CrowdStrike has dismantled the Glassworm botnet in an operation aided by Google and Shadowserver, stripping the operators’ access to infrastructure that helped threat actors infect hundreds of pieces of open-source software with malware since early 2025, the company said Tuesday. 

The coordinated effort involved the simultaneous takedown of four attacker-controlled servers that were designed to obscure the botnet’s operations and remain resilient against disruptions.

CrowdStrike and partners took down infrastructure, severed access to the botnet’s most critical services, impeded operation momentum and slowed the attackers’ ability to scale, Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop.

“The broader goal is sustained pressure that forces the adversary to spend time, resources, and operational energy reconstituting infrastructure instead of targeting victims,” Meyers added. “By exposing tradecraft and sharing intelligence, defenders can harden developer environments, CI/CD pipelines, and software supply chains against similar activity. That raises the operating cost for the adversary and gives defenders an advantage.”

Glassworm has targeted software developers in order to access source code repositories, cloud platforms, integration and delivery processes, and open-source package registries to push malware into the supply chain and trigger compromises downstream. 

The threat group behind the botnet, which is likely based in Russia, according to CrowdStrike, fed malware into VSCode extensions, npm and Python packages and more than 300 GitHub repositories, researchers said. 

Glassworm affected Windows, macOS and Linux systems with data and credential theft, and a remote-access tool called GlasswormRAT.

“What stood out about Glassworm was the operational sophistication around propagation and automation,” Meyers said. “This wasn’t just a smash-and-grab compromise of a package repository. The operation was designed to move through trusted developer workflows in a way that could expand reach very quickly if left unchecked.”

The botnet relied on four layered channels that CrowdStrike disrupted, including the Solana blockchain, BitTorrent’s peer-to-peer network, Google Calendar and virtual private servers hosted by commercial providers. 

“As part of our disruption efforts, we are working with partners to bring more pain to attackers, especially when we see them abusing our products or targeting our users,” John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, said in a post on X.

Piotr Kijewski, CEO of the Shadowserver, said the non-profit organization assisted with some analysis and data sharing but noted the disruption was mostly CrowdStrike work.

The countermeasures took down “the connective tissue of the operation to create cascading operational pain,” Meyers said. “This forces the adversary to rebuild, while exposing tradecraft.”

CrowdStrike said the takedown demonstrates how the security industry can effectively thwart supply-chain threats by proactively disrupting the precise infrastructure attackers use without waiting for lengthy judicial processes. 

“When threat actors operate from jurisdictions where law enforcement cooperation is limited or nonexistent, disruption becomes one of the most effective tools available. If you can’t put handcuffs on the operator, you focus on dismantling the infrastructure, trust relationships, and operational dependencies,” Meyers added. 

The security company shared indicators of compromise to help organizations hunt for potential infections in their environments and called for other vendors, law enforcement agencies, platform operators and the open-source ecosystem to muster equal determination in responding to threats in the software supply chain.

“The more visibility and alignment you create across the ecosystem, the harder it becomes for the actor to quietly stand the operation back up,” Meyers said. “You may not eliminate the threat actor entirely, but you can absolutely reduce effectiveness, limit reach, and raise the cost of doing business.”

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Instructure, the company behind Canvas, said it reached an agreement with the cybercriminals who threatened to leak a trove of sensitive data they claim was stolen during a prolonged cyberattack on the widely used education tech platform.

Pressure was mounting on the company as widespread outages left schools, students and teachers temporarily unable to access critical data late last week when the company took Canvas offline after the attackers defaced the platform’s login page. By Friday, the company said Canvas — a central hub for K-12 and university coursework, exams, grades and communication — was back online and fully operational. 

ShinyHunters, a decentralized crew of prolific cybercriminals that researchers affiliate with The Com, claimed responsibility for the attack on its data leak site and was attempting to extort the company for an unknown ransom amount. 

Instructure didn’t outright say it paid a ransom, but insisted the agreement provided all necessary assurances. “The data was returned to us. We received digital confirmation of data destruction (shred logs),” the company said in an update Monday.

“We have been informed that no Instructure customers will be extorted as a result of this incident, publicly or otherwise,” the company added. “This agreement covers all impacted Instructure customers, and there is no need for individual customers to attempt to engage with the unauthorized actor.”

The threat group initially set a deadline of May 6 — four days after Instructure previously said the incident was contained — claiming it stole 3.65 terabytes of data spanning 275 million records across 8,809 school systems. 

When that deadline passed without payment, ShinyHunters escalated its pressure on the company by “injecting an extortion message directly into the Canvas login pages of roughly 330 institutions, and pivoted to school-by-school extortion with a current deadline of May 12,” Cynthia Kaiser, senior vice president of Halcyon’s Ransomware Research Center, told CyberScoop.

The additional public pressure prompted Infrastructure to take Canvas offline, disrupting schoolwork and access to critical systems nationwide. 

Instructure CEO Steve Daly apologized over the weekend for the company’s inconsistent communication and deficient public response to the cyberattack. 

“Over the past few days, many of you dealt with real disruption. Stress on your teams. Missed moments in the classroom. Questions you couldn’t get answered. You deserved more consistent communication from us, and we didn’t deliver it. I’m sorry for that,” he said in a statement.

Daly acknowledged that the attack, which remains under investigation aided by CrowdStrike, exposed usernames, email addresses, course names, enrollment information and messages. He insisted that course content, submissions and credentials were not compromised.

The temporary but widespread disruption has spurred broad concern across the education sector as ransomware experts and threat hunters continue to track developments. The cyberattack also caught the attention of lawmakers on Capitol Hill. 

The House Homeland Security Committee on Monday published a letter to Daly seeking a briefing with him or a senior leader at Instructure by May 21. 

“The recurrence of an intrusion within days of an initial breach disclosure, and Instructure’s apparent failure to fully remediate the underlying vulnerabilities during that window, raise serious questions about the company’s incident response capabilities and its obligations to the institutions and individuals whose data it holds,” House Homeland Security Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., wrote in the letter to Daly.

The committee wants to learn more about the “circumstances of both intrusions, the the nature and volume of data accessed, the steps Instructure has taken and is taking to contain the threat and notify affected institutions, and the adequacy of the company’s coordination with federal law enforcement and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,” he added. 

CISA did not describe the extent of its involvement in Instructure’s response. “CISA is aware of a potential cyber incident affecting Canvas. As the nation’s cyber defense agency, we provide voluntary support and cybersecurity services to organizations in responding to and recovering from incidents,” Chris Butera, the agency’s acting executive assistant director for cybersecurity, said in a statement.

Instructure’s timeline of the attack has changed and remains incomplete. The company said it first detected unauthorized activity in Canvas on April 29 and immediately revoked the attacker’s access and initiated an incident response. Researchers not directly involