both to Cloudflare. When Cloudflare responded by blocking the sites with a phishing warning, the real Internet address of these sites was exposed as belonging to a known “bulletproof hosting” network called Stark Industries Solutions Ltd.

Stark Industries Solutions appeared two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, materializing out of nowhere with hundreds of thousands of Internet addresses in its stable — many of them originally assigned to Russian government organizations. In May 2024, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive on Stark, which has repeatedly been used to host infrastructure for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, phishing, malware and disinformation campaigns from Russian intelligence agencies and pro-Kremlin hacker groups.

In March 2023, Russia’s Supreme Court designated the Freedom of Russia legion as a terrorist organization, meaning that Russians caught communicating with the group could face between 10 and 20 years in prison.

Tamoian said those searching online for information about these paramilitary groups have become easy prey for Russian security services.

“I started looking into those phishing websites, because I kept stumbling upon news that someone gets arrested for trying to join [the] Ukrainian Army or for trying to help them,” Tamoian told KrebsOnSecurity. “I have also seen reports [of] FSB contacting people impersonating Ukrainian officers, as well as using fake Telegram bots, so I thought fake websites might be an option as well.”

Tamoian said reports surface regularly in Russia about people being arrested for trying carry out an action requested by a “Ukrainian recruiter,” with the courts unfailingly imposing harsh sentences regardless of the defendant’s age.

“This keeps happening regularly, but usually there are no details about how exactly the person gets caught,” he said. “All cases related to state treason [and] terrorism are classified, so there are barely any details.”

Tamoian said while he has no direct evidence linking any of the reported arrests and convictions to these phishing sites, he is certain the sites are part of a larger campaign by the Russian government.

“Considering that they keep them alive and keep spawning more, I assume it might be an efficient thing,” he said. “They are on top of DuckDuckGo and Yandex, so it unfortunately works.”

Further reading: Silent Push report, Russian Intelligence Targeting its Citizens and Informants.

Arrests in Tap-to-Pay Scheme Powered by Phishing

Authorities in at least two U.S. states last week independently announced arrests of Chinese nationals accused of perpetrating a novel form of tap-to-pay fraud using mobile devices. Details released by authorities so far indicate the mobile wallets being used by the scammers were created through online phishing scams, and that the accused were relying on a custom Android app to relay tap-to-pay transactions from mobile devices located in China.

Authorities in Knoxville, Tennessee last week said they arrested 11 Chinese nationals accused of buying tens of thousands of dollars worth of gift cards at local retailers with mobile wallets created through online phishing scams. The Knox County Sheriff’s office said the arrests are considered the first in the nation for a new type of tap-to-pay fraud.

Responding to questions about what makes this scheme so remarkable, Knox County said that while it appears the fraudsters are simply buying gift cards, in fact they are using multiple transactions to purchase various gift cards and are plying their scam from state to state.

“These offenders have been traveling nationwide, using stolen credit card information to purchase gift cards and launder funds,” Knox County Chief Deputy Bernie Lyon wrote. “During Monday’s operation, we recovered gift cards valued at over $23,000, all bought with unsuspecting victims’ information.”

Asked for specifics about the mobile devices seized from the suspects, Lyon said “tap-to-pay fraud involves a group utilizing Android phones to conduct Apple Pay transactions utilizing stolen or compromised credit/debit card information,” [emphasis added].

Lyon declined to offer additional specifics about the mechanics of the scam, citing an ongoing investigation.

Ford Merrill works in security research at SecAlliance, a CSIS Security Group company. Merrill said there aren’t many valid use cases for Android phones to transmit Apple Pay transactions. That is, he said, unless they are running a custom Android app that KrebsOnSecurity wrote about last month as part of a deep dive into the operations of China-based phishing cartels that are breathing new life into the payment card fraud industry (a.k.a. “carding”).

How are these China-based phishing groups obtaining stolen payment card data and then loading it onto Google and Apple phones? It all starts with phishing.

If you own a mobile phone, the chances are excellent that at some point in the past two years it has received at least one phishing message that spoofs the U.S. Postal Service to supposedly collect some outstanding delivery fee, or an SMS that pretends to be a local toll road operator warning of a delinquent toll fee.

These messages are being sent through sophisticated phishing kits sold by several cybercriminals based in mainland China. And they are not traditional SMS phishing or “smishing” messages, as they bypass the mobile networks entirely. Rather, the missives are sent through the Apple iMessage service and through RCS, the functionally equivalent technology on Google phones.

People who enter their payment card data at one of these sites will be told their financial institution needs to verify the small transaction by sending a one-time passcode to the customer’s mobile device. In reality, that code will be sent by the victim’s financial institution in response to a request by the fraudsters to link the phished card data to a mobile wallet.

If the victim then provides that one-time code, the phishers will link the card data to a new mobile wallet from Apple or Google, loading the wallet onto a mobile phone that the scammers control. These phones are then loaded with multiple stolen wallets (often between 5-10 per device) and sold in bulk to scammers on Telegram.

Merrill found that at least one of the Chinese phishing groups sells an Android app called “Z-NFC” that can relay a valid NFC transaction to anywhere in the world. The user simply waves their phone at a local payment terminal that accepts Apple or Google pay, and the app relays an NFC transaction over the Internet from a phone in China.

“I would be shocked if this wasn’t the NFC relay app,” Merrill said, concerning the arrested suspects in Tennessee.

Merrill said the Z-NFC software can work from anywhere in the world, and that one phishing gang offers the software for $500 a month.

“It can relay both NFC enabled tap-to-pay as well as any digital wallet,” Merrill said. “They even have 24-hour support.”

On March 16, the ABC affiliate in Sacramento (ABC10), Calif. aired a segment about two Chinese nationals who were arrested after using an app to run stolen credit cards at a local Target store. The news story quoted investigators saying the men were trying to buy gift cards using a mobile app that cycled through more than 80 stolen payment cards.

ABC10 reported that while most of those transactions were declined, the suspects still made off with $1,400 worth of gift cards. After their arrests, both men reportedly admitted that they were being paid $250 a day to conduct the fraudulent transactions.

Merrill said it’s not unusual for fraud groups to advertise this kind of work on social media networks, including TikTok.

A CBS News story on the Sacramento arrests said one of the suspects tried to use 42 separate bank cards, but that 32 were declined. Even so, the man still was reportedly able to spend $855 in the transactions.

Likewise, the suspect’s alleged accomplice tried 48 transactions on separate cards, finding success 11 times and spending $633, CBS reported.

“It’s interesting that so many of the cards were declined,” Merrill said. “One reason this might be is that banks are getting better at detecting this type of fraud. The other could be that the cards were already used and so they were already flagged for fraud even before these guys had a chance to use them. So there could be some element of just sending these guys out to stores to see if it works, and if not they’re on their own.”

Merrill’s investigation into the Telegram sales channels for these China-based phishing gangs shows their phishing sites are actively manned by fraudsters who sit in front of giant racks of Apple and Google phones that are used to send the spam and respond to replies in real time.

In other words, the phishing websites are powered by real human operators as long as new messages are being sent. Merrill said the criminals appear to send only a few dozen messages at a time, likely because completing the scam takes manual work by the human operators in China. After all, most one-time codes used for mobile wallet provisioning are generally only good for a few minutes before they expire.

For more on how these China-based mobile phishing groups operate, check out How Phished Data Turns Into Apple and Google Wallets.

DOGE to Fired CISA Staff: Email Us Your Personal Data

A message posted on Monday to the homepage of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is the latest exhibit in the Trump administration’s continued disregard for basic cybersecurity protections. The message instructed recently-fired CISA employees to get in touch so they can be rehired and then immediately placed on leave, asking employees to send their Social Security number or date of birth in a password-protected email attachment — presumably with the password needed to view the file included in the body of the email.

On March 13, a Maryland district court judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstate more than 130 probationary CISA employees who were fired last month. On Monday, the administration announced that those dismissed employees would be reinstated but placed on paid administrative leave. They are among nearly 25,000 fired federal workers who are in the process of being rehired.

A notice covering the CISA homepage said the administration is making every effort to contact those who were unlawfully fired in mid-February.

“Please provide a password protected attachment that provides your full name, your dates of employment (including date of termination), and one other identifying factor such as date of birth or social security number,” the message reads. “Please, to the extent that it is available, attach any termination notice.”

The message didn’t specify how affected CISA employees should share the password for any attached files, so the implicit expectation is that employees should just include the plaintext password in their message.

Email is about as secure as a postcard sent through the mail, because anyone who manages to intercept the missive anywhere along its path of delivery can likely read it. In security terms, that’s the equivalent of encrypting sensitive data while also attaching the secret key needed to view the information.

What’s more, a great many antivirus and security scanners have trouble inspecting password-protected files, meaning the administration’s instructions are likely to increase the risk that malware submitted by cybercriminals could be accepted and opened by U.S. government employees.

The message in the screenshot above was removed from the CISA homepage Tuesday evening and replaced with a much shorter notice directing former CISA employees to contact a specific email address. But a slightly different version of the same message originally posted to CISA’s website still exists at the website for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which likewise instructs those fired employees who wish to be rehired and put on leave to send a password-protected email attachment with sensitive personal data.

This is hardly the first example of the administration discarding Security 101 practices in the name of expediency. Last month, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sent an unencrypted email to the White House with the first names and first letter of the last names of recently hired CIA officers who might be easy to fire.

As cybersecurity journalist Shane Harris noted in The Atlantic, even those fragments of information could be useful to foreign spies.

“Over the weekend, a former senior CIA official showed me the steps by which a foreign adversary who knew only his first name and last initial could have managed to identify him from the single line of the congressional record where his full name was published more than 20 years ago, when he became a member of the Foreign Service,” Harris wrote. “The former official was undercover at the time as a State Department employee. If a foreign government had known even part of his name from a list of confirmed CIA officers, his cover would have been blown.”

The White House has also fired at least 100 intelligence staffers from the National Security Agency (NSA), reportedly for using an internal NSA chat tool to discuss their personal lives and politics. Testifying before the House Select Committee on the Communist Party earlier this month, the NSA’s former top cybersecurity official said the Trump administration’s attempts to mass fire probationary federal employees will be “devastating” to U.S. cybersecurity operations.

Rob Joyce, who spent 34 years at the NSA, told Congress how important those employees are in sustaining an aggressive stance against China in cyberspace.

“At my former agency, remarkable technical talent was recruited into developmental programs that provided intensive unique training and hands-on experience to cultivate vital skills,” Joyce told the panel. “Eliminating probationary employees will destroy a pipeline of top talent responsible for hunting and eradicating [Chinese] threats.”

Both the message to fired CISA workers and DOGE’s ongoing efforts to bypass vetted government networks for a faster Wi-Fi signal are emblematic of this administration’s overall approach to even basic security measures: To go around them, or just pretend they don’t exist for a good reason.

On Monday, The New York Times reported that U.S. Secret Service agents at the White House were briefly on alert last month when a trusted captain of Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) visited the roof of the Eisenhower building inside the White House compound — to see about setting up a dish to receive satellite Internet access directly from Musk’s Starlink service.

The White House press secretary told The Times that Starlink had “donated” the service and that the gift had been vetted by the lawyer overseeing ethics issues in the White House Counsel’s Office. The White House claims the service is necessary because its wireless network is too slow.

Jake Williams, vice president for research and development at the cybersecurity consulting firm Hunter Strategy, told The Times “it’s super rare” to install Starlink or another internet provider as a replacement for existing government infrastructure that has been vetted and secured.

“I can’t think of a time that I have heard of that,” Williams said. “It introduces another attack point,” Williams said. “But why introduce that risk?”

Meanwhile, NBC News reported on March 7 that Starlink is expanding its footprint across the federal government.

“Multiple federal agencies are exploring the idea of adopting SpaceX’s Starlink for internet access — and at least one agency, the General Services Administration (GSA), has done so at the request of Musk’s staff, according to someone who worked at the GSA last month and is familiar with its network operations — despite a vow by Musk and Trump to slash the overall federal budget,” NBC wrote.

