Krebs on Security – In-depth security news and investigation

Data Broker Radaris Loses Domains in Privacy Fight

September 16, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microsoft Plugs Nearly 1,000 Security Holes

September 8, 2026

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Microsoft Corp. today issued updates to plug at least 974 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, by far its biggest single patch batch ever. Microsoft says artificial intelligence is helping to speed the discovery of vulnerabilities, but security experts warn that many organizations already are struggling to prioritize the more human-intensive endeavor of testing and deploying so many fixes each month.

Image: Shutterstock.com, Kirill Makarov.

This month’s patch bundle obliterates the software giant’s previous record set in July, when it released updates for at least 570 security vulnerabilities. September’s Patch Tuesday brings this year’s total to more than 2,600, more than twice Microsoft’s previous record-setting patch year in 2020 (1,245) and with three more months to go.

There are two “zero-day” flaws fixed this month that are being actively exploited: both CVE-2026-81963 and CVE-2026-85880 allow an attacker to elevate their privileges on Windows system.

Fully 113 of the bugs addressed today earned Microsoft’s “critical” rating, meaning they could be abused by malware or miscreants to seize control over a vulnerable Windows machine with little or no help from the user. Continue reading →

FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses

September 1, 2026

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A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada. Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely-used identity verification company based in Louisiana. KrebsOnSecurity also has learned that the New Orleans field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) today launched an official inquiry into the source of the images.

A record available at this identity theft service that includes the drivers license for U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, one of several high-ranking U.S. government officials whose drivers licenses can be found for sale.

On Monday, Aug. 31, a source alerted KrebsOnSecurity to a service advertised by a new user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more than 170 million people in North America. The source brought it to my attention because the proprietor of this identity theft service offered my Virginia drivers license as a free sample in their initial sales thread on Exploit.

The service, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 million drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada, as well as more than 10 million identification cards; more than three million travel documents and/or international IDs; and at least 579,000 medical cards.

A quick look around Nexus finds they are likely not exaggerating about that 153 million number: Running a blank search in Nexus (with no search parameters entered) returns approximately 11.5 million pages of results, with roughly 15 results displayed per page. It includes documents from people in both Canada and the United States, but the bulk of these records are on Americans: searching for just Canadian drivers licenses returns approximately 1.1 million results, with the largest concentration from Ontario (473,673 records).

Curiously, the identity records include not only drivers licenses but also marijuana dispensary cards. Some of the records list their “source” as “CDL,” presumably short for “commercial drivers license.” Other records carry the source notation of “CAC,” which may refer to Common Access Cards, government issued identity cards that grant physical access to government buildings and secure rooms.

The people behind Nexus claim the license images are coming from an active breach at “a major identity verification company” whose customers include multiple Fortune 500 companies.

The record totals listed by the Nexus identity theft service. The number of drivers license records increased by nearly 400,000 in the span of just 24 hours.

“We have been continuously exfiltrating new data for over a year into our private database,” the service enthused in its introductory post on Exploit. “Records are available to preview before purchase with pertinent information redacted. Customer photos are displayed if available.”

Indeed, over the past 24 hours, the number of drivers license records listed as available in Nexus has increased by nearly 400,000, suggesting that freshly stolen license data is being harvested and uploaded to this service on a semi-regular basis.

The record featuring my drivers license includes six image files: three pairs of photos of the license’s front and back, a basic image scan, as well as infrared and ultraviolet versions of the same images. A date and timestamp is appended to each image file, and the timestamp on my license scan corresponds to a date in June 2025 when I took a flight to the midwest United States to attend a family funeral.

Some of the 153 million+ license scans — including mine — feature six image files with date and timestamps appended to the filenames. Not all records include photos, and some that do feature photos do not display the associated filenames.

Intent on discovering the source of this data, KrebsOnSecurity asked more than a dozen friends and family members for permission to search for their licenses in this service. Each person whose license could be found (nine of them) confirmed having traveled on or very close to the dates in the timestamps attached to their images. It is unclear what timezone these timestamps are in, but from reviewing car rental records shared by several people who helped with this research, it appears the timezone is set to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

At first, I thought the source of the data might have something to do with airports. However, that theory went out the window when it became apparent there were no passports in this data set. Also, only some of those who helped with this research said they showed their drivers license at the airport on the day of their travel. One person whose license was in Nexus hadn’t flown at all recently, but was renting a car from Hertz for several months around the date of their timestamp.

Two of those who agreed to help are federal employees who said they shared other forms of government identification when passing through airport security. However, those individuals each said they shared their state-issued drivers licenses later that day when renting vehicles at their respective destinations, and that both rented their cars from Hertz.

After finding a note in my calendar for the day of my June 2025 flight reminding me to bring my passport, I remembered that I also never actually shared my drivers license when I went through security at Reagan National Airport on that day because I did not yet have a Real ID, a security-enhanced drivers license that is now required by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for all domestic travel. Instead, I showed the TSA agent my government-issued U.S. passport.

Here’s where it gets interesting: I was able to find my mother’s drivers license in this service as well, and the timestamps for her images are just a few seconds apart from mine. That’s notable because we both handed our licenses to the Hertz rental car representative at the same time. Continue reading →

Two Alleged ‘TeamPCP’ Hackers Arrested in Australia

August 27, 2026

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Authorities in Australia have arrested two men believed to be members of TeamPCP, a prolific cybercrime and data extortion group blamed for perpetrating the longest running spree of software supply chain attacks ever.

In a statement released today, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said two men from Western Australia, aged 21 and 23, were arrested in connection with a “sophisticated cybercrime syndicate that allegedly created malicious open-source software to rob thousands of global businesses.”

The AFP did not name the defendants, but KrebsOnSecurity learned the 21-year-old suspect’s real identity in June, and has been communicating with him ever since. This story includes interviews with TeamPCP’s self-described spokesperson, and examines clues left behind by the TeamPCP leader that likely led to his undoing.

TeamPCP vaulted onto the cybercrime scene in late 2025, embedding malicious code in hundreds of open source software tools and extorting victims for profit. Members of the group made headlines by compromising corporate cloud environments using a self-propagating worm dubbed Shai-Hulud, which added malicious code to open source programs maintained by developers whose credentials at public code repositories like GitHub or NPM were phished or stolen.

Writing for Wired, journalist Andy Greenberg described TeamPCP’s core tactic as a kind of cyclical exploitation of software developers.

“The hackers gain access to a network where an open source tool commonly used by coders is being developed,” Greenberg wrote in May. “The hackers plant malware in the tool that ends up on other software developers’ machines, including some who are writing other tools intended to be used by coders. The malware allows TeamPCP’s hackers to steal credentials that let them publish malicious versions of those software development tools, too. The cycle repeats, and TeamPCP’s collection of breached networks grows.”

TeamPCP also has practiced something akin to cyclical recruitment. In May, the source code for the third iteration of Shai-Hulud was published online, and TeamPCP soon after launched a contest offering $1,000 in virtual currency to whichever participant could conduct the largest supply chain operation using the worm’s code. According to the contest rules, participants were scored based on the number of weekly and monthly downloads of packages they compromised — directly incentivizing them to target the most popular code libraries.

A screenshot of a message from TeamPCP’s Telegram account, announcing the supply chain hacking contest. Image: dataminr.com.

“TeamPCP has stated the competition is a recruiting opportunity and they intend to purchase all meaningful access harvested from participants’ campaigns,” the security firm Dataminr wrote. “The $1,000 XMR (Monero) prize is a recruitment floor and has been dismissed by the actor as ‘just like participation trophy,’ adding ‘if you find something good you will be paid way more,’ confirming the contest’s true function as talent identification and malicious access acquisition at scale.”

In March, TeamPCP executed a supply chain attack targeting AI infrastructure by compromising the code for LiteLLM, an open source AI gateway that connects users to more than 100 different large language models. A recent analysis by the security firm CloudSEK found TeamPCPs attack on LiteLLM harvested cloud service keys and other secrets from more than 2,500 organizations, including many of the world’s top technology companies.

In May, TeamPCP claimed credit for compromising at least 3,800 code repositories at the Microsoft-owned GitHub, after a GitHub developer installed a code extension that was compromised by TeamPCP’s malware.

MEET THE CYBERCATS

Security experts say TeamPCP is less of a hacker group than an amalgamation of threat actors from multiple cybercriminal gangs who sometimes work together toward similar goals.

“It is not a structured criminal crew with a single operator,” said Austin Larsen, a principal threat analyst with the Google Threat Intelligence Group. “It is a peer community of individually-skilled actors, with one clear center of gravity.”

That center of gravity is George Prepakis, an accomplished security researcher and self-described exploit developer who operates the Twitter/X profile @kernelstub. Earlier this year, @kernelstub tweeted a public invite link to a Matrix chat server he created and dubbed “Cybercats,” and TeamPCP and several other cybercrime entities have been using this server to communicate daily for the past several months.

A screenshot of the Matrix chat server “Cybercats,” whose members used hacker handles associated with multiple distinct cybercrime groups that have occasionally collaborated on a series of supply chain and data ransom attacks over the past nine months.

Kernelstub, like other administrators in the Cybercats chat, has been using his Twitter/X profile name as his handle in these Matrix communications, frequently tweeting references to other members and to conversations taking place in the Cybercats chat. In a number of cases, the corresponding X accounts for members of the Cybercats chat taunted cybercrime victims publicly before the incidents were reported in the news media.

The Cybercats administrator listed at the top of the screenshot above — “Boxturtle” — is a close associate of TeamPCP who has been tweeting about the group’s conquests under the name @xpl0itrsturtle. This handle corresponds to a data breach broker active on Breachforums and Darkforums who has been selling data stolen in a wave of recent breaches at automobile manufacturers, including BMW Group, Audi, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo and Toyota, as well as data allegedly taken from Snapchat and SportRadar.

The data leak site for the extortion group or handle “xpl0itrs.”

The Cybercats administrator “SeesawSec” in the screenshot above is the alias of whoever is behind the cybercrime group known as Fulcrumsec, which recently claimed credit for data extortion attacks against the pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, the data broker LexisNexis, and Avnet, a Fortune 500 distributor of electronic components.

The data leak site of Fulcrum Security, a.k.a. Fulcrumsec.

The Cybercats administrator “@pcpcasper” also has been using a similar name on X to discuss TeamPCP’s attacks and victims. This person has an extensive message history on Telegram, where their messages and shared videos show @pcpcasper is an active and vocal member of the National Socialist Network, a neo-Nazi political organization based in Australia.

At one point in these chats, @pcpcasper shared videos and images of what they claimed was their cat, and several of those videos place this user in Western Australia. One source close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity that @pcpcasper was one of the two arrested, a claim supported by messages that @kernelstub posted online this morning.

The Cybercats member roster pictured above also features an administrator with the username “T,” which is short for the now-banned Twitter/X profile @pcpcats, the account operated by the self-described TeamPCP spokesperson who was arrested today. As we’ll see in a moment, @pcpcats also is from Western Australia.

By the time @kernelstub tweeted a public invite link to the Cybercats Matrix server, T/@pcpcats was posting only infrequently to the group chat, with other members often inquiring as to his whereabouts and well-being. The group’s collective concern related to @pcpcats’s tendency to blame his increasingly extended absences on the use of hallucinogens and other narcotics that kept him awake for days on end, but also caused him to crash in bed for several days after the highs wore off. Continue reading →

Who’s Tracking You? Use This New Service to Find Out

August 14, 2026

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It can be daunting to determine who’s responsible for showing ads on the websites we visit, or who’s harvesting data from the mobile apps we use every day. That information is already semi-public, but it is not easily parsed and traditionally much of it has remained walled away in the hands of large advertising platforms. Not anymore: A powerful and free new service called DecryptAds scrapes and correlates this adtech data and makes it simple to quickly learn a great deal about the entities that are tracking you.

A Decryptads summary of the advertising partnerships declared by espn.com.

The newly launched decryptads.com says it is constantly scraping the files that websites and apps make publicly available to disclose the companies that are permitted to run ads or collect user data. These files include:

–ads.txt: all of the adtech companies and data brokers that may run ads or harvest data from the site;
–app-ads.txt: entities that can harvest data from or display ads on mobile and smart TV apps;
–buyers.json/sellers.json: the entities buying, selling or reselling ad inventory for a given site or app.

Zach Edwards is chief research officer for DecryptAds and a threat researcher at the security company Infoblox. Edwards said he and two other founders decided the service was needed because the adtech data in these files is generally only useful when it can be cross-referenced to build a more complete picture of the advertising ecosystem for each website or app.

“It’s an adtech tool but we’re trying to approach adtech from a security perspective,” Edwards said. “It’s really built for a lot of privacy and security use cases that have been dramatically underserved.”

Those use cases, he said, include tracking down the source of malicious ads that try to foist malware on targeted users, identifying ad networks located in adversarial nations, and detecting the fast growing swarms of AI-generated slop websites and apps. And as decryptads.com demonstrates, these potential security and privacy threats are near impossible to detect just by viewing a single apps.txt or app-ads.txt file.

“Supply-chain integrity issues rarely live in a single file,” the site explains. “They show up as broken cross-references between ads.txt, app-ads.txt, and sellers.json files; as cloned declaration sets across unrelated domains; as seller removals that only make sense when viewed across exchanges; and even as supply paths in bid logs that never actually appear in any given publisher’s authorized-seller list.”

A search in DecryptAds for the hugely popular sports network espn.com reveals 143 ad partners and 19 registered data broker domains are listed within its ads.txt and app-ads.txt files. That data broker information is gradually becoming available because four states — California, Oregon, Texas and Vermont — have recently passed laws requiring data brokers to register if they buy or sell data on consumers from those states. DecryptAds reports that almost half of those data brokers are collecting geolocation data from espn.com visitors who aren’t blocking ads, while another three disclose that they collect device fingerprints and sensitive personal information.

A visual representation of the complex ad supply chain declared by espn.com. Image: decryptads.com.

HIGH-RISK AD PARTNERS

DecryptAds also makes it easy to learn the beneficiaries and national origins of the advertising firms lurking in apps and websites, displaying a conspicuous warning when adtech partners of an app or website are based in “geo-risk” areas like China and Russia, or in countries with strong financial and political ties to both — such as Cyprus and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

According to DecryptAds, espn.com works with four different advertising entities that are based in either Russia, China or the UAE, including the adtech firm Between Digital, which lists a New York address. However, the dossier on Between Digital flags them as a Russian firm, showing that their publisher offers (PDF) are processed through Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest private commercial bank and one of several financial institutions placed under U.S. sanctions in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine. KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from both Between Digital and the company’s founder, and will update this story in the event that either replies.

A search for several top U.S. military news websites — including armytimes.com, airforcetimes.com, defensenews.com, navytimes.com, marinecorpstimes.com and federaltimes.com — shows they all allow Between Digital to serve ads and track users, as well as two entities in the UAE and another in the ownership secrecy haven of Panama. DecryptAds reports that Between Digital is collecting ad data on approximately 55,000 partner websites.

The “Geo Risk” section of decryptads.com.

Pivoting on Between Digital’s app-ads.txt file reveals hundreds of domains featuring simple web-based games that are frequently interrupted by ads. Edwards said Between Digital’s own declarations show the company is listed as both a publisher and a reseller on approximately two-thirds of their portfolio.

“It means they are basically playing both sides of the bidding equation, which creates opportunities to direct client spend at your owned and operated properties or client infrastructure, essentially creating opportunities for conflicts of interest,” Edwards told KrebsOnSecurity. “The problem we have right now is that for years we’ve had almost no one policing these ads.txt and app-ads.txt files.”

The Opera Web browser remains quite popular, and probably many users are unaware that since 2016 it has been majority owned and controlled by the Chinese company Kunlun Tech (the operational headquarters of Opera remain in Oslo, Norway).

Opera.com’s profile at DecryptAds identifies 27 registered data brokers collecting information, including 15 adtech partners in the UAE, six in China, three in Cyprus, two in Russia and one each in Hong Kong and Ukraine. DecryptAds makes clear, however, that these companies represent just seven percent of the adtech partners specified in Opera.com’s ads.txt and app-ads.txt files. Continue reading →

Microsoft Plugs Nearly 400 Security Holes

August 11, 2026

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Microsoft today released updates to remedy at least 398 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software, including one weakness that is already being actively exploited and two others that were publicly detailed prior to today.

Image: Shutterstock, Mallika Home Studio.

August’s overstuffed bundle of patch joy from Microsoft did not eclipse its recording breaking release of more than 570 security updates last month, but it is double June’s then-record batch of nearly 200 fixes. Microsoft has attributed the recent patch deluge to vulnerability discoveries aided by artificial intelligence, and experts roundly agree that Windows users should get used to the idea of Patch Tuesdays (the second Tuesday of each month) covering hundreds of newly discovered security flaws.

Fully 42 of the 398 flaws that Microsoft patched today earned Redmond’s most-dire “critical” rating, meaning they are severe enough that malware or malcontents could exploit them to gain remote control over a Windows computer with little to no help from the user.

The sole known “zero day” bug fixed by Microsoft this month is CVE-2026-68820, a privilege escalation weakness in a core Windows component called afd.sys, which the security firm Automox describes as “the driver behind Windows socket connections on effectively every endpoint.”

“This isn’t a front-door bug,” Automox’s Landon Miles wrote in a Patch Tuesday blog post. “It’s step two in a chain: an attacker phishes their way into a low-privilege foothold, then uses the driver flaw to take the box. The 7.0 score reflects the high attack complexity, because race conditions are fiddly. The exploit has to be thrown over and over until the timing lands. Someone is clearly landing it anyway.”

CVE-2026-62832 is another privilege escalation flaw that Microsoft has labeled likely to be exploited; this flaw, in the Windows User Profile Service, may be related to the recent “LegacyHive” public disclosure from the prolific bug hunter known as Nightmare Eclipse. The other publicly disclosed flaw is CVE-2026-72971, a low-impact local tampering vulnerability that Microsoft reckons is unlikely to be exploited. Continue reading →

Canadian Man Pleads Guilty in Snowflake Extortions

August 6, 2026

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A 26-year-old Canadian man once described as one of the most consequential cybercrime threat actors of 2024 has pleaded guilty to computer fraud and conspiracy to hack and extort more than 165 organizations that used the cloud provider Snowflake. Connor Riley Moucka, of Kitchener, Ontario, also admitted to stealing call and text history records of more than 100 million AT&T customers.

A surveillance photo of Connor Riley Moucka, a.k.a. “Judische” and “Waifu,” dated Oct 21, 2024, 9 days before Moucka’s arrest. This image was included in an affidavit filed by an investigator with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

The U.S. Justice Department said between February and October 2024, Moucka and co-conspirators used stolen login credentials to steal cloud-hosted data belonging to at least 165 customers of a U.S.-based software-as-a-service company.

The hackers targeted stolen credentials for Snowflake customer accounts that did not enforce multi-factor authentication, and extorted or attempted to extort a host of well-known companies, including TicketMaster, Lending Tree, Advance Auto Parts and Neiman Marcus. Snowflake responded to the data thefts by increasing password complexity requirements and enforcing multi-factor authentication.

Moucka adopted new nicknames frequently — sometimes operating multiple identities concurrently — but two of his best-known monikers were “Judische” and “Waifu.” Judische’s admitted role in the Snowflake data thefts was first documented by KrebsOnSecurity in a September 2024 story about the overlap between Western, English-speaking cybercriminals and extremist groups that harass and extort minors into harming themselves or others.

