The short answer is yes, but if you don’t want big brands or to use Amazon then more time and a lot more prompts are needed

• ‘Is retail ready for the AI shopping shift?

The question “what present do you recommend for …” will be tapped into phones and computers countless times over this festive period, as more people turn to AI platforms to help choose gifts for loved ones.

With a quarter of Britons using AI to find products, brands are increasingly adapting their strategies to ensure their products are the ones recommended, especially those trying to reach younger audiences.

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© Photograph: Peter Morgan/AP

© Photograph: Peter Morgan/AP

© Photograph: Peter Morgan/AP

Amazon has been updating the large-screened Kindle Scribe tablet more frequently and regularly than it updates its standard e-readers, and today the company is announcing the tablet’s third hardware update in four years. The regular Scribe is also being joined by a lower-end Scribe with less storage and no front light and an upgraded Kindle Scribe Colorsoft model with a color e-ink screen. This makes it only the second Kindle to include a color screen, after last year’s Kindle Colorsoft.

Both the regular Kindle Scribe and the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft are available to order starting today for $500 and $630, respectively. Both of those devices include a Premium Pen accessory and 32GB of internal storage; 64GB of storage is available for an extra $50 for both devices. The cheaper front light-less Scribe is coming sometime next year and will run $430 for a model with a more modest 16GB of storage. (These are all much more expensive than the original Scribe’s $340 launch price, but inflation, tariffs, and shortages are wreaking havoc with all kinds of tech prices for the past few years.)

The Scribe and Scribe Colorsoft both come with an updated front light “with miniaturized LEDs that fit tightly against the display,” narrowing the bezel and improving the uniformity of the lighting. Amazon has also tweaked the friction level of the paper-like texture on the glass display, shrunk the gap between the glass and the actual display panel to make writing on the tablet feel more like writing on paper, and added a quad-core processor and more RAM to speed the tablet up.

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Amazon Prime Video has scaled back an experiment that created laughable anime dubs with generative AI.

In March, Amazon announced that its streaming service would start including “AI-aided dubbing on licensed movies and series that would not have been dubbed otherwise.” In late November, some AI-generated English and Spanish dubs of anime popped up, including dubs for the Banana Fish series and the movie No Game No Life: Zero. The dubs appear to be part of a beta launch, and users have been able to select “English (AI beta)” or “Spanish (AI beta)” as an audio language option in supported titles.

“Absolutely disrespectful”

Not everyone likes dubbed content. Some people insist on watching movies and shows in their original language to experience the media more authentically, with the passion and talent of the original actors. But you don’t need to be against dubs to see what’s wrong with the ones Prime Video tested.

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On the surface, the Superbox media streaming devices for sale at retailers like BestBuy and Walmart may seem like a steal: They offer unlimited access to more than 2,200 pay-per-view and streaming services like Netflix, ESPN and Hulu, all for a one-time fee of around $400. But security experts warn these TV boxes require intrusive software that forces the user’s network to relay Internet traffic for others, traffic that is often tied to cybercrime activity such as advertising fraud and account takeovers.

Superbox bills itself as an affordable way for households to stream all of the television and movie content they could possibly want, without the hassle of monthly subscription fees — for a one-time payment of nearly $400.

“Tired of confusing cable bills and hidden fees?,” Superbox’s website asks in a recent blog post titled, “Cheap Cable TV for Low Income: Watch TV, No Monthly Bills.”

“Real cheap cable TV for low income solutions does exist,” the blog continues. “This guide breaks down the best alternatives to stop overpaying, from free over-the-air options to one-time purchase devices that eliminate monthly bills.”

Superbox claims that watching a stream of movies, TV shows, and sporting events won’t violate U.S. copyright law.

“SuperBox is just like any other Android TV box on the market, we can not control what software customers will use,” the company’s website maintains. “And you won’t encounter a law issue unless uploading, downloading, or broadcasting content to a large group.”

There is nothing illegal about the sale or use of the Superbox itself, which can be used strictly as a way to stream content at providers where users already have a paid subscription. But that is not why people are shelling out $400 for these machines. The only way to watch those 2,200+ channels for free with a Superbox is to install several apps made for the device that enable them to stream this content.

Superbox’s homepage includes a prominent message stating the company does “not sell access to or preinstall any apps that bypass paywalls or provide access to unauthorized content.” The company explains that they merely provide the hardware, while customers choose which apps to install.

“We only sell the hardware device,” the notice states. “Customers must use official apps and licensed services; unauthorized use may violate copyright law.”

Superbox is technically correct here, except for maybe the part about how customers must use official apps and licensed services: Before the Superbox can stream those thousands of channels, users must configure the device to update itself, and the first step involves ripping out Google’s official Play store and replacing it with something called the “App Store” or “Blue TV Store.”

Superbox does this because the device does not use the official Google-certified Android TV system, and its apps will not load otherwise. Only after the Google Play store has been supplanted by this unofficial App Store do the various movie and video streaming apps that are built specifically for the Superbox appear available for download (again, outside of Google’s app ecosystem).

Experts say while these Android streaming boxes generally do what they advertise — enabling buyers to stream video content that would normally require a paid subscription — the apps that enable the streaming also ensnare the user’s Internet connection in a distributed residential proxy network that uses the devices to relay traffic from others.

Ashley is a senior solutions engineer at Censys, a cyber intelligence company that indexes Internet-connected devices, services and hosts. Ashley requested that only her first name be used in this story.

In a recent video interview, Ashley showed off several Superbox models that Censys was studying in the malware lab — including one purchased off the shelf at BestBuy.

“I’m sure a lot of people are thinking, ‘Hey, how bad could it be if it’s for sale at the big box stores?'” she said. “But the more I looked, things got weirder and weirder.”

Ashley said she found the Superbox devices immediately contacted a server at the Chinese instant messaging service Tencent QQ, as well as a residential proxy service called Grass IO.

GET GRASSED

Also known as getgrass[.]io, Grass says it is “a decentralized network that allows users to earn rewards by sharing their unused Internet bandwidth with AI labs and other companies.”

“Buyers seek unused internet bandwidth to access a more diverse range of IP addresses, which enables them to see certain websites from a retail perspective,” the Grass website explains. “By utilizing your unused internet bandwidth, they can conduct market research, or perform tasks like web scraping to train AI.” 

Reached via Twitter/X, Grass founder Andrej Radonjic told KrebsOnSecurity he’d never heard of a Superbox, and that Grass has no affiliation with the device maker.

“It looks like these boxes are distributing an unethical proxy network which people are using to try to take advantage of Grass,” Radonjic said. “The point of grass is to be an opt-in network. You download the grass app to monetize your unused bandwidth. There are tons of sketchy SDKs out there that hijack people’s bandwidth to help webscraping companies.”

Radonjic said Grass has implemented “a robust system to identify network abusers,” and that if it discovers anyone trying to misuse or circumvent its terms of service, the company takes steps to stop it and prevent those users from earning points or rewards.

Superbox’s parent company, Super Media Technology Company Ltd., lists its street address as a UPS store in Fountain Valley, Calif. The company did not respond to multiple inquiries.

According to this teardown by behindmlm.com, a blog that covers multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes, Grass’s compensation plan is built around “grass points,” which are earned through the use of the Grass app and through app usage by recruited affiliates. Affiliates can earn 5,000 grass points for clocking 100 hours usage of Grass’s app, but they must progress through ten affiliate tiers or ranks before they can redeem their grass points (presumably for some type of cryptocurrency). The 10th or “Titan” tier requires affiliates to accumulate a whopping 50 million grass points, or recruit at least 221 more affiliates.

Radonjic said Grass’s system has changed in recent months, and confirmed the company has a referral program where users can earn Grass Uptime Points by contributing their own bandwidth and/or by inviting other users to participate.

“Users are not required to participate in the referral program to earn Grass Uptime Points or to receive Grass Tokens,” Radonjic said. “Grass is in the process of phasing out the referral program and has introduced an updated Grass Points model.”

A review of the Terms and Conditions page for getgrass[.]io at the Wayback Machine shows Grass’s parent company has changed names at least five times in the course of its two-year existence. Searching the Wayback Machine on getgrass[.]io shows that in June 2023 Grass was owned by a company called Wynd Network. By March 2024, the owner was listed as Lower Tribeca Corp. in the Bahamas. By August 2024, Grass was controlled by a Half Space Labs Limited, and in November 2024 the company was owned by Grass OpCo (BVI) Ltd. Currently, the Grass website says its parent is just Grass OpCo Ltd (no BVI in the name).

Radonjic acknowledged that Grass has undergone “a handful of corporate clean-ups over the last couple of years,” but described them as administrative changes that had no operational impact. “These reflect normal early-stage restructuring as the project moved from initial development…into the current structure under the Grass Foundation,” he said.

UNBOXING

Censys’s Ashley said the phone home to China’s Tencent QQ instant messaging service was the first red flag with the Superbox devices she examined. She also discovered the streaming boxes included powerful network analysis and remote access tools, such as Tcpdump and Netcat.

“This thing DNS hijacked my router, did ARP poisoning to the point where things fall off the network so they can assume that IP, and attempted to bypass controls,” she said. “I have root on all of them now, and they actually have a folder called ‘secondstage.’ These devices also have Netcat and Tcpdump on them, and yet they are supposed to be streaming devices.”

A quick online search shows various Superbox models and many similar Android streaming devices for sale at a wide range of top retail destinations, including Amazon, BestBuy, Newegg, and Walmart. Newegg.com, for example, currently lists more than three dozen Superbox models. In all cases, the products are sold by third-party merchants on these platforms, but in many instances the fulfillment comes from the e-commerce platform itself.

“Newegg is pretty bad now with these devices,” Ashley said. “Ebay is the funniest, because they have Superbox in Spanish — the SuperCaja — which is very popular.”

Ashley said Amazon recently cracked down on Android streaming devices branded as Superbox, but that those listings can still be found under the more generic title “modem and router combo” (which may be slightly closer to the truth about the device’s behavior).

Superbox doesn’t advertise its products in the conventional sense. Rather, it seems to rely on lesser-known influencers on places like Youtube and TikTok to promote the devices. Meanwhile, Ashley said, Superbox pays those influencers 50 percent of the value of each device they sell.

“It’s weird to me because influencer marketing usually caps compensation at 15 percent, and it means they don’t care about the money,” she said. “This is about building their network.”

BADBOX

As plentiful as the Superbox is on e-commerce sites, it is just one brand in an ocean of no-name Android-based TV boxes available to consumers. While these devices generally do provide buyers with “free” streaming content, they also tend to include factory-installed malware or require the installation of third-party apps that engage the user’s Internet address in advertising fraud.

In July 2025, Google filed a “John Doe” lawsuit (PDF) against 25 unidentified defendants dubbed the “BadBox 2.0 Enterprise,” which Google described as a botnet of over ten million Android streaming devices that engaged in advertising fraud. Google said the BADBOX 2.0 botnet, in addition to compromising multiple types of devices prior to purchase, can also infect devices by requiring the download of malicious apps from unofficial marketplaces.

Several of the Android streaming devices flagged in Google’s lawsuit are still for sale on top U.S. retail sites. For example, searching for the “X88Pro 10” and the “T95” Android streaming boxes finds both continue to be peddled by Amazon sellers.

Google’s lawsuit came on the heels of a June 2025 advisory from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which warned that cyber criminals were gaining unauthorized access to home networks by either configuring the products with malicious software prior to the user’s purchase, or infecting the device as it downloads required applications that contain backdoors, usually during the set-up process.

“Once these compromised IoT devices are connected to home networks, the infected devices are susceptible to becoming part of the BADBOX 2.0 botnet and residential proxy services known to be used for malicious activity,” the FBI said.

The FBI said BADBOX 2.0 was discovered after the original BADBOX campaign was disrupted in 2024. The original BADBOX was identified in 2023, and primarily consisted of Android operating system devices that were compromised with backdoor malware prior to purchase.

Riley Kilmer is founder of Spur, a company that tracks residential proxy networks. Kilmer said Badbox 2.0 was used as a distribution platform for IPidea, a China-based entity that is now the world’s largest residential proxy network.

Kilmer and others say IPidea is merely a rebrand of 911S5 Proxy, a China-based proxy provider sanctioned last year by the U.S. Department of the Treasury for operating a botnet that helped criminals steal billions of dollars from financial institutions, credit card issuers, and federal lending programs (the U.S. Department of Justice also arrested the alleged owner of 911S5).

How are most IPidea customers using the proxy service? According to the proxy detection service Synthient, six of the top ten destinations for IPidea proxies involved traffic that has been linked to either ad fraud or credential stuffing (account takeover attempts).

Kilmer said companies like Grass are probably being truthful when they say that some of their customers are companies performing web scraping to train artificial intelligence efforts, because 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. By routing this unwelcome traffic through residential IP addresses, Kilmer said, content scraping firms can make it far trickier to filter out.

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

SOME FRIENDLY ADVICE

Products like Superbox are drawing increased interest from consumers as more popular network television shows and sportscasts migrate to subscription streaming services, and as people begin to realize they’re spending as much or more on streaming services than they previously paid for cable or satellite TV.

These streaming devices from no-name technology vendors are another example of the maxim, “If something is free, you are the product,” meaning the company is making money by selling access to and/or information about its users and their data.

Superbox owners might counter, “Free? I paid $400 for that device!” But remember: Just because you paid a lot for something doesn’t mean you are done paying for it, or that somehow you are the only one who might be worse off from the transaction.

It may be that many Superbox customers don’t care if someone uses their Internet connection to tunnel traffic for ad fraud and account takeovers; for them, it beats paying for multiple streaming services each month. My guess, however, is that quite a few people who buy (or are gifted) these products have little understanding of the bargain they’re making when they plug them into an Internet router.

Superbox performs some serious linguistic gymnastics to claim its products don’t violate copyright laws, and that its customers alone are responsible for understanding and observing any local laws on the matter. However, buyer beware: If you’re a resident of the United States, you should know that using these devices for unauthorized streaming violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and can incur legal action, fines, and potential warnings and/or suspension of service by your Internet service provider.

According to the FBI, there are several signs to look for that may indicate a streaming device you own is malicious, including:

-The presence of suspicious marketplaces where apps are downloaded.
-Requiring Google Play Protect settings to be disabled.
-Generic TV streaming devices advertised as unlocked or capable of accessing free content.
-IoT devices advertised from unrecognizable brands.
-Android devices that are not Play Protect certified.
-Unexplained or suspicious Internet traffic.

This explainer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation delves a bit deeper into each of the potential symptoms listed above.

Jeff Bezos is one of the world’s richest and most famous tech CEOs, but he hasn’t actually been a CEO of anything since 2021. That’s now changing as he takes on the role of co-CEO of a new AI company, according to a New York Times report citing three people familiar with the company.

Grandiosely named Project Prometheus (and not to be confused with the NASA project of the same name), the company will focus on using AI to pursue breakthroughs in research, engineering, manufacturing, and other fields that are dubbed part of “the physical economy”—in contrast to the software applications that are likely the first thing most people in the general public think of when they hear “AI.”

Bezos’ co-CEO will be Vik Bajaj, a chemist and physicist who previously led life sciences work at Google X, an Alphabet-backed research group that worked on speculative projects that could lead to more product categories. (For example, it developed technologies that would later underpin Google’s Waymo service.) Bajaj also worked at Verily, another Alphabet-backed research group focused on life sciences, and Foresite Labs, an incubator for new AI companies.

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For the past week, domains associated with the massive Aisuru botnet have repeatedly usurped Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft in Cloudflare’s public ranking of the most frequently requested websites. Cloudflare responded by redacting Aisuru domain names from their top websites list. The chief executive at Cloudflare says Aisuru’s overlords are using the botnet to boost their malicious domain rankings, while simultaneously attacking the company’s domain name system (DNS) service.

Aisuru is a rapidly growing botnet comprising hundreds of thousands of hacked Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as poorly secured Internet routers and security cameras. The botnet has increased in size and firepower significantly since its debut in 2024, demonstrating the ability to launch record distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks nearing 30 terabits of data per second.

Until recently, Aisuru’s malicious code instructed all infected systems to use DNS servers from Google — specifically, the servers at 8.8.8.8. But in early October, Aisuru switched to invoking Cloudflare’s main DNS server — 1.1.1.1 — and over the past week domains used by Aisuru to control infected systems started populating Cloudflare’s top domain rankings.

As screenshots of Aisuru domains claiming two of the Top 10 positions ping-ponged across social media, many feared this was yet another sign that an already untamable botnet was running completely amok. One Aisuru botnet domain that sat prominently for days at #1 on the list was someone’s street address in Massachusetts followed by “.com”. Other Aisuru domains mimicked those belonging to major cloud providers.

Cloudflare tried to address these security, brand confusion and privacy concerns by partially redacting the malicious domains, and adding a warning at the top of its rankings:

“Note that the top 100 domains and trending domains lists include domains with organic activity as well as domains with emerging malicious behavior.”

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told KrebsOnSecurity the company’s domain ranking system is fairly simplistic, and that it merely measures the volume of DNS queries to 1.1.1.1.

“The attacker is just generating a ton of requests, maybe to influence the ranking but also to attack our DNS service,” Prince said, adding that Cloudflare has heard reports of other large public DNS services seeing similar uptick in attacks. “We’re fixing the ranking to make it smarter. And, in the meantime, redacting any sites we classify as malware.”

Renee Burton, vice president of threat intel at the DNS security firm Infoblox, said many people erroneously assumed that the skewed Cloudflare domain rankings meant there were more bot-infected devices than there were regular devices querying sites like Google and Apple and Microsoft.

“Cloudflare’s documentation is clear — they know that when it comes to ranking domains you have to make choices on how to normalize things,” Burton wrote on LinkedIn. “There are many aspects that are simply out of your control. Why is it hard? Because reasons. TTL values, caching, prefetching, architecture, load balancing. Things that have shared control between the domain owner and everything in between.”

Alex Greenland is CEO of the anti-phishing and security firm Epi. Greenland said he understands the technical reason why Aisuru botnet domains are showing up in Cloudflare’s rankings (those rankings are based on DNS query volume, not actual web visits). But he said they’re still not meant to be there.

“It’s a failure on Cloudflare’s part, and reveals a compromise of the trust and integrity of their rankings,” he said.

Greenland said Cloudflare planned for its Domain Rankings to list the most popular domains as used by human users, and it was never meant to be a raw calculation of query frequency or traffic volume going through their 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver.

“They spelled out how their popularity algorithm is designed to reflect real human use and exclude automated traffic (they said they’re good at this),” Greenland wrote on LinkedIn. “So something has evidently gone wrong internally. We should have two rankings: one representing trust and real human use, and another derived from raw DNS volume.”

Why might it be a good idea to wholly separate malicious domains from the list? Greenland notes that Cloudflare Domain Rankings see widespread use for trust and safety determination, by browsers, DNS resolvers, safe browsing APIs and things like TRANCO.

“TRANCO is a respected open source list of the top million domains, and Cloudflare Radar is one of their five data providers,” he continued. “So there can be serious knock-on effects when a malicious domain features in Cloudflare’s top 10/100/1000/million. To many people and systems, the top 10 and 100 are naively considered safe and trusted, even though algorithmically-defined top-N lists will always be somewhat crude.”

Over this past week, Cloudflare started redacting portions of the malicious Aisuru domains from its Top Domains list, leaving only their domain suffix visible. Sometime in the past 24 hours, Cloudflare appears to have begun hiding the malicious Aisuru domains entirely from the web version of that list. However, downloading a spreadsheet of the current Top 200 domains from Cloudflare Radar shows an Aisuru domain still at the very top.

According to Cloudflare’s website, the majority of DNS queries to the top Aisuru domains — nearly 52 percent — originated from the United States. This tracks with my reporting from early October, which found Aisuru was drawing most of its firepower from IoT devices hosted on U.S. Internet providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon.

Experts tracking Aisuru say the botnet relies on well more than a hundred control servers, and that for the moment at least most of those domains are registered in the .su top-level domain (TLD). Dot-su is the TLD assigned to the former Soviet Union (.su’s Wikipedia page says the TLD was created just 15 months before the fall of the Berlin wall).

A Cloudflare blog post from October 27 found that .su had the highest “DNS magnitude” of any TLD, referring to a metric estimating the popularity of a TLD based on the number of unique networks querying Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 resolver. The report concluded that the top .su hostnames were associated with a popular online world-building game, and that more than half of the queries for that TLD came from the United States, Brazil and Germany [it’s worth noting that servers for the world-building game Minecraft were some of Aisuru’s most frequent targets].

A simple and crude way to detect Aisuru bot activity on a network may be to set an alert on any systems attempting to contact domains ending in .su. This TLD is frequently abused for cybercrime and by cybercrime forums and services, and blocking access to it entirely is unlikely to raise any legitimate complaints.

A newly disclosed security flaw in the Amazon WorkSpaces client for Linux has raised serious concerns across organizations relying on AWS virtual desktop infrastructure. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2025-12779, enables local attackers to extract valid authentication tokens and gain unauthorized access to other users’ WorkSpace sessions.  On November 5, 2025, AWS issued a formal security bulletin, AWS-2025-025, detailing the issue and urging immediate remediation. The bulletin categorized the flaw as “Important (requires attention)” and warned users that improper token handling in specific client versions could expose sensitive credentials on shared systems. 