The longtime Musk employee who encountered the Secret Service on the roof in the White House complex was Christopher Stanley, the 33-year-old senior director for security engineering at X and principal security engineer at SpaceX.

On Monday, Bloomberg broke the news that Stanley had been tapped for a seat on the board of directors at the mortgage giant Fannie Mae. Stanley was added to the board alongside newly confirmed Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte, the grandson of the late housing businessman and founder of PulteGroup — William J. Pulte.

In a nod to his new board role atop an agency that helps drive the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market, Stanley retweeted a Bloomberg story about the hire with a smiley emoji and the comment “Tech Support.”

But earlier today, Bloomberg reported that Stanley had abruptly resigned from the Fannie board, and that details about the reason for his quick departure weren’t immediately clear. As first reported here last month, Stanley had a brush with celebrity on Twitter in 2015 when he leaked the user database for the DDoS-for-hire service LizardStresser, and soon faced threats of physical violence against his family.

My 2015 story on that leak did not name Stanley, but he exposed himself as the source by posting a video about it on his Youtube channel. A review of domain names registered by Stanley shows he went by the nickname “enKrypt,” and was the former owner of a pirated software and hacking forum called error33[.]net, as well as theC0re, a video game cheating community.

Stanley is one of more than 50 DOGE workers, mostly young men and women who have worked with one or more of Musk’s companies. The Trump administration remains dogged by questions about how many — if any — of the DOGE workers were put through the gauntlet of a thorough security background investigation before being given access to such sensitive government databases.

That’s largely because in one of his first executive actions after being sworn in for a second term on Jan. 20, President Trump declared that the security clearance process was simply too onerous and time-consuming, and that anyone so designated by the White House counsel would have full top secret/sensitive compartmented information (TS/SCI) clearances for up to six months. Translation: We accepted the risk, so TAH-DAH! No risk!

Presumably, this is the same counsel who saw no ethical concerns with Musk “donating” Starlink to the White House, or with President Trump summoning the media to film him hawking Cybertrucks and Teslas (a.k.a. “Teslers”) on the White House lawn last week.

Mr. Musk’s unelected role as head of an ad hoc executive entity that is gleefully firing federal workers and feeding federal agencies into “the wood chipper” has seen his Tesla stock price plunge in recent weeks, while firebombings and other vandalism attacks on property carrying the Tesla logo are cropping up across the U.S. and overseas and driving down Tesla sales.

President Trump and his attorney general Pam Bondi have dubiously asserted that those responsible for attacks on Tesla dealerships are committing “domestic terrorism,” and that vandals will be prosecuted accordingly. But it’s not clear this administration would recognize a real domestic security threat if it was ensconced squarely behind the Resolute Desk.

Or at the pinnacle of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The Washington Post reported last month that Trump’s new FBI director Kash Patel was paid $25,000 last year by a film company owned by a dual U.S. Russian citizen that has made programs promoting “deep state” conspiracy theories pushed by the Kremlin.

“The resulting six-part documentary appeared on Tucker Carlson’s online network, itself a reliable conduit for Kremlin propaganda,” The Post reported. “In the film, Patel made his now infamous pledge to shut down the FBI’s headquarters in Washington and ‘open it up as a museum to the deep state.'”

When the head of the FBI is promising to turn his own agency headquarters into a mocking public exhibit on the U.S. National Mall, it may seem silly to fuss over the White House’s clumsy and insulting instructions to former employees they unlawfully fired.

Indeed, one consistent feedback I’ve heard from a subset of readers here is something to this effect: “I used to like reading your stuff more when you weren’t writing about politics all the time.”

My response to that is: “Yeah, me too.” It’s not that I’m suddenly interested in writing about political matters; it’s that various actions by this administration keep intruding on my areas of coverage.

A less charitable interpretation of that reader comment is that anyone still giving such feedback is either dangerously uninformed, being disingenuous, or just doesn’t want to keep being reminded that they’re on the side of the villains, despite all the evidence showing it.

Article II of the U.S. Constitution unambiguously states that the president shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed. But almost from Day One of his second term, Mr. Trump has been acting in violation of his sworn duty as president by choosing not to enforce laws passed by Congress (TikTok ban, anyone?), by freezing funds already allocated by Congress, and most recently by flouting a federal court order while simultaneously calling for the impeachment of the judge who issued it. Sworn to uphold, protect and defend The Constitution, President Trump appears to be creating new constitutional challenges with almost each passing day.

When Mr. Trump was voted out of office in November 2020, he turned to baseless claims of widespread “election fraud” to explain his loss — with deadly and long-lasting consequences. This time around, the rallying cry of DOGE and White House is “government fraud,” which gives the administration a certain amount of cover for its actions among a base of voters that has long sought to shrink the size and cost of government.

In reality, “government fraud” has become a term of derision and public scorn applied to anything or anyone the current administration doesn’t like. If DOGE and the White House were truly interested in trimming government waste, fraud and abuse, they could scarcely do better than consult the inspectors general fighting it at various federal agencies.

After all, the inspectors general likely know exactly where a great deal of the federal government’s fiscal skeletons are buried. Instead, Mr. Trump fired at least 17 inspectors general, leaving the government without critical oversight of agency activities. That action is unlikely to stem government fraud; if anything, it will only encourage such activity.

As Techdirt founder Mike Masnick noted in a recent column “Why Techdirt is Now a Democracy Blog (Whether We Like it or Not),” when the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore: It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist.

“This is why tech journalism’s perspective is so crucial right now,” Masnick wrote. “We’ve spent decades documenting how technology and entrepreneurship can either strengthen or undermine democratic institutions. We understand the dangers of concentrated power in the digital age. And we’ve watched in real-time as tech leaders who once championed innovation and openness now actively work to consolidate control and dismantle the very systems that enabled their success.”

“But right now, the story that matters most is how the dismantling of American institutions threatens everything else we cover,” Masnick continued. “When the fundamental structures that enable innovation, protect civil liberties, and foster open dialogue are under attack, every other tech policy story becomes secondary.”

ClickFix: How to Infect Your PC in Three Easy Steps

A clever malware deployment scheme first spotted in targeted attacks last year has now gone mainstream. In this scam, dubbed “ClickFix,” the visitor to a hacked or malicious website is asked to distinguish themselves from bots by pressing a combination of keyboard keys that causes Microsoft Windows to download password-stealing malware.

ClickFix attacks mimic the “Verify You are a Human” tests that many websites use to separate real visitors from content-scraping bots. This particular scam usually starts with a website popup that looks something like this:

Clicking the “I’m not a robot” button generates a pop-up message asking the user to take three sequential steps to prove their humanity.

Step 1 involves simultaneously pressing the keyboard key with the Windows icon and the letter “R,” which opens a Windows “Run” prompt that will execute any specified program that is already installed on the system.

Step 2 asks the user to press the “CTRL” key and the letter “V” at the same time, which pastes malicious code from the site’s virtual clipboard.

Step 3 — pressing the “Enter” key — causes Windows to download and launch malicious code through “mshta.exe,” a Windows program designed to run Microsoft HTML application files.

“This campaign delivers multiple families of commodity malware, including XWorm, Lumma stealer, VenomRAT, AsyncRAT, Danabot, and NetSupport RAT,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “Depending on the specific payload, the specific code launched through mshta.exe varies. Some samples have downloaded PowerShell, JavaScript, and portable executable (PE) content.”

According to Microsoft, hospitality workers are being tricked into downloading credential-stealing malware by cybercriminals impersonating Booking.com. The company said attackers have been sending malicious emails impersonating Booking.com, often referencing negative guest reviews, requests from prospective guests, or online promotion opportunities — all in a bid to convince people to step through one of these ClickFix attacks.

In November 2024, KrebsOnSecurity reported that hundreds of hotels that use booking.com had been subject to targeted phishing attacks. Some of those lures worked, and allowed thieves to gain control over booking.com accounts. From there, they sent out phishing messages asking for financial information from people who’d just booked travel through the company’s app.

Earlier this month, the security firm Arctic Wolf warned about ClickFix attacks targeting people working in the healthcare sector. The company said those attacks leveraged malicious code stitched into the widely used physical therapy video site HEP2go that redirected visitors to a ClickFix prompt.

An alert (PDF) released in October 2024 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services warned that the ClickFix attack can take many forms, including fake Google Chrome error pages and popups that spoof Facebook.

The ClickFix attack — and its reliance on mshta.exe — is reminiscent of phishing techniques employed for years that hid exploits inside Microsoft Office macros. Malicious macros became such a common malware threat that Microsoft was forced to start blocking macros by default in Office documents that try to download content from the web.

Alas, the email security vendor Proofpoint has documented plenty of ClickFix attacks via phishing emails that include HTML attachments spoofing Microsoft Office files. When opened, the attachment displays an image of Microsoft Word document with a pop-up error message directing users to click the “Solution” or “How to Fix” button.

Organizations that wish to do so can take advantage of Microsoft Group Policy restrictions to prevent Windows from executing the “run” command when users hit the Windows key and the “R” key simultaneously.

Microsoft: 6 Zero-Days in March 2025 Patch Tuesday

Microsoft today issued more than 50 security updates for its various Windows operating systems, including fixes for a whopping six zero-day vulnerabilities that are already seeing active exploitation.

Two of the zero-day flaws include CVE-2025-24991 and CVE-2025-24993, both vulnerabilities in NTFS, the default file system for Windows and Windows Server. Both require the attacker to trick a target into mounting a malicious virtual hard disk. CVE-2025-24993 would lead to the possibility of local code execution, while CVE-2025-24991 could cause NTFS to disclose portions of memory.

Microsoft credits researchers at ESET with reporting the zero-day bug labeled CVE-2025-24983, an elevation of privilege vulnerability in older versions of Windows. ESET said the exploit was deployed via the PipeMagic backdoor, capable of exfiltrating data and enabling remote access to the machine.

ESET’s Filip Jurčacko said the exploit in the wild targets only older versions of Windows OS: Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2. Although still used by millions, security support for these products ended more than a year ago, and mainstream support ended years ago. However, ESET notes the vulnerability itself also is present in newer Windows OS versions, including Windows 10 build 1809 and the still-supported Windows Server 2016.

Rapid7’s lead software engineer Adam Barnett said Windows 11 and Server 2019 onwards are not listed as receiving patches, so are presumably not vulnerable.

“It’s not clear why newer Windows products dodged this particular bullet,” Barnett wrote. “The Windows 32 subsystem is still presumably alive and well, since there is no apparent mention of its demise on the Windows client OS deprecated features list.”

The zero-day flaw CVE-2025-24984 is another NTFS weakness that can be exploited by inserting a malicious USB drive into a Windows computer. Barnett said Microsoft’s advisory for this bug doesn’t quite join the dots, but successful exploitation appears to mean that portions of heap memory could be improperly dumped into a log file, which could then be combed through by an attacker hungry for privileged information.

“A relatively low CVSSv3 base score of 4.6 reflects the practical difficulties of real-world exploitation, but a motivated attacker can sometimes achieve extraordinary results starting from the smallest of toeholds, and Microsoft does rate this vulnerability as important on its own proprietary severity ranking scale,” Barnett said.

Another zero-day fixed this month — CVE-2025-24985 — could allow attackers to install malicious code. As with the NTFS bugs, this one requires that the user mount a malicious virtual hard drive.

The final zero-day this month is CVE-2025-26633, a weakness in the Microsoft Management Console, a component of Windows that gives system administrators a way to configure and monitor the system. Exploiting this flaw requires the target to open a malicious file.

This month’s bundle of patch love from Redmond also addresses six other vulnerabilities Microsoft has rated “critical,” meaning that malware or malcontents could exploit them to seize control over vulnerable PCs with no help from users.

