A prolific data ransom gang that calls itself Scattered Lapsus ShinyHunters (SLSH) has a distinctive playbook when it seeks to extort payment from victim firms: Harassing, threatening and even swatting executives and their families, all while notifying journalists and regulators about the extent of the intrusion. Some victims reportedly are paying — perhaps as much to contain the stolen data as to stop the escalating personal attacks. But a top SLSH expert warns that engaging at all beyond a “We’re not paying” response only encourages further harassment, noting that the group’s fractious and unreliable history means the only winning move is not to pay.

Unlike traditional, highly regimented Russia-based ransomware affiliate groups, SLSH is an unruly and somewhat fluid English-language extortion gang that appears uninterested in building a reputation of consistent behavior whereby victims might have some measure of confidence that the criminals will keep their word if paid.

That’s according to Allison Nixon, director of research at the New York City based security consultancy Unit 221B. Nixon has been closely tracking the criminal group and individual members as they bounce between various Telegram channels used to extort and harass victims, and she said SLSH differs from traditional data ransom groups in other important ways that argue against trusting them to do anything they say they’ll do — such as destroying stolen data.

Like SLSH, many traditional Russian ransomware groups have employed high-pressure tactics to force payment in exchange for a decryption key and/or a promise to delete stolen data, such as publishing a dark web shaming blog with samples of stolen data next to a countdown clock, or notifying journalists and board members of the victim company. But Nixon said the extortion from SLSH quickly escalates way beyond that — to threats of physical violence against executives and their families, DDoS attacks on the victim’s website, and repeated email-flooding campaigns.

SLSH is known for breaking into companies by phishing employees over the phone, and using the purloined access to steal sensitive internal data. In a January 30 blog post, Google’s security forensics firm Mandiant said SLSH’s most recent extortion attacks stem from incidents spanning early to mid-January 2026, when SLSH members pretended to be IT staff and called employees at targeted victim organizations claiming that the company was updating MFA settings.

“The threat actor directed the employees to victim-branded credential harvesting sites to capture their SSO credentials and MFA codes, and then registered their own device for MFA,” the blog post explained.

Victims often first learn of the breach when their brand name is uttered on whatever ephemeral new public Telegram group chat SLSH is using to threaten, extort and harass their prey. According to Nixon, the coordinated harassment on the SLSH Telegram channels is part of a well-orchestrated strategy to overwhelm the victim organization by manufacturing humiliation that pushes them over the threshold to pay.

Nixon said multiple executives at targeted organizations have been subject to “swatting” attacks, wherein SLSH communicated a phony bomb threat or hostage situation at the target’s address in the hopes of eliciting a heavily armed police response at their home or place of work.

“A big part of what they’re doing to victims is the psychological aspect of it, like harassing executives’ kids and threatening the board of the company,” Nixon told KrebsOnSecurity. “And while these victims are getting extortion demands, they’re simultaneously getting outreach from media outlets saying, ‘Hey, do you have any comments on the bad things we’re going to write about you.”

In a blog post today, Unit 221B argues that no one should negotiate with SLSH because the group has demonstrated a willingness to extort victims based on promises that it has no intention to keep. Nixon points out that all of SLSH’s known members hail from The Com, shorthand for a constellation of cybercrime-focused Discord and Telegram communities which serve as a kind of distributed social network that facilitates instant collaboration.

Nixon said Com-based extortion groups tend to instigate feuds and drama between group members, leading to lying, betrayals, credibility destroying behavior, backstabbing, and sabotaging each other.

“With this type of ongoing dysfunction, often compounding by substance abuse, these threat actors often aren’t able to act with the core goal in mind of completing a successful, strategic ransom operation,” Nixon wrote. “They continually lose control with outbursts that put their strategy and operational security at risk, which severely limits their ability to build a professional, scalable, and sophisticated criminal organization network for continued successful ransoms – unlike other, more tenured and professional criminal organizations focused on ransomware alone.”

Intrusions from established ransomware groups typically center around encryption/decryption malware that mostly stays on the affected machine. In contrast, Nixon said, ransom from a Com group is often structured the same as violent sextortion schemes against minors, wherein members of The Com will steal damaging information, threaten to release it, and “promise” to delete it if the victim complies without any guarantee or technical proof point that they will keep their word. She writes:

A key component of SLSH’s efforts to convince victims to pay, Nixon said, involves manipulating the media into hyping the threat posed by this group. This approach also borrows a page from the playbook of sextortion attacks, she said, which encourages predators to keep targets continuously engaged and worrying about the consequences of non-compliance.

“On days where SLSH had no substantial criminal ‘win’ to announce, they focused on announcing death threats and harassment to keep law enforcement, journalists, and cybercrime industry professionals focused on this group,” she said.

Nixon knows a thing or two about being threatened by SLSH: For the past several months, the group’s Telegram channels have been replete with threats of physical violence against her, against Yours Truly, and against other security researchers. These threats, she said, are just another way the group seeks to generate media attention and achieve a veneer of credibility, but they are useful as indicators of compromise because SLSH members tend to name drop and malign security researchers even in their communications with victims.

“Watch for the following behaviors in their communications to you or their public statements,” Unit 221B’s advisory reads. “Repeated abusive mentions of Allison Nixon (or “A.N”), Unit 221B, or cybersecurity journalists—especially Brian Krebs—or any other cybersecurity employee, or cybersecurity company. Any threats to kill, or commit terrorism, or violence against internal employees, cybersecurity employees, investigators, and journalists.”

Unit 221B says that while the pressure campaign during an extortion attempt may be traumatizing to employees, executives, and their family members, entering into drawn-out negotiations with SLSH incentivizes the group to increase the level of harm and risk, which could include the physical safety of employees and their families.

“The breached data will never go back to the way it was, but we can assure you that the harassment will end,” Nixon said. “So, your decision to pay should be a separate issue from the harassment. We believe that when you separate these issues, you will objectively see that the best course of action to protect your interests, in both the short and long term, is to refuse payment.”

A new Internet-of-Things (IoT) botnet called Kimwolf has spread to more than 2 million devices, forcing infected systems to participate in massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and to relay other malicious and abusive Internet traffic. Kimwolf’s ability to scan the local networks of compromised systems for other IoT devices to infect makes it a sobering threat to organizations, and new research reveals Kimwolf is surprisingly prevalent in government and corporate networks.

Kimwolf grew rapidly in the waning months of 2025 by tricking various “residential proxy” services into relaying malicious commands to devices on the local networks of those proxy endpoints. Residential proxies are sold as a way to anonymize and localize one’s Web traffic to a specific region, and the biggest of these services allow customers to route their Internet activity through devices in virtually any country or city around the globe.

The malware that turns one’s Internet connection into a proxy node is often quietly bundled with various mobile apps and games, and it typically forces the infected device to relay malicious and abusive traffic — including ad fraud, account takeover attempts, and mass content-scraping.

Kimwolf mainly targeted proxies from IPIDEA, a Chinese service that has millions of proxy endpoints for rent on any given week. The Kimwolf operators discovered they could forward malicious commands to the internal networks of IPIDEA proxy endpoints, and then programmatically scan for and infect other vulnerable devices on each endpoint’s local network.

Most of the systems compromised through Kimwolf’s local network scanning have been unofficial Android TV streaming boxes. These are typically Android Open Source Project devices — not Android TV OS devices or Play Protect certified Android devices — and they are generally marketed as a way to watch unlimited (read:pirated) video content from popular subscription streaming services for a one-time fee.

However, a great many of these TV boxes ship to consumers with residential proxy software pre-installed. What’s more, they have no real security or authentication built-in: If you can communicate directly with the TV box, you can also easily compromise it with malware.

While IPIDEA and other affected proxy providers recently have taken steps to block threats like Kimwolf from going upstream into their endpoints (reportedly with varying degrees of success), the Kimwolf malware remains on millions of infected devices.

Kimwolf’s close association with residential proxy networks and compromised Android TV boxes might suggest we’d find relatively few infections on corporate networks. However, the security firm Infoblox said a recent review of its customer traffic found nearly 25 percent of them made a query to a Kimwolf-related domain name since October 1, 2025, when the botnet first showed signs of life.

Infoblox found the affected customers are based all over the world and in a wide range of industry verticals, from education and healthcare to government and finance.

“To be clear, this suggests that nearly 25% of customers had at least one device that was an endpoint in a residential proxy service targeted by Kimwolf operators,” Infoblox explained. “Such a device, maybe a phone or a laptop, was essentially co-opted by the threat actor to probe the local network for vulnerable devices. A query means a scan was made, not that new devices were compromised. Lateral movement would fail if there were no vulnerable devices to be found or if the DNS resolution was blocked.”

Synthient, a startup that tracks proxy services and was the first to disclose on January 2 the unique methods Kimwolf uses to spread, found proxy endpoints from IPIDEA were present in alarming numbers at government and academic institutions worldwide. Synthient said it spied at least 33,000 affected Internet addresses at universities and colleges, and nearly 8,000 IPIDEA proxies within various U.S. and foreign government networks.

In a webinar on January 16, experts at the proxy tracking service Spur profiled Internet addresses associated with IPIDEA and 10 other proxy services that were thought to be vulnerable to Kimwolf’s tricks. Spur found residential proxies in nearly 300 government owned and operated networks, 318 utility companies, 166 healthcare companies or hospitals, and 141 companies in banking and finance.

“I looked at the 298 [government] owned and operated [networks], and so many of them were DoD [U.S. Department of Defense], which is kind of terrifying that DoD has IPIDEA and these other proxy services located inside of it,” Spur Co-Founder Riley Kilmer said. “I don’t know how these enterprises have these networks set up. It could be that [infected devices] are segregated on the network, that even if you had local access it doesn’t really mean much. However, it’s something to be aware of. If a device goes in, anything that device has access to the proxy would have access to.”

Kilmer said Kimwolf demonstrates how a single residential proxy infection can quickly lead to bigger problems for organizations that are harboring unsecured devices behind their firewalls, noting that proxy services present a potentially simple way for attackers to probe other devices on the local network of a targeted organization.

“If you know you have [proxy] infections that are located in a company, you can chose that [network] to come out of and then locally pivot,” Kilmer said. “If you have an idea of where to start or look, now you have a foothold in a company or an enterprise based on just that.”

This is the third story in our series on the Kimwolf botnet. Next week, we’ll shed light on the myriad China-based individuals and companies connected to the Badbox 2.0 botnet, the collective name given to a vast number of Android TV streaming box models that ship with no discernible security or authentication built-in, and with residential proxy malware pre-installed.

Further reading:

The Kimwolf Botnet is Stalking Your Local Network

Who Benefitted from the Aisuru and Kimwolf Botnets?

A Broken System Fueling Botnets (Synthient).

Microsoft today issued patches to plug at least 113 security holes in its various Windows operating systems and supported software. Eight of the vulnerabilities earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating, and the company warns that attackers are already exploiting one of the bugs fixed today.

January’s Microsoft zero-day flaw — CVE-2026-20805 — is brought to us by a flaw in the Desktop Window Manager (DWM), a key component of Windows that organizes windows on a user’s screen. Kev Breen, senior director of cyber threat research at Immersive, said despite awarding CVE-2026-20805 a middling CVSS score of 5.5, Microsoft has confirmed its active exploitation in the wild, indicating that threat actors are already leveraging this flaw against organizations.

Breen said vulnerabilities of this kind are commonly used to undermine Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), a core operating system security control designed to protect against buffer overflows and other memory-manipulation exploits.

“By revealing where code resides in memory, this vulnerability can be chained with a separate code execution flaw, transforming a complex and unreliable exploit into a practical and repeatable attack,” Breen said. “Microsoft has not disclosed which additional components may be involved in such an exploit chain, significantly limiting defenders’ ability to proactively threat hunt for related activity. As a result, rapid patching currently remains the only effective mitigation.”

Chris Goettl, vice president of product management at Ivanti, observed that CVE-2026-20805 affects all currently supported and extended security update supported versions of the Windows OS. Goettl said it would be a mistake to dismiss the severity of this flaw based on its “Important” rating and relatively low CVSS score.

“A risk-based prioritization methodology warrants treating this vulnerability as a higher severity than the vendor rating or CVSS score assigned,” he said.

Among the critical flaws patched this month are two Microsoft Office remote code execution bugs (CVE-2026-20952 and CVE-2026-20953) that can be triggered just by viewing a booby-trapped message in the Preview Pane.

Our October 2025 Patch Tuesday “End of 10” roundup noted that Microsoft had removed a modem driver from all versions after it was discovered that hackers were abusing a vulnerability in it to hack into systems. Adam Barnett at Rapid7 said Microsoft today removed another couple of modem drivers from Windows for a broadly similar reason: Microsoft is aware of functional exploit code for an elevation of privilege vulnerability in a very similar modem driver, tracked as CVE-2023-31096.

“That’s not a typo; this vulnerability was originally published via MITRE over two years ago, along with a credible public writeup by the original researcher,” Barnett said. “Today’s Windows patches remove agrsm64.sys and agrsm.sys. All three modem drivers were originally developed by the same now-defunct third party, and have been included in Windows for decades. These driver removals will pass unnoticed for most people, but you might find active modems still in a few contexts, including some industrial control systems.”

According to Barnett, two questions remain: How many more legacy modem drivers are still present on a fully-patched Windows asset; and how many more elevation-to-SYSTEM vulnerabilities will emerge from them before Microsoft cuts off attackers who have been enjoying “living off the land[line] by exploiting an entire class of dusty old device drivers?”

“Although Microsoft doesn’t claim evidence of exploitation for CVE-2023-31096, the relevant 2023 write-up and the 2025 removal of the other Agere modem driver have provided two strong signals for anyone looking for Windows exploits in the meantime,” Barnett said. “In case you were wondering, there is no need to have a modem connected; the mere presence of the driver is enough to render an asset vulnerable.”

Immersive, Ivanti and Rapid7 all called attention to CVE-2026-21265, which is a critical Security Feature Bypass vulnerability affecting Windows Secure Boot. This security feature is designed to protect against threats like rootkits and bootkits, and it relies on a set of certificates that are set to expire in June 2026 and October 2026. Once these 2011 certificates expire, Windows devices that do not have the new 2023 certificates can no longer receive Secure Boot security fixes.

Barnett cautioned that when updating the bootloader and BIOS, it is essential to prepare fully ahead of time for the specific OS and BIOS combination you’re working with, since incorrect remediation steps can lead to an unbootable system.

“Fifteen years is a very long time indeed in information security, but the clock is running out on the Microsoft root certificates which have been signing essentially everything in the Secure Boot ecosystem since the days of Stuxnet,” Barnett said. “Microsoft issued replacement certificates back in 2023, alongside CVE-2023-24932 which covered relevant Windows patches as well as subsequent steps to remediate the Secure Boot bypass exploited by the BlackLotus bootkit.”

Goettl noted that Mozilla has released updates for Firefox and Firefox ESR resolving a total of 34 vulnerabilities, two of which are suspected to be exploited (CVE-2026-0891 and CVE-2026-0892). Both are resolved in Firefox 147 (MFSA2026-01) and CVE-2026-0891 is resolved in Firefox ESR 140.7 (MFSA2026-03).

“Expect Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge updates this week in addition to a high severity vulnerability in Chrome WebView that was resolved in the January 6 Chrome update (CVE-2026-0628),” Goettl said.

As ever, the SANS Internet Storm Center has a per-patch breakdown by severity and urgency. Windows admins should keep an eye on askwoody.com for any news about patches that don’t quite play nice with everything. If you experience any issues related installing January’s patches, please drop a line in the comments below.

The Trump administration has pursued a staggering range of policy pivots this past year that threaten to weaken the nation’s ability and willingness to address a broad spectrum of technology challenges, from cybersecurity and privacy to countering disinformation, fraud and corruption. These shifts, along with the president’s efforts to restrict free speech and freedom of the press, have come at such a rapid clip that many readers probably aren’t even aware of them all.

FREE SPEECH

President Trump has repeatedly claimed that a primary reason he lost the 2020 election was that social media and Big Tech companies had conspired to silence conservative voices and stifle free speech. Naturally, the president’s impulse in his second term has been to use the levers of the federal government in an effort to limit the speech of everyday Americans, as well as foreigners wishing to visit the United States.

In September, Donald Trump signed a national security directive known as NSPM-7, which directs federal law enforcement officers and intelligence analysts to target “anti-American” activity, including any “tax crimes” involving extremist groups who defrauded the IRS. According to extensive reporting by journalist Ken Klippenstein, the focus of the order is on those expressing “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology,” as well as “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” and “anti-Christianity.”

Earlier this month, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo advising the FBI to compile a list of Americans whose activities “may constitute domestic terrorism.” Bondi also ordered the FBI to establish a “cash reward system” to encourage the public to report suspected domestic terrorist activity. The memo states that domestic terrorism could include “opposition to law and immigration enforcement” or support for “radical gender ideology.”

The Trump administration also is planning to impose social media restrictions on tourists as the president continues to ramp up travel restrictions for foreign visitors. According to a notice from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), tourists — including those from Britain, Australia, France, and Japan — will soon be required to provide five years of their social media history.

The CBP said it will also collect “several high value data fields,” including applicants’ email addresses from the past 10 years, their telephone numbers used in the past five years, and names and details of family members. Wired reported in October that the US CBP executed more device searches at the border in the first three months of the year than any other previous quarter.

The new requirements from CBP add meat to the bones of Executive Order 14161, which in the name of combating “foreign terrorist and public safety threats” granted broad new authority that civil rights groups warn could enable a renewed travel ban and expanded visa denials or deportations based on perceived ideology. Critics alleged the order’s vague language around “public safety threats,” creates latitude for targeting individuals based on political views, national origin, or religion. At least 35 nations are now under some form of U.S. travel restrictions.

CRIME AND CORRUPTION

In February, 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.”

The White House 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.

Also in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi dissolved the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, an entity created during Trump’s first term designed to counter the influence of foreign governments on American politics.

In March 2025, Reuters reported that several U.S. national security agencies had halted work on a coordinated effort to counter Russian sabotage, disinformation and cyberattacks. Former President Joe Biden had ordered his national security team to establish working groups to monitor the issue amid warnings from U.S. intelligence that Russia was escalating a shadow war against Western nations.

In a test of prosecutorial independence, Trump’s Justice Department ordered prosecutors to drop the corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams. The fallout was immediate: Multiple senior officials resigned in protest, the case was reassigned, and chaos engulfed the Southern District of New York (SDNY) – historically one of the nation’s most aggressive offices for pursuing public corruption, white-collar crime, and cybercrime cases.

When it comes to cryptocurrency, the administration has shifted regulators at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) away from enforcement to cheerleading an industry that has consistently been plagued by scams, fraud and rug-pulls. The SEC in 2025 systematically retreated from enforcement against cryptocurrency operators, dropping major cases against Coinbase, Binance, and others.

Perhaps the most troubling example involves Justin Sun, the Chinese-born founder of crypto currency company Tron. In 2023, the SEC charged Sun with fraud and market manipulation. Sun subsequently invested $75 million in the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial (WLF) tokens, became the top holder of the $TRUMP memecoin, and secured a seat at an exclusive dinner with the president.

In late February 2025, the SEC dropped its lawsuit. Sun promptly took Tron public through a reverse merger arranged by Dominari Securities, a firm with Trump family ties. Democratic lawmakers have urged the SEC to investigate what they call “concerning ties to President Trump and his family” as potential conflicts of interest and foreign influence.

In October, President Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance. In 2023, Zhao and his company pled guilty to failing to prevent money laundering on the platform. Binance paid a $4 billion fine, and Zhao served a four-month sentence. As CBS News observed last month, shortly after Zhao’s pardon application, he was at the center of a blockbuster deal that put the Trump’s family’s WLF on the map.

“Zhao is a citizen of the United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf and in May, an Emirati fund put $2 billion in Zhao’s Binance,” 60 Minutes reported. “Of all the currencies in the world, the deal was done in World Liberty crypto.”

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins has made the agency’s new posture towards crypto explicit, stating “most crypto tokens are not securities.” At the same time, President Trump has directed the Department of Labor and the SEC to expand 401(k) access to private equity and crypto — assets that regulators have historically restricted for retail investors due to high risk, fees, opacity, and illiquidity. The executive order explicitly prioritizes “curbing ERISA litigation,” and reducing accountability for fiduciaries while shifting risk onto ordinary workers’ retirement savings.

At the White House’s behest, the U.S. Treasury in March suspended the Corporate Transparency Act, a law that required companies to reveal their real owners. Finance experts warned the suspension would bring back shell companies and “open the flood gates of dirty money” through the US, such as funds from drug gangs, human traffickers, and fraud groups.

Trump’s clemency decisions have created a pattern of freed criminals committing new offenses, including Jonathan Braun, whose sentence for drug trafficking was commuted during Trump’s first term, was found guilty in 2025 of violating supervised release and faces new charges.

Eliyahu Weinstein, who received a commutation in January 2021 for running a Ponzi scheme, was sentenced in November 2025 to 37 years for running a new Ponzi scheme. The administration has also granted clemency to a growing list of white-collar criminals: David Gentile, a private equity executive sentenced to seven years for securities and wire fraud (functionally a ponzi-like scheme), and Trevor Milton, the Nikola founder sentenced to four years for defrauding investors over electric vehicle technology. The message: Financial crimes against ordinary investors are no big deal.

At least 10 of the January 6 insurrectionists pardoned by President Trump have already been rearrested, charged or sentenced for other crimes, including plotting the murder of FBI agents, child sexual assault, possession of child sexual abuse material and reckless homicide while driving drunk.

The administration also imposed sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC). On February 6, 2025, Executive Order 14203 authorized asset freezes and visa restrictions against ICC officials investigating U.S. citizens or allies, primarily in response to the ICC’s arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over alleged war crimes in Gaza.

Earlier this month the president launched the “Gold Card,” a visa scheme established by an executive order in September that offers wealthy individuals and corporations expedited paths to U.S. residency and citizenship in exchange for $1 million for individuals and $2 million for companies, plus ongoing fees. The administration says it is also planning to offer a “platinum” version of the card that offers special tax breaks — for a cool $5 million.

FEDERAL CYBERSECURITY

President Trump campaigned for a second term insisting that the previous election was riddled with fraud and had been stolen from him. Shortly after Mr. Trump took the oath of office for a second time, he fired the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — Chris Krebs (no relation) — for having the audacity to state publicly that the 2020 election was the most secure in U.S. history.

Mr. Trump revoked Krebs’s security clearances, ordered a Justice Department investigation into his election security work, and suspended the security clearances of employees at SentinelOne, the cybersecurity firm where Krebs worked as chief intelligence and public policy officer. The executive order was the first direct presidential action against any US cybersecurity company. Krebs subsequently resigned from SentinelOne, telling The Wall Street Journal he was leaving to push back on Trump’s efforts “to go after corporate interests and corporate relationships.”

The president also dismissed all 15 members of the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB), a nonpartisan government entity established in 2022 with a mandate to investigate the security failures behind major cybersecurity events — likely because those advisors included Chris Krebs.

At the time, the CSRB was in the middle of compiling a much-anticipated report on the root causes of Chinese government-backed digital intrusions into at least nine U.S. telecommunications providers. Not to be outdone, the Federal Communication Commission quickly moved to roll back a previous ruling that required U.S. telecom carriers to implement stricter cybersecurity measures.

Meanwhile, CISA has lost roughly a third of its workforce this year amid mass layoffs and deferred resignations. When the government shutdown began in October, CISA laid off even more employees and furloughed 65 percent of the remaining staff, leaving only 900 employees working without pay.

Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security has reassigned CISA cyber specialists to jobs supporting the president’s deportation agenda. As Bloomberg reported earlier this year, CISA employees were given a week to accept the new roles or resign, and some of the reassignments included relocations to new geographic areas.

The White House has signaled that it plans to cut an additional $491 million from CISA’s budget next year, cuts that primarily target CISA programs focused on international affairs and countering misinformation and foreign propaganda. The president’s budget proposal justified the cuts by repeating debunked claims about CISA engaging in censorship.

The Trump administration has pursued a similar reorganization at the FBI: The Washington Post reported in October that a quarter of all FBI agents have now been reassigned from national security threats to immigration enforcement. Reuters reported last week that the replacement of seasoned leaders at the FBI and Justice Department with Trump loyalists has led to an unprecedented number of prosecutorial missteps, resulting in a 21 percent dismissal rate of the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office criminal complaints over eight weeks, compared to a mere .5% dismissal rate over the prior 10 years.

“These mistakes are causing department attorneys to lose credibility with federal courts, with some judges quashing subpoenas, threatening criminal contempt and issuing opinions that raise questions about their conduct,” Reuters reported. “Grand juries have also in some cases started rejecting indictments, a highly unusual event since prosecutors control what evidence gets presented.”

In August, the DHS banned state and local governments from using cyber grants on services provided by the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), a group that for more than 20 years has shared critical cybersecurity intelligence across state lines and provided software and other resources at free or heavily discounted rates. Specifically, DHS barred states from spending funds on services offered by the Elections Infrastructure ISAC, which was effectively shuttered after DHS pulled its funding in February.

Cybersecurity Dive reports that the Trump administration’s massive workforce cuts, along with widespread mission uncertainty and a persistent leadership void, have interrupted federal agencies’ efforts to collaborate with the businesses and local utilities that run and protect healthcare facilities, water treatment plans, energy companies and telecommunications networks. The publication said the changes came after the US government eliminated CIPAC — a framework that allowed private companies to share cyber and threat intel without legal penalties.

“Government leaders have canceled meetings with infrastructure operators, forced out their longtime points of contact, stopped attending key industry events and scrapped a coordination program that made companies feel comfortable holding sensitive talks about cyberattacks and other threats with federal agencies,” Cybersecurity Dive’s Eric Geller wrote.

Both the National Security Agency (NSA) and U.S. Cyber Command have been without a leader since Trump dismissed Air Force General Timothy Haugh in April, allegedly for disloyalty to the president and at the suggestion of far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. The nomination of Army Lt. Gen. William Hartman for the same position fell through in October. The White House has ordered the NSA to cut 8 percent of its civilian workforce (between 1,500 and 2,000 employees).

As The Associated Press reported in August, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence plans to dramatically reduce its workforce and cut its budget by more than $700 million annually. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said the cuts were warranted because ODNI had become “bloated and inefficient, and the intelligence community is rife with abuse of power, unauthorized leaks of classified intelligence, and politicized weaponization of intelligence.”

The firing or forced retirements of so many federal employees has been a boon to foreign intelligence agencies. Chinese intelligence agencies, for example, reportedly moved quickly to take advantage of the mass layoffs, using a network of front companies to recruit laid-off U.S. government employees for “consulting work.” Former workers with the Defense Department’s Defense Digital Service who resigned en-masse earlier this year thanks to DOGE encroaching on their mission have been approached by the United Arab Emirates to work on artificial intelligence for the oil kingdom’s armed forces, albeit reportedly with the blessing of the Trump administration.

PRESS FREEDOM

President Trump has filed multibillion-dollar lawsuits against a number of major news outlets over news segments or interviews that allegedly portrayed him in a negative light, suing the networks ABC, the BBC, the CBS parent company Paramount, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, among others.

The president signed an executive order aimed at slashing public subsidies to PBS and NPR, alleging “bias” in the broadcasters’ reporting. In July, Congress approved a request from Trump to cut $1.1 billion in federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the nonprofit entity that funds PBS and NPR.

Brendan Carr, the president’s pick to run the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), initially 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.

President Trump in February seized control of the White House Correspondents’ Association, the nonprofit entity that decides which media outlets should have access to the White House and the press pool that follows the president. The president invited an additional 32 media outlets, mostly conservative or right-wing organizations.

According to the journalism group Poynter.org, there are three religious networks, all of which lean conservative, as well as a mix of outlets that includes a legacy paper, television networks, and a digital outlet powered by artificial intelligence.  Trump also barred The Associated Press from the White House over their refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

Under Trump appointee Kari Lake, the U.S. Agency for Global Media moved to dismantle Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and other networks that for decades served as credible news sources behind authoritarian lines. Courts blocked shutdown orders, but the damage continues through administrative leave, contract terminations, and funding disputes.

President Trump this term has 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.

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 Trump administration announced increased vetting of applicants for H-1B visas for highly skilled workers, with an internal State Department memo saying that anyone involved in “censorship” of free speech should be considered for rejection.

Executive Order 14161, issued in 2025 on “foreign terrorist and public safety threats,” granted broad new authority that civil rights groups warn could enable a renewed travel ban and expanded visa denials or deportations based on perceived ideology. Critics charged that the order’s vague language around “public safety threats” creates latitude for targeting individuals based on political views, national origin, or religion.

CONSUMER PROTECTION, PRIVACY

At the beginning of this year, President Trump 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 Trump administration said it planned to fire up to 90 percent of all CFPB staff, but a recent federal appeals court ruling in Washington tossed out an earlier decision that would have allowed the firings to proceed. Reuters reported this week that an employee union and others have battled against it in court for ten months, during which the agency has been almost completely idled.

The CFPB’s acting director is Russell Vought, a key architect of the GOP policy framework Project 2025. Under Vought’s direction, the CFPB in May quietly withdrew a data broker protection rule intended to limit the ability of U.S. data brokers to sell personal information on Americans.

Despite the Federal Reserve’s own post-mortem explicitly blaming Trump-era deregulation for the 2023 Silicon Valley Bank collapse, which triggered a fast-moving crisis requiring emergency weekend bailouts of banks, Trump’s banking regulators in 2025 doubled down. They loosened capital requirements, narrowed definitions of “unsafe” banking practices, and stripped specific risk categories from supervisory frameworks. The setup for another banking crisis requiring taxpayer intervention is now in place.

The Privacy Act of 1974, one of the few meaningful federal privacy laws, was built on the principles of consent and separation in response to the abuses of power that came to light during the Watergate era. The law states that when an individual provides personal information to a federal agency to receive a particular service, that data must be used solely for its original purpose.

Nevertheless, it emerged in June that the Trump administration has built a central database of all US citizens. According to NPR, the White House plans to use the new platform during upcoming elections to verify the identity and citizenship status of US voters. The database was built by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Governmental Efficiency and is being rolled out in phases to US states.

DOGE

Probably the biggest ungotten scoop of 2025 is the inside story of what happened to all of the personal, financial and other sensitive data that was accessed by workers at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). President Trump tapped Elon Musk to lead the newly created department, which was mostly populated by current and former employees of Musk’s various technology companies (including a former denizen of the cybercrime community known as the “Com”). It soon emerged that the DOGE team was using artificial intelligence to surveil at least one federal agency’s communications for hostility to Mr. Trump and his agenda.

DOGE employees were able to access and synthesize data taken from a large number of previously separate and highly guarded federal databases, including those at the Social Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Personnel Management, and the U.S. Department of the Treasury. DOGE staffers did so largely by circumventing or dismantling security measures designed to detect and prevent misuse of federal databases, including standard incident response protocols, auditing, and change-tracking mechanisms.

For example, an IT expert with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleges that DOGE employees likely downloaded gigabytes of data from agency case files in early March, using short-lived accounts that were configured to leave few traces of network activity. The NLRB whistleblower said the large data outflows coincided with multiple blocked login attempts from addresses in Russia, which attempted to use valid credentials for a newly-created DOGE user account.

The stated goal of DOGE was to reduce bureaucracy and to massively cut costs — mainly by eliminating funding for a raft of federal initiatives that had already been approved by Congress. The DOGE website claimed those efforts reduced “wasteful” and “fraudulent” federal spending by more than $200 billion. However, multiple independent reviews by news organizations determined the true “savings” DOGE achieved was off by a couple of orders of magnitude, and was likely closer to $2 billion.

At the same time DOGE was slashing federal programs, President Trump fired at least 17 inspectors general at federal agencies — the very people tasked with actually identifying and stopping waste, fraud and abuse at the federal level. Those included several agencies (such as the NLRB) that had open investigations into one or more of Mr. Musk’s companies for allegedly failing to comply with protocols aimed at protecting state secrets. In September, a federal judge found the president unlawfully fired the agency watchdogs, but none of them have been reinstated.

Where is DOGE now? Reuters reported last month that as far as the White House is concerned, DOGE no longer exists, even though it technically has more than half a year left to its charter. Meanwhile, who exactly retains access to federal agency data that was fed by DOGE into AI tools is anyone’s guess.

KrebsOnSecurity would like to thank the anonymous researcher NatInfoSec for assisting with the research on this story.

Microsoft today pushed updates to fix at least 56 security flaws in its Windows operating systems and supported software. This final Patch Tuesday of 2025 tackles one zero-day bug that is already being exploited, as well as two publicly disclosed vulnerabilities.

Despite releasing a lower-than-normal number of security updates these past few months, Microsoft patched a whopping 1,129 vulnerabilities in 2025, an 11.9% increase from 2024. According to Satnam Narang at Tenable, this year marks the second consecutive year that Microsoft patched over one thousand vulnerabilities, and the third time it has done so since its inception.

The zero-day flaw patched today is CVE-2025-62221, a privilege escalation vulnerability affecting Windows 10 and later editions. The weakness resides in a component called the “Windows Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver” — a system driver that enables cloud applications to access file system functionalities.

“This is particularly concerning, as the mini filter is integral to services like OneDrive, Google Drive, and iCloud, and remains a core Windows component, even if none of those apps were installed,” said Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7.

Only three of the flaws patched today earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating: Both CVE-2025-62554 and CVE-2025-62557 involve Microsoft Office, and both can exploited merely by viewing a booby-trapped email message in the Preview Pane. Another critical bug — CVE-2025-62562 — involves Microsoft Outlook, although Redmond says the Preview Pane is not an attack vector with this one.

But according to Microsoft, the vulnerabilities most likely to be exploited from this month’s patch batch are other (non-critical) privilege escalation bugs, including:

–CVE-2025-62458 — Win32k
–CVE-2025-62470 — Windows Common Log File System Driver
–CVE-2025-62472 — Windows Remote Access Connection Manager
–CVE-2025-59516 — Windows Storage VSP Driver
–CVE-2025-59517 — Windows Storage VSP Driver

Kev Breen, senior director of threat research at Immersive, said privilege escalation flaws are observed in almost every incident involving host compromises.

“We don’t know why Microsoft has marked these specifically as more likely, but the majority of these components have historically been exploited in the wild or have enough technical detail on previous CVEs that it would be easier for threat actors to weaponize these,” Breen said. “Either way, while not actively being exploited, these should be patched sooner rather than later.”

One of the more interesting vulnerabilities patched this month is CVE-2025-64671, a remote code execution flaw in the Github Copilot Plugin for Jetbrains AI-based coding assistant that is used by Microsoft and GitHub. Breen said this flaw would allow attackers to execute arbitrary code by tricking the large language model (LLM) into running commands that bypass the user’s “auto-approve” settings.

CVE-2025-64671 is part of a broader, more systemic security crisis that security researcher Ari Marzuk has branded IDEsaster (IDE  stands for “integrated development environment”), which encompasses more than 30 separate vulnerabilities reported in nearly a dozen market-leading AI coding platforms, including Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, and Claude Code.

The other publicly-disclosed vulnerability patched today is CVE-2025-54100, a remote code execution bug in Windows Powershell on Windows Server 2008 and later that allows an unauthenticated attacker to run code in the security context of the user.

For anyone seeking a more granular breakdown of the security updates Microsoft pushed today, check out the roundup at the SANS Internet Storm Center. As always, please leave a note in the comments if you experience problems applying any of this month’s Windows patches.

An intermittent outage at Cloudflare on Tuesday briefly knocked many of the Internet’s top destinations offline. Some affected Cloudflare customers were able to pivot away from the platform temporarily so that visitors could still access their websites. But security experts say doing so may have also triggered an impromptu network penetration test for organizations that have come to rely on Cloudflare to block many types of abusive and malicious traffic.

At around 6:30 EST/11:30 UTC on Nov. 18, Cloudflare’s status page acknowledged the company was experiencing “an internal service degradation.” After several hours of Cloudflare services coming back up and failing again, many websites behind Cloudflare found they could not migrate away from using the company’s services because the Cloudflare portal was unreachable and/or because they also were getting their domain name system (DNS) services from Cloudflare.

However, some customers did manage to pivot their domains away from Cloudflare during the outage. And many of those organizations probably need to take a closer look at their web application firewall (WAF) logs during that time, said Aaron Turner, a faculty member at IANS Research.

Turner said Cloudflare’s WAF does a good job filtering out malicious traffic that matches any one of the top ten types of application-layer attacks, including credential stuffing, cross-site scripting, SQL injection, bot attacks and API abuse. But he said this outage might be a good opportunity for Cloudflare customers to better understand how their own app and website defenses may be failing without Cloudflare’s help.

“Your developers could have been lazy in the past for SQL injection because Cloudflare stopped that stuff at the edge,” Turner said. “Maybe you didn’t have the best security QA [quality assurance] for certain things because Cloudflare was the control layer to compensate for that.”

Turner said one company he’s working with saw a huge increase in log volume and they are still trying to figure out what was “legit malicious” versus just noise.

“It looks like there was about an eight hour window when several high-profile sites decided to bypass Cloudflare for the sake of availability,” Turner said. “Many companies have essentially relied on Cloudflare for the OWASP Top Ten [web application vulnerabilities] and a whole range of bot blocking. How much badness could have happened in that window? Any organization that made that decision needs to look closely at any exposed infrastructure to see if they have someone persisting after they’ve switched back to Cloudflare protections.”

Turner said some cybercrime groups likely noticed when an online merchant they normally stalk stopped using Cloudflare’s services during the outage.

“Let’s say you were an attacker, trying to grind your way into a target, but you felt that Cloudflare was in the way in the past,” he said. “Then you see through DNS changes that the target has eliminated Cloudflare from their web stack due to the outage. You’re now going to launch a whole bunch of new attacks because the protective layer is no longer in place.”

Nicole Scott, senior product marketing manager at the McLean, Va. based Replica Cyber, called yesterday’s outage “a free tabletop exercise, whether you meant to run one or not.”

“That few-hour window was a live stress test of how your organization routes around its own control plane and shadow IT blossoms under the sunlamp of time pressure,” Scott said in a post on LinkedIn. “Yes, look at the traffic that hit you while protections were weakened. But also look hard at the behavior inside your org.”

Scott said organizations seeking security insights from the Cloudflare outage should ask themselves:

1. What was turned off or bypassed (WAF, bot protections, geo blocks), and for how long?
2. What emergency DNS or routing changes were made, and who approved them?
3. Did people shift work to personal devices, home Wi-Fi, or unsanctioned Software-as-a-Service providers to get around the outage?
4. Did anyone stand up new services, tunnels, or vendor accounts “just for now”?
5. Is there a plan to unwind those changes, or are they now permanent workarounds?
6. For the next incident, what’s the intentional fallback plan, instead of decentralized improvisation?

In a postmortem published Tuesday evening, Cloudflare said the disruption was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyberattack or malicious activity of any kind.

“Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems’ permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a ‘feature file’ used by our Bot Management system,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote. “That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.”

Cloudflare estimates that roughly 20 percent of websites use its services, and with much of the modern web relying heavily on a handful of other cloud providers including AWS and Azure, even a brief outage at one of these platforms can create a single point of failure for many organizations.

Martin Greenfield, CEO at the IT consultancy Quod Orbis, said Tuesday’s outage was another reminder that many organizations may be putting too many of their eggs in one basket.

“There are several practical and overdue fixes,” Greenfield advised. “Split your estate. Spread WAF and DDoS protection across multiple zones. Use multi-vendor DNS. Segment applications so a single provider outage doesn’t cascade. And continuously monitor controls to detect single-vendor dependency.”

Google is suing more than two dozen unnamed individuals allegedly involved in peddling a popular China-based mobile phishing service that helps scammers impersonate hundreds of trusted brands, blast out text message lures, and convert phished payment card data into mobile wallets from Apple and Google.

In a lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York on November 12, Google sued to unmask and disrupt 25 “John Doe” defendants allegedly linked to the sale of Lighthouse, a sophisticated phishing kit that makes it simple for even novices to steal payment card data from mobile users. Google said Lighthouse has harmed more than a million victims across 120 countries.

Lighthouse is one of several prolific phishing-as-a-service operations known as the “Smishing Triad,” and collectively they are responsible for sending millions of text messages that spoof the U.S. Postal Service to supposedly collect some outstanding delivery fee, or that pretend to be a local toll road operator warning of a delinquent toll fee. More recently, Lighthouse has been used to spoof e-commerce websites, financial institutions and brokerage firms.

Regardless of the text message lure or brand used, the basic scam remains the same: After the visitor enters their payment information, the phishing site will automatically attempt to enroll the card as a mobile wallet from Apple or Google. The phishing site then tells the visitor that their bank is going to verify the transaction by sending a one-time code that needs to be entered into the payment page before the transaction can be completed.

If the recipient provides that one-time code, the scammers can link the victim’s card data to a mobile wallet on a device that they control. Researchers say the fraudsters usually load several stolen wallets onto each mobile device, and wait 7-10 days after that enrollment before selling the phones or using them for fraud.

Google called the scale of the Lighthouse phishing attacks “staggering.” A May 2025 report from Silent Push found the domains used by the Smishing Triad are rotated frequently, with approximately 25,000 phishing domains active during any 8-day period.

Google’s lawsuit alleges the purveyors of Lighthouse violated the company’s trademarks by including Google’s logos on countless phishing websites. The complaint says Lighthouse offers over 600 templates for phishing websites of more than 400 entities, and that Google’s logos were featured on at least a quarter of those templates.

Google is also pursuing Lighthouse under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, saying the Lighthouse phishing enterprise encompasses several connected threat actor groups that work together to design and implement complex criminal schemes targeting the general public.

According to Google, those threat actor teams include a “developer group” that supplies the phishing software and templates; a “data broker group” that provides a list of targets; a “spammer group” that provides the tools to send fraudulent text messages in volume; a “theft group,” in charge of monetizing the phished information; and an “administrative group,” which runs their Telegram support channels and discussion groups designed to facilitate collaboration and recruit new members.

“While different members of the Enterprise may play different roles in the Schemes, they all collaborate to execute phishing attacks that rely on the Lighthouse software,” Google’s complaint alleges. “None of the Enterprise’s Schemes can generate revenue without collaboration and cooperation among the members of the Enterprise. All of the threat actor groups are connected to one another through historical and current business ties, including through their use of Lighthouse and the online community supporting its use, which exists on both YouTube and Telegram channels.”

Silent Push’s May report observed that the Smishing Triad boasts it has “300+ front desk staff worldwide” involved in Lighthouse, staff that is mainly used to support various aspects of the group’s fraud and cash-out schemes.

Google alleges that in addition to blasting out text messages spoofing known brands, Lighthouse makes it easy for customers to mass-create fake e-commerce websites that are advertised using Google Ads accounts (and paid for with stolen credit cards). These phony merchants collect payment card information at checkout, and then prompt the customer to expect and share a one-time code sent from their financial institution.

Once again, that one-time code is being sent by the bank because the fake e-commerce site has just attempted to enroll the victim’s payment card data in a mobile wallet. By the time a victim understands they will likely never receive the item they just purchased from the fake e-commerce shop, the scammers have already run through hundreds of dollars in fraudulent charges, often at high-end electronics stores or jewelers.

Ford Merrill works in security research at SecAlliance, a CSIS Security Group company, and he’s been tracking Chinese SMS phishing groups for several years. Merrill said many Lighthouse customers are now using the phishing kit to erect fake e-commerce websites that are advertised on Google and Meta platforms.

“You find this shop by searching for a particular product online or whatever, and you think you’re getting a good deal,” Merrill said. “But of course you never receive the product, and they will phish that one-time code at checkout.”

Merrill said some of the phishing templates include payment buttons for services like PayPal, and that victims who choose to pay through PayPal can also see their PayPal accounts hijacked.

“The main advantage of the fake e-commerce site is that it doesn’t require them to send out message lures,” Merrill said, noting that the fake vendor sites have more staying power than traditional phishing sites because it takes far longer for them to be flagged for fraud.

Merrill said Google’s legal action may temporarily disrupt the Lighthouse operators, and could make it easier for U.S. federal authorities to bring criminal charges against the group. But he said the Chinese mobile phishing market is so lucrative right now that it’s difficult to imagine a popular phishing service voluntarily turning out the lights.

Merrill said Google’s lawsuit also can help lay the groundwork for future disruptive actions against Lighthouse and other phishing-as-a-service entities that are operating almost entirely on Chinese networks. According to Silent Push, a majority of the phishing sites created with these kits are sitting at two Chinese hosting companies: Tencent (AS132203) and Alibaba (AS45102).

“Once Google has a default judgment against the Lighthouse guys in court, theoretically they could use that to go to Alibaba and Tencent and say, ‘These guys have been found guilty, here are their domains and IP addresses, we want you to shut these down or we’ll include you in the case.'”

If Google can bring that kind of legal pressure consistently over time, Merrill said, they might succeed in increasing costs for the phishers and more frequently disrupting their operations.

“If you take all of these Chinese phishing kit developers, I have to believe it’s tens of thousands of Chinese-speaking people involved,” he said. “The Lighthouse guys will probably burn down their Telegram channels and disappear for a while. They might call it something else or redevelop their service entirely. But I don’t believe for a minute they’re going to close up shop and leave forever.”

The U.S. government is reportedly preparing to ban the sale of wireless routers and other networking gear from TP-Link Systems, a tech company that currently enjoys an estimated 50% market share among home users and small businesses. Experts say while the proposed ban may have more to do with TP-Link’s ties to China than any specific technical threats, much of the rest of the industry serving this market also sources hardware from China and ships products that are insecure fresh out of the box.

The Washington Post recently reported that more than a half-dozen federal departments and agencies were backing a proposed ban on future sales of TP-Link devices in the United States. The story said U.S. Department of Commerce officials concluded TP-Link Systems products pose a risk because the U.S.-based company’s products handle sensitive American data and because the officials believe it remains subject to jurisdiction or influence by the Chinese government.

TP-Link Systems denies that, saying that it fully split from the Chinese TP-Link Technologies over the past three years, and that its critics have vastly overstated the company’s market share (TP-Link puts it at around 30 percent). TP-Link says it has headquarters in California, with a branch in Singapore, and that it manufactures in Vietnam. The company says it researches, designs, develops and manufactures everything except its chipsets in-house.

TP-Link Systems told The Post it has sole ownership of some engineering, design and manufacturing capabilities in China that were once part of China-based TP-Link Technologies, and that it operates them without Chinese government supervision.

“TP-Link vigorously disputes any allegation that its products present national security risks to the United States,” Ricca Silverio, a spokeswoman for TP-Link Systems, said in a statement. “TP-Link is a U.S. company committed to supplying high-quality and secure products to the U.S. market and beyond.”

Cost is a big reason TP-Link devices are so prevalent in the consumer and small business market: As this February 2025 story from Wired observed regarding the proposed ban, TP-Link has long had a reputation for flooding the market with devices that are considerably cheaper than comparable models from other vendors. That price point (and consistently excellent performance ratings) has made TP-Link a favorite among Internet service providers (ISPs) that provide routers to their customers.

In August 2024, the chairman and the ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party called for an investigation into TP-Link devices, which they said were found on U.S. military bases and for sale at exchanges that sell them to members of the military and their families.

“TP-Link’s unusual degree of vulnerabilities and required compliance with PRC law are in and of themselves disconcerting,” the House lawmakers warned in a letter (PDF) to the director of the Commerce Department. “When combined with the PRC government’s common use of SOHO [small office/home office] routers like TP-Link to perpetrate extensive cyberattacks in the United States, it becomes significantly alarming.”

The letter cited a May 2023 blog post by Check Point Research about a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group dubbed “Camaro Dragon” that used a malicious firmware implant for some TP-Link routers to carry out a sequence of targeted cyberattacks against European foreign affairs entities. Check Point said while it only found the malicious firmware on TP-Link devices, “the firmware-agnostic nature of the implanted components indicates that a wide range of devices and vendors may be at risk.”

In a report published in October 2024, Microsoft said it was tracking a network of compromised TP-Link small office and home office routers that has been abused by multiple distinct Chinese state-sponsored hacking groups since 2021. Microsoft found the hacker groups were leveraging the compromised TP-Link systems to conduct “password spraying” attacks against Microsoft accounts. Password spraying involves rapidly attempting to access a large number of accounts (usernames/email addresses) with a relatively small number of commonly used passwords.

TP-Link rightly points out that most of its competitors likewise source components from China. The company also correctly notes that advanced persistent threat (APT) groups from China and other nations have leveraged vulnerabilities in products from their competitors, such as Cisco and Netgear.

But that may be cold comfort for TP-Link customers who are now wondering if it’s smart to continue using these products, or whether it makes sense to buy more costly networking gear that might only be marginally less vulnerable to compromise.

Almost without exception, the hardware and software that ships with most consumer-grade routers includes a number of default settings that need to be changed before the devices can be safely connected to the Internet. For example, bring a new router online without changing the default username and password and chances are it will only take a few minutes before it is probed and possibly compromised by some type of Internet-of-Things botnet. Also, it is incredibly common for the firmware in a brand new router to be dangerously out of date by the time it is purchased and unboxed.

Until quite recently, the idea that router manufacturers should make it easier for their customers to use these products safely was something of an anathema to this industry. Consumers were largely left to figure that out on their own, with predictably disastrous results.

But over the past few years, many manufacturers of popular consumer routers have begun forcing users to perform basic hygiene — such as changing the default password and updating the internal firmware — before the devices can be used as a router. For example, most brands of “mesh” wireless routers — like Amazon’s Eero, Netgear’s Orbi series, or Asus’s ZenWifi — require online registration that automates these critical steps going forward (or at least through their stated support lifecycle).

For better or worse, less expensive, traditional consumer routers like those from Belkin and Linksys also now automate this setup by heavily steering customers toward installing a mobile app to complete the installation (this often comes as a shock to people more accustomed to manually configuring a router). Still, these products tend to put the onus on users to check for and install available updates periodically. Also, they’re often powered by underwhelming or else bloated firmware, and a dearth of configurable options.

Of course, not everyone wants to fiddle with mobile apps or is comfortable with registering their router so that it can be managed or monitored remotely in the cloud. For those hands-on folks — and for power users seeking more advanced router features like VPNs, ad blockers and network monitoring — the best advice is to check if your router’s stock firmware can be replaced with open-source alternatives, such as OpenWrt or DD-WRT.

These open-source firmware options are compatible with a wide range of devices, and they generally offer more features and configurability. Open-source firmware can even help extend the life of routers years after the vendor stops supporting the underlying hardware, but it still requires users to manually check for and install any available updates.

Happily, TP-Link users spooked by the proposed ban may have an alternative to outright junking these devices, as many TP-Link routers also support open-source firmware options like OpenWRT. While this approach may not eliminate any potential hardware-specific security flaws, it could serve as an effective hedge against more common vendor-specific vulnerabilities, such as undocumented user accounts, hard-coded credentials, and weaknesses that allow attackers to bypass authentication.

Regardless of the brand, if your router is more than four or five years old it may be worth upgrading for performance reasons alone — particularly if your home or office is primarily accessing the Internet through WiFi.

NB: The Post’s story notes that a substantial portion of TP-Link routers and those of its competitors are purchased or leased through ISPs. In these cases, the devices are typically managed and updated remotely by your ISP, and equipped with custom profiles responsible for authenticating your device to the ISP’s network. If this describes your setup, please do not attempt to modify or replace these devices without first consulting with your Internet provider.

Aisuru, the botnet responsible for a series of record-smashing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks this year, recently was overhauled to support a more low-key, lucrative and sustainable business: Renting hundreds of thousands of infected Internet of Things (IoT) devices to proxy services that help cybercriminals anonymize their traffic. Experts say a glut of proxies from Aisuru and other sources is fueling large-scale data harvesting efforts tied to various artificial intelligence (AI) projects, helping content scrapers evade detection by routing their traffic through residential connections that appear to be regular Internet users.

First identified in August 2024, Aisuru has spread to at least 700,000 IoT systems, such as poorly secured Internet routers and security cameras. Aisuru’s overlords have used their massive botnet to clobber targets with headline-grabbing DDoS attacks, flooding targeted hosts with blasts of junk requests from all infected systems simultaneously.

In June, Aisuru hit KrebsOnSecurity.com with a DDoS clocking at 6.3 terabits per second — the biggest attack that Google had ever mitigated at the time. In the weeks and months that followed, Aisuru’s operators demonstrated DDoS capabilities of nearly 30 terabits of data per second — well beyond the attack mitigation capabilities of most Internet destinations.

These digital sieges have been particularly disruptive this year for U.S.-based Internet service providers (ISPs), in part because Aisuru recently succeeded in taking over a large number of IoT devices in the United States. And when Aisuru launches attacks, the volume of outgoing traffic from infected systems on these ISPs is often so high that it can disrupt or degrade Internet service for adjacent (non-botted) customers of the ISPs.

“Multiple broadband access network operators have experienced significant operational impact due to outbound DDoS attacks in excess of 1.5Tb/sec launched from Aisuru botnet nodes residing on end-customer premises,” wrote Roland Dobbins, principal engineer at Netscout, in a recent executive summary on Aisuru. “Outbound/crossbound attack traffic exceeding 1Tb/sec from compromised customer premise equipment (CPE) devices has caused significant disruption to wireline and wireless broadband access networks. High-throughput attacks have caused chassis-based router line card failures.”

The incessant attacks from Aisuru have caught the attention of federal authorities in the United States and Europe (many of Aisuru’s victims are customers of ISPs and hosting providers based in Europe). Quite recently, some of the world’s largest ISPs have started informally sharing block lists identifying the rapidly shifting locations of the servers that the attackers use to control the activities of the botnet.

Experts say the Aisuru botmasters recently updated their malware so that compromised devices can more easily be rented to so-called “residential proxy” providers. These proxy services allow paying customers to route their Internet communications through someone else’s device, providing anonymity and the ability to appear as a regular Internet user in almost any major city worldwide.

From a website’s perspective, the IP traffic of a residential proxy network user appears to originate from the rented residential IP address, not from the proxy service customer. Proxy services can be used in a legitimate manner for several business purposes — such as price comparisons or sales intelligence. But they are massively abused for hiding cybercrime activity (think advertising fraud, credential stuffing) because they can make it difficult to trace malicious traffic to its original source.

And as we’ll see in a moment, this entire shadowy industry appears to be shifting its focus toward enabling aggressive content scraping activity that continuously feeds raw data into large language models (LLMs) built to support various AI projects.

‘INSANE’ GROWTH

Riley Kilmer is co-founder of spur.us, a service that tracks proxy networks. Kilmer said all of the top proxy services have grown substantially over the past six months.

“I just checked, and in the last 90 days we’ve seen 250 million unique residential proxy IPs,” Kilmer said. “That is insane. That is so high of a number, it’s unheard of. These proxies are absolutely everywhere now.”

Today, Spur says it is tracking an unprecedented spike in available proxies across all providers, including;

LUMINATI_PROXY    11,856,421
NETNUT_PROXY    10,982,458
ABCPROXY_PROXY    9,294,419
OXYLABS_PROXY     6,754,790
IPIDEA_PROXY     3,209,313
EARNFM_PROXY    2,659,913
NODEMAVEN_PROXY    2,627,851
INFATICA_PROXY    2,335,194
IPROYAL_PROXY    2,032,027
YILU_PROXY    1,549,155

Reached for comment about the apparent rapid growth in their proxy network, Oxylabs (#4 on Spur’s list) said while their proxy pool did grow recently, it did so at nowhere near the rate cited by Spur.

“We don’t systematically track other providers’ figures, and we’re not aware of any instances of 10× or 100× growth, especially when it comes to a few bigger companies that are legitimate businesses,” the company said in a written statement.

Bright Data was formerly known as Luminati Networks, the name that is currently at the top of Spur’s list of the biggest residential proxy networks. Bright Data likewise told KrebsOnSecurity that Spur’s current estimates of its proxy network are dramatically overstated and inaccurate.

“We did not actively initiate nor do we see any 10x or 100x expansion of our network, which leads me to believe that someone might be presenting these IPs as Bright Data’s in some way,” said Rony Shalit, Bright Data’s chief compliance and ethics officer. “In many cases in the past, due to us being the leading data collection proxy provider, IPs were falsely tagged as being part of our network, or while being used by other proxy providers for malicious activity.”

“Our network is only sourced from verified IP providers and a robust opt-in only residential peers, which we work hard and in complete transparency to obtain,” Shalit continued. “Every DC, ISP or SDK partner is reviewed and approved, and every residential peer must actively opt in to be part of our network.”

HK NETWORK

Even Spur acknowledges that Luminati and Oxylabs are unlike most other proxy services on their top proxy providers list, in that these providers actually adhere to “know-your-customer” policies, such as requiring video calls with all customers, and strictly blocking customers from reselling access.

Benjamin Brundage is founder of Synthient, a startup that helps companies detect proxy networks. Brundage said if there is increasing confusion around which proxy networks are the most worrisome, it’s because nearly all of these lesser-known proxy services have evolved into highly incestuous bandwidth resellers. What’s more, he said, some proxy providers do not appreciate being tracked and have been known to take aggressive steps to confuse systems that scan the Internet for residential proxy nodes.

Brundage said most proxy services today have created their own software development kit or SDK that other app developers can bundle with their code to earn revenue. These SDKs quietly modify the user’s device so that some portion of their bandwidth can be used to forward traffic from proxy service customers.

“Proxy providers have pools of constantly churning IP addresses,” he said. “These IP addresses are sourced through various means, such as bandwidth-sharing apps, botnets, Android SDKs, and more. These providers will often either directly approach resellers or offer a reseller program that allows users to resell bandwidth through their platform.”

Many SDK providers say they require full consent before allowing their software to be installed on end-user devices. Still, those opt-in agreements and consent checkboxes may be little more than a formality for cybercriminals like the Aisuru botmasters, who can earn a commission each time one of their infected devices is forced to install some SDK that enables one or more of these proxy services.

Depending on its structure, a single provider may operate hundreds of different proxy pools at a time — all maintained through other means, Brundage said.

“Often, you’ll see resellers maintaining their own proxy pool in addition to an upstream provider,” he said. “It allows them to market a proxy pool to high-value clients and offer an unlimited bandwidth plan for cheap reduce their own costs.”

Some proxy providers appear to be directly in league with botmasters. Brundage identified one proxy seller that was aggressively advertising cheap and plentiful bandwidth to content scraping companies. After scanning that provider’s pool of available proxies, Brundage said he found a one-to-one match with IP addresses he’d previously mapped to the Aisuru botnet.

Brundage says that by almost any measurement, the world’s largest residential proxy service is IPidea, a China-based proxy network. IPidea is #5 on Spur’s Top 10, and Brundage said its brands include ABCProxy (#3), Roxlabs, LunaProxy, PIA S5 Proxy, PyProxy, 922Proxy, 360Proxy, IP2World, and Cherry Proxy. Spur’s Kilmer said they also track Yilu Proxy (#10) as IPidea.

Brundage said all of these providers operate under a corporate umbrella known on the cybercrime forums as “HK Network.”

“The way it works is there’s this whole reseller ecosystem, where IPidea will be incredibly aggressive and approach all these proxy providers with the offer, ‘Hey, if you guys buy bandwidth from us, we’ll give you these amazing reseller prices,'” Brundage explained. “But they’re also very aggressive in recruiting resellers for their apps.”

Those apps include a range of low-cost and “free” virtual private networking (VPN) services that indeed allow users to enjoy a free VPN, but which also turn the user’s device into a traffic relay that can be rented to cybercriminals, or else parceled out to countless other proxy networks.

“They have all this bandwidth to offload,” Brundage said of IPidea and its sister networks. “And they can do it through their own platforms, or they go get resellers to do it for them by advertising on sketchy hacker forums to reach more people.”

One of IPidea’s core brands is 922S5Proxy, which is a not-so-subtle nod to the 911S5Proxy service that was hugely popular between 2015 and 2022. In July 2022, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive into 911S5Proxy’s origins and apparent owners in China. Less than a week later, 911S5Proxy announced it was closing down after the company’s servers were massively hacked.

That 2022 story named Yunhe Wang from Beijing as the apparent owner and/or manager of the 911S5 proxy service. In May 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice arrested Mr Wang, alleging that his network was used to steal billions of dollars from financial institutions, credit card issuers, and federal lending programs. At the same time, the U.S. Treasury Department announced sanctions against Wang and two other Chinese nationals for operating 911S5Proxy.

DATA SCRAPING FOR AI

In recent months, multiple experts who track botnet and proxy activity have shared that a great deal of content scraping which ultimately benefits AI companies is now leveraging these proxy networks to further obfuscate their aggressive data-slurping activity. That’s because by routing it through residential IP addresses, content scraping firms can make their traffic far trickier to filter out.

“It’s really difficult to block, because there’s a risk of blocking real people,” Spur’s Kilmer said of the LLM scraping activity that is fed through individual residential IP addresses, which are often shared by multiple customers at once.

Kilmer says the AI industry has brought a veneer of legitimacy to residential proxy business, which has heretofore mostly been associated with sketchy affiliate money making programs, automated abuse, and unwanted Internet traffic.

“Web crawling and scraping has always been a thing, but AI made it like a commodity, data that had to be collected,” Kilmer said. “Everybody wanted to monetize their own data pots, and how they monetize that is different across the board.”

Kilmer said many LLM-related scrapers rely on residential proxies in cases where the content provider has restricted access to their platform in some way, such as forcing interaction through an app, or keeping all content behind a login page with multi-factor authentication.

“Where the cost of data is out of reach — there is some exclusivity or reason they can’t access the data — they’ll turn to residential proxies so they look like a real person accessing that data,” Kilmer said of the content scraping efforts.

Aggressive AI crawlers increasingly are overloading community-maintained infrastructure, causing what amounts to persistent DDoS attacks on vital public resources. A report earlier this year from LibreNews found some open-source projects now see as much as 97 percent of their traffic originating from AI company bots, dramatically increasing bandwidth costs, service instability, and burdening already stretched-thin maintainers.

Cloudflare is now experimenting with tools that will allow content creators to charge a fee to AI crawlers to scrape their websites. The company’s “pay-per-crawl” feature is currently in a private beta, and it lets publishers set their own prices that bots must pay before scraping content.

On October 22, the social media and news network Reddit sued Oxylabs (PDF) and several other proxy providers, alleging that their systems enabled the mass-scraping of Reddit user content even though Reddit had taken steps to block such activity.

“Recognizing that Reddit denies scrapers like them access to its site, Defendants scrape the data from Google’s search results instead,” the lawsuit alleges. “They do so by masking their identities, hiding their locations, and disguising their web scrapers as regular people (among other techniques) to circumvent or bypass the security restrictions meant to stop them.”

Denas Grybauskas, chief governance and strategy officer at Oxylabs, said the company was shocked and disappointed by the lawsuit.

“Reddit has made no attempt to speak with us directly or communicate any potential concerns,” Grybauskas said in a written statement. “Oxylabs has always been and will continue to be a pioneer and an industry leader in public data collection, and it will not hesitate to defend itself against these allegations. Oxylabs’ position is that no company should claim ownership of public data that does not belong to them. It is possible that it is just an attempt to sell the same public data at an inflated price.”

As big and powerful as Aisuru may be, it is hardly the only botnet that is contributing to the overall broad availability of residential proxies. For example, on June 5 the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center warned that an IoT malware threat dubbed BADBOX 2.0 had compromised millions of smart-TV boxes, digital projectors, vehicle infotainment units, picture frames, and other IoT devices.

In July, Google filed a lawsuit in New York federal court against the Badbox botnet’s alleged perpetrators. Google said the Badbox 2.0 botnet “compromised more than 10 million uncertified devices running Android’s open-source software, which lacks Google’s security protections. Cybercriminals infected these devices with pre-installed malware and exploited them to conduct large-scale ad fraud and other digital crimes.”

A FAMILIAR DOMAIN NAME

Brundage said the Aisuru botmasters have their own SDK, and for some reason part of its code tells many newly-infected systems to query the domain name fuckbriankrebs[.]com. This may be little more than an elaborate “screw you” to this site’s author: One of the botnet’s alleged partners goes by the handle “Forky,” and was identified in June by KrebsOnSecurity as a young man from Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Brundage noted that only systems infected with Aisuru’s Android SDK will be forced to resolve the domain. Initially, there was some discussion about whether the domain might have some utility as a “kill switch” capable of disrupting the botnet’s operations, although Brundage and others interviewed for this story say that is unlikely.

For one thing, they said, if the domain was somehow critical to the operation of the botnet, why was it still unregistered and actively for-sale? Why indeed, we asked. Happily, the domain name was deftly snatched up last week by Philippe Caturegli, “chief hacking officer” for the security intelligence company Seralys.

Caturegli enabled a passive DNS server on that domain and within a few hours received more than 700,000 requests for unique subdomains on fuckbriankrebs[.]com.

But even with that visibility into Aisuru, it is difficult to use this domain check-in feature to measure its true size, Brundage said. After all, he said, the systems that are phoning home to the domain are only a small portion of the overall botnet.

“The bots are hardcoded to just spam lookups on the subdomains,” he said. “So anytime an infection occurs or it runs in the background, it will do one of those DNS queries.”

The domain fuckbriankrebs[.]com has a storied history. On its initial launch in 2009, it was used to spread malicious software by the Cutwail spam botnet. In 2011, the domain was involved in a notable DDoS against this website from a botnet powered by Russkill (a.k.a. “Dirt Jumper”).

Domaintools.com finds that in 2015, fuckbriankrebs[.]com was registered to an email address attributed to David “Abdilo” Crees, a 27-year-old Australian man sentenced in May 2025 to time served for cybercrime convictions related to the Lizard Squad hacking group.

Update, Nov. 1, 2025, 10:25 a.m. ET: An earlier version of this story erroneously cited Spur’s proxy numbers from earlier this year; Spur said those numbers conflated residential proxies — which are rotating and attached to real end-user devices — with “ISP proxies” located at AT&T. ISP proxies, Spur said, involve tricking an ISP into routing a large number of IP addresses that are resold as far more static datacenter proxies.

Cybercriminals are abusing a widespread lack of authentication in the customer service platform Zendesk to flood targeted email inboxes with menacing messages that come from hundreds of Zendesk corporate customers simultaneously.

Zendesk is an automated help desk service designed to make it simple for people to contact companies for customer support issues. Earlier this week, KrebsOnSecurity started receiving thousands of ticket creation notification messages through Zendesk in rapid succession, each bearing the name of different Zendesk customers, such as CapCom, CompTIA, Discord, GMAC, NordVPN, The Washington Post, and Tinder.

The abusive missives sent via Zendesk’s platform can include any subject line chosen by the abusers. In my case, the messages variously warned about a supposed law enforcement investigation involving KrebsOnSecurity.com, or else contained personal insults.

Moreover, the automated messages that are sent out from this type of abuse all come from customer domain names — not from Zendesk. In the example below, replying to any of the junk customer support responses from The Washington Post’s Zendesk installation shows the reply-to address is help@washpost.com.

Notified about the mass abuse of their platform, Zendesk said the emails were ticket creation notifications from customer accounts that configured their Zendesk instance to allow anyone to submit support requests — including anonymous users.

“These types of support tickets can be part of a customer’s workflow, where a prior verification is not required to allow them to engage and make use of the Support capabilities,” said Carolyn Camoens, communications director at Zendesk. “Although we recommend our customers to permit only verified users to submit tickets, some Zendesk customers prefer to use an anonymous environment to allow for tickets to be created due to various business reasons.”

Camoens said requests that can be submitted in an anonymous manner can also make use of an email address of the submitter’s choice.

“However, this method can also be used for spam requests to be created on behalf of third party email addresses,” Camoens said. “If an account has enabled the auto-responder trigger based on ticket creation, then this allows for the ticket notification email to be sent from our customer’s accounts to these third parties. The notification will also include the Subject added by the creator of these tickets.”

Zendesk claims it uses rate limits to prevent a high volume of requests from being created at once, but those limits did not stop Zendesk customers from flooding my inbox with thousands of messages in just a few hours.

“We recognize that our systems were leveraged against you in a distributed, many-against-one manner,” Camoens said. “We are actively investigating additional preventive measures. We are also advising customers experiencing this type of activity to follow our general security best practices and configure an authenticated ticket creation workflow.”

In all of the cases above, the messaging abuse would not have been possible if Zendesk customers validated support request email addresses prior to sending responses. Failing to do so may make it easier for Zendesk clients to handle customer support requests, but it also allows ne’er-do-wells to sully the sender’s brand in service of disruptive and malicious email floods.

The world’s largest and most disruptive botnet is now drawing a majority of its firepower from compromised Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices hosted on U.S. Internet providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, new evidence suggests. Experts say the heavy concentration of infected devices at U.S. providers is complicating efforts to limit collateral damage from the botnet’s attacks, which shattered previous records this week with a brief traffic flood that clocked in at nearly 30 trillion bits of data per second.

Since its debut more than a year ago, the Aisuru botnet has steadily outcompeted virtually all other IoT-based botnets in the wild, with recent attacks siphoning Internet bandwidth from an estimated 300,000 compromised hosts worldwide.

The hacked systems that get subsumed into the botnet are mostly consumer-grade routers, security cameras, digital video recorders and other devices operating with insecure and outdated firmware, and/or factory-default settings. Aisuru’s owners are continuously scanning the Internet for these vulnerable devices and enslaving them for use in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that can overwhelm targeted servers with crippling amounts of junk traffic.

As Aisuru’s size has mushroomed, so has its punch. In May 2025, KrebsOnSecurity was hit with a near-record 6.35 terabits per second (Tbps) attack from Aisuru, which was then the largest assault that Google’s DDoS protection service Project Shield had ever mitigated. Days later, Aisuru shattered that record with a data blast in excess of 11 Tbps.

By late September, Aisuru was publicly flexing DDoS capabilities topping 22 Tbps. Then on October 6, its operators heaved a whopping 29.6 terabits of junk data packets each second at a targeted host. Hardly anyone noticed because it appears to have been a brief test or demonstration of Aisuru’s capabilities: The traffic flood lasted less only a few seconds and was pointed at an Internet server that was specifically designed to measure large-scale DDoS attacks.

Aisuru’s overlords aren’t just showing off. Their botnet is being blamed for a series of increasingly massive and disruptive attacks. Although recent assaults from Aisuru have targeted mostly ISPs that serve online gaming communities like Minecraft, those digital sieges often result in widespread collateral Internet disruption.

For the past several weeks, ISPs hosting some of the Internet’s top gaming destinations have been hit with a relentless volley of gargantuan attacks that experts say are well beyond the DDoS mitigation capabilities of most organizations connected to the Internet today.

Steven Ferguson is principal security engineer at Global Secure Layer (GSL), an ISP in Brisbane, Australia. GSL hosts TCPShield, which offers free or low-cost DDoS protection to more than 50,000 Minecraft servers worldwide. Ferguson told KrebsOnSecurity that on October 8, TCPShield was walloped with a blitz from Aisuru that flooded its network with more than 15 terabits of junk data per second.

Ferguson said that after the attack subsided, TCPShield was told by its upstream provider OVH that they were no longer welcome as a customer.

“This was causing serious congestion on their Miami external ports for several weeks, shown publicly via their weather map,” he said, explaining that TCPShield is now solely protected by GSL.

Traces from the recent spate of crippling Aisuru attacks on gaming servers can be still seen at the website blockgametracker.gg, which indexes the uptime and downtime of the top Minecraft hosts. In the following example from a series of data deluges on the evening of September 28, we can see an Aisuru botnet campaign briefly knocked TCPShield offline.

Paging through the same uptime graphs for other network operators listed shows almost all of them suffered brief but repeated outages around the same time. Here is the same uptime tracking for Minecraft servers on the network provider Cosmic (AS30456), and it shows multiple large dips that correspond to game server outages caused by Aisuru.

BOTNETS R US

Ferguson said he’s been tracking Aisuru for about three months, and recently he noticed the botnet’s composition shifted heavily toward infected systems at ISPs in the United States. Ferguson shared logs from an attack on October 8 that indexed traffic by the total volume sent through each network provider, and the logs showed that 11 of the top 20 traffic sources were U.S. based ISPs.

AT&T customers were by far the biggest U.S. contributors to that attack, followed by botted systems on Charter Communications, Comcast, T-Mobile and Verizon, Ferguson found. He said the volume of data packets per second coming from infected IoT hosts on these ISPs is often so high that it has started to affect the quality of service that ISPs are able to provide to adjacent (non-botted) customers.

“The impact extends beyond victim networks,” Ferguson said. “For instance we have seen 500 gigabits of traffic via Comcast’s network alone. This amount of egress leaving their network, especially being so US-East concentrated, will result in congestion towards other services or content trying to be reached while an attack is ongoing.”

Roland Dobbins is principal engineer at Netscout. Dobbins said Ferguson is spot on, noting that while most ISPs have effective mitigations in place to handle large incoming DDoS attacks, many are far less prepared to manage the inevitable service degradation caused by large numbers of their customers suddenly using some or all available bandwidth to attack others.

“The outbound and cross-bound DDoS attacks can be just as disruptive as the inbound stuff,” Dobbin said. “We’re now in a situation where ISPs are routinely seeing terabit-per-second plus outbound attacks from their networks that can cause operational problems.”

“The crying need for effective and universal outbound DDoS attack suppression is something that is really being highlighted by these recent attacks,” Dobbins continued. “A lot of network operators are learning that lesson now, and there’s going to be a period ahead where there’s some scrambling and potential disruption going on.”

KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from the ISPs named in Ferguson’s report. Charter Communications pointed to a recent blog post on protecting its network, stating that Charter actively monitors for both inbound and outbound attacks, and that it takes proactive action wherever possible.

“In addition to our own extensive network security, we also aim to reduce the risk of customer connected devices contributing to attacks through our Advanced WiFi solution that includes Security Shield, and we make Security Suite available to our Internet customers,” Charter wrote in an emailed response to questions. “With the ever-growing number of devices connecting to networks, we encourage customers to purchase trusted devices with secure development and manufacturing practices, use anti-virus and security tools on their connected devices, and regularly download security patches.”

A spokesperson for Comcast responded, “Currently our network is not experiencing impacts and we are able to handle the traffic.”

9 YEARS OF MIRAI

Aisuru is built on the bones of malicious code that was leaked in 2016 by the original creators of the Mirai IoT botnet. Like Aisuru, Mirai quickly outcompeted all other DDoS botnets in its heyday, and obliterated previous DDoS attack records with a 620 gigabit-per-second siege that sidelined this website for nearly four days in 2016.

The Mirai botmasters likewise used their crime machine to attack mostly Minecraft servers, but with the goal of forcing Minecraft server owners to purchase a DDoS protection service that they controlled. In addition, they rented out slices of the Mirai botnet to paying customers, some of whom used it to mask the sources of other types of cybercrime, such as click fraud.

Dobbins said Aisuru’s owners also appear to be renting out their botnet as a distributed proxy network that cybercriminal customers anywhere in the world can use to anonymize their malicious traffic and make it appear to be coming from regular residential users in the U.S.

“The people who operate this botnet are also selling (it as) residential proxies,” he said. “And that’s being used to reflect application layer attacks through the proxies on the bots as well.”

The Aisuru botnet harkens back to its predecessor Mirai in another intriguing way. One of its owners is using the Telegram handle “9gigsofram,” which corresponds to the nickname used by the co-owner of a Minecraft server protection service called Proxypipe that was heavily targeted in 2016 by the original Mirai botmasters.

Robert Coelho co-ran Proxypipe back then along with his business partner Erik “9gigsofram” Buckingham, and has spent the past nine years fine-tuning various DDoS mitigation companies that cater to Minecraft server operators and other gaming enthusiasts. Coelho said he has no idea why one of Aisuru’s botmasters chose Buckingham’s nickname, but added that it might say something about how long this person has been involved in the DDoS-for-hire industry.

“The Aisuru attacks on the gaming networks these past seven day have been absolutely huge, and you can see tons of providers going down multiple times a day,” Coelho said.

Coelho said the 15 Tbps attack this week against TCPShield was likely only a portion of the total attack volume hurled by Aisuru at the time, because much of it would have been shoved through networks that simply couldn’t process that volume of traffic all at once. Such outsized attacks, he said, are becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to mitigate.

“It’s definitely at the point now where you need to be spending at least a million dollars a month just to have the network capacity to be able to deal with these attacks,” he said.

RAPID SPREAD

Aisuru has long been rumored to use multiple zero-day vulnerabilities in IoT devices to aid its rapid growth over the past year. XLab, the Chinese security company that was the first to profile Aisuru’s rise in 2024, warned last month that one of the Aisuru botmasters had compromised the firmware distribution website for Totolink, a maker of low-cost routers and other networking gear.

“Multiple sources indicate the group allegedly compromised a router firmware update server in April and distributed malicious scripts to expand the botnet,” XLab wrote on September 15. “The node count is currently reported to be around 300,000.”

Aisuru’s operators received an unexpected boost to their crime machine in August when the U.S. Department Justice charged the alleged proprietor of Rapper Bot, a DDoS-for-hire botnet that competed directly with Aisuru for control over the global pool of vulnerable IoT systems.

Once Rapper Bot was dismantled, Aisuru’s curators moved quickly to commandeer vulnerable IoT devices that were suddenly set adrift by the government’s takedown, Dobbins said.

“Folks were arrested and Rapper Bot control servers were seized and that’s great, but unfortunately the botnet’s attack assets were then pieced out by the remaining botnets,” he said. “The problem is, even if those infected IoT devices are rebooted and cleaned up, they will still get re-compromised by something else generally within minutes of being plugged back in.”

BOTMASTERS AT LARGE

XLab’s September blog post cited multiple unnamed sources saying Aisuru is operated by three cybercriminals: “Snow,” who’s responsible for botnet development; “Tom,” tasked with finding new vulnerabilities; and “Forky,” responsible for botnet sales.

KrebsOnSecurity interviewed Forky in our May 2025 story about the record 6.3 Tbps attack from Aisuru. That story identified Forky as a 21-year-old man from Sao Paulo, Brazil who has been extremely active in the DDoS-for-hire scene since at least 2022. The FBI has seized Forky’s DDoS-for-hire domains several times over the years.

Like the original Mirai botmasters, Forky also operates a DDoS mitigation service called 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.

In our previous interview, Forky acknowledged being involved in the development and marketing of Aisuru, but denied participating in attacks launched by the botnet.

Reached for comment earlier this month, Forky continued to maintain his innocence, claiming that he also is still trying to figure out who the current Aisuru botnet operators are in real life (Forky said the same thing in our May interview).

But after a week of promising juicy details, Forky came up empty-handed once again. Suspecting that Forky was merely being coy, I asked him how someone so connected to the DDoS-for-hire world could still be mystified on this point, and suggested that his inability or unwillingness to blame anyone else for Aisuru would not exactly help his case.

At this, Forky verbally bristled at being pressed for more details, and abruptly terminated our interview.

“I’m not here to be threatened with ignorance because you are stressed,” Forky replied. “They’re blaming me for those new attacks. Pretty much the whole world (is) due to your blog.”

A cybercriminal group that used voice phishing attacks to siphon more than a billion records from Salesforce customers earlier this year has launched a website that threatens to publish data stolen from dozens of Fortune 500 firms if they refuse to pay a ransom. The group also claimed responsibility for a recent breach involving Discord user data, and for stealing terabytes of sensitive files from thousands of customers of the enterprise software maker Red Hat.

In May 2025, a prolific and amorphous English-speaking cybercrime group known as ShinyHunters launched a social engineering campaign that used voice phishing to trick targets into connecting a malicious app to their organization’s Salesforce portal.

The first real details about the incident came in early June, when the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) warned that ShinyHunters — tracked by Google as UNC6040 — was extorting victims over their stolen Salesforce data, and that the group was poised to launch a data leak site to publicly shame victim companies into paying a ransom to keep their records private. A month later, Google acknowledged that one of its own corporate Salesforce instances was impacted in the voice phishing campaign.

Last week, a new victim shaming blog dubbed “Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters” began publishing the names of companies that had customer Salesforce data stolen as a result of the May voice phishing campaign.

“Contact us to negotiate this ransom or all your customers data will be leaked,” the website stated in a message to Salesforce. “If we come to a resolution all individual extortions against your customers will be withdrawn from. Nobody else will have to pay us, if you pay, Salesforce, Inc.”

Below that message were more than three dozen entries for companies that allegedly had Salesforce data stolen, including Toyota, FedEx, Disney/Hulu, and UPS. The entries for each company specified the volume of stolen data available, as well as the date that the information was retrieved (the stated breach dates range between May and September 2025).

On October 5, the Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters victim shaming and extortion blog announced that the group was responsible for a breach in September involving a GitLab server used by Red Hat that contained more than 28,000 Git code repositories, including more than 5,000 Customer Engagement Reports (CERs).

“Alot of folders have their client’s secrets such as artifactory access tokens, git tokens, azure, docker (redhat docker, azure containers, dockerhub), their client’s infrastructure details in the CERs like the audits that were done for them, and a whole LOT more, etc.,” the hackers claimed.

Their claims came several days after a previously unknown hacker group calling itself the Crimson Collective took credit for the Red Hat intrusion on Telegram.

Red Hat disclosed on October 2 that attackers had compromised a company GitLab server, and said it was in the process of notifying affected customers.

“The compromised GitLab instance housed consulting engagement data, which may include, for example, Red Hat’s project specifications, example code snippets, internal communications about consulting services, and limited forms of business contact information,” Red Hat wrote.

Separately, Discord has started emailing users affected by another breach claimed by ShinyHunters. Discord said an incident on September 20 at a “third-party customer service provider” impacted a “limited number of users” who communicated with Discord customer support or Trust & Safety teams. The information included Discord usernames, emails, IP address, the last four digits of any stored payment cards, and government ID images submitted during age verification appeals.

The Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters claim they will publish data stolen from Salesforce and its customers if ransom demands aren’t paid by October 10. The group also claims it will soon begin extorting hundreds more organizations that lost data in August after a cybercrime group stole vast amounts of authentication tokens from Salesloft, whose AI chatbot is used by many corporate websites to convert customer interaction into Salesforce leads.

In a communication sent to customers today, Salesforce emphasized that the theft of any third-party Salesloft data allegedly stolen by ShinyHunters did not originate from a vulnerability within the core Salesforce platform. The company also stressed that it has no plans to meet any extortion demands.

“Salesforce will not engage, negotiate with, or pay any extortion demand,” the message to customers read. “Our focus is, and remains, on defending our environment, conducting thorough forensic analysis, supporting our customers, and working with law enforcement and regulatory authorities.”

The GTIG tracked the group behind the Salesloft data thefts as UNC6395, and says the group has been observed harvesting the data for authentication tokens tied to a range of cloud services like Snowflake and Amazon’s AWS.

Google catalogs Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters by so many UNC names (throw in UNC6240 for good measure) because it is thought to be an amalgamation of three hacking groups — Scattered Spider, Lapsus$ and ShinyHunters. The members of these groups hail from many of the same chat channels on the Com, a mostly English-language cybercriminal community that operates across an ocean of Telegram and Discord servers.

The Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters darknet blog is currently offline. The outage appears to have coincided with the disappearance of the group’s new clearnet blog — breachforums[.]hn — which vanished after shifting its Domain Name Service (DNS) servers from DDoS-Guard to Cloudflare.

But before it died, the websites disclosed that hackers were exploiting a critical zero-day vulnerability in Oracle’s E-Business Suite software. Oracle has since confirmed that a security flaw tracked as CVE-2025-61882 allows attackers to perform unauthenticated remote code execution, and is urging customers to apply an emergency update to address the weakness.

Mandiant’s Charles Carmakal shared on LinkedIn that CVE-2025-61882 was initially exploited in August 2025 by the Clop ransomware gang to steal data from Oracle E-Business Suite servers. Bleeping Computer writes that news of the Oracle zero-day first surfaced on the Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters blog, which published a pair of scripts that were used to exploit vulnerable Oracle E-Business Suite instances.

On Monday evening, KrebsOnSecurity received a malware-laced message from a reader that threatened physical violence unless their unstated demands were met. The missive, titled “Shiny hunters,” contained the hashtag $LAPSU$$SCATEREDHUNTER, and urged me to visit a page on limewire[.]com to view their demands.

KrebsOnSecurity did not visit this link, but instead forwarded it to Mandiant, which confirmed that similar menacing missives were sent to employees at Mandiant and other security firms around the same time.

The link in the message fetches a malicious trojan disguised as a Windows screensaver file (Virustotal’s analysis on this malware is here). Simply viewing the booby-trapped screensaver on a Windows PC is enough to cause the bundled trojan to launch in the background.

Mandiant’s Austin Larsen said the trojan is a commercially available backdoor known as ASYNCRAT, a .NET-based backdoor that communicates using a custom binary protocol over TCP, and can execute shell commands and download plugins to extend its features.

“Downloaded plugins may be executed directly in memory or stored in the registry,” Larsen wrote in an analysis shared via email. “Capabilities added via plugins include screenshot capture, file transfer, keylogging, video capture, and cryptocurrency mining. ASYNCRAT also supports a plugin that targets credentials stored by Firefox and Chromium-based web browsers.”

Malware-laced targeted emails are not out of character for certain members of the Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, who have previously harassed and threatened security researchers and even law enforcement officials who are investigating and warning about the extent of their attacks.

With so many big data breaches and ransom attacks now coming from cybercrime groups operating on the Com, law enforcement agencies on both sides of the pond are under increasing pressure to apprehend the criminal hackers involved. In late September, prosecutors in the U.K. charged two alleged Scattered Spider members aged 18 and 19 with extorting at least $115 million in ransom payments from companies victimized by data theft.

U.S. prosecutors heaped their own charges on the 19 year-old in that duo — U.K. resident Thalha Jubair — who is alleged to have been involved in data ransom attacks against Marks & Spencer and Harrods, the British food retailer Co-op Group, and the 2023 intrusions at MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment. Jubair also was allegedly a key member of LAPSUS$, a cybercrime group that broke into dozens of technology companies beginning in late 2021.

In August, convicted Scattered Spider member and 20-year-old Florida man Noah Michael Urban was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison and ordered to pay roughly $13 million in restitution to victims.

In April 2025, a 23-year-old Scottish man thought to be an early Scattered Spider member was extradited from Spain to the U.S., 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.

Update, Oct. 8, 8:59 a.m. ET: A previous version of this story incorrectly referred to the malware sent by the reader as a Windows screenshot file. Rather, it is a Windows screensaver file.

At least 187 code packages made available through the JavaScript repository NPM have been infected with a self-replicating worm that steals credentials from developers and publishes those secrets on GitHub, experts warn. The malware, which briefly infected multiple code packages from the security vendor CrowdStrike, steals and publishes even more credentials every time an infected package is installed.

The novel malware strain is being dubbed Shai-Hulud — after the name for the giant sandworms in Frank Herbert’s Dune novel series — because it publishes any stolen credentials in a new public GitHub repository that includes the name “Shai-Hulud.”

“When a developer installs a compromised package, the malware will look for a npm token in the environment,” said Charlie Eriksen, a researcher for the Belgian security firm Aikido. “If it finds it, it will modify the 20 most popular packages that the npm token has access to, copying itself into the package, and publishing a new version.”

At the center of this developing maelstrom are code libraries available on NPM (short for “Node Package Manager”), which acts as a central hub for JavaScript development and provides the latest updates to widely-used JavaScript components.

The Shai-Hulud worm emerged just days after unknown attackers launched a broad phishing campaign that spoofed NPM and asked developers to “update” their multi-factor authentication login options. That attack led to malware being inserted into at least two-dozen NPM code packages, but the outbreak was quickly contained and was narrowly focused on siphoning cryptocurrency payments.

In late August, another compromise of an NPM developer resulted in malware being added to “nx,” an open-source code development toolkit with as many as six million weekly downloads. In the nx compromise, the attackers introduced code that scoured the user’s device for authentication tokens from programmer destinations like GitHub and NPM, as well as SSH and API keys. But instead of sending those stolen credentials to a central server controlled by the attackers, the malicious nx code created a new public repository in the victim’s GitHub account, and published the stolen data there for all the world to see and download.

