Flock Safety’s cameras are automated license plate readers (ALPRs) designed to help police find stolen cars or wanted suspects.

A joint investigation by 404 Media and WIRED, based on data recovered from a physically removed Flock camera, found that its on-device software explicitly detects people as well as vehicles, bicycles, and license plates.

Separately, Washington DC’s police union says the Metropolitan Police Department used Flock data to track officers under Internal Affairs investigation without their knowledge.

Together, these reports illustrate a privacy problem: A network built to record the movements of vehicles can readily be used to follow almost anyone.

The latest reporting adds an important technical detail to that debate.

What Flock cameras collect

A group of hackers reportedly removed a Flock camera from a roadway, copied its storage, and recovered an encryption key stored on the device. That allowed them to unlock videos of thousands of vehicle detections despite Flock’s claim that its devices are protected by on-device encryption. Flock said it could not assess the claims without more detail.

The recovered camera files reportedly contained software models that detect people, even though public discussion of Flock has usually focused on cars and license plates. The researchers found no evidence that face-recognition features were actively used. Reassuring, but it should not be mistaken for a clean privacy bill of health.

Even without facial recognition, a system that records repeated sightings can potentially reveal sensitive patterns of movement, including where someone lives, works, worships, seeks healthcare, attends protests, visits family, or spends time with other people. When a person is matched to a vehicle, vehicle-based tracking can become person-based tracking in practice.

As an example of how widely the data can be shared, WIRED found that records from the city of Alpharetta, Georgia:

“were accessible to more than 2,000 agencies, including police departments, colleges, airports, and, inexplicably, the Office of Inspector General for the federal General Services Administration.”

Targeted tracking of people

The Washington DC dispute shows what happens when the power to follow people is turned inward.

The DC Police Union says it learned in July that MPD’s Internal Affairs investigators had used Flock license-plate-reader data to track sworn officers under investigation without their knowledge. The union filed a complaint and asked the department to stop, arguing that MPD lacked adequate controls for a system with such extensive surveillance capabilities.

MPD defended the use, saying its position is that the use of license-plate-reader data in the misconduct investigation was appropriate. It said the labor dispute is headed to arbitration.

If police officers themselves are concerned that the system can be used to monitor them without transparent rules, the public should ask an obvious follow-up question: What prevents the same tools from being used to follow residents, employees, journalists, activists, former partners, or other people with no meaningful ability to challenge the search?

Even when Flock wants privacy to meet surveillance halfway, its measures do not eliminate the underlying civil-liberties issue.

The recovered camera software and the DC dispute make the same point from different directions. Flock’s network is not merely a collection of roadside plate readers. It is a distributed system for recording movement, identifying patterns, and making those records available for search.

Meaningful safeguards should include:

• Public approval before cameras are deployed, with clear maps showing their locations and stated purposes.
• Strict limits on collection, retention, searches, and cross-jurisdictional sharing.
• A requirement for documented investigative justification before a search, with elevated approval for sensitive investigations.
• Independently reviewable audit logs, regular public transparency reports, and meaningful penalties for misuse.
• Clear bans on searches related to protected activity, immigration enforcement where local law forbids cooperation, abortion-related investigations, political surveillance, and personal purposes.
• Independent security assessments covering the cameras, cloud services, identity controls, key management, and third-party integrations.
• Automatic deletion that cannot be overridden merely because data could someday be useful.

Privacy cannot depend on authorized users always following rules, vendors configuring every setting correctly, or abuses being discovered the hard way. The first safeguard should be limiting the system’s ability to build a searchable record of ordinary people’s lives at all.

Browse like no one’s watching. 

Malwarebytes Privacy VPN encrypts your connection and never logs what you do, so the next story you read doesn’t have to feel personal. Try it free → 

Multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in Oracle products, the most severe of which could allow for arbitrary code execution. Successful exploitation of the most severe of these vulnerabilities could result in an attacker gaining the same privileges as the logged-on user. Depending on the privileges associated with the user, an attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than those who operate with administrative user rights.

At the end of August, a malspam message was caught in the quarantine of a mail gateway operated by one of my customers. The message was not especially remarkable – it asked the recipient to review some attached requirements and provide a price quotation for a fiber optic system and appeared to impersonate an employee of a legitimate company.

The receiving gateway quarantined the message because it detected malicious content in the attachment, though even if it didn’t, the e-mail would not have gotten much further due to failed SPF and DMARC checks.

Nevertheless, it was the attachment that turned out to be worth a closer look.

The archive attached to the message had an '.r01' extension and contained a roughly 613 KB file named 'PO.4843293191 For Supply Chain - Imports HM..js'. At the time of writing, the file had a 28/55 detection rate on VirusTotal[1], with several engines providing information about the malware family this script belongs to – that being LausivLoader.

Looking at the script, one could hardly miss the large number (450 in total) of comment lines containing seemingly random English words.

After these were removed, much of the remaining 205 KB bulk of the file consisted of slightly obfuscated code for putting together several long strings rather than a particularly complicated JavaScript.

In cases when one sees obviously obfuscated or encoded code, it is often beneficial to start with the analysis at the end of the file and work upwards. If we were to look at then end of this code, we would find, several string fragments constructed using 'String.fromCharCode' being combined with one of the aforementioned large strings to form a command line call, with the last line trying to execute it:

As I have mentioned before, it is often useful to let malicious code decode or deobfuscate itself, rather than manually reproducing every transformation[2]. In this case, redirecting the final result to a text file would make the command line much easier to inspect.

For example, one could simply replace the Run call with the following code, and get the full command line call.

var s = new ActiveXObject("ADODB.Stream");
s.Type = 2;
s.Charset = "utf-8";
s.Open();
s.WriteText(v6177);
s.SaveToFile("C:\\output.txt", 2);
s.Close();

There is an important qualification, however. Replacing the last line would – of course – not neutralize this entire script, and would not provide us with everything needed for further analysis.

In this case, it is because earlier code copies the JavaScript to another location, attempts to register a scheduled task, and writes two other files. Before we look at all of this, let’s get back to the deobfuscated command line call – as you can see below, it was intended to call 'conhost.exe', which was supposed to launch PowerShell with an encoded command.

C:\Windows\System32\conhost.exe --headless "C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoP -NonI -W Hidden -EncodedCommand <Base64 code>

Decoding the Base64-encoded argument revealed a relatively short PowerShell script, first few lines of which were particularly interesting:

We can clearly see that the PowerShell code tries to load files from paths saved in two environment variables – Kv7408 and Kv562 – which is somewhat unusual way for inter-process data handoff. It is also one of the reasons why looking only at the decoded command would leave us with an incomplete picture.

If we returned to the JavaScript, we would find the reason for this behavior – i.e., the reason why the paths to the two files are not hardcoded. The JavaScript code constructs a directory name from a random number and the current timestamp, represented in base 36, and creates this directory in %TEMP% folder. Then it writes the contents of two large strings it created to files whose names end in 'a' and 'b'. The following excerpt has only the intervening comments removed and the stream operations expanded onto separate lines:

The last three lines explain how the two stages – the JavaScript one and the PowerShell one – fit together. The JavaScript sets variables in its own process environment. And since child processes normally inherit their parent's environment[3], this allows the paths to reach the PowerShell code through the intermediate 'conhost.exe' process.

If we looked at the two files and the remainder of the decoded PowerShell, we would find that the PowerShell code carries the decoding instructions, the environment carries the file paths, and the files themselves carry the encoded payload. The variables do not contain the payload itself, nor does the script persist them as user-wide or machine-wide environment settings. It is “just” an ordinary environment inheritance used to pass information between different stages of an execution chain… Which is nevertheless an interesting approach from a technical standpoint.

It also has a practical consequence for analysis – copying the decoded PowerShell command into an unrelated shell would not be able to recreate the original inputs, and per partes analysis of this infection chain would therefore not be practicable.
In any case, once the strings from the two files were combined and decoded, the PowerShell script would decrypt the resulting value using AES-128-CBC with PKCS#7 padding, using a key and IV that are  included directly in the code:

The decrypted data would then be decompressed using GZipStream.

Reproducing these transformations offline yielded a 315,904-byte, 64-bit .NET executable. The script itself would not save this decoded executable to disk, instead, it would load the resulting byte array as an assembly and invoke its entry point:

For the sake of completeness, it should be mentioned that the two files in the temporary folder are deleted after their contents are read and before the decoding and decryption take place.

This is all that the PowerShell loader stage does, however since we didn’t yet go through everything that the original JavaScript does, let’s get back to it for a moment.

Near the beginning of the script, it attempts to copy itself to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\PhotoEngine\PhotoStudio.js, as you can see below.

It then tries to ensure persistence by using the Schedule.Service COM object to attempt to register a task named '\MicrosoftEdgeUpdateTaskCore'.

As you can see, the XML stored in 'v1840' specifies a logon trigger for the current user and an action that would launch 'wscript.exe' with '//B //Nologo' and the copied script's path.

This persistence mechanism is the last part of the JavaScript code we didn’t cover yet, which means we can get back to the .NET executable decoded from the two temporary files.

The executable in question turned out to be another loader. Its reachable code resolves Windows APIs dynamically and attempts to modify code in 'AmsiScanBuffer' and 'AmsiScanString' before loading another assembly, which is an obvious attempt to interfere with AMSI.

It is worth mentioning that the “packaging” of the .NET file was somewhat excessive. Its embedded 299,520 bytes long array does contain the next encrypted executable, but the loader retains only every fifth byte before RC4-decrypting it (i.e., it keeps bytes at offsets 0, 5, 10, etc., and drops everything else). Reproducing that transformation yields a second, 59,904-byte .NET executable.

This executable adds a network dependency to the chain, and decoding its configuration reveals the following download location:

hxxps[:]//yapw[.]life/phpt/stego_zrgaixkku8.png

At the time of writing, the URL was no longer live, nevertheless, from the rest of the .NET code, we can see what would have happened to the downloaded file.

Surprisingly, the file would have been a PNG, and not an executable with fake extension. The downloader would walk the PNG structure and look for an 'iTXt' chunk. PNG defines 'iTXt' as a container for international textual data[4], however instead of this information, the loader would expect to find the final payload there.

Within the data from the aforementioned chunk, it would search for the marker 'FF 89 AD 4A', read an appropriate payload length, apply an XOR-based decryption, and decompress the result using DEFLATE. It expects the recovered bytes to begin with 'MZ', which is – of course – unsurprising…

After recovering the PE file from the PNG, the loader determines whether it is a managed .NET assembly or a native executable and selects the appropriate execution method. Managed assemblies are loaded directly from memory using .NET reflection, while native executables are executed using a process-hollowing routine. Nevertheless, since I was unable to get my hands on the PNG file, it is unclear both which path would have been taken by the downloader, as well as what malware family the final payload would have belonged to…

Although there are several interesting layers to this sample, the small handoff between JavaScript and PowerShell using temporary files and process environment variables seems particularly noteworthy and provides a useful lesson in inter-process data sharing. Thanks to the use of this mechanism, a decoded command line could tell us what the next stage is supposed to do without containing everything it needs to do it…

[1] https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/408b2df6e81824fa5bdf4f0fbd185a7e6db06e2be98fbeebce416f66954b9fa9
[2] https://isc.sans.edu/diary/Passive+analysis+of+a+phishing+attachment/29798
[3] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/procthread/environment-variables
[4] https://www.w3.org/TR/png-3/#11iTXt

IoCs

Files

PO.4843293191 For Supply Chain - Imports HM..js
MD5: 7acd5c5f1689332615c03357e143f51e
SHA-256: 408b2df6e81824fa5bdf4f0fbd185a7e6db06e2be98fbeebce416f66954b9fa9

First .NET loader - 315,904 bytes
MD5: 5d92d1fb5d5fbd79a588f22e994a4aff
e4130bf8769a50106a963b6a43dfd4fe5b56c70eae76a0de971d25993159acfe

Second .NET downloader - 59,904 bytes
MD5: f351968c76eefc80d4e292a3f179b7b9
SHA-256: be73e8b06c4356b5b4644d69b4f426bb3b32b4bf9f14cc5743f17532799f760b

URL

hxxps://yapw[.]life/phpt/stego_zrgaixkku8.png

TTPs

T1566.001 - Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment – Purchase-quotation lure carrying an archive with malicious JavaScript
T1204.002 - User Execution: Malicious File – Intended execution of the extracted script by the recipient
T1059.007 - Command and Scripting Interpreter: JavaScript – Windows Script Host executes JavaScript file
T1059.001 - Command and Scripting Interpreter: PowerShell – JavaScript constructs and executes a PowerShell command
T1053.005 - Scheduled Task/Job: Scheduled Task – Creation of logon task named 'MicrosoftEdgeUpdateTaskCore'
T1036.004 - Masquerading: Masquerade Task or Service – Creation of logon task named 'MicrosoftEdgeUpdateTaskCore'
T1564.003 - Hide Artifacts: Hidden Window – Hidden WScript.Shell launch, hidden PowerShell window, conhost invoked with '--headless'
T1027.009 - Obfuscated Files or Information: Embedded Payloads – Embedded assemblies
T1027.013 - Obfuscated Files or Information: Encrypted/Encoded File – Multiple obfuscation techniques including use of Base64, AES and RC4
T1027.015 - Obfuscated Files or Information: Compression – Use of GZip, DEFLATE
T1027.016 - Obfuscated Files or Information: Junk Code Insertion – Multiple nonfunctional script expressions
T1140 - Deobfuscate/Decode Files or Information – Runtime decoding, decryption, decompression, and removal of interleaved padding
T1070.004 - Indicator Removal: File Deletion – Delete of two temporary payload-fragment files after use
T1620 - Reflective Code Loading – Use of 'Assembly.Load(byte[])' and entry-point invocation within the current process
T1685 - Disable or Modify Tools – AMSI patching and ETW redirection attempts
T1105 - Ingress Tool Transfer – PNG download
T1027.003 - Obfuscated Files or Information: Steganography – Extraction of payload from PNG metadata
T1055.012 - Process Injection: Process Hollowing – Conditional execution branch for final payload

-----------
Jan Kopriva
LinkedIn
Nettles Consulting

Only days after Revolut acknowledged that it disclosed sensitive customer records to an unauthorized party, affected customers are receiving phishing texts. However, we don’t know yet if the phishing texts are linked to the breach.

The company had accepted fraudulent information requests sent from an email address on a legitimate government agency domain.

Through this social engineering attack, rather than by gaining access to Revolut’s systems, the criminals obtained the following types of information about customers:

• Identity and contact information such as dates of birth, postal addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers
• Copies of IDs such as passports and driver’s licenses
• Verification selfies
• Account statements and transaction histories

Revolut has said only that a “limited” or “very limited” number of customers were affected, and that it contacted them directly.

One affected customer received a phishing text on Monday, September 14, two days after Revolut publicly acknowledged the data breach. The message appeared in the same conversation as other Revolut texts, making it look as though it had come from the bank.

According to VirusTotal, the phishing domain was first scanned that same day.

In a separate example, another customer said that opening the link took them to a web page that requested access to their device’s camera. If you tap Allow, the page reportedly imitates Revolut’s live-video “turn your head” identity check before prompting you to enter a password.

This makes the phishing page appear more authentic. It may also allow the scammers to collect a selfie or video that could be used for further social engineering, identity fraud, or to make subsequent scams more convincing.

A convincing fake liveness check followed by a password screen is a common way to lower suspicion and obtain the information attackers need to attempt a real login or account-recovery flow.

If the campaign is connected to the breach, the information obtained from Revolut, combined with login details entered by victims or their approval of a login request, could be enough to take over their accounts.

How to stay safe

We don’t yet know whether the phishing campaign is using data exposed in the breach or whether unrelated scammers are exploiting news of the incident to target Revolut customers more broadly.

Either way, treat unexpected messages about your account with caution:

• Don’t follow links in unsolicited messages. If a message concerns your account, open the official Revolut app directly.
• Check the actual domain in your browser’s address bar to see if it corresponds with what you expect.
• Use an up-to-date, real-time anti-malware solution on your device, preferably with a web protection component.
• Malwarebytes Scam Guard can help you determine whether a message is a scam and advise you on what to do next.

Stop threats before they can do any harm.

Malwarebytes Browser Guard blocks phishing pages and malicious sites automatically. Free, one click to install. Add it to your browser →

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has seized the domains of 12 deepfake websites in what it called the largest known seizure of celebrity deepfake sites in history.

The sites, which marketed themselves as deepfake pornography platforms, hosted AI-generated videos of over 1,200 people, including those in the public eye, ranging from politicians to actors, musicians, and social justice advocates. At least one allowed users to create their own deepfakes by grafting real faces and bodies onto sexual imagery.

The term non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) is increasingly used instead of pornography when the person depicted has not given permission. Deepfake NCII is growing, due in part to the ease with which it can be created. It only takes one photo to generate it, as we discussed on the Lock and Code podcast in June.

MrDeepFakes was previously the largest site for this kind of content. Its operators shut it down in May 2025, citing data loss. An Australian man who posted explicit deepfakes to the site was arrested, fined for contempt of court, and charged with publishing obscene material.

But other deepfake NCII sites continue to compete for attention online.

Deepfake technology can cause real harm when misused, and its effects continue to spread. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg warned that domestic abusers are threatening to release deepfake NCII depicting their victims. The FBI has also warned that sextortion attackers are using AI to turn social media photos of minors into sexually explicit images.

Legal action is growing

Law enforcement has been working hard to stem the flood of deepfake NCII sites. In June, the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security seized two domains hosting hundreds of thousands of forged images and videos. San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu’s office also sued 16 deepfake sites in August 2024, managing to get ten of them taken offline or made inaccessible in California. New York state also passed legislation prohibiting the distribution of intimate deepfake images and videos in 2023.

At the federal level, the TAKE IT DOWN Act, enacted in May 2025, made certain intentional publication of NCII, including sexual deepfakes, a federal crime.

Seizing a deepfake site stops the immediate distribution of its content, but operators can migrate quickly to other infrastructure. A report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) found that the deepfake ecosystem is made of many parts, from AI tool providers through to hosting companies and cryptocurrency payment processors. It called for a multi-sector collaboration to stop the production and spread of this material.

Bragg’s office said it will continue monitoring the seized websites to stop them reappearing under different domains.

What can you do?

If someone creates or threatens to share intimate deepfakes of you, save the evidence and report it to the police. Do not pay someone who threatens to publish the images, as payment does not guarantee that the threats will stop.

Bragg’s office said many of the victims it approached did not realize that action could be taken. It urged anyone affected by the seized websites to contact its Cyber Crime Bureau at 212-335-9600.

You can learn more in the Malwarebytes guide to deepfakes. UN Women also provides useful resources for people affected by AI-powered abuse.

Scammers don’t need to hack you. They just need you to click once. 

Malwarebytes Identity Theft Protection catches suspicious activity before it becomes a problem.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian.

There are plenty of signs that AI will make all of our experiences of the US midterm elections worse. Voters have anxiety about AI’s impacts on the country. Politicos are using AI deepfakes to spread lies. The White House is posting slopaganda.

Meanwhile, candidates are missing a real opportunity to use AI to make campaigning better. The technology can help candidates listen more deeply to voters’ concerns, engage constituents more inclusively, and formulate policy platforms that are more responsive to our input. There are vanishingly few examples of this in US politics, but groups in Japan, Scotland and the US’s own academic and private institutions show how that could change.

The problem with American campaigns’ current use of AI is that it’s not very different from the web ads of 30 years ago, or television ads before that: they are all about inundating voters with the candidate’s message. This one-to-many broadcasting is an uninspiring way to campaign, but not the only way. AI can help candidates connect one-to-one with as many people as possible. Or it can facilitate many-to-many connections, engaging voters in deliberation about issues at scale.

One of the most promising applications of AI being developed by pro-democracy innovators around the world is broad listening. These tools can collect public input in a format much richer than checkboxes on a survey form.

For example, the newly founded Japanese political party Team Mirai has built a foundation for eliciting public input from voters at scale, in depth, and across the breadth of legislative policy issues. It has developed an AI interviewer to cultivate constituent input on policy. Through extended conversations with this chatbot, voters explore and share their perspectives on specific policy issues. And the party has scaled this across a wide array of policy issues by integrating this functionality with an AI-powered portal for exploring bills.

Team Mirai describes itself as a “utility party”, developing tools for any Japanese political party to use to connect with voters. You might question whether Americans would willingly talk to a political AI. So far, Japanese voters have exchanged more than 300,000 messages across 16,000 AI interviews. Team Mirai grew adoption by providing a real incentive to engage: that talking to their AI interviewer does more than just posting on a platform such as Twitter/X or, equivalently, shouting into a void. Users see evidence that the party is actually listening and might take action on their behalf.

Team Mirai party members have directly cited AI interviews from constituents during legislative committee hearings, published a synthesis of that input back for voters, and even amended their policy platform based on user input. The party has rapidly risen to win 12 seats in the Diet, and is explicitly following in the footsteps of the civic hackers in Taiwan’s “gov zero” movement, who won political influence in their fight for transparency.

Other civic technologists are developing AI tools for scaling many-to-many conversations. CrownShy, a company funded in part by the Scottish government, is building a platform to bring the Platonic ideal of the town hall debate into the digital age. Their Comhairle tool integrates AI interviewing tools like the ones described above with software for synthesizing diverse viewpoints, holding virtual assemblies, and sharing video testimonials to help legislatures—or campaigners—organize digital consultations of their constituents en masse.

One thing the AI-powered software of Team Mirai and CrownShy have in common is that they are open-source, meant for anyone to use. Even though they are projects funded by political parties—the upstart party in Japan and the ruling party in Scotland—they are built to make democratic processes better, not necessarily for partisan political advantage.

For interested candidates, there is a wealth of tools available, many of them US-grown. The Stanford-affiliated deliberation.io uses AI to facilitate structured dialogues among thousands of participants and has been piloted for public listening sessions by the city of Washington DC. The MIT-affiliated Cortico project provides tools that surface under-heard community perspectives from recorded conversations, and is now organizing listening sessions at libraries across the country. The US non-profit-built Talk to the City uses AI to analyze large datasets of stakeholder input. The US startup Remesh has a commercial offering that uses AI to generate recommendations from dialogue, which has been tested in policy development scenarios.

There is a long and proud tradition of this sort of “civic technology” in the United States. Two decades ago, the spirit of innovation to develop software for better politics and civic engagement was so strong in organizations like Code for America and the Obama 2008 campaign that Congress funded a new executive agency to bring these ideas to government: the US Digital Service. (The Trump administration repurposed the USDS to become the US Doge Service in 2025.)

One signal that candidates and political parties may start adopting these kinds of tools came this spring from Higher Ground Labs. The Democratic-aligned campaign tech investment firm launched a new fund targeting, in part, “AI-Native Campaign Systems” and “community-Led Messaging Platforms that surface authentic, bottom-up insights from real conversations”.

AI is a multifaceted issue that deserves to be on the table in the midterms. So far, the powerful force of polarization in US politics seems to be separating the parties into the AI skeptics versus the AI boosters. We urge both voters and politicians to separate the technology of AI from its profiteers. We want big tech money out of politics, holding the AI companies accountable for the harm their models cause, taxing their revenues, and maybe even nationalizing them if the AI bubble bursts.

But we also think congressional candidates in the US midterms seeking authentic connection with voters, and seeking to differentiate themselves from their opponents, should be looking to use AI responsibly in their campaigning. The broad listening and deliberation tools pioneered by others around the world could make US politics more transparent, responsive and community-driven. The impact of AI on campaigning doesn’t have to be all bad.

Since early May 2026, we’ve been monitoring a large phishing campaign based on T-Mobile rewards points.

The messages falsely warn that a customer’s rewards points are about to expire. They aren’t legitimate account notices: They use urgency, invented point balances, and phishing links to push recipients into acting before they can verify the claim.

A typical message says that a T-Mobile Rewards account holds 18,400 points, gives an imminent expiry date, and states that unused points will be removed under the program’s terms. These details make the message look as though it was written specifically for the recipient, even though it was sent to many people.

“T-Mobile Rewards Points Reminder: Your Points Are About to Expire

Dear Customer,

We are hereby reminding you that your T-Mobile Rewards account points are about to expire. You currently have 18,400 points, which will expire on June 4, 2026, if unused.

Your Points Overview:

Current Balance: 18,400 Points

Expiry Date: {today or tomorrow}

Points will not be recovered after this date.

Redeem Points:

Visit:

https://t-mobile.{rotating domains}.top/pay

Use the T-Mobile App: Account > Rewards & Benefits

Our points expiry policy aims to ensure the fairness of the program and encourage active participation. Please don’t let these valuable points go to waste.

Thank you for choosing T-Mobile.

Customer Service Team”

This phishing operation does not rely on a single, identical SMS. We found more than 1,000 closely related campaign templates with a semantic similarity score of at least 0.60. The 199 closest matches all scored at least 0.95.

This means the variations only change superficial elements, such as the salutation, headline, expiry date, point balance, and whether the message is called a “reminder,” “alert,” or “important update.” The central story remains the same: T-Mobile rewards points are supposedly expiring, and the recipient must follow a link to redeem them as soon as possible.

The messages use formal but generic language, such as “Dear T-Mobile Customer,” “Dear Valued Customer,” or “T-Mobile User,” rather than naming the recipient or providing verifiable account information.

The campaign began slowly before producing two huge spikes in activity. The green line shows detections of message variants seen previously, while the red line shows messages detected on the first day that particular variant appeared. We’re still seeing messages from the campaign, although activity has fallen considerably since those spikes.

The scam relies on a familiar social engineering formula: a valuable-looking reward, a deadline, and a simple action that supposedly protects the customer from losing out. A recipient who has a T-Mobile account may click first and question the message later.

The links use rotating domains designed to look as though they belong to T-Mobile. Their purpose is to persuade recipients to follow the link to supposedly redeem their points. Do not enter login credentials, personal information, payment details, or verification codes after following a link in an unsolicited message.

How to stay safe

The anonymized data used in this analysis was gathered through Text Protection in Malwarebytes Mobile Security, which alerts users to potentially malicious or scam text messages. 

You can also reduce your risk by following these tips:

• Don’t follow links in unsolicited messages. Instead, open the alleged sender’s website or app independently and check for notifications there.
• Check the domain in your browser’s address bar to make sure it matches the site you expected to visit.
• Use an up-to-date, real-time anti-malware solution with web protection.
• Malwarebytes Scam Guard can help you determine whether a message is a scam and advise you on what to do next.

The URLs in this campaign are very short-lived. The criminals used at least 81 domains over four months, but the domains follow a recognizable pattern that is blocked in Malwarebytes Browser Guard.

IOCs

Example domains showing the pattern used by the campaign:

t-mobile.biktpw[.]top

t-mobile.cugbjl[.]top

t-mobile.cymfjd[.]top

t-mobile.gdikxv[.]top

t-mobile.hdzcnb[.]top

t-mobile.koxetp[.]top

t-mobile.nxdcfp[.]top

t-mobile.pkrbai[.]top

t-mobile.qfrhkt[.]top

t-mobile.qscizj[.]top

t-mobile.tmfncb[.]top

t-mobile.vmnqsu[.]top

Stop threats before they can do any harm.

Malwarebytes Browser Guard blocks phishing pages and malicious sites automatically. Free, one click to install. Add it to your browser →

Earlier today, I noted an odd request showing up in our "First Seen" report:

GET /PIAF-HMS/ HTTP/1.1
Host: [redacted]
User-Agent: Farez-Sorter/1.0
Accept-Encoding: gzip

This request is linked to a rather old application, a "PBX in a Flash Hospitality Management System" [1]. The last update, the addition of a license file, happened 10 years ago, and I would consider the project abandoned. However, I also noted a new vulnerability reported a couple of months ago: An SQL injection issue. A quick scan of the code shows many more, and the author does not believe in input validation at all. I am also not seeing any authentication and access control, but I have a suspicion that this code may never have been used, and may be intended more as a lab/experiment to test some Asterix PBX integration. With that, I was about to move on.

However, looking at the somewhat odd user agent, I found a few other similar requests:

/admin/
/admin/config.php
/ucp/
/hms/
/hotel/

The scans started yesterday and have been continuing today. The only source IP for the scans is %%ip:94.102.49.125%%. This IP address is associated with IP Volume ( AS202425), which is often considered a bulletproof hoster. Hotels are often "soft targets" for attackers seeking to steal valuable personal data. In some cases, they have been compromised to launch MitM attacks against guests. The focus on PBX systems is interesting, and maybe there are some tricks that could be played on guests if an attacker can appear to call from "inside" the property.

Please let me know if you have some insight as to what is going on here.

[1] https://github.com/claudiopizzillo/PIAF-HMS

--
Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D. , Dean of Research, SANS.edu
Twitter|

The consumer data broker Radaris.com has long had a reputation for ignoring requests to remove personal information from its vast empire of people-search services online. That reputation caught up with the company recently in a lawsuit alleging Radaris violated a New Jersey privacy law that provides for hefty fines against data brokers that publish personal information on state law enforcement officials. In the face of repeated stonewalling and prevarication by attorneys for Radaris, the judge in the case ordered that radaris.com and more than a dozen other data broker domains be transferred to the plaintiffs.

The radaris.com website, prior to the domain transfer to Atlas.

In February 2024, Radaris was sued by Atlas Data Privacy Corp, a company that has been pursuing data brokers alleged to be violating a New Jersey statute called Daniel’s Law. The statute allows state law enforcement officials, government personnel, judges and their families to have their information completely removed from commercial data brokers and people-search services, and provides for fines of $1,000 per violation against companies that ignore removal requests.

Less than a month after Atlas sued Radaris, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive into the Radaris co-founders — Igor and Dmitry Lubarsky (also spelled Lybarsky) — Russian-born brothers living in Massachusetts who operate a dizzying array of people-search companies as well as a number of Russian language dating services and affiliate programs.

Attorneys for the Lubarsky brothers threatened to sue for defamation if the story wasn’t removed and an apology issued. Their attorney asserted that our reporting was wildly inaccurate, and that the true owners of the company were Ukrainians living in Ukraine.

The Lubarsky brothers Dmitry or “Dan” (left) and Gary/Igor.

KrebsOnSecurity doubled down and showed how the Lubarsky brothers built and operated Radaris and other data broker companies using a fictitious CEO’s name. Our follow-up story noted that Radaris’s attorney — a lawyer with the Boston Law Group named Val Gurvits — admitted his clients had invented the CEO pseudonym “Gary Norden,” and that Radaris also had issued multiple press releases over the years that quoted the fake CEO while seeking money from potential investors.

Attorneys for Radaris waited until the last minute to appear in court and contest what was all but certain to be a default judgment in favor of the plaintiffs, and then told the court that Atlas had failed to serve the real owners and operators of Radaris and several of its sister data broker companies.

Atlas re-filed the lawsuit in June 2025, this time dramatically expanding the number of Radaris family data brokers accused of violating Daniel’s Law. Matt Adkisson, president and CEO of Atlas, said Radaris turned to a tried-and-true playbook: Delaying in court until the last possible minute, and playing shell games with Radaris’s true country of origin and the individuals listed as owners and operators of these sites.

“We refer to this period as their island-hopping phase. Privacy policies changed constantly, and new entities kept appearing from places like the Marshall Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Seychelles,” Adkisson told KrebsOnSecurity. “Behind the scenes, it felt like a shell game. Defense lawyers told the court that certain entities merely operated the domains and were the proper parties to sue. But by the time a judgment neared, those entities would be discarded and new entities would appear. Meanwhile, the lawyers claimed the other entities that actually owned the domains should not be held responsible.”

Adkisson said when the defendants updated their terms of service to state that Radaris was suddenly managed by a company in the Marshall Islands, Atlas hired an investigator in that country and soon learned the brand new entity that Radaris claimed was managing the company didn’t even exist yet.

