China-based phishing groups blamed for non-stop scam SMS messages about a supposed wayward package or unpaid toll fee are promoting a new offering, just in time for the holiday shopping season: Phishing kits for mass-creating fake but convincing e-commerce websites that convert customer payment card data into mobile wallets from Apple and Google. Experts say these same phishing groups also are now using SMS lures that promise unclaimed tax refunds and mobile rewards points.

Over the past week, thousands of domain names were registered for scam websites that purport to offer T-Mobile customers the opportunity to claim a large number of rewards points. The phishing domains are being promoted by scam messages sent via Apple’s iMessage service or the functionally equivalent RCS messaging service built into Google phones.

The website scanning service urlscan.io shows thousands of these phishing domains have been deployed in just the past few days alone. The phishing websites will only load if the recipient visits with a mobile device, and they ask for the visitor’s name, address, phone number and payment card data to claim the points.

If card data is submitted, the site will then prompt the user to share a one-time code sent via SMS by their financial institution. In reality, the bank is sending the code because the fraudsters have just attempted to enroll the victim’s phished card details in a mobile wallet from Apple or Google. If the victim also provides that one-time code, the phishers can then link the victim’s card to a mobile device that they physically control.

Pivoting off these T-Mobile phishing domains in urlscan.io reveals a similar scam targeting AT&T customers:

Ford Merrill works in security research at SecAlliance, a CSIS Security Group company. Merrill said multiple China-based cybercriminal groups that sell phishing-as-a-service platforms have been using the mobile points lure for some time, but the scam has only recently been pointed at consumers in the United States.

“These points redemption schemes have not been very popular in the U.S., but have been in other geographies like EU and Asia for a while now,” Merrill said.

A review of other domains flagged by urlscan.io as tied to this Chinese SMS phishing syndicate shows they are also spoofing U.S. state tax authorities, telling recipients they have an unclaimed tax refund. Again, the goal is to phish the user’s payment card information and one-time code.

CAVEAT EMPTOR

Many SMS phishing or “smishing” domains are quickly flagged by browser makers as malicious. But Merrill said one burgeoning area of growth for these phishing kits — fake e-commerce shops — can be far harder to spot because they do not call attention to themselves by spamming the entire world.

Merrill said the same Chinese phishing kits used to blast out package redelivery message scams are equipped with modules that make it simple to quickly deploy a fleet of fake but convincing e-commerce storefronts. Those phony stores are typically advertised on Google and Facebook, and consumers usually end up at them by searching online for deals on specific products.

With these fake e-commerce stores, the customer is supplying their payment card and personal information as part of the normal check-out process, which is then punctuated by a request for a one-time code sent by your financial institution. The fake shopping site claims the code is required by the user’s bank to verify the transaction, but it is sent to the user because the scammers immediately attempt to enroll the supplied card data in a mobile wallet.

According to Merrill, it is only during the check-out process that these fake shops will fetch the malicious code that gives them away as fraudulent, which tends to make it difficult to locate these stores simply by mass-scanning the web. Also, most customers who pay for products through these sites don’t realize they’ve been snookered until weeks later when the purchased item fails to arrive.

“The fake e-commerce sites are tough because a lot of them can fly under the radar,” Merrill said. “They can go months without being shut down, they’re hard to discover, and they generally don’t get flagged by safe browsing tools.”

Happily, reporting these SMS phishing lures and websites is one of the fastest ways to get them properly identified and shut down. Raymond Dijkxhoorn is the CEO and a founding member of SURBL, a widely-used blocklist that flags domains and IP addresses known to be used in unsolicited messages, phishing and malware distribution. SURBL has created a website called smishreport.com that asks users to forward a screenshot of any smishing message(s) received.

“If [a domain is] unlisted, we can find and add the new pattern and kill the rest” of the matching domains, Dijkxhoorn said. “Just make a screenshot and upload. The tool does the rest.”

Merrill said the last few weeks of the calendar year typically see a big uptick in smishing — particularly package redelivery schemes that spoof the U.S. Postal Service or commercial shipping companies.

“Every holiday season there is an explosion in smishing activity,” he said. “Everyone is in a bigger hurry, frantically shopping online, paying less attention than they should, and they’re just in a better mindset to get phished.”

SHOP ONLINE LIKE A SECURITY PRO

As we can see, adopting a shopping strategy of simply buying from the online merchant with the lowest advertised prices can be a bit like playing Russian Roulette with your wallet. Even people who shop mainly at big-name online stores can get scammed if they’re not wary of too-good-to-be-true offers (think third-party sellers on these platforms).

If you don’t know much about the online merchant that has the item you wish to buy, take a few minutes to investigate its reputation. If you’re buying from an online store that is brand new, the risk that you will get scammed increases significantly. How do you know the lifespan of a site selling that must-have gadget at the lowest price? One easy way to get a quick idea is to run a basic WHOIS search on the site’s domain name. The more recent the site’s “created” date, the more likely it is a phantom store.