That September 2024 story identified Judische as a software engineer from Ontario who has been involved in numerous data breaches and voice phishing attacks against U.S. companies since at least 2020. A little more than a month later, Canadian authorities arrested Moucka on a provisional warrant from the United States.

The government says Moucka and others used their unauthorized access to steal billions of sensitive customer records and download terabytes of information, “including individuals’ non-content call and text history records, banking and other financial information, payroll records, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) registration numbers, driver’s license numbers, passport numbers, social security numbers and other personally identifiable information. They then extorted victims by threatening to publish data online.”

Moucka also threatened and harassed government officials and security researchers who were helping to track him down. The Justice Department said the conspirators made over $2.5 million in ransom payments, and that in at least one instance, Moucka re-extorted a victim with threats of further disclosure of the victim’s stolen data.

“Moucka used the stolen data of a government officer and members of a then-former government officer’s immediate family in this re-extortion attempt,” reads a statement from the Justice Department. Continue reading →

Read This Before You Buy That TV Streaming Stick

July 30, 2026

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Security experts have been sounding the alarm for years about the risks of using generic TV boxes that promise unlimited content streaming for a one-time fee, warning that they secretly rent the user’s Internet connection out to strangers. But a groundbreaking new analysis finds these devices also routinely spoof themselves as mobile phones clicking ads on AI-generated websites as part of a sprawling operation that seeks to defraud online merchants and advertising networks.

Pedro Falé is a threat researcher with the security firm Bitsight. Falé told KrebsOnSecurity he was able to peer inside a vast and complex ad fraud network by registering an expired domain name that was used to coordinate fake ad clicks across a particularly popular brand of these streaming devices known as H96.

An H96 TV streaming device currently advertised for sale on Amazon.

Falé said the domain he scooped up was previously used for telemetry, periodically collecting full hardware information and the entire list of installed apps from tens of thousands of H96 streaming sticks plugged into television sets around the globe. But upon inspecting the traffic being funneled to the domain, he discovered nearly all of the TV boxes transmitting data claimed to be mobile phone models from a variety of manufacturers, including Samsung, Vivo, Huawei, and Xiaomi.

“We noticed something was wildly wrong,” Falé said. “Multiple devices reporting to this factory Android TV Box backdoor were ‘phones.'”

Image: Bitsight.

The researcher found all of the devices reported having the same two apps installed, and that those apps were made by a company called Zhejiang Fengwo IoT Technology Ltd, an entity founded in 2019 in mainland China which operates an ad-publishing portfolio under the name Fengwo Group. Further investigation into the Fengwo Group revealed it has registered multiple patents that match the inner workings of these apps.

“Bitsight TRACE identified several Hong Kong, Singapore, and single person ‘legal’ shell identities used to collect the monetization and traced the operation back to a mainland China company known as Zhejiang Fengwo IoT Technology Co., Ltd, which operates under the Fengwo Group,” Falé wrote in a report released today about their findings.

Falé said an analysis of the apps shows they help to coordinate an ad fraud network that uses these H96 devices as a captive traffic source to click on ads at AI-generated websites operated by the Fengwo Group.

Bitsight discovered the websites contain machine-generated news articles and graphics across a range of categories, including finance, health, education, gaming, music and food blogs. But they also found none of those sites displayed ads unless the device visiting the page matched the spoofed mobile profile of these H96 devices.

AI DIGITAL HUMANS

The domain for the Fengwo Group — fwgcloud[.]com — claims the company is “redefining the boundaries of human-AI interaction,” and that it has created more than 120,000 “AI digital humans” available to rent for everything from emotional companionship to 24/7 customer service and creative design.

The homepage for fwgcloud dot com.

Falé said the Fengwo Group’s domain shared its SSL certificate data with other domains associated with the apps found on H96 devices, specifically the phone spoofing mechanism. He noted the domain also has an internal wiki platform that directly ties the Fengwo Group to a proprietary implementation of a Google-built visual programming language called Blockly, which was originally designed to help kids learn how to write software.