Mr. Gurvits stepped forward as Radaris’s attorney in a class action lawsuit the company temporarily lost in 2017 because it never contested the claim in court. When the plaintiffs told the judge they couldn’t collect on the $7.5 million default judgment, the court ordered the domain registry Verisign to transfer the radaris.com domain name to the plaintiffs.

Mr. Gurvits appealed that verdict, arguing the lawsuit hadn’t named the actual owners of the Radaris domain name — a Cyprus company called Bitseller Expert Limited — and thus taking the domain away would be a violation of their due process rights.

The judge in the 2017 case ruled in Radaris’ favor — halting the domain transfer — and told the plaintiffs they could refile their complaint. Soon after, the operator of Radaris changed from Bitseller to Andtop Company, an entity formed (PDF) in the Marshall Islands in Oct. 2020. The plaintiffs never re-filed their lawsuit.

A mind map of various entities tied to Radaris and the company’s co-founders. Click to enlarge.

“That seemed to be their modus operandi,” said Raj Parikh, a partner at PEM Law in New Jersey who handles most of the Daniel’s Law litigation for Atlas. “In the past, they won by attrition. Plaintiffs’ attorneys tired of the procedural games and just gave up. That strategy worked for a decade, and it probably would have worked in this case too, since any financial recovery from foreign actors will be difficult. But we were acutely aware of the threat this website posed to law enforcement officers and other public officials in New Jersey, and decided early on to commit whatever time and resources were necessary to remove that threat.”

On August 26, the judge in the New Jersey case found the defendants were given multiple chances to appear and defend the claims against them but had failed to do so. Mr. Gurvits declined to comment on the case, saying it had been assigned to another attorney, a Mr. Victor Worms. In response to questions, Mr. Worms asserted the New Jersey court transferred Radaris.com to Atlas as part of a default judgment against Radaris.com, which is not a legal entity.

“We have made a motion to vacate that default judgment on the grounds that it is void since a non-entity has no legal capacity to sue or be sued,” Worms replied. “We also intend to pursue all appropriate appeals because we believe the transfer of Radaris.com amounts to a forfeiture in violation of various constitutional principles.”

While radaris.com still comes up prominently in results when searching online for U.S. residents by name, the domain no longer sells detailed personal dossiers on millions of Americans. Its homepage now displays a notice from Atlas, as well as links to our previous reporting on Radaris.

EMAIL CONFIRMATIONS

Atlas told KrebsOnSecurity that it has obtained more than 10,000 emails and documents in the course of litigation, and that those messages confirm our previous reporting on the owners and operators of Radaris and its myriad companies.

Atlas said the emails clearly establish that the nominal legal vehicles — Radaris America, Inc.; Bitseller Expert Limited; Digital Orbit Corp; Core Solutions Group Inc; Lucky Solutions Inc; Virtura Corp; Veripages Inc.; Nuform Solutions Inc.; Growth Data Advisors Inc.; Property Experts, Inc — are all administered by the same three or four people from the same mailboxes, share one bank or payment card set, and are all managed from one virtual office address.

“The corpus establishes, with documentary evidence generated independently by banks, payment processors, hosting providers, registrars, software-as-a-service vendors and the operators’ own systems, that radaris.com and at least twenty-five other people-search websites are one operation run by a small Boston-area group whose administrative, financial and technical functions sit on the difive.com mail domain and its successors (centerex.com, scienteco.com, eprofit.com, realmo.com, pub360.com),” reads a summary shared by Atlas.

Atlas said the emails show Radaris.com earns approximately $42,000 a month, while Veripages.com earns around $45,000 monthly via its partnership with the Lifetime Value Company, a marketing and advertising firm whose brands include PeopleLooker, PeopleSmart, NumberGuru, and Bumper, a car history site.

According to Atlas, the emails also showed the Radaris family of websites earns as much as $25,000 each month from their partnership with Onerep, a company that claims to help people remove their information from people-search sites. In March 2024, KrebsOnSecurity revealed how the Belarusian founder of Onerep had launched and operated dozens of people-search sites over the years and was continuing to operate one of them (Nuwber), effectively spreading the disease and selling the cure.

The domain radaris.com now redirects to this notice from Atlas about the court-ordered domain transfer.

All told, the New Jersey court has so far transferred 14 domain names from the Radaris family of companies to Atlas. Radaris.com now redirects to a notice of the court-ordered domain transfer.

THE ROAD AHEAD

The Radaris family of companies is still potentially facing fines of $1,000 per alleged violation of Daniel’s Law. For the time being, however, Daniel’s Law is facing a constitutional challenge from virtually all of the 150 other consumer data broker firms being sued by Atlas.

The data broker industry responded by having at least 70 of the Atlas lawsuits moved to federal court, challenging the New Jersey statute as overly broad and a violation of the First Amendment. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has not yet issued a decision on the constitutional challenge, but either way the case is widely expected to be appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, at least 14 other states have now passed laws modeled after the New Jersey statute, with more states considering similar measures. However, West Virginia’s Daniel’s Law was ruled facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment by a federal district court in August 2025.

Justin Sherman is a privacy expert and author of the forthcoming book “The Middlemen,” which examines how the data broker industry powers modern surveillance. Sherman said federal lawmakers have long faced intense lobbying by the technology industry against more restrictive U.S. data privacy laws, but that many powerful industries are now working against passing comprehensive data privacy legislation.

“These days at the federal level, add in the intense amount of lobbying against these laws from social media companies, big tech, cryptocurrency firms, and now AI proponents in the mix who claim that limiting their data scraping is somehow going to collapse the whole U.S. economy under Chinese rule,” he said.

Sherman said people-search companies will continue to thrive unless and until Congress enacts meaningful consumer privacy and data protection laws that are relevant to life in the 21st century. That’s because virtually all state privacy laws exempt records that might be considered “public” or “government” documents, including voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal records, court documents, death records, professional licenses, bankruptcy filings, and more.

At least 25 states have passed or implemented laws requiring age verification for residents seeking to access adult content online, but there is no federal law that limits how the companies that are scanning everyone’s drivers license can use, share or keep the data provided. Had such restrictions been enshrined in law, we may have avoided the recent breach at IDScan.net, which exposed the drivers license information on more than 153 million Americans when the records were briefly turned into a point-and-click identity theft service on the dark web.

“The average person can look at Daniel’s Law and have a perfectly normal reaction, which is that everyone should be covered, not just police and judges,” Sherman said. “But we don’t need more wake-up calls. We’ve had eight million wake-up calls already on the need for better privacy laws. The lack of comprehensive federal privacy law is not for a lack of knowledge, and anyone claiming otherwise is either not reading the news or kidding themselves.”

CenterPoint Energy disclosed to federal regulators on Sept. 14 that an unauthorized party obtained personal information belonging to some of its customers through an external-facing system, days after a post on a cybercrime forum advertised a data set the seller said covered roughly 7.5 million customer records.

The Houston-based utility, which delivers electricity and natural gas to about 7 million metered customers across Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio and Texas, said in a Form 8-K that it learned of the online post this month and opened an investigation with outside forensic experts. It has reported the matter to law enforcement.

Operations were not affected. The filing states that the company's "delivery of electric and gas services has not been impacted" and remains undisrupted — a distinction that matters for a utility, where regulators and customers draw a sharp line between the theft of billing records and interference with grid operations.

CenterPoint has not confirmed the volume or authenticity of the advertised data set, and has not described how the intruder got in or how long access persisted. The forum poster, using a hexadecimal-styled handle, claimed to have pulled the records from an API endpoint that lacked adequate authentication and rate limiting, and listed fields including customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, service and billing addresses, account and premise identifiers, billing amounts and past-due balances, billing and due dates, service and rate information, autopay and paperless billing status, driver’s license numbers, last four digits of Social Security numbers.

Also read: Origin Energy Data Breach Affects 900,000 Current and Former Customers

The actor claimed, additional identity information was exposed through a second account-verification function. According to the post, the extraction was split across seven parallel data ranges covering Texas and Minnesota. The actor said that security changes, including CAPTCHA enforcement, were eventually enforced and that prevented further data collection. These claims remain unverified.

Plaintiffs' firms moved faster than the investigation. At least one has already announced an inquiry into potential claims on behalf of affected customers — now a standard sequel to any large consumer breach at a regulated utility.

The incident is not CenterPoint's first brush with data exposure; the company was linked to earlier third-party file-transfer compromises, though analysts at the time judged much of that data to have originated outside its systems.

What Makes the Best Brand Protection Solutions in 2026 

1. Cyble — Best for Brand Protection Tied to Threat Intelligence

• Best for: Security teams that want brand protection unified with dark web monitoring and attack surface management, not a standalone point solution. 
• Trade-off: Its marketplace/counterfeit-listing enforcement is less specialized than vendors built specifically for e-commerce abuse — brands whose primary problem is counterfeit products on Amazon or TikTok Shop may find more purpose-built workflows elsewhere. 

2. BrandShield — Best for Coverage Across Channels

• Best for: Enterprises facing abuse across many channels at once who want one platform instead of stitching together point tools. 
• Trade-off: The breadth comes with enterprise-level pricing and onboarding that smaller teams may find heavier than necessary if they only face one or two threat types. 

3. Red Points — Best for Automated Marketplace and Counterfeit Takedowns

• Best for: E-commerce and consumer brands where counterfeit product listings are the dominant threat and takedown speed at scale matters more than case-by-case nuance. 
• Trade-off: Less flexible for broader digital threats like phishing infrastructure or executive impersonation, which sit outside its core automation model. 

4. ZeroFox — Best for Social Media and Executive Protection at Enterprise Scale

• Best for: Enterprises where executive and social-channel impersonation is the primary risk, particularly in regulated or high-visibility industries. 
• Trade-off: Marketplace and counterfeit-listing coverage isn't its core strength compared to vendors purpose-built for e-commerce enforcement. 

5. Netcraft — Best for Phishing and Domain Takedown Speed

• Best for: Banks, fintechs, and other frequently-phished brands that need fast domain and phishing-site takedown above all else. 
• Trade-off: Less built out for social media impersonation or marketplace counterfeit monitoring than dedicated brand-protection suites. 

6. Corsearch — Best for Trademark and Legal-First Enforcement

• Best for: Legal and IP teams that need trademark enforcement and domain monitoring managed through a legal-research lens. 
• Trade-off: Security teams looking for dark web or threat-intelligence correlation will find this outside its scope. 

7. MarqVision — Best for AI-Plus-Human Hybrid at Mid-Market Pricing

• Best for: Mid-market brands that want more oversight than a pure-automation tool but don't need enterprise-scale pricing. 
• Trade-off: Smaller analyst bench than larger enterprise vendors, which can matter during a high-volume incident. 

8. Bolster — Best for API-First Automated Phishing and Domain Detection

• Best for: Security engineering teams that want to pipe brand-threat detection into their own SIEM or SOAR rather than manage another standalone console. 
• Trade-off: Less suited to teams that want a managed, dashboard-driven experience with heavy analyst involvement. 

9. Recorded Future (Brand Intelligence) — Best for Integrating with an Existing Threat Intel Program

• Best for: Organizations already running Recorded Future as their primary threat-intel platform who want brand monitoring in the same system. 
• Trade-off: Adopting it purely for brand protection, without the broader platform, is a heavier commitment than most standalone brand-protection vendors require. 

10. CSC — Best for Enterprise Domain Portfolio and DNS-Led Brand Protection

• Best for: Large enterprises that already manage domain portfolios through CSC and want brand-abuse monitoring layered onto existing domain security. 
• Trade-off: Less focused on social media or marketplace counterfeit detection than dedicated brand-protection platforms. 

How to Choose Among the Best Brand Protection Solutions 

Frequently Asked Questions About Best Brand Protection Solutions

What is a brand protection software? 

Why do companies need brand protection in 2026? 

What's the difference between brand protection and trademark monitoring? 

Is Cyble a brand protection company or a broader cybersecurity company? 

Which brand protection tool is best for e-commerce counterfeits specifically? 

Which brand protection tool is best for phishing-heavy industries like banking? 

Can brand protection tools stop deepfake impersonation of executives? 

Do brand protection platforms guarantee takedowns? 

How much does brand protection software cost? 

What should be in a brand protection contract? 

Does brand protection cover social media impersonation? 

What is a fake domain or look-alike domain? 

How do brand protection tools detect fake mobile apps? 

What industries need brand protection most? 

Is dark web monitoring part of brand protection? 

What's the difference between detection and enforcement in brand protection? 

Can small businesses afford brand protection software? 

How long does a typical takedown take? 

What is executive impersonation? 

Do brand protection tools integrate with security operations (SOC) tools? 

What is business email compromise (BEC) and how does it relate to brand protection? 

Should legal teams or security teams own brand protection? 

What is a takedown success rate and how is it measured? 

Can AI reduce false positives in brand monitoring? 

What is the difference between BrandShield and Red Points? 

Does brand protection help with paid ad abuse? 

What data sources feed brand protection platforms? 

How do I evaluate brand protection vendors during a trial? 

Is brand protection a compliance requirement in any industry? 

What's a common mistake companies make when choosing a brand protection vendor? 

CSWC's Mandate and Structure for the Cybersecurity Action Plan

Federal CERT Tops the Priority List 

Strategy, Escalation and Infrastructure Protection 

Workforce and Next Steps 

One of Apple's Largest Coordinated Patches Yet 

Notable Vulnerabilities Addressed 

Which Update Should iPhone Users Install? 

AI-Generated Deepfake Videos Target 1,200 People

12 Domains Seized Under Court Order

Manhattan D.A. Expands Domain Seizures

Ihor Klymenko Takes Over Cybersecurity Role

Cybersecurity Coordination Expands Beyond Digital Systems

Ukraine Cybersecurity Efforts Under National Security Structure

The file looked like an MRI scan. Lumbar spine, several grey slices of vertebrae, a heading reading something like 'Disk Herniation and Degeneration.' For a dissident living in exile - someone with a body that has been through things, someone waiting on results - it was a plausible thing to open.

Opening it handed Iranian intelligence the microphone.

That lure, reproduced in a joint advisory published Monday by Britain's National Cyber Security Centre, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Netherlands' General Intelligence and Security Service, is one of several used to deliver a spyware family the NCSC has named "CHOSEN BRICK." The three agencies say Iranian state cyber actors have used it since at least 2025 against dissidents, activists and journalists worldwide, including in all three of their countries.

What makes the campaign notable is not its technical sophistication. By the standards of state espionage, CHOSEN BRICK is unglamorous - Windows only, no automated spread, command-and-control running over Telegram bots. What makes it notable is the patience of the human work wrapped around it, and what appears to happen to the data afterward.

Getting to know you first

The operators do not spray phishing links. They research a target, then open a conversation on WhatsApp or Telegram posing either as someone the target already knows or as technical support from the messaging platform itself. Then they talk. The advisory describes rapport-building as a distinct phase of the attack chain, drawing on what it calls extensive target knowledge gathered in preparation.

Only after that does a file arrive, themed to whatever the conversation has been about — a video tool like Pictory or RunwayML, a password manager, an antivirus installer, medical results. Open it and a convincing screen appears: a real-looking Pictory login page, a real-looking scan. Behind it, the implant installs.

The single most telling detail in the advisory is a paragraph about which device gets hit. The actors often approach a target's work computer first. If that fails, or if detection looks likely, they ask the target to open the file at home instead - deliberately steering the victim off a monitored corporate machine and onto the personal laptop where nobody is watching. That is not a technical exploit. It is an understanding of how a journalist's life is actually configured.

What CHOSEN BRICK malware does

A bot for every victim

Once installed, the malware survives reboots through a registry run key, writes itself Microsoft Defender exclusions, and reports to a Telegram bot. It can enumerate running processes, grab the screen, switch on the microphone, lift Telegram and WhatsApp session data out of browsers, pull email, download further payloads and delete files. The NCSC says one sample also carried data-wiping functionality, though the FBI's own 55-page technical breakdown, published the same day, documents no wiper.

Two design choices stand out. First, each infected device talks to its own unique Telegram bot ID — an operational security measure, the advisory notes, to prevent cross-contamination between victims. The people hunting dissidents are careful to compartmentalize their victims from one another.

Second, one payload documented by the FBI kills the real WhatsApp process and substitutes a trojanized copy, rewriting the desktop shortcut to point at it. The victim keeps using WhatsApp. WhatsApp keeps working. Another sample dumps entire Outlook mailboxes, attachments included, to a zip archive. Others stage screen and audio recordings into password-protected archives before shipping them out through Telegram or cloud object storage.

The FBI calls the same malware HEAVYGRAM, and goes considerably further than its British counterpart on attribution. Its report states plainly that the activity is conducted "on behalf of the Government of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security" — MOIS. The NCSC advisory says only "Iranian state cyber actors." That gap between two co-signing agencies is unusual enough to be worth noticing.

Where the data goes

Espionage against exiles would be alarming enough. The advisory's quietest sentence is the one that should worry readers most: personal details of some previous CHOSEN BRICK victims have turned up on pro-Iranian leak sites.

That is the hinge between surveillance and harm. A stolen contact list is not just intelligence; published, it is a map of everyone a dissident in London still speaks to in Tehran. In May, Global Affairs Canada documented a July 2025 hack-and-leak by the Iran-linked Handala persona that exposed five Iran International staff — passports, driver's licences, permanent resident cards, email passwords, and intimate photographs — then amplified the material across social platforms. The U.S. Justice Department seized four Iranian-linked leak and harassment domains in March 2026, and the FBI has separately assessed that some data posted by Handala was obtained using this malware. No public document yet ties the Iran International leak specifically to CHOSEN BRICK, but the timelines converge uncomfortably.

Read: Iran-Linked Handala Hackers Launch New Domain Hours After FBI Seized the Older One

Paul Chichester, the NCSC's director of operations, said the campaign shows how Iran "ruthlessly uses digital surveillance in pursuit of its aim to repress critics," urging those at risk to study the social-engineering patterns described and act on the advice. Dutch intelligence said victims in the Netherlands have been informed. No agency published a victim count, and none should be inferred.

Why a microphone matters

The reason a spyware advisory about contact lists and screenshots reads like a physical-safety story is that, in this particular threat model, it is one.

Ruhollah Zam ran a Telegram channel with more than a million followers from exile in Paris. In October 2019 he was lured to Iraq with the offer of an exclusive interview, seized on arrival, and hanged in December 2020. Masih Alinejad, the Iranian-American journalist, survived both a plot to render her out of New York and a murder-for-hire attempt; two men were sentenced to 25 years each in October 2025. Pouria Zeraati, an Iran International presenter, was stabbed outside his London home in March 2024; two men were jailed at the Old Bailey in July 2026, where the judge found the attack was carried out for the benefit of a foreign power.

MI5 Director General Sir Ken McCallum said in his October 2025 threat update that the service had tracked "more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots" in a single year — roughly matching the total for the preceding three.

Against that backdrop, a stranger's warmth on WhatsApp and a file that looks like your scan results are not a nuisance. They are reconnaissance. The advisory's most practical instruction is also its bluntest: do not let a persuasive contact move you onto the device where no one is watching.