Barnett observed that this is now the sixth consecutive month where Microsoft has published zero-day vulnerabilities on Patch Tuesday without evaluating any of them as critical severity at time of publication.

The SANS Internet Storm Center has a useful list of all the Microsoft patches released today, indexed by severity. Windows enterprise administrators would do well to keep an eye on askwoody.com, which often has the scoop on any patches causing problems. Please consider backing up your data before updating, and leave a comment below if you experience any issues applying this month’s updates.

Alleged Co-Founder of Garantex Arrested in India

Authorities in India today arrested the alleged co-founder of Garantex, a cryptocurrency exchange sanctioned by the U.S. government in 2022 for facilitating tens of billions of dollars in money laundering by transnational criminal and cybercriminal organizations. Sources close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity the Lithuanian national Aleksej Besciokov, 46, was apprehended while vacationing on the coast of India with his family.

On March 7, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) unsealed an indictment against Besciokov and the other alleged co-founder of Garantex, Aleksandr Mira Serda, 40, a Russian national living in the United Arab Emirates.

Launched in 2019, Garantex was first sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control in April 2022 for receiving hundreds of millions in criminal proceeds, including funds used to facilitate hacking, ransomware, terrorism and drug trafficking. Since those penalties were levied, Garantex has processed more than $60 billion, according to the blockchain analysis company Elliptic.

“Garantex has been used in sanctions evasion by Russian elites, as well as to launder proceeds of crime including ransomware, darknet market trade and thefts attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group,” Elliptic wrote in a blog post. “Garantex has also been implicated in enabling Russian oligarchs to move their wealth out of the country, following the invasion of Ukraine.”

The DOJ alleges Besciokov was Garantex’s primary technical administrator and responsible for obtaining and maintaining critical Garantex infrastructure, as well as reviewing and approving transactions. Mira Serda is allegedly Garantex’s co-founder and chief commercial officer.

In conjunction with the release of the indictments, German and Finnish law enforcement seized servers hosting Garantex’s operations. A “most wanted” notice published by the U.S. Secret Service states that U.S. authorities separately obtained earlier copies of Garantex’s servers, including customer and accounting databases. Federal investigators say they also froze over $26 million in funds used to facilitate Garantex’s money laundering activities.

Besciokov was arrested within the past 24 hours while vacationing with his family in Varkala, a major coastal city in the southwest Indian state of Kerala. An officer with the local police department in Varkala confirmed Besciokov’s arrest, and said the suspect will appear in a Delhi court on March 14 to face charges.

The DOJ’s indictment says Besciokov went by the hacker handle “proforg.” This nickname corresponds to the administrator of a 20-year-old Russian language forum dedicated to nudity and crudity called “udaff.”

Besciokov and Mira Serda are each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Besciokov is also charged with one count of conspiracy to violate the International Economic Emergency Powers Act—which also carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in person—and with conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

Feds Link $150M Cyberheist to 2022 LastPass Hacks

In September 2023, KrebsOnSecurity published findings from security researchers who concluded that a series of six-figure cyberheists across dozens of victims resulted from thieves cracking master passwords stolen from the password manager service LastPass in 2022. In a court filing this week, U.S. federal agents investigating a spectacular $150 million cryptocurrency heist said they had reached the same conclusion.

On March 6, federal prosecutors in northern California said they seized approximately $24 million worth of cryptocurrencies that were clawed back following a $150 million cyberheist on Jan. 30, 2024. The complaint refers to the person robbed only as “Victim-1,” but according to blockchain security researcher ZachXBT the theft was perpetrated against Chris Larsen, the co-founder of the cryptocurrency platform Ripple. ZachXBT was the first to report on the heist.

This week’s action by the government merely allows investigators to officially seize the frozen funds. But there is an important conclusion in this seizure document: It basically says the U.S. Secret Service and the FBI agree with the findings of the LastPass breach story published here in September 2023.

That piece quoted security researchers who said they were witnessing six-figure crypto heists several times each month that all appeared to be the result of crooks cracking master passwords for the password vaults stolen from LastPass in 2022.

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been investigating these data breaches, and law enforcement agents investigating the instant case have spoken with FBI agents about their investigation,” reads the seizure complaint, which was written by a U.S. Secret Service agent. “From those conversations, law enforcement agents in this case learned that the stolen data and passwords that were stored in several victims’ online password manager accounts were used to illegally, and without authorization, access the victims’ electronic accounts and steal information, cryptocurrency, and other data.”

The document continues:

“Based on this investigation, law enforcement had probable cause to believe the same attackers behind the above-described commercial online password manager attack used a stolen password held in Victim 1’s online password manager account and, without authorization, accessed his cryptocurrency wallet/account.”

Working with dozens of victims, security researchers Nick Bax and Taylor Monahan found that none of the six-figure cyberheist victims appeared to have suffered the sorts of attacks that typically preface a high-dollar crypto theft, such as the compromise of one’s email and/or mobile phone accounts, or SIM-swapping attacks.

They discovered the victims all had something else in common: Each had at one point stored their cryptocurrency seed phrase — the secret code that lets anyone gain access to your cryptocurrency holdings — in the “Secure Notes” area of their LastPass account prior to the 2022 breaches at the company.

Bax and Monahan found another common theme with these robberies: They all followed a similar pattern of cashing out, rapidly moving stolen funds to a dizzying number of drop accounts scattered across various cryptocurrency exchanges.

According to the government, a similar level of complexity was present in the $150 million heist against the Ripple co-founder last year.

“The scale of a theft and rapid dissipation of funds would have required the efforts of multiple malicious actors, and was consistent with the online password manager breaches and attack on other victims whose cryptocurrency was stolen,” the government wrote. “For these reasons, law enforcement agents believe the cryptocurrency stolen from Victim 1 was committed by the same attackers who conducted the attack on the online password manager, and cryptocurrency thefts from other similarly situated victims.”

Reached for comment, LastPass said it has seen no definitive proof — from federal investigators or others — that the cyberheists in question were linked to the LastPass breaches.

“Since we initially disclosed this incident back in 2022, LastPass has worked in close cooperation with multiple representatives from law enforcement,” LastPass said in a written statement. “To date, our law enforcement partners have not made us aware of any conclusive evidence that connects any crypto thefts to our incident. In the meantime, we have been investing heavily in enhancing our security measures and will continue to do so.”

On August 25, 2022, LastPass CEO Karim Toubba told users the company had detected unusual activity in its software development environment, and that the intruders stole some source code and proprietary LastPass technical information. On Sept. 15, 2022, LastPass said an investigation into the August breach determined the attacker did not access any customer data or password vaults.

But on Nov. 30, 2022, LastPass notified customers about another, far more serious security incident that the company said leveraged data stolen in the August breach. LastPass disclosed that criminal hackers had compromised encrypted copies of some password vaults, as well as other personal information.

Experts say the breach would have given thieves “offline” access to encrypted password vaults, theoretically allowing them all the time in the world to try to crack some of the weaker master passwords using powerful systems that can attempt millions of password guesses per second.

Researchers found that many of the cyberheist victims had chosen master passwords with relatively low complexity, and were among LastPass’s oldest customers. That’s because legacy LastPass users were more likely to have master passwords that were protected with far fewer “iterations,” which refers to the number of times your password is run through the company’s encryption routines. In general, the more iterations, the longer it takes an offline attacker to crack your master password.

Over the years, LastPass forced new users to pick longer and more complex master passwords, and they increased the number of iterations on multiple occasions by several orders of magnitude. But researchers found strong indications that LastPass never succeeded in upgrading many of its older customers to the newer password requirements and protections.

Asked about LastPass’s continuing denials, Bax said that after the initial warning in our 2023 story, he naively hoped people would migrate their funds to new cryptocurrency wallets.

“While some did, the continued thefts underscore how much more needs to be done,” Bax told KrebsOnSecurity. “It’s validating to see the Secret Service and FBI corroborate our findings, but I’d much rather see fewer of these hacks in the first place. ZachXBT and SEAL 911 reported yet another wave of thefts as recently as December, showing the threat is still very real.”

Monahan said LastPass still hasn’t alerted their customers that their secrets—especially those stored in “Secure Notes”—may be at risk.

“Its been two and a half years since LastPass was first breached [and] hundreds of millions of dollars has been stolen from individuals and companies around the globe,” Monahan said. “They could have encouraged users to rotate their credentials. They could’ve prevented millions and millions of dollars from being stolen by these threat actors. But  instead they chose to deny that their customers were are risk and blame the victims instead.”

Who is the DOGE and X Technician Branden Spikes?

At 49, Branden Spikes isn’t just one of the oldest technologists who has been involved in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). As the current director of information technology at X/Twitter and an early hire at PayPal, Zip2, Tesla and SpaceX, Spikes is also among Musk’s most loyal employees. Here’s a closer look at this trusted Musk lieutenant, whose Russian ex-wife was once married to Elon’s cousin.

When President Trump took office again in January, he put the world’s richest man — Elon Musk — in charge of the U.S. Digital Service, and renamed the organization as DOGE. The group is reportedly staffed by at least 50 technologists, many of whom have ties to Musk’s companies.

DOGE has been enabling the president’s ongoing mass layoffs and firings of federal workers, largely by seizing control over computer systems and government data for a multitude of federal agencies, including the Social Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Treasury Department.

It is difficult to find another person connected to DOGE who has stronger ties to Musk than Branden Spikes. A native of California, Spikes initially teamed up with Musk in 1997 as a lead systems engineer for the software company Zip2, the first major venture for Musk. In 1999, Spikes was hired as director of IT at PayPal, and in 2002 he became just the fourth person hired at SpaceX.

In 2012, Spikes launched Spikes Security, a software product that sought to create a compartmentalized or “sandboxed” web browser that could insulate the user from malware attacks. A review of spikes.com in the Wayback Machine shows that as far back as 1998, Musk could be seen joining Spikes for team matches in the online games Quake and Quake II. In 2016, Spikes Security was merged with another security suite called Aurionpro, with the combined company renamed Cyberinc.

Spikes’s LinkedIn profile says he was appointed head of IT at X in February 2025. And although his name shows up on none of the lists of DOGE employees circulated by various media outlets, multiple sources told KrebsOnSecurity that Spikes was working with DOGE and operates within Musk’s inner circle of trust.

In a conversation with KrebsOnSecurity, Spikes said he is dedicated to his country and to saving it from what he sees as certain ruin.

“Myself, I was raised by a southern conservative family in California and I strongly believe in America and her future,” Spikes said. “This is why I volunteered for two months in DC recently to help DOGE save us from certain bankruptcy.”

Spikes told KrebsOnSecurity that he recently decided to head back home and focus on his job as director of IT at X.

“I loved it, but ultimately I did not want to leave my hometown and family back in California,” Spikes said of his tenure at DOGE. “After a couple of months it became clear that to continue helping I would need to move to DC and commit a lot more time, so I politely bowed out.”

Prior to founding Spikes Security, Branden Spikes was married to a native Russian woman named Natalia whom he’d met at a destination wedding in South America in 2003.

Branden and Natalia’s names are both on the registration records for the domain name orangetearoom[.]com. This domain, which DomainTools.com says was originally registered by Branden in 2009, is the home of a tax-exempt charity in Los Angeles called the California Russian Association.

Here is a photo from a 2011 event organized by the California Russian Association, showing Branden and Natalia at one of its “White Nights” charity fundraisers:

In 2011, the Spikes couple got divorced, and Natalia changed her last name to Haldeman. That is not her maiden name, which appears to be “Libina.” Rather, Natalia acquired the surname Haldeman in 1998, when she married Elon Musk’s cousin.

Reeve Haldeman is the son of Scott Haldeman, who is the brother of Elon Musk’s mother, Maye Musk. Divorce records show Reeve and Natalia officially terminated their marriage in 2007. Reeve Haldeman did not respond to a request for comment.