Last month’s attack on nx did not self-propagate like a worm, but this Shai-Hulud malware does and bundles reconnaissance tools to assist in its spread. Namely, it uses the open-source tool TruffleHog to search for exposed credentials and access tokens on the developer’s machine. It then attempts to create new GitHub actions and publish any stolen secrets.

“Once the first person got compromised, there was no stopping it,” Aikido’s Eriksen told KrebsOnSecurity. He said the first NPM package compromised by this worm appears to have been altered on Sept. 14, around 17:58 UTC.

The security-focused code development platform socket.dev reports the Shai-Halud attack briefly compromised at least 25 NPM code packages managed by CrowdStrike. Socket.dev said the affected packages were quickly removed by the NPM registry.

In a written statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity, CrowdStrike said that after detecting several malicious packages in the public NPM registry, the company swiftly removed them and rotated its keys in public registries.

“These packages are not used in the Falcon sensor, the platform is not impacted and customers remain protected,” the statement reads, referring to the company’s widely-used endpoint threat detection service. “We are working with NPM and conducting a thorough investigation.”

A writeup on the attack from StepSecurity found that for cloud-specific operations, the malware enumerates AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform secrets. It also found the entire attack design assumes the victim is working in a Linux or macOS environment, and that it deliberately skips Windows systems.

StepSecurity said Shai-Hulud spreads by using stolen NPM authentication tokens, adding its code to the top 20 packages in the victim’s account.

“This creates a cascading effect where an infected package leads to compromised maintainer credentials, which in turn infects all other packages maintained by that user,” StepSecurity’s Ashish Kurmi wrote.

Eriksen said Shai-Hulud is still propagating, although its spread seems to have waned in recent hours.

“I still see package versions popping up once in a while, but no new packages have been compromised in the last ~6 hours,” Eriksen said. “But that could change now as the east coast starts working. I would think of this attack as a ‘living’ thing almost, like a virus. Because it can lay dormant for a while, and if just one person is suddenly infected by accident, they could restart the spread. Especially if there’s a super-spreader attack.”

For now, it appears that the web address the attackers were using to exfiltrate collected data was disabled due to rate limits, Eriksen said.

Nicholas Weaver is a researcher with the International Computer Science Institute, a nonprofit in Berkeley, Calif. Weaver called the Shai-Hulud worm “a supply chain attack that conducts a supply chain attack.” Weaver said NPM (and all other similar package repositories) need to immediately switch to a publication model that requires explicit human consent for every publication request using a phish-proof 2FA method.

“Anything less means attacks like this are going to continue and become far more common, but switching to a 2FA method would effectively throttle these attacks before they can spread,” Weaver said. “Allowing purely automated processes to update the published packages is now a proven recipe for disaster.”

Microsoft Corp. today issued security updates to fix more than 80 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and software. There are no known “zero-day” or actively exploited vulnerabilities in this month’s bundle from Redmond, which nevertheless includes patches for 13 flaws that earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” label. Meanwhile, both Apple and Google recently released updates to fix zero-day bugs in their devices.

Microsoft assigns security flaws a “critical” rating when malware or miscreants can exploit them to gain remote access to a Windows system with little or no help from users. Among the more concerning critical bugs quashed this month is CVE-2025-54918. The problem here resides with Windows NTLM, or NT LAN Manager, a suite of code for managing authentication in a Windows network environment.

Redmond rates this flaw as “Exploitation More Likely,” and although it is listed as a privilege escalation vulnerability, Kev Breen at Immersive says this one is actually exploitable over the network or the Internet.

“From Microsoft’s limited description, it appears that if an attacker is able to send specially crafted packets over the network to the target device, they would have the ability to gain SYSTEM-level privileges on the target machine,” Breen said. “The patch notes for this vulnerability state that ‘Improper authentication in Windows NTLM allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges over a network,’ suggesting an attacker may already need to have access to the NTLM hash or the user’s credentials.”

Breen said another patch — CVE-2025-55234, a 8.8 CVSS-scored flaw affecting the Windows SMB client for sharing files across a network — also is listed as privilege escalation bug but is likewise remotely exploitable. This vulnerability was publicly disclosed prior to this month.

“Microsoft says that an attacker with network access would be able to perform a replay attack against a target host, which could result in the attacker gaining additional privileges, which could lead to code execution,” Breen noted.

CVE-2025-54916 is an “important” vulnerability in Windows NTFS — the default filesystem for all modern versions of Windows — that can lead to remote code execution. Microsoft likewise thinks we are more than likely to see exploitation of this bug soon: The last time Microsoft patched an NTFS bug was in March 2025 and it was already being exploited in the wild as a zero-day.

“While the title of the CVE says ‘Remote Code Execution,’ this exploit is not remotely exploitable over the network, but instead needs an attacker to either have the ability to run code on the host or to convince a user to run a file that would trigger the exploit,” Breen said. “This is commonly seen in social engineering attacks, where they send the user a file to open as an attachment or a link to a file to download and run.”

Critical and remote code execution bugs tend to steal all the limelight, but Tenable Senior Staff Research Engineer Satnam Narang notes that nearly half of all vulnerabilities fixed by Microsoft this month are privilege escalation flaws that require an attacker to have gained access to a target system first before attempting to elevate privileges.

“For the third time this year, Microsoft patched more elevation of privilege vulnerabilities than remote code execution flaws,” Narang observed.

On Sept. 3, Google fixed two flaws that were detected as exploited in zero-day attacks, including CVE-2025-38352, an elevation of privilege in the Android kernel, and CVE-2025-48543, also an elevation of privilege problem in the Android Runtime component.

Also, Apple recently patched its seventh zero-day (CVE-2025-43300) of this year. It was part of an exploit chain used along with a vulnerability in the WhatsApp (CVE-2025-55177) instant messenger to hack Apple devices. Amnesty International reports that the two zero-days have been used in “an advanced spyware campaign” over the past 90 days. The issue is fixed in iOS 18.6.2, iPadOS 18.6.2, iPadOS 17.7.10, macOS Sequoia 15.6.1, macOS Sonoma 14.7.8, and macOS Ventura 13.7.8.

The SANS Internet Storm Center has a clickable breakdown of each individual fix from Microsoft, indexed by severity and CVSS score. Enterprise Windows admins involved in testing patches before rolling them out should keep an eye on askwoody.com, which often has the skinny on wonky updates.

AskWoody also reminds us that we’re now just two months out from Microsoft discontinuing free security updates for Windows 10 computers. For those interested in safely extending the lifespan and usefulness of these older machines, check out last month’s Patch Tuesday coverage for a few pointers.

As ever, please don’t neglect to back up your data (if not your entire system) at regular intervals, and feel free to sound off in the comments if you experience problems installing any of these fixes.

At least 18 popular JavaScript code packages that are collectively downloaded more than two billion times each week were briefly compromised with malicious software today, after a developer involved in maintaining the projects was phished. The attack appears to have been quickly contained and was narrowly focused on stealing cryptocurrency. But experts warn that a similar attack with a slightly more nefarious payload could lead to a disruptive malware outbreak that is far more difficult to detect and restrain.

Aikido is a security firm in Belgium that monitors new code updates to major open-source code repositories, scanning any code updates for suspicious and malicious code. In a blog post published today, Aikido said its systems found malicious code had been added to at least 18 widely-used code libraries available on NPM (short for) “Node Package Manager,” which acts as a central hub for JavaScript development and the latest updates to widely-used JavaScript components.

JavaScript is a powerful web-based scripting language used by countless websites to build a more interactive experience with users, such as entering data into a form. But there’s no need for each website developer to build a program from scratch for entering data into a form when they can just reuse already existing packages of code at NPM that are specifically designed for that purpose.

Unfortunately, if cybercriminals manage to phish NPM credentials from developers, they can introduce malicious code that allows attackers to fundamentally control what people see in their web browser when they visit a website that uses one of the affected code libraries.

According to Aikido, the attackers injected a piece of code that silently intercepts cryptocurrency activity in the browser, “manipulates wallet interactions, and rewrites payment destinations so that funds and approvals are redirected to attacker-controlled accounts without any obvious signs to the user.”

“This malware is essentially a browser-based interceptor that hijacks both network traffic and application APIs,” Aikido researcher Charlie Eriksen wrote. “What makes it dangerous is that it operates at multiple layers: Altering content shown on websites, tampering with API calls, and manipulating what users’ apps believe they are signing. Even if the interface looks correct, the underlying transaction can be redirected in the background.”

Aikido said it used the social network Bsky to notify the affected developer, Josh Junon, who quickly replied that he was aware of having just been phished. The phishing email that Junon fell for was part of a larger campaign that spoofed NPM and told recipients they were required to update their two-factor authentication (2FA) credentials. The phishing site mimicked NPM’s login page, and intercepted Junon’s credentials and 2FA token. Once logged in, the phishers then changed the email address on file for Junon’s NPM account, temporarily locking him out.

Junon also issued a mea culpa on HackerNews, telling the community’s coder-heavy readership, “Hi, yep I got pwned.”

“It looks and feels a bit like a targeted attack,” Junon wrote. “Sorry everyone, very embarrassing.”

Philippe Caturegli, “chief hacking officer” at the security consultancy Seralys, observed that the attackers appear to have registered their spoofed website — npmjs[.]help — just two days before sending the phishing email. The spoofed website used services from dnsexit[.]com, a “dynamic DNS” company that also offers “100% free” domain names that can instantly be pointed at any IP address controlled by the user.

Caturegli said it’s remarkable that the attackers in this case were not more ambitious or malicious with their code modifications.

“The crazy part is they compromised billions of websites and apps just to target a couple of cryptocurrency things,” he said. “This was a supply chain attack, and it could easily have been something much worse than crypto harvesting.”

Aikido’s Eriksen agreed, saying countless websites dodged a bullet because this incident was handled in a matter of hours. As an example of how these supply-chain attacks can escalate quickly, Eriksen pointed to another compromise of an NPM developer in late August that added malware to “nx,” an open-source code development toolkit with as many as six million weekly downloads.

In the nx compromise, the attackers introduced code that scoured the user’s device for authentication tokens from programmer destinations like GitHub and NPM, as well as SSH and API keys. But instead of sending those stolen credentials to a central server controlled by the attackers, the malicious code created a new public repository in the victim’s GitHub account, and published the stolen data there for all the world to see and download.

Eriksen said coding platforms like GitHub and NPM should be doing more to ensure that any new code commits for broadly-used packages require a higher level of attestation that confirms the code in question was in fact submitted by the person who owns the account, and not just by that person’s account.

“More popular packages should require attestation that it came through trusted provenance and not just randomly from some location on the Internet,” Eriksen said. “Where does the package get uploaded from, by GitHub in response to a new pull request into the main branch, or somewhere else? In this case, they didn’t compromise the target’s GitHub account. They didn’t touch that. They just uploaded a modified version that didn’t come where it’s expected to come from.”

Eriksen said code repository compromises can be devastating for developers, many of whom end up abandoning their projects entirely after such an incident.

“It’s unfortunate because one thing we’ve seen is people have their projects get compromised and they say, ‘You know what, I don’t have the energy for this and I’m just going to deprecate the whole package,'” Eriksen said.

Kevin Beaumont, a frequently quoted security expert who writes about security incidents at the blog doublepulsar.com, has been following this story closely today in frequent updates to his account on Mastodon. Beaumont said the incident is a reminder that much of the planet still depends on code that is ultimately maintained by an exceedingly small number of people who are mostly overburdened and under-resourced.

“For about the past 15 years every business has been developing apps by pulling in 178 interconnected libraries written by 24 people in a shed in Skegness,” Beaumont wrote on Mastodon. “For about the past 2 years orgs have been buying AI vibe coding tools, where some exec screams ‘make online shop’ into a computer and 389 libraries are added and an app is farted out. The output = if you want to own the world’s companies, just phish one guy in Skegness.”

Aikido recently launched a product that aims to help development teams ensure that every code library used is checked for malware before it can be used or installed. Nicholas Weaver, a researcher with the International Computer Science Institute, a nonprofit in Berkeley, Calif., said Aikido’s new offering exists because many organizations are still one successful phishing attack away from a supply-chain nightmare.

Weaver said these types of supply-chain compromises will continue as long as people responsible for maintaining widely-used code continue to rely on phishable forms of 2FA.

“NPM should only support phish-proof authentication,” Weaver said, referring to physical security keys that are phish-proof — meaning that even if phishers manage to steal your username and password, they still can’t log in to your account without also possessing that physical key.

“All critical infrastructure needs to use phish-proof 2FA, and given the dependencies in modern software, archives such as NPM are absolutely critical infrastructure,” Weaver said. “That NPM does not require that all contributor accounts use security keys or similar 2FA methods should be considered negligence.”

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.”

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).

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 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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.