CVE-2025-12779 Vulnerability Details and Impact

According to the advisory, the vulnerability affects the Amazon WorkSpaces client for Linux versions 2023.0 through 2024.8. These versions mishandle authentication tokens used in DCV-based WorkSpaces, potentially leaving them accessible to other local users on the same client machine. Under the right conditions, a malicious local user could retrieve these tokens and establish unauthorized access to another individual’s virtual desktop session.  In its official statement, AWS noted:  “Improper handling of the authentication token in the Amazon WorkSpaces client for Linux, versions 2023.0 through 2024.8, may expose the authentication token for DCV-based WorkSpaces to other local users on the same client machine. Under certain circumstances, an unintended user may be able to extract a valid authentication token from the client machine and access another user’s WorkSpace.”  The issue stems from improper token management within the affected client versions. When deployed in multi-user or shared Linux environments, these tokens may remain accessible to other users on the system. This creates a direct path for attackers to exploit the weakness and impersonate legitimate users.  Once a valid token is obtained, an attacker can connect to the victim’s WorkSpace as an authenticated user, bypassing standard access controls. Because the session would appear legitimate, traditional network-based intrusion detection tools might fail to detect the compromise. This allows an attacker to maintain persistent access to sensitive applications, data, and system resources hosted within the virtual environment.  The CVE-2025-12779 flaw highlights a critical risk in desktop virtualization environments where shared systems or contractor workstations are common. Unlike remote exploits that target network vulnerabilities, this issue operates at the local level. 

AWS Response and Patch Availability

To mitigate the vulnerability, AWS confirmed that the problem has been resolved in the Amazon WorkSpaces client for Linux version 2025.0. Users are strongly advised to upgrade to version 2025.0 or newer as soon as possible. The updated client can be downloaded directly from the Amazon WorkSpaces Client Download page.  Furthermore, AWS announced the end of support for the affected client versions, effectively requiring all organizations to transition to the patched release. Security teams are urged to audit their current deployments to identify any instances still running versions 2023.0 through 2024.8. Immediate upgrades should be prioritized for environments where multiple users share access to the same Linux systems.  In addition to updating software, organizations are encouraged to review access logs for signs of unauthorized token extraction or abnormal login activity during the period when the vulnerability was active. This step is critical for detecting potential breaches that may have already occurred before the patch was applied. 

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs:

• From threats to apology, hackers pull child data offline after public backlash
• Your Meta AI conversations may come back as ads in your feed
• Scam Facebook groups send malicious Android malware to seniors
• Sendit tricked kids, harvested their data, and faked messages, FTC claims
• Gemini AI flaws could have exposed your data
• Tile trackers plagued by weak security, researchers warn
• Apple fixes critical font processing bug. Update now!
• 260 romance scammers and sextortionists caught in huge Interpol sting
• Amazon pays $2.5B settlement over deceptive Prime subscriptions
• Sex offenders, terrorists, drug dealers, exposed in spyware breach

Stay safe!

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Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.

Another day, another settlement. Amazon has settled a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over misleading customers who signed up for Amazon Prime—though it claims it did nothing wrong.

The FTC alleged that Amazon used deceptive methods to sign up consumers for Prime subscriptions—and made it exceedingly difficult to cancel.

In the settlement, Amazon will be required to pay a $1 billion civil penalty, provide $1.5 billion in refunds back to consumers harmed by their deceptive Prime enrollment practices, and cease unlawful enrollment and cancellation practices for Prime.

The FTC claimed in its lawsuit that Amazon had used:

“manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user-interface designs known as ‘dark patterns’ to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically-renewing Prime subscriptions.” 

Dark patterns are tricks on websites or in apps to nudge or mislead people toward choices they wouldn’t normally make, like spending more money or signing up for recurring services without realizing it. Instead of helping users, these designs obscure, confuse, or pressure viewers to act quickly or accidentally.

Some common examples are:

• Large, colorful “Yes” buttons, but almost hidden “No” options
• Confusing cancellation steps with unclear language
• Pre-checked boxes for paid extras
• Endless popups urging one not to leave a page

Former FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya described Amazon’s “End Your Prime Membership” method as:

“a 4-page, 6-click, 15-option cancellation journey that Amazon itself compared to that slim airport read, Homer’s Iliad.”