If you receive a message warning about a problem with an order or shipment, visit the e-commerce or shipping site directly, and avoid clicking on links or attachments — particularly missives that warn of some dire consequences unless you act quickly. Phishers and malware purveyors typically seize upon some kind of emergency to create a false alarm that often causes recipients to temporarily let their guard down.

But it’s not just outright scammers who can trip up your holiday shopping: Often times, items that are advertised at steeper discounts than other online stores make up for it by charging way more than normal for shipping and handling.

So be careful what you agree to: Check to make sure you know how long the item will take to be shipped, and that you understand the store’s return policies. Also, keep an eye out for hidden surcharges, and be wary of blithely clicking “ok” during the checkout process.

Most importantly, keep a close eye on your monthly statements. If I were a fraudster, I’d most definitely wait until the holidays to cram through a bunch of unauthorized charges on stolen cards, so that the bogus purchases would get buried amid a flurry of other legitimate transactions. That’s why it’s key to closely review your credit card bill and to quickly dispute any charges you didn’t authorize.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Financial regulators in Canada this week levied $176 million in fines against Cryptomus, a digital payments platform that supports dozens of Russian cryptocurrency exchanges and websites hawking cybercrime services. The penalties for violating Canada’s anti money-laundering laws come ten months after KrebsOnSecurity noted that Cryptomus’s Vancouver street address was home to dozens of foreign currency dealers, money transfer businesses, and cryptocurrency exchanges — none of which were physically located there.

On October 16, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Canada (FINTRAC) imposed a $176,960,190 penalty on Xeltox Enterprises Ltd., more commonly known as the cryptocurrency payments platform Cryptomus.

FINTRAC found that Cryptomus failed to submit suspicious transaction reports in cases where there were reasonable grounds to suspect that they were related to the laundering of proceeds connected to trafficking in child sexual abuse material, fraud, ransomware payments and sanctions evasion.

“Given that numerous violations in this case were connected to trafficking in child sexual abuse material, fraud, ransomware payments and sanctions evasion, FINTRAC was compelled to take this unprecedented enforcement action,” said Sarah Paquet, director and CEO at the regulatory agency.

In December 2024, KrebsOnSecurity covered research by blockchain analyst and investigator Richard Sanders, who’d spent several months signing up for various cybercrime services, and then tracking where their customer funds go from there. The 122 services targeted in Sanders’s research all used Cryptomus, and included some of the more prominent businesses advertising on the cybercrime forums, such as:

-abuse-friendly or “bulletproof” hosting providers like anonvm[.]wtf, and PQHosting;
-sites selling aged email, financial, or social media accounts, such as verif[.]work and kopeechka[.]store;
-anonymity or “proxy” providers like crazyrdp[.]com and rdp[.]monster;
-anonymous SMS services, including anonsim[.]net and smsboss[.]pro.

Sanders found at least 56 cryptocurrency exchanges were using Cryptomus to process transactions, including financial entities with names like casher[.]su, grumbot[.]com, flymoney[.]biz, obama[.]ru and swop[.]is.

“These platforms were built for Russian speakers, and they each advertised the ability to anonymously swap one form of cryptocurrency for another,” the December 2024 story noted. “They also allowed the exchange of cryptocurrency for cash in accounts at some of Russia’s largest banks — nearly all of which are currently sanctioned by the United States and other western nations.”

Reached for comment on FINTRAC’s action, Sanders told KrebsOnSecurity he was surprised it took them so long.

“I have no idea why they don’t just sanction them or prosecute them,” Sanders said. “I’m not let down with the fine amount but it’s also just going to be the cost of doing business to them.”

The $173 million fine is a significant sum for FINTRAC, which imposed 23 such penalties last year totaling less than $26 million. But Sanders says FINTRAC still has much work to do in pursuing other shadowy money service businesses (MSBs) that are registered in Canada but are likely money laundering fronts for entities based in Russia and Iran.

In an investigation published in July 2024, CTV National News and the Investigative Journalism Foundation (IJF) documented dozens of cases across Canada where multiple MSBs are incorporated at the same address, often without the knowledge or consent of the location’s actual occupant.

Their inquiry found that the street address for Cryptomus parent Xeltox Enterprises was listed as the home of at least 76 foreign currency dealers, eight MSBs, and six cryptocurrency exchanges. At that address is a three-story building that used to be a bank and now houses a massage therapy clinic and a co-working space. But the news outlets found none of the MSBs or currency dealers were paying for services at that co-working space.

The reporters also found another collection of 97 MSBs clustered at an address for a commercial office suite in Ontario, even though there was no evidence any of these companies had ever arranged for any business services at that address.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOTNETS R US

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9 YEARS OF MIRAI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RAPID SPREAD

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

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

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

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

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

BOTMASTERS AT LARGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE OUTSIDER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE PERFECT CRIME?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BREAKING BAD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ADSPRO AND TEKNOLOGY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A REVEALING PIVOT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FROM AXACT TO ABTACH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE TEXAS NEXUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

VICTIMS SPEAK OUT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GOOGLE RESPONDS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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