A review of other domain names connected to Natalia Haldeman’s email address show she has registered more than a dozen domains over the years that are tied to the California Russian Association, and an apparently related entity called the Russian Heritage Foundation, Inc.:

russianamericans.org
russianamericanstoday.com
russianamericanstoday.org
russiancalifornia.org
russianheritagefoundation.com
russianheritagefoundation.org
russianwhitenights.com
russianwhitenights.org
theforafoundation.org
thegoldentearoom.com
therussianheritagefoundation.org
tsarinahome.com

Ms. Haldeman did not respond to requests for comment. Her name and contact information appears in the registration records for these domains dating back to 2010, and a document published by ProPublica show that by 2016 Natalia Haldeman was appointed CEO of the California Russian Foundation.

The domain name that bears both Branden’s and Natalia’s names — orangetearoom.com — features photos of Ms. Haldeman at fundraising events for the Russian foundation through 2014. Additional photos of her and many of the same people can be seen through 2023 at another domain she registered in 2010 — russianheritagefoundation.com.

The photo of Branden and Natalia above is from one such event in 2011 (tied to russianwhitenights.org, another Haldeman domain). The person on the right in that image — Ivan Y. Podvalov — appears in many fundraising event photos published by the foundation over the past decade. Podvalov is a board member of the Congress of Russian Americans (CRA), a nonprofit group that is known for vehemently opposing U.S. financial and legal sanctions against Russia.

Writing for The Insider in 2022, journalist Diana Fishman described how the CRA has engaged in outright political lobbying, noting that the organization in June 2014 sent a letter to President Obama and the secretary of the United Nations, calling for an end to the “large-scale US intervention in Ukraine and the campaign to isolate Russia.”

“The US military contingents must be withdrawn immediately from the Eastern European region, and NATO’s enlargement efforts and provocative actions against Russia must cease,” the message read.

The Insider said the CRA director sent another two letters, this time to President Donald Trump, in 2017 and 2018.

“One was a request not to sign a law expanding sanctions against Russia,” Fishman wrote. “The other regretted the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats from the United States and urged not to jump to conclusions on Moscow’s involvement in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal.”

The nonprofit tracking website CauseIQ.com reports that The Russian Heritage Foundation, Inc. is now known as Constellation of Humanity.

The Russian Heritage Foundation and the California Russian Association both promote the interests of the Russian Orthodox Church. This page indexed by Archive.org from russiancalifornia.org shows The California Russian Foundation organized a community effort to establish an Orthodox church in Orange County, Calif.

A press release from the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) shows that in 2021 the Russian Heritage Foundation donated money to organize a conference for the Russian Orthodox Church in Serbia.

A review of the “Partners” listed on the Spikes’ jointly registered domain — orangetearoom.com — shows the organization worked with a marketing company called Russian American Media. Reporting by KrebsOnSecurity last year showed that Russian American Media also partners with the problematic people-search service Radaris, which was formed by two native Russian brothers in Massachusetts who have built a fleet of consumer data brokers and Russian affiliate programs.

When asked about his ex-wife’s history, Spikes said she has a good heart and bears no ill-will toward anyone.

“I attended several of Natalia’s social events over the years we were together and can assure you that she’s got the best intentions with those,” Spikes told KrebsOnSecurity. “There’s no funny business going on. It is just a way for those friendly immigrants to find resources amongst each other to help get settled in and chase the American dream. I mean, they’re not unlike the immigrants from other countries who come to America and try to find each other and help each other find others who speak the language and share in the building of their businesses here in America.”

Spikes said his own family roots go back deeply into American history, sharing that his 6th great grandfather was Alexander Hamilton on his mom’s side, and Jessie James on his dad’s side.

“My family roots are about as American as you can get,” he said. “I’ve also been entrusted with building and safeguarding Elon’s companies since 1999 and have a keen eye (as you do) for bad actors, so have enough perspective to tell you that Natalia has no bad blood and that she loves America.”

Of course, this perspective comes from someone who has the utmost regard for the interests of the “special government employee” Mr. Musk, who has been bragging about tossing entire federal agencies into the “wood chipper,” and who recently wielded an actual chainsaw on stage while referring to it as the “chainsaw for bureaucracy.”

“Elon’s intentions are good and you can trust him,” Spikes assured.

A special note of thanks for research assistance goes to Jacqueline Sweet, an independent investigative journalist whose work has been published in The Guardian, Rolling Stone, POLITICO and The Intercept.

Notorious Malware, Spam Host “Prospero” Moves to Kaspersky Lab

One of the most notorious providers of abuse-friendly “bulletproof” web hosting for cybercriminals has started routing its operations through networks run by the Russian antivirus and security firm Kaspersky Lab, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

Security experts say the Russia-based service provider Prospero OOO (the triple O is the Russian version of “LLC”) has long been a persistent source of malicious software, botnet controllers, and a torrent of phishing websites. Last year, the French security firm Intrinsec detailed Prospero’s connections to bulletproof services advertised on Russian cybercrime forums under the names Securehost and BEARHOST.

Bulletproof hosts are so named when they earn or cultivate a reputation for ignoring legal demands and abuse complaints. And BEARHOST has been cultivating its reputation since at least 2019.

“If you need a server for a botnet, for malware, brute, scan, phishing, fakes and any other tasks, please contact us,” BEARHOST’s ad on one forum advises. “We completely ignore all abuses without exception, including SPAMHAUS and other organizations.”

Intrinsec found Prospero has courted some of Russia’s nastiest cybercrime groups, hosting control servers for multiple ransomware gangs over the past two years. Intrinsec said its analysis showed Prospero frequently hosts malware operations such as SocGholish and GootLoader, which are spread primarily via fake browser updates on hacked websites and often lay the groundwork for more serious cyber intrusions — including ransomware.

BEARHOST prides itself on the ability to evade blocking by Spamhaus, an organization that many Internet service providers around the world rely on to help identify and block sources of malware and spam. Earlier this week, Spamhaus said it noticed that Prospero was suddenly connecting to the Internet by routing through networks operated by Kaspersky Lab in Moscow.

Update, March 1, 9:43 a.m. ET: In a written statement, Kaspersky said it is aware of the public claim about the company allegedly providing services to a “bulletproof” web hosting provider. Here is their full statement:

“Kaspersky denies these claims as the company does not work and has never worked with the service provider in question. The routing through networks operated by Kaspersky doesn’t by default mean provision of the company’s services, as Kaspersky’s automatic system (AS) path might appear as a technical prefix in the network of telecom providers the company works with and provides its DDoS services.”

“Kaspersky pays great attention to conducting business ethically and ensuring that its solutions are used for their original purpose of providing cybersecurity protection. The company is currently investigating the situation to inform the company whose network could have served as a transit for a “bulletproof” web hosting provider so that the former takes the necessary measures.”

Kaspersky began selling antivirus and security software in the United States in 2005, and the company’s malware researchers have earned accolades from the security community for many important discoveries over the years. But in September 2017, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) barred U.S. federal agencies from using Kaspersky software, mandating its removal within 90 days.

Cybersecurity reporter Kim Zetter notes that DHS didn’t cite any specific justification for its ban in 2017, but media reports quoting anonymous government officials referenced two incidents. Zetter wrote:

According to one story, an NSA contractor developing offensive hacking tools for the spy agency had Kaspersky software installed on his home computer where he was developing the tools, and the software detected the source code as malicious code and extracted it from his computer, as antivirus software is designed to do. A second story claimed that Israeli spies caught Russian government hackers using Kaspersky software to search customer systems for files containing U.S. secrets.

Kaspersky denied that anyone used its software to search for secret information on customer machines and said that the tools on the NSA worker’s machine were detected in the same way that all antivirus software detects files it deems suspicious and then quarantines or extracts them for analysis. Once Kaspersky discovered that the code its antivirus software detected on the NSA worker’s machine were not malicious programs but source code in development by the U.S. government for its hacking operations, CEO Eugene Kaspersky says he ordered workers to delete the code.

Last year, the U.S. Commerce Department banned the sale of Kaspersky software in the U.S. effective July 20, 2024. U.S. officials argued the ban was needed because Russian law requires domestic companies to cooperate in all official investigations, and thus the Russian government could force Kaspersky to secretly gather intelligence on its behalf.

Phishing data gathered last year by the Interisle Consulting Group ranked hosting networks by their size and concentration of spambot hosts, and found Prospero had a higher spam score than any other provider by far.

It remains unclear why Kaspersky is providing transit to Prospero. Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Kentik, said routing records show the relationship between Prospero and Kaspersky started at the beginning of December 2024.

Madory said Kaspersky’s network appears to be hosting several financial institutions, including Russia’s largest — Alfa-Bank. Kaspersky sells services to help protect customers from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and Madory said it could be that Prospero is simply purchasing that protection from Kaspersky.

But if that is the case, it doesn’t make the situation any better, said Zach Edwards, a senior threat researcher at the security firm Silent Push.

“In some ways, providing DDoS protection to a well-known bulletproof hosting provider may be even worse than just allowing them to connect to the rest of the Internet over your infrastructure,” Edwards said.

U.S. Soldier Charged in AT&T Hack Searched “Can Hacking Be Treason”

A U.S. Army soldier who pleaded guilty last week to leaking phone records for high-ranking U.S. government officials searched online for non-extradition countries and for an answer to the question “can hacking be treason?” prosecutors in the case said Wednesday. The government disclosed the details in a court motion to keep the defendant in custody until he is discharged from the military.

Cameron John Wagenius, 21, was arrested near the Army base in Fort Cavazos, Texas on Dec. 20, and charged with two criminal counts of unlawful transfer of confidential phone records. Wagenius was a communications specialist at a U.S. Army base in South Korea, who secretly went by the nickname Kiberphant0m and was part of a trio of criminal hackers that extorted dozens of companies last year over stolen data.

At the end of 2023, malicious hackers learned that many companies had uploaded sensitive customer records to accounts at the cloud data storage service Snowflake that were protected with little more than a username and password (no multi-factor authentication needed). After scouring darknet markets for stolen Snowflake account credentials, the hackers began raiding the data storage repositories used by some of the world’s largest corporations.

Among those was AT&T, which disclosed in July that cybercriminals had stolen personal information and phone and text message records for roughly 110 million people — nearly all of its customers. AT&T reportedly paid a hacker $370,000 to delete stolen phone records. More than 160 other Snowflake customers were relieved of data, including TicketMaster, Lending Tree, Advance Auto Parts and Neiman Marcus.

In several posts to an English-language cybercrime forum in November, Kiberphant0m leaked some of the phone records and threatened to leak them all unless paid a ransom. Prosecutors said that in addition to his public posts on the forum, Wagenius had engaged in multiple direct attempts to extort “Victim-1,” which appears to be a reference to AT&T. The government states that Kiberphant0m privately demanded $500,000 from Victim-1, threatening to release all of the stolen phone records unless he was paid.

On Feb. 19, Wagenius pleaded guilty to two counts of unlawfully transferring confidential phone records, but he did so without the benefit of a plea agreement. In entering the plea, Wagenius’s attorneys had asked the court to allow him to stay with his father pending his sentencing.

But in a response filed today (PDF), prosecutors in Seattle said Wagenius was a flight risk, partly because prior to his arrest he was searching online for how to defect to countries that do not extradite to the United States. According to the government, while Kiberphant0m was extorting AT&T, Wagenius’s searches included:

-“where can i defect the u.s government military which country will not hand me over”
-“U.S. military personnel defecting to Russia”
-“Embassy of Russia – Washington, D.C.”

“As discussed in the government’s sealed filing, the government has uncovered evidence suggesting that the charged conduct was only a small part of Wagenius’ malicious activity,” the government memo states. “On top of this, for more than two weeks in November 2024, Wagenius communicated with an email address he believed belonged to Country-1’s military intelligence service in an attempt to sell stolen information. Days after he apparently finished communicating with Country-1’s military intelligence service, Wagenius Googled, ‘can hacking be treason.'”