Due to Amazon’s use of dark patterns, millions of people ended up signing up for Prime, some without realizing they’d agreed to recurring charges. Others gave up trying to cancel due to the exhausting steps.

The FTC found this to be a violation of the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act, which was signed into law in 2010 to prevent companies using deception to prompt or encourage online purchases.

Amazon issued a statement saying:

“Amazon and our executives have always followed the law and this settlement allows us to move forward and focus on innovating for customers. We work incredibly hard to make it clear and simple for customers to both sign up or cancel their Prime membership, and to offer substantial value for our many millions of loyal Prime members around the world. We will continue to do so, and look forward to what we’ll deliver for Prime members in the coming years.”

Customers who enrolled in Prime between June 23, 2019 and June 23, 2025 may be eligible for a refund. Those who rarely used Prime benefits will automatically get back their fees—capped at $51—while others who meet the criteria can apply for a refund of up to the same amount.

As we argued a few days ago, settlements like these highlight a worrying trend: big tech pays off privacy violations, class actions grab headlines, and lawyers collect fees—while consumers hand over personal details again for a token payout.

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Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs:

• Italian hotels breached for tens of thousands of scanned IDs
• National Public Data returns after massive Social Security Number leak
• Romance scammers in Ghana charged with more than $100 million in theft
• Netflix scammers target jobseekers to trick them into handing over their Facebook logins
• Russians hacked US courts, say investigators
• Microsoft patches some very important vulnerabilities in August’s patch Tuesday
• WinRAR vulnerability exploited by two different groups
• Scam hunter scammed by tax office impersonators
• That “Amazon Safety Recall” message may well be a scam
• “The worst thing” for online rights: An age-restricted grey web (Lock and Code S06E16)
• Online portal exposed car and personal data, allowed anyone to remotely unlock carslock-cars

Last week on ThreatDown:

• AI has “fully defeated” most of the ways people authenticate

Stay safe!

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Scammers are using the age old tactic of scaring victims into clicking by sending out fake product recall messages from Amazon.

The text message tells you that the item does not meet Amazon’s standards, and tries to install some urgency by claiming it is not safe to use. It also includes a link where it says you can find more information and claim a refund.

“Amazon Safety Recall: We are contacting you because the product you purchased is being recalled. This recall is due to quality and safety issues. We urge you to stop using the product immediately and contact us to arrange a full refund. You can view your order details at the following link:

Safety Recall: Order Number:#-142-15261-31435 Your safety is our top priority, please visit our website for more details and instructions. We apologize for the inconvenience and disappointment this may cause you.

Thank you for shopping at Amazon.”

Of course the link doesn’t go anywhere near Amazon, it’s actually a shortened URL that sends you to amazonzbzc[.]co. This is a known phishing site that mimics Amazon, and is after your personal information or to steal your money.

The text messages are intentionally vague about the nature of the product or the exact issue they are being recalled for. This is done so a maximum number of people will think that this might concern them. If the scammers said that the TV you bought might explode, you wouldn’t click the link if you hadn’t purchased a TV recently.

The Federal Trade Commission even issued a warning about these scams back in July, illustrating how this type of scam tactic is growing.

How to avoid Amazon phishing scams

• If you receive a text like this, don’t click on any links. Instead, check if it’s legit by logging in to the Amazon app or website, then going to Message Centre under Your Account. Legitimate messages from Amazon will appear there.
• Report the scam to Amazon itself, whether you’ve fallen for it or not. US citizens can send unwanted texts to 7726(SPAM) or use the Report Junk option.
• Set up two-step verification for your Amazon account. This puts an extra barrier between you and the scammers if they do manage to get hold of your login details.
• Scammers sometimes use information they’ve found online to personalize their scam messages. Check what information is already out there about you using our free Digital Footprint Scanner and then remove or change as much of it as you can.
• Install web protection that can warn you of phishing sites, card skimmers, and other nasties that could lead to your data being taken.
• Lastly, if you’ve fallen for this or a similar scam, change your Amazon password and anywhere else you use that password. Also, make sure to monitor your card statements for any unfamiliar charges, and contact your bank immediately if you see anything suspicious.

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Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. If something looks dodgy to you, check if it’s a scam using Malwarebytes Scam Guard, a feature of our mobile protection products. Submit a screenshot, paste suspicious content, or share a text or phone number, and we’ll tell you if it’s a scam or legit. Download Malwarebytes Mobile Security for iOS or Android and try it today!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading: Berulis’s complaint (PDF).