According to Bitsight, the Fengwo Group’s employees use Blockly to build the sham websites, allowing low-skilled operators to drag blocks of code together in their Blockly editor — without any need to understand what the underlying code blocks do or how they work.

The Blockly homepage.

“An operator can drag blocks together in their Blockly editor, to define each fraud routine, given a task type,” reads Bitsight’s report. “Once the routine is saved, it gets exported as JavaScript and uploaded to the S3 buckets. An operator doesn’t need as much understanding of the underlying technicalities, as it is all set in place for ease of use.” Continue reading →

LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps

July 21, 2026

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The home appliance giant LG Electronics USA said this week it plans to suspend any apps built for its smart TVs that turn one’s television into an always-on residential proxy node. The move comes less than a month after researchers found that more than 42 percent of games and other apps available for download on LG’s webOS store allow unknown third-parties to route their Internet traffic through a user’s TV.

Proxy SDK prevalence among smart TV apps for LG (webOS) and Samsung (Tizen OS) televisions. Image: Spur.us.

On July 2, we featured research by the security firm Spur that examined the prevalence of residential proxy software development kits (SDKs) in smart TV apps. Spur found more than 42 percent of apps available for download on LG smart TVs include SDKs that turn one’s television in a proxy node indefinitely, and that more than a quarter of the apps made for Samsung’s Tizen operating system had similar residential proxy components.

Responding to questions about Spur’s research, LG Senior Vice President John Taylor told KrebsOnSecurity the company was working with app developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform. Developers that fail to comply, he said, will find their apps suspended.

“A residential proxy network is not an intended use for LG smart TVs, and LG Electronics is working with developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform,” Taylor said. “If this option is not removed, these apps will be suspended.”

Taylor said LG is committed to keeping residential proxy networks out of its smart TV apps going forward, and that the company’s review of those apps is “well underway now.”

“As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance platform quality and the user experience, LG will continue to strengthen our evaluation process for developer-submitted apps, including those that incorporate residential proxy SDKs,” Taylor wrote in an emailed statement.

App makers looking for ways to monetize their creations can turn to residential proxy providers, which pay developers to include SDKs that turn the user’s device into a residential proxy node that is rented to paying customers. In the case of LG and Samsung smart TVs, Spur found residential proxy SDKs bundled with everything from simple games like Pac-Man to screensavers and file utilities.

A Pac-Man smart TV app from Bright Data offers users the choice between viewing ads in the game or agreeing to allow their TV to serve as a residential proxy node. Image: Spur.us.

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Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws

July 14, 2026

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Microsoft Corp. today released software updates to plug at least 570 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, almost triple the number of vulnerabilities the software giant fixed in its record-smashing Patch Tuesday release last month. Microsoft attributed the burgeoning patch counts to vulnerability discoveries aided by artificial intelligence.

Nearly 60 of the bugs quashed in July’s Patch Tuesday earned a “critical” severity rating, meaning miscreants or malware could use them to seize remote control over a Windows device with little or no help from the user. Microsoft also addressed three zero-day flaws, including two that are already being exploited in the wild.

Two of the zero-day weaknesses allow an attacker to elevate their user rights on a Windows system, as do approximately 250 other elevation of privilege flaws fixed this month; they include CVE-2026-56155 — an Active Directory Federation Services bug — and CVE-2026-56164, a Microsoft Sharepoint vulnerability.

CVE-2026-50661 is a security feature bypass in Windows BitLocker that could allow attackers to gain access to encrypted data if they have physical access to the device. Microsoft said this bug has been detailed publicly, but that it is not aware of any active exploitation.

In a blog post on July 9, Microsoft Executive Vice President Pavan Davuluri wrote that Windows users will notice “a higher volume of security updates included in each security release” as a result of AI aiding in the discovery of vulnerabilities.

“The pace of vulnerability discovery is changing with advances in AI making it possible to find more issues, faster, across more code, with new mechanisms that can accelerate both discovery and analysis,” Davuluri wrote. Continue reading →

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