Prosecutors told the court investigators also found a screenshot on Wagenius’ laptop that suggested he had over 17,000 files that included passports, driver’s licenses, and other identity cards belonging to victims of a breach, and that in one of his online accounts, the government also found a fake identification document that contained his picture.

“Wagenius should also be detained because he presents a serious risk of flight, has the means and intent to flee, and is aware that he will likely face additional charges,” the Seattle prosecutors asserted.

The court filing says Wagenius is presently in the process of being separated from the Army, but the government has not received confirmation that his discharge has been finalized.

“The government’s understanding is that, until his discharge from the Army is finalized (which is expected to happen in early March), he may only be released directly to the Army,” reads a footnote in the memo. “Until that process is completed, Wagenius’ proposed release to his father should be rejected for this additional reason.”

Wagenius’s interest in defecting to another country in order to escape prosecution mirrors that of his alleged co-conspirator, John Erin Binns, an 25-year-old elusive American man indicted by the Justice Department for a 2021 breach at T-Mobile that exposed the personal information of at least 76.6 million customers.

Binns has since been charged with the Snowflake hack and subsequent extortion activity. He is currently in custody in a Turkish prison. Sources close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity that prior to his arrest by Turkish police, Binns visited the Russian embassy in Turkey to inquire about Russian citizenship.

In late November 2024, Canadian authorities arrested a third alleged member of the extortion conspiracy, 25-year-old Connor Riley Moucka of Kitchener, Ontario. The U.S. government has indicted Moucka and Binns, charging them with one count of conspiracy; 10 counts of wire fraud; four counts of computer fraud and abuse; two counts of extortion in relation to computer fraud; and two counts aggravated identity theft.

Less than a month before Wagenius’s arrest, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive into Kiberphant0m’s various Telegram and Discord identities over the years, revealing how the owner of the accounts told others they were in the Army and stationed in South Korea.

The maximum penalty Wagenius could face at sentencing includes up to ten years in prison for each count, and fines not to exceed $250,000.

Trump 2.0 Brings Cuts to Cyber, Consumer Protections

One month into his second term, President Trump’s actions to shrink the government through mass layoffs, firings and withholding funds allocated by Congress have thrown federal cybersecurity and consumer protection programs into disarray. At the same time, agencies are battling an ongoing effort by the world’s richest man to wrest control over their networks and data.

The Trump administration has fired at least 130 employees at the federal government’s foremost cybersecurity body — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Those dismissals reportedly included CISA staff dedicated to securing U.S. elections, and fighting misinformation and foreign influence operations.

Earlier this week, technologists with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) arrived at CISA and gained access to the agency’s email and networked files. Those DOGE staffers include Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a 19-year-old former denizen of the “Com,” an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network.

The investigative journalist Jacob Silverman writes that Coristine is the grandson of Valery Martynov, a KGB double agent who spied for the United States. Silverman recounted how Martynov’s wife Natalya Martynova moved to the United States with her two children after her husband’s death.

“Her son became a Virginia police officer who sometimes posts comments on blogs about his historically famous father,” Silverman wrote. “Her daughter became a financial professional who married Charles Coristine, the proprietor of LesserEvil, a snack company. Among their children is a 19-year-old young man named Edward Coristine, who currently wields an unknown amount of power and authority over the inner-workings of our federal government.”

Another member of DOGE is Christopher Stanley, formerly senior director for security engineering at X and principal security engineer at Musk’s SpaceX. Stanley, 33, had a brush with celebrity on Twitter in 2015 when he leaked the user database for the DDoS-for-hire service LizardStresser, and soon faced threats of physical violence against his family.

My 2015 story on that leak did not name Stanley, but he exposed himself as the source by posting a video about it on his Youtube channel. A review of domain names registered by Stanley shows he went by the nickname “enKrypt,” and was the former owner of a pirated software and hacking forum called error33[.]net, as well as theC0re, a video game cheating community.

“A NATIONAL CYBERATTACK”

DOGE has been steadily gaining sensitive network access to federal agencies that hold a staggering amount of personal and financial information on Americans, including the Social Security Administration (SSA), the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the Treasury Department.

Most recently, DOGE has sought broad access to systems at the Internal Revenue Service that contain the personal tax information on millions of Americans, including how much individuals earn and owe, property information, and even details related to child custody agreements. The New York Times reported Friday that the IRS had reached an agreement whereby a single DOGE employee — 25-year-old Gavin Kliger — will be allowed to see only anonymized taxpayer information.

The rapidity with which DOGE has rifled through one federal database after another in the name of unearthing “massive fraud” by government agencies has alarmed many security experts, who warned that DOGE’s actions bypassed essential safeguards and security measures.

“The most alarming aspect isn’t just the access being granted,” wrote Bruce Schneier and Davi Ottenheimer, referring to DOGE as a national cyberattack. “It’s the systematic dismantling of security measures that would detect and prevent misuse—including standard incident response protocols, auditing, and change-tracking mechanisms—by removing the career officials in charge of those security measures and replacing them with inexperienced operators.”

Jacob Williams is a former hacker with the U.S. National Security Agency who now works as managing director of the cybersecurity firm Hunter Labs. Williams kicked a virtual hornet’s nest last week when he posted on LinkedIn that the network incursions by DOGE were “a bigger threat to U.S. federal government information systems than China.”

Williams said while he doesn’t believe anyone at DOGE would intentionally harm the integrity and availability of these systems, it’s widely reported (and not denied) that DOGE introduced code changes into multiple federal IT systems. These code changes, he maintained, are not following the normal process for vetting and review given to federal government IT systems.

“For those thinking ‘I’m glad they aren’t following the normal federal government IT processes, those are too burdensome’ I get where you’re coming from,” Williams wrote. “But another name for ‘red tape’ are ‘controls.’ If you’re comfortable bypassing controls for the advancement of your agenda, I have questions – mostly about whether you do this in your day job too. Please tag your employer letting them know your position when you comment that controls aren’t important (doubly so if you work in cybersecurity). All satire aside, if you’re comfortable abandoning controls for expediency, I implore you to decide where the line is that you won’t cross in that regard.”

The DOGE website’s “wall of receipts” boasts that Musk and his team have saved the federal government more than $55 billion through staff reductions, lease cancellations and terminated contracts. But a team of reporters at The New York Times found the math that could back up those checks is marred with accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, outdated data and other mistakes.

For example, DOGE claimed it saved $8 billion in one contract, when the total amount was actually $8 million, The Times found.

“Some contracts the group claims credit for were double- or triple-counted,” reads a Times story with six bylines. “Another initially contained an error that inflated the totals by billions of dollars. While the DOGE team has surely cut some number of billions of dollars, its slapdash accounting adds to a pattern of recklessness by the group, which has recently gained access to sensitive government payment systems.”

So far, the DOGE website does not inspire confidence: We learned last week that the doge.gov administrators somehow left their database wide open, allowing someone to publish messages that ridiculed the site’s insecurity.

APPOINTMENTS

Trump’s efforts to grab federal agencies by their data has seen him replace career civil servants who refused to allow DOGE access to agency networks. CNN reports that Michelle King, acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration for more than 30 years, was shown the door after she denied DOGE access to sensitive information.

King was replaced by Leland Dudek, formerly a senior advisor in the SSA’s Office of Program Integrity. This week, Dudek posted a now-deleted message on LinkedIn acknowledging he had been placed on administrative leave for cooperating with DOGE.

“I confess,” Dudek wrote. “I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done. I confess. I asked where the fat was and is in our contracts so we can make the right tough choices.”

According to Wired, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was also bracing this week for roughly 500 staffers to be fired, which could have serious impacts on NIST’s cybersecurity standards and software vulnerability tracking work.

“And cuts last week at the US Digital Service included the cybersecurity lead for the central Veterans Affairs portal, VA.gov, potentially leaving VA systems and data more vulnerable without someone in his role,” Wired’s Andy Greenberg and Lily Hay Newman wrote.

NextGov reports that Trump named the Department of Defense’s new chief information security officer: Katie Arrington, a former South Carolina state lawmaker who helped steer Pentagon cybersecurity contracting policy before being put on leave amid accusations that she disclosed classified data from a military intelligence agency.

NextGov notes that the National Security Agency suspended her clearance in 2021, although the exact reasons that led to the suspension and her subsequent leave were classified. Arrington argued that the suspension was a politically motivated effort to silence her.

Trump also appointed the former chief operating officer of the Republican National Committee as the new head of the Office of National Cyber Director. Sean Cairncross, who has no formal experience in technology or security, will be responsible for coordinating national cybersecurity policy, advising the president on cyber threats, and ensuring a unified federal response to emerging cyber-risks, Politico writes.

DarkReading reports that Cairncross would share responsibility for advising the president on cyber matters, along with the director of cyber at the White House National Security Council (NSC) — a group that advises the president on all matters security related, and not just cyber.

CONSUMER PROTECTION?

The president also ordered staffers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to stop most work. Created by Congress in 2011 to be a clearinghouse of consumer complaints, the CFPB has sued some of the nation’s largest financial institutions for violating consumer protection laws.

The CFPB says its actions have put nearly $18 billion back in Americans’ pockets in the form of monetary compensation or canceled debts, and imposed $4 billion in civil money penalties against violators. The CFPB’s homepage has featured a “404: Page not found” error for weeks now.

Trump has appointed Russell Vought, the architect of the conservative policy playbook Project 2025, to be the CFPB’s acting director. Vought has publicly favored abolishing the agency, as has Elon Musk, whose efforts to remake X into a payments platform would otherwise be regulated by the CFPB.

The New York Times recently published a useful graphic showing all of the government staffing changes, including the firing of several top officials, affecting agencies with federal investigations into or regulatory battles with Musk’s companies. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee also have released a comprehensive account (PDF) of Musk’s various conflicts of interest.

As the Times notes, Musk and his companies have repeatedly failed to comply with federal reporting protocols aimed at protecting state secrets, and these failures have prompted at least three federal reviews. Those include an inquiry launched last year by the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General. Four days after taking office, Trump fired the DoD inspector general along with 17 other inspectors general.

The Trump administration also shifted the enforcement priorities of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) away from prosecuting misconduct in the cryptocurrency sector, reassigning lawyers and renaming the unit to focus more on “cyber and emerging technologies.”

Reuters reports that the former SEC chair Gary Gensler made fighting misconduct in a sector he termed the “wild west” a priority for the agency, targeting not only cryptocurrency fraudsters but also the large firms that facilitate trading such as Coinbase.

On Friday, Coinbase said the SEC planned to withdraw its lawsuit against the crypto exchange. Also on Friday, the cryptocurrency exchange Bybit announced on X that a cybersecurity breach led to the theft of more than $1.4 billion worth of cryptocurrencies — making it the largest crypto heist ever.

ORGANIZED CRIME AND CORRUPTION

On Feb. 10, Trump ordered executive branch agencies to stop enforcing the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which froze foreign bribery investigations, and even allows for “remedial actions” of past enforcement actions deemed “inappropriate.”

Trump’s action also disbanded the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative and KleptoCapture Task Force — units which proved their value in corruption cases and in seizing the assets of sanctioned Russian oligarchs — and diverted resources away from investigating white-collar crime.

That’s according to the independent Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an investigative journalism outlet that until very recently was funded in part by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The OCCRP lost nearly a third of its funding and was forced to lay off 43 reporters and staff after Trump moved to shutter USAID and freeze its spending. NBC News reports the Trump administration plans to gut the agency and leave fewer than 300 staffers on the job out of the current 8,000 direct hires and contractors.

The Global Investigative Journalism Network wrote this week that the sudden hold on USAID foreign assistance funding has frozen an estimated $268 million in agreed grants for independent media and the free flow of information in more than 30 countries — including several under repressive regimes.

Elon Musk has called USAID “a criminal organization” without evidence, and promoted fringe theories on his social media platform X that the agency operated without oversight and was rife with fraud. Just months before the election, USAID’s Office of Inspector General announced an investigation into USAID’s oversight of Starlink satellite terminals provided to the government of Ukraine.

KrebsOnSecurity this week heard from a trusted source that all outgoing email from USAID now carries a notation of “sensitive but unclassified,” a designation that experts say could make it more difficult for journalists and others to obtain USAID email records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). On Feb. 20, Fedscoop reported also hearing the same thing from multiple sources, noting that the added message cannot be seen by senders until after the email is sent.

FIVE BULLETS

On Feb. 18, Trump issued an executive order declaring that only the U.S. attorney general and the president can provide authoritative interpretations of the law for the executive branch, and that this authority extends to independent agencies operating under the executive branch.

Trump is arguing that Article II, Clause 1 of the Constitution vests this power with the president. However, jurist.org writes that Article II does not expressly state the president or any other person in the executive branch has the power to interpret laws.

“The article states that the president is required to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed,'” Juris noted. “Jurisdiction to interpret laws and determine constitutionality belongs to the judicial branch under Article III. The framers of the Constitution designed the separation of duties to prevent any single branch of government from becoming too powerful.”

The executive order requires all agencies to submit to “performance standards and management objectives” to be established by the White House Office of Management and Budget, and to report periodically to the president.

Those performance metrics are already being requested: Employees at multiple federal agencies on Saturday reported receiving an email from the Office of Personnel Management ordering them to reply with a set of bullet points justifying their work for the past week.

“Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager,” the notice read. “Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments. Deadline is this Monday at 11:59 p.m. EST.”

In a social media post Saturday, Musk said the directive came at the behest of President Trump, and that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. Meanwhile, Bloomberg writes the Department of Justice has been urging employees to hold off replying out of concern doing so could trigger ethics violations. The National Treasury Employees Union also is advising its employees not to respond.

A legal battle over Trump’s latest executive order is bound to join more than 70 other lawsuits currently underway to halt the administration’s efforts to massively reduce the size of the federal workforce through layoffs, firings and attrition.

KING TRUMP?

On Feb. 15, the president posted on social media, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” citing a quote often attributed to the French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte. Four days later, Trump referred to himself as “the king” on social media, while the White House nonchalantly posted an illustration of him wearing a crown.

Trump has been publicly musing about running for an unconstitutional third-term in office, a statement that some of his supporters dismiss as Trump just trying to rile his liberal critics. However, just days after Trump began his second term, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) introduced a bill to amend the Constitution so that Trump — and any other future president — can be elected to serve a third term.

This week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Rep. Ogles reportedly led a group of Trump supporters calling itself the “Third Term Project,” which is trying to gain support for the bill from GOP lawmakers. The event featured images of Trump depicted as Caesar.

Russia continues to be among the world’s top exporters of cybercrime, narcotics, money laundering, human trafficking, disinformation, war and death, and yet the Trump administration has suddenly broken with the Western world in normalizing relations with Moscow.

This week President Trump stunned U.S. allies by repeating Kremlin talking points that Ukraine is somehow responsible for Russia’s invasion, and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a “dictator.” The president repeated these lies even as his administration is demanding that Zelensky give the United States half of his country’s mineral wealth in exchange for a promise that Russia will cease its territorial aggression there.

President Trump’s servility toward an actual dictator — Russian President Vladimir Putin — does not bode well for efforts to improve the cybersecurity of U.S. federal IT networks, or the private sector systems on which the government is largely reliant. In addition, this administration’s baffling moves to alienate, antagonize and sideline our closest allies could make it more difficult for the United States to secure their ongoing cooperation in cybercrime investigations.

It’s also startling how closely DOGE’s approach so far hews to tactics typically employed by ransomware gangs: A group of 20-somethings with names like “Big Balls” shows up on a weekend and gains access to your servers, deletes data, locks out key staff, takes your website down, and prevents you from serving customers.

When the federal executive starts imitating ransomware playbooks against its own agencies while Congress largely gazes on in either bewilderment or amusement, we’re in four-alarm fire territory. At least in theory, one can negotiate with ransomware purveyors.

How Phished Data Turns into Apple & Google Wallets

Carding — the underground business of stealing, selling and swiping stolen payment card data — has long been the dominion of Russia-based hackers. Happily, the broad deployment of more secure chip-based payment cards in the United States has weakened the carding market. But a flurry of innovation from cybercrime groups in China is breathing new life into the carding industry, by turning phished card data into mobile wallets that can be used online and at main street stores.

If you own a mobile phone, the chances are excellent that at some point in the past two years it has received at least one phishing message that spoofs the U.S. Postal Service to supposedly collect some outstanding delivery fee, or an SMS that pretends to be a local toll road operator warning of a delinquent toll fee.

These messages are being sent through sophisticated phishing kits sold by several cybercriminals based in mainland China. And they are not traditional SMS phishing or “smishing” messages, as they bypass the mobile networks entirely. Rather, the missives are sent through the Apple iMessage service and through RCS, the functionally equivalent technology on Google phones.

People who enter their payment card data at one of these sites will be told their financial institution needs to verify the small transaction by sending a one-time passcode to the customer’s mobile device. In reality, that code will be sent by the victim’s financial institution to verify that the user indeed wishes to link their card information to a mobile wallet.

If the victim then provides that one-time code, the phishers will link the card data to a new mobile wallet from Apple or Google, loading the wallet onto a mobile phone that the scammers control.

CARDING REINVENTED

Ford Merrill works in security research at SecAlliance, a CSIS Security Group company. Merrill has been studying the evolution of several China-based smishing gangs, and found that most of them feature helpful and informative video tutorials in their sales accounts on Telegram. Those videos show the thieves are loading multiple stolen digital wallets on a single mobile device, and then selling those phones in bulk for hundreds of dollars apiece.

“Who says carding is dead?,” said Merrill, who presented about his findings at the M3AAWG security conference in Lisbon earlier today. “This is the best mag stripe cloning device ever. This threat actor is saying you need to buy at least 10 phones, and they’ll air ship them to you.”

One promotional video shows stacks of milk crates stuffed full of phones for sale. A closer inspection reveals that each phone is affixed with a handwritten notation that typically references the date its mobile wallets were added, the number of wallets on the device, and the initials of the seller.

Merrill said one common way criminal groups in China are cashing out with these stolen mobile wallets involves setting up fake e-commerce businesses on Stripe or Zelle and running transactions through those entities — often for amounts totaling between $100 and $500.

Merrill said that when these phishing groups first began operating in earnest two years ago, they would wait between 60 to 90 days before selling the phones or using them for fraud. But these days that waiting period is more like just seven to ten days, he said.

“When they first installed this, the actors were very patient,” he said. “Nowadays, they only wait like 10 days before [the wallets] are hit hard and fast.”

GHOST TAP

Criminals also can cash out mobile wallets by obtaining real point-of-sale terminals and using tap-to-pay on phone after phone. But they also offer a more cutting-edge mobile fraud technology: Merrill found that at least one of the Chinese phishing groups sells an Android app called “ZNFC” that can relay a valid NFC transaction to anywhere in the world. The user simply waves their phone at a local payment terminal that accepts Apple or Google pay, and the app relays an NFC transaction over the Internet from a phone in China.

“The software can work from anywhere in the world,” Merrill said. “These guys provide the software for $500 a month, and it can relay both NFC enabled tap-to-pay as well as any digital wallet. They even have 24-hour support.”

The rise of so-called “ghost tap” mobile software was first documented in November 2024 by security experts at ThreatFabric. Andy Chandler, the company’s chief commercial officer, said their researchers have since identified a number of criminal groups from different regions of the world latching on to this scheme.

Chandler said those include organized crime gangs in Europe that are using similar mobile wallet and NFC attacks to take money out of ATMs made to work with smartphones.

“No one is talking about it, but we’re now seeing ten different methodologies using the same modus operandi, and none of them are doing it the same,” Chandler said. “This is much bigger than the banks are prepared to say.”

A November 2024 story in the Singapore daily The Straits Times reported authorities there arrested three foreign men who were recruited in their home countries via social messaging platforms, and given ghost tap apps with which to purchase expensive items from retailers, including mobile phones, jewelry, and gold bars.

“Since Nov 4, at least 10 victims who had fallen for e-commerce scams have reported unauthorised transactions totaling more than $100,000 on their credit cards for purchases such as electronic products, like iPhones and chargers, and jewelry in Singapore,” The Straits Times wrote, noting that in another case with a similar modus operandi, the police arrested a Malaysian man and woman on Nov 8.

ADVANCED PHISHING TECHNIQUES

According to Merrill, the phishing pages that spoof the USPS and various toll road operators are powered by several innovations designed to maximize the extraction of victim data.

For example, a would-be smishing victim might enter their personal and financial information, but then decide the whole thing is scam before actually submitting the data. In this case, anything typed into the data fields of the phishing page will be captured in real time, regardless of whether the visitor actually clicks the “submit” button.

Merrill said people who submit payment card data to these phishing sites often are then told their card can’t be processed, and urged to use a different card. This technique, he said, sometimes allows the phishers to steal more than one mobile wallet per victim.

Many phishing websites expose victim data by storing the stolen information directly on the phishing domain. But Merrill said these Chinese phishing kits will forward all victim data to a back-end database operated by the phishing kit vendors. That way, even when the smishing sites get taken down for fraud, the stolen data is still safe and secure.

Another important innovation is the use of mass-created Apple and Google user accounts through which these phishers send their spam messages. One of the Chinese phishing groups posted images on their Telegram sales channels showing how these robot Apple and Google accounts are loaded onto Apple and Google phones, and arranged snugly next to each other in an expansive, multi-tiered rack that sits directly in front of the phishing service operator.

In other words, the smishing websites are powered by real human operators as long as new messages are being sent. Merrill said the criminals appear to send only a few dozen messages at a time, likely because completing the scam takes manual work by the human operators in China. After all, most one-time codes used for mobile wallet provisioning are generally only good for a few minutes before they expire.

Notably, none of the phishing sites spoofing the toll operators or postal services will load in a regular Web browser; they will only render if they detect that a visitor is coming from a mobile device.

“One of the reasons they want you to be on a mobile device is they want you to be on the same device that is going to receive the one-time code,” Merrill said. “They also want to minimize the chances you will leave. And if they want to get that mobile tokenization and grab your one-time code, they need a live operator.”

Merrill found the Chinese phishing kits feature another innovation that makes it simple for customers to turn stolen card details into a mobile wallet: They programmatically take the card data supplied by the phishing victim and convert it into a digital image of a real payment card that matches that victim’s financial institution. That way, attempting to enroll a stolen card into Apple Pay, for example, becomes as easy as scanning the fabricated card image with an iPhone.

“The phone isn’t smart enough to know whether it’s a real card or just an image,” Merrill said. “So it scans the card into Apple Pay, which says okay we need to verify that you’re the owner of the card by sending a one-time code.”

PROFITS

How profitable are these mobile phishing kits? The best guess so far comes from data gathered by other security researchers who’ve been tracking these advanced Chinese phishing vendors.

In August 2023, the security firm Resecurity discovered a vulnerability in one popular Chinese phish kit vendor’s platform that exposed the personal and financial data of phishing victims. Resecurity dubbed the group the Smishing Triad, and found the gang had harvested 108,044 payment cards across 31 phishing domains (3,485 cards per domain).

In August 2024, security researcher Grant Smith gave a presentation at the DEFCON security conference about tracking down the Smishing Triad after scammers spoofing the U.S. Postal Service duped his wife. By identifying a different vulnerability in the gang’s phishing kit, Smith said he was able to see that people entered 438,669 unique credit cards in 1,133 phishing domains (387 cards per domain).

Based on his research, Merrill said it’s reasonable to expect between $100 and $500 in losses on each card that is turned into a mobile wallet. Merrill said they observed nearly 33,000 unique domains tied to these Chinese smishing groups during the year between the publication of Resecurity’s research and Smith’s DEFCON talk.

Using a median number of 1,935 cards per domain and a conservative loss of $250 per card, that comes out to about $15 billion in fraudulent charges over a year.

Merrill was reluctant to say whether he’d identified additional security vulnerabilities in any of the phishing kits sold by the Chinese groups, noting that the phishers quickly fixed the vulnerabilities that were detailed publicly by Resecurity and Smith.

FIGHTING BACK

Adoption of touchless payments took off in the United States after the Coronavirus pandemic emerged, and many financial institutions in the United States were eager to make it simple for customers to link payment cards to mobile wallets. Thus, the authentication requirement for doing so defaulted to sending the customer a one-time code via SMS.

Experts say the continued reliance on one-time codes for onboarding mobile wallets has fostered this new wave of carding. KrebsOnSecurity interviewed a security executive from a large European financial institution who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

That expert said the lag between the phishing of victim card data and its eventual use for fraud has left many financial institutions struggling to correlate the causes of their losses.

“That’s part of why the industry as a whole has been caught by surprise,” the expert said. “A lot of people are asking, how this is possible now that we’ve tokenized a plaintext process. We’ve never seen the volume of sending and people responding that we’re seeing with these phishers.”

To improve the security of digital wallet provisioning, some banks in Europe and Asia require customers to log in to the bank’s mobile app before they can link a digital wallet to their device.

Addressing the ghost tap threat may require updates to contactless payment terminals, to better identify NFC transactions that are being relayed from another device. But experts say it’s unrealistic to expect retailers will be eager to replace existing payment terminals before their expected lifespans expire.

And of course Apple and Google have an increased role to play as well, given that their accounts are being created en masse and used to blast out these smishing messages. Both companies could easily tell which of their devices suddenly have 7-10 different mobile wallets added from 7-10 different people around the world. They could also recommend that financial institutions use more secure authentication methods for mobile wallet provisioning.

Neither Apple nor Google responded to requests for comment on this story.

Nearly a Year Later, Mozilla is Still Promoting OneRep

In mid-March 2024, KrebsOnSecurity revealed that the founder of the personal data removal service Onerep also founded dozens of people-search companies. Shortly after that investigation was published, Mozilla said it would stop bundling Onerep with the Firefox browser and wind down its partnership with the company. But nearly a year later, Mozilla is still promoting it to Firefox users.

Mozilla offers Onerep to Firefox users on a subscription basis as part of Mozilla Monitor Plus. Launched in 2018 under the name Firefox Monitor, Mozilla Monitor also checks data from the website Have I Been Pwned? to let users know when their email addresses or password are leaked in data breaches.

The ink on that partnership agreement had barely dried before KrebsOnSecurity published a story showing that Onerep’s Belarusian CEO and founder Dimitiri Shelest launched dozens of people-search services since 2010, including a still-active data broker called Nuwber that sells background reports on people. This seemed to contradict Onerep’s stated motto, “We believe that no one should compromise personal online security and get a profit from it.”

Shelest released a lengthy statement (PDF) wherein he acknowledged maintaining an ownership stake in Nuwber, a consumer data broker he founded in 2015 — around the same time he started Onerep.

Shelest maintained that Nuwber has “zero cross-over or information-sharing with Onerep,” and said any other old domains that may be found and associated with his name are no longer being operated by him.

“I get it,” Shelest wrote. “My affiliation with a people search business may look odd from the outside. In truth, if I hadn’t taken that initial path with a deep dive into how people search sites work, Onerep wouldn’t have the best tech and team in the space. Still, I now appreciate that we did not make this more clear in the past and I’m aiming to do better in the future.”

When asked to comment on the findings, Mozilla said then that although customer data was never at risk, the outside financial interests and activities of Onerep’s CEO did not align with their values.

“We’re working now to solidify a transition plan that will provide customers with a seamless experience and will continue to put their interests first,” Mozilla said.

In October 2024, Mozilla published a statement saying the search for a different provider was taking longer than anticipated.

“While we continue to evaluate vendors, finding a technically excellent and values-aligned partner takes time,” Mozilla wrote. “While we continue this search, Onerep will remain the backend provider, ensuring that we can maintain uninterrupted services while we continue evaluating new potential partners that align more closely with Mozilla’s values and user expectations. We are conducting thorough diligence to find the right vendor.”

Asked for an update, Mozilla said the search for a replacement partner continues.

“The work’s ongoing but we haven’t found the right alternative yet,” Mozilla said in an emailed statement. “Our customers’ data remains safe, and since the product provides a lot of value to our subscribers, we’ll continue to offer it during this process.”

It’s a win-win for Mozilla that they’ve received accolades for their principled response while continuing to partner with Onerep almost a year later. But if it takes so long to find a suitable replacement, what does that say about the personal data removal industry itself?

Onerep appears to be working in partnership with another problematic people-search service: Radaris, which has a history of ignoring opt-out requests or failing to honor them. A week before breaking the story about Onerep, KrebsOnSecurity published research showing the co-founders of Radaris were two native Russian brothers who’d built a vast network of affiliate marketing programs and consumer data broker services.

Lawyers for the Radaris co-founders threatened to sue KrebsOnSecurity unless that story was retracted in full, claiming the founders were in fact Ukrainian and that our reporting had defamed the brothers by associating them with the actions of Radaris. Instead, we published a follow-up investigation which showed that not only did the brothers from Russia create Radaris, for many years they issued press releases quoting a fictitious CEO seeking money from investors.

Several readers have shared emails they received from Radaris after attempting to remove their personal data, and those messages show Radaris has been promoting Onerep.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, February 2025 Edition

Microsoft today issued security updates to fix at least 56 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software, including two zero-day flaws that are being actively exploited.

All supported Windows operating systems will receive an update this month for a buffer overflow vulnerability that carries the catchy name CVE-2025-21418. This patch should be a priority for enterprises, as Microsoft says it is being exploited, has low attack complexity, and no requirements for user interaction.

Tenable senior staff research engineer Satnam Narang noted that since 2022, there have been nine elevation of privilege vulnerabilities in this same Windows component — three each year — including one in 2024 that was exploited in the wild as a zero day (CVE-2024-38193).

“CVE-2024-38193 was exploited by the North Korean APT group known as Lazarus Group to implant a new version of the FudModule rootkit in order to maintain persistence and stealth on compromised systems,” Narang said. “At this time, it is unclear if CVE-2025-21418 was also exploited by Lazarus Group.”

The other zero-day, CVE-2025-21391, is an elevation of privilege vulnerability in Windows Storage that could be used to delete files on a targeted system. Microsoft’s advisory on this bug references something called “CWE-59: Improper Link Resolution Before File Access,” says no user interaction is required, and that the attack complexity is low.

Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7, said although the advisory provides scant detail, and even offers some vague reassurance that ‘an attacker would only be able to delete targeted files on a system,’ it would be a mistake to assume that the impact of deleting arbitrary files would be limited to data loss or denial of service.

“As long ago as 2022, ZDI researchers set out how a motivated attacker could parlay arbitrary file deletion into full SYSTEM access using techniques which also involve creative misuse of symbolic links,”Barnett wrote.

One vulnerability patched today that was publicly disclosed earlier is CVE-2025-21377, another weakness that could allow an attacker to elevate their privileges on a vulnerable Windows system. Specifically, this is yet another Windows flaw that can be used to steal NTLMv2 hashes — essentially allowing an attacker to authenticate as the targeted user without having to log in.

According to Microsoft, minimal user interaction with a malicious file is needed to exploit CVE-2025-21377, including selecting, inspecting or “performing an action other than opening or executing the file.”

“This trademark linguistic ducking and weaving may be Microsoft’s way of saying ‘if we told you any more, we’d give the game away,'” Barnett said. “Accordingly, Microsoft assesses exploitation as more likely.”

The SANS Internet Storm Center has a handy list of all the Microsoft patches released today, indexed by severity. Windows enterprise administrators would do well to keep an eye on askwoody.com, which often has the scoop on any patches causing problems.

It’s getting harder to buy Windows software that isn’t also bundled with Microsoft’s flagship Copilot artificial intelligence (AI) feature. Last month Microsoft started bundling Copilot with Microsoft Office 365, which Redmond has since rebranded as “Microsoft 365 Copilot.” Ostensibly to offset the costs of its substantial AI investments, Microsoft also jacked up prices from 22 percent to 30 percent for upcoming license renewals and new subscribers.

Office-watch.com writes that existing Office 365 users who are paying an annual cloud license do have the option of “Microsoft 365 Classic,” an AI-free subscription at a lower price, but that many customers are not offered the option until they attempt to cancel their existing Office subscription.

In other security patch news, Apple has shipped iOS 18.3.1, which fixes a zero day vulnerability (CVE-2025-24200) that is showing up in attacks.

Adobe has issued security updates that fix a total of 45 vulnerabilities across InDesign, Commerce, Substance 3D Stager, InCopy, Illustrator, Substance 3D Designer and Photoshop Elements.

Chris Goettl at Ivanti notes that Google Chrome is shipping an update today which will trigger updates for Chromium based browsers including Microsoft Edge, so be on the lookout for Chrome and Edge updates as we proceed through the week.

Teen on Musk’s DOGE Team Graduated from ‘The Com’

Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so. As today’s story explores, the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant collaboration.

Since President Trump’s second inauguration, Musk’s DOGE team has gained access to a truly staggering amount of personal and sensitive data on American citizens, moving quickly to seize control over databases at the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Resources, among others.

Wired first reported on Feb. 2 that one of the technologists on Musk’s crew is a 19-year-old high school graduate named Edward Coristine, who reportedly goes by the nickname “Big Balls” online. One of the companies Coristine founded, Tesla.Sexy LLC, was set up in 2021, when he would have been around 16 years old.

“Tesla.Sexy LLC controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains,” Wired reported. “One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market. While the operation of a Russian website would not violate US sanctions preventing Americans doing business with Russian companies, it could potentially be a factor in a security clearance review.”

Mr. Coristine has not responded to requests for comment. In a follow-up story this week, Wired found that someone using a Telegram handle tied to Coristine solicited a DDoS-for-hire service in 2022, and that he worked for a short time at a company that specializes in protecting customers from DDoS attacks.

Internet routing records show that Coristine runs an Internet service provider called Packetware (AS400495). Also known as “DiamondCDN,” Packetware currently hosts tesla[.]sexy and diamondcdn[.]com, among other domains.

DiamondCDN was advertised and claimed by someone who used the nickname “Rivage” on several Com-based Discord channels over the years. A review of chat logs from some of those channels show other members frequently referred to Rivage as “Edward.”

From late 2020 to late 2024, Rivage’s conversations would show up in multiple Com chat servers that are closely monitored by security companies. In November 2022, Rivage could be seen requesting recommendations for a reliable and powerful DDoS-for-hire service.

Rivage made that request in the cybercrime channel “Dstat,” a core Com hub where users could buy and sell attack services. Dstat’s website dstat[.]cc was seized in 2024 as part of “Operation PowerOFF,” an international law enforcement action against DDoS services.

Coristine’s LinkedIn profile said that in 2022 he worked at an anti-DDoS company called Path Networks, which Wired generously described as a “network monitoring firm known for hiring reformed blackhat hackers.” Wired wrote:

“At Path Network, Coristine worked as a systems engineer from April to June of 2022, according to his now-deleted LinkedIn résumé. Path has at times listed as employees Eric Taylor, also known as Cosmo the God, a well-known former cybercriminal and member of the hacker group UGNazis, as well as Matthew Flannery, an Australian convicted hacker whom police allege was a member of the hacker group LulzSec. It’s unclear whether Coristine worked at Path concurrently with those hackers, and WIRED found no evidence that either Coristine or other Path employees engaged in illegal activity while at the company.”

The founder of Path is a young man named Marshal Webb. I wrote about Webb back in 2016, in a story about a DDoS defense company he co-founded called BackConnect Security LLC. On September 20, 2016, KrebsOnSecurity published data showing that the company had a history of hijacking Internet address space that belonged to others.

Less than 24 hours after that story ran, KrebsOnSecurity.com was hit with the biggest DDoS attack the Internet had ever seen at the time. That sustained attack kept this site offline for nearly 4 days.

The other founder of BackConnect Security LLC was Tucker Preston, a Georgia man who pleaded guilty in 2020 to paying a DDoS-for-hire service to launch attacks against others.

The aforementioned Path employee Eric Taylor pleaded guilty in 2017 to charges including an attack on our home in 2013. Taylor was among several men involved in making a false report to my local police department about a supposed hostage situation at our residence in Virginia. In response, a heavily-armed police force surrounded my home and put me in handcuffs at gunpoint before the police realized it was all a dangerous hoax known as “swatting.”

CosmoTheGod rocketed to Internet infamy in 2013 when he and a number of other hackers set up the Web site exposed[dot]su, which “doxed” dozens of public officials and celebrities by publishing the address, Social Security numbers and other personal information on the former First Lady Michelle Obama, the then-director of the FBI and the U.S. attorney general, among others. The group also swatted many of the people they doxed.

Wired noted that Coristine only worked at Path for a few months in 2022, but the story didn’t mention why his tenure was so short. A screenshot shared on the website pathtruths.com includes a snippet of conversations in June 2022 between Path employees discussing Coristine’s firing.

According to that record, Path founder Marshal Webb dismissed Coristine for leaking internal documents to a competitor. Not long after Coristine’s termination, someone leaked an abundance of internal Path documents and conversations. Among other things, those chats revealed that one of Path’s technicians was a Canadian man named Curtis Gervais who was convicted in 2017 of perpetrating dozens of swatting attacks and fake bomb threats — including at least two attempts against our home in 2014.

On May 11, 2024, Rivage posted on a Discord channel for a DDoS protection service that is chiefly marketed to members of The Com. Rivage expressed frustration with his time spent on Com-based communities, suggesting that its profitability had been oversold.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of money to be made in the com,” Rivage lamented. “I’m not buying Heztner [servers] to set up some com VPN.”

Rivage largely stopped posting messages on Com channels after that. Wired reports that Coristine subsequently spent three months last summer working at Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant startup.

The trouble with all this is that even if someone sincerely intends to exit The Com after years of consorting with cybercriminals, they are often still subject to personal attacks, harassment and hacking long after they have left the scene.

That’s because a huge part of Com culture involves harassing, swatting and hacking other members of the community. These internecine attacks are often for financial gain, but just as frequently they are perpetrated by cybercrime groups to exact retribution from or assert dominance over rival gangs.

Experts say it is extremely difficult for former members of violent street gangs to gain a security clearance needed to view sensitive or classified information held by the U.S. government. That’s because ex-gang members are highly susceptible to extortion and coercion from current members of the same gang, and that alone presents an unacceptable security risk for intelligence agencies.

And make no mistake: The Com is the English-language cybercriminal hacking equivalent of a violent street gang. KrebsOnSecurity has published numerous stories detailing how feuds within the community periodically spill over into real-world violence.

When Coristine’s name surfaced in Wired‘s report this week, members of The Com immediately took notice. In the following segment from a February 5, 2025 chat in a Com-affiliated hosting provider, members criticized Rivage’s skills, and discussed harassing his family and notifying authorities about incriminating accusations that may or may not be true.

2025-02-05 16:29:44 UTC vperked#0 they got this nigga on indiatimes man
2025-02-05 16:29:46 UTC alexaloo#0 Their cropping is worse than AI could have done
2025-02-05 16:29:48 UTC hebeatsme#0 bro who is that
2025-02-05 16:29:53 UTC hebeatsme#0 yalla re talking about
2025-02-05 16:29:56 UTC xewdy#0 edward
2025-02-05 16:29:56 UTC .yarrb#0 rivagew
2025-02-05 16:29:57 UTC vperked#0 Rivarge
2025-02-05 16:29:57 UTC xewdy#0 diamondcdm
2025-02-05 16:29:59 UTC vperked#0 i cant spell it
2025-02-05 16:30:00 UTC hebeatsme#0 rivage
2025-02-05 16:30:08 UTC .yarrb#0 yes
2025-02-05 16:30:14 UTC hebeatsme#0 i have him added
2025-02-05 16:30:20 UTC hebeatsme#0 hes on discord still
2025-02-05 16:30:47 UTC .yarrb#0 hes focused on stroking zaddy elon
2025-02-05 16:30:47 UTC vperked#0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Coristine
2025-02-05 16:30:50 UTC vperked#0 no fucking way
2025-02-05 16:30:53 UTC vperked#0 they even made a wiki for him
2025-02-05 16:30:55 UTC vperked#0 LOOOL
2025-02-05 16:31:05 UTC hebeatsme#0 no way
2025-02-05 16:31:08 UTC hebeatsme#0 hes not a good dev either
2025-02-05 16:31:14 UTC hebeatsme#0 like????
2025-02-05 16:31:22 UTC hebeatsme#0 has to be fake
2025-02-05 16:31:24 UTC xewdy#0 and theyre saying ts
2025-02-05 16:31:29 UTC xewdy#0 like ok bro
2025-02-05 16:31:51 UTC .yarrb#0 now i wanna know what all the other devs are like…
2025-02-05 16:32:00 UTC vperked#0 “`Coristine used the moniker “bigballs” on LinkedIn and @Edwardbigballer on Twitter, according to The Daily Dot.[“`
2025-02-05 16:32:05 UTC vperked#0 LOL
2025-02-05 16:32:06 UTC hebeatsme#0 lmfaooo
2025-02-05 16:32:07 UTC vperked#0 bro
2025-02-05 16:32:10 UTC hebeatsme#0 bro
2025-02-05 16:32:17 UTC hebeatsme#0 has to be fake right
2025-02-05 16:32:22 UTC .yarrb#0 does it mention Rivage?
2025-02-05 16:32:23 UTC xewdy#0 He previously worked for NeuraLink, a brain computer interface company led by Elon Musk
2025-02-05 16:32:26 UTC xewdy#0 bro what
2025-02-05 16:32:27 UTC alexaloo#0 I think your current occupation gives you a good insight of what probably goes on
2025-02-05 16:32:29 UTC hebeatsme#0 bullshit man
2025-02-05 16:32:33 UTC xewdy#0 this nigga got hella secrets
2025-02-05 16:32:37 UTC hebeatsme#0 rivage couldnt print hello world
2025-02-05 16:32:42 UTC hebeatsme#0 if his life was on the line
2025-02-05 16:32:50 UTC xewdy#0 nigga worked for neuralink
2025-02-05 16:32:54 UTC hebeatsme#0 bullshit
2025-02-05 16:33:06 UTC Nashville Dispatch ##0000 ||@PD Ping||
2025-02-05 16:33:07 UTC hebeatsme#0 must have killed all those test pigs with some bugs
2025-02-05 16:33:24 UTC hebeatsme#0 ur telling me the rivage who failed to start a company
2025-02-05 16:33:28 UTC hebeatsme#0 https://cdn.camp
2025-02-05 16:33:32 UTC hebeatsme#0 who didnt pay for servers
2025-02-05 16:33:34 UTC hebeatsme#0 ?
2025-02-05 16:33:42 UTC hebeatsme#0 was too cheap
2025-02-05 16:33:44 UTC vperked#0 yes
2025-02-05 16:33:50 UTC hebeatsme#0 like??
2025-02-05 16:33:53 UTC hebeatsme#0 it aint adding up
2025-02-05 16:33:56 UTC alexaloo#0 He just needed to find his calling idiot.
2025-02-05 16:33:58 UTC alexaloo#0 He found it.
2025-02-05 16:33:59 UTC hebeatsme#0 bro
2025-02-05 16:34:01 UTC alexaloo#0 Cope in a river dude
2025-02-05 16:34:04 UTC hebeatsme#0 he cant make good money right
2025-02-05 16:34:08 UTC hebeatsme#0 doge is about efficiency
2025-02-05 16:34:11 UTC hebeatsme#0 he should make $1/he
2025-02-05 16:34:15 UTC hebeatsme#0 $1/hr
2025-02-05 16:34:25 UTC hebeatsme#0 and be whipped for better code
2025-02-05 16:34:26 UTC vperked#0 prolly makes more than us
2025-02-05 16:34:35 UTC vperked#0 with his dad too
2025-02-05 16:34:52 UTC hebeatsme#0 time to report him for fraud
2025-02-05 16:34:54 UTC hebeatsme#0 to donald trump
2025-02-05 16:35:04 UTC hebeatsme#0 rivage participated in sim swap hacks in 2018
2025-02-05 16:35:08 UTC hebeatsme#0 put that on his wiki
2025-02-05 16:35:10 UTC hebeatsme#0 thanks
2025-02-05 16:35:15 UTC hebeatsme#0 and in 2021
2025-02-05 16:35:17 UTC hebeatsme#0 thanks
2025-02-05 16:35:19 UTC chainofcommand#0 i dont think they’ll care tbh

Given the speed with which Musk’s DOGE team was allowed access to such critical government databases, it strains credulity that Coristine could have been properly cleared beforehand. After all, he’d recently been dismissed from a job for allegedly leaking internal company information to outsiders.

According to the national security adjudication guidelines (PDF) released by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), eligibility determinations take into account a person’s stability, trustworthiness, reliability, discretion, character, honesty, judgment, and ability to protect classified information.

The DNI policy further states that “eligibility for covered individuals shall be granted only when facts and circumstances indicate that eligibility is clearly consistent with the national security interests of the United States, and any doubt shall be resolved in favor of national security.”

On Thursday, 25-year-old DOGE staff member Marko Elez resigned after being linked to a deleted social media account that advocated racism and eugenics. Elez resigned after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to the account.

“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” the account posted in July. “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” the account wrote on X in September. “Normalize Indian hate,” the account wrote the same month, in reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley.

Elez’s resignation came a day after the Department of Justice agreed to limit the number of DOGE employees who have access to federal payment systems. The DOJ said access would be limited to two people, Elez and Tom Krause, the CEO of a company called Cloud Software Group.

Earlier today, Musk said he planned to rehire Elez after President Trump and Vice President JD Vance reportedly endorsed the idea. Speaking at The White House today, Trump said he wasn’t concerned about the security of personal information and other data accessed by DOGE, adding that he was “very proud of the job that this group of young people” are doing.

A White House official told Reuters on Wednesday that Musk and his engineers have appropriate security clearances and are operating in “full compliance with federal law, appropriate security clearances, and as employees of the relevant agencies, not as outside advisors or entities.”

NPR reports Trump added that his administration’s cost-cutting efforts would soon turn to the Education Department and the Pentagon, “where he suggested without evidence that there could be ‘trillions’ of dollars in wasted spending within the $6.75 trillion the federal government spent in fiscal year 2024.”

GOP leaders in the Republican-controlled House and Senate have largely shrugged about Musk’s ongoing efforts to seize control over federal databases, dismantle agencies mandated by Congress, freeze federal spending on a range of already-appropriated government programs, and threaten workers with layoffs.

Meanwhile, multiple parties have sued to stop DOGE’s activities. ABC News says a federal judge was to rule today on whether DOGE should be blocked from accessing Department of Labor records, following a lawsuit alleging Musk’s team sought to illegally access highly sensitive data, including medical information, from the federal government.

At least 13 state attorneys general say they plan to file a lawsuit to stop DOGE from accessing federal payment systems containing Americans’ sensitive personal information, reports The Associated Press.

Reuters reported Thursday that the U.S. Treasury Department had agreed not to give Musk’s team access to its payment systems while a judge is hearing arguments in a lawsuit by employee unions and retirees alleging Musk illegally searched those records.

Ars Technica writes that The Department of Education (DoE) was sued Friday by a California student association demanding an “immediate stop” to DOGE’s “unlawfully” digging through student loan data to potentially dismantle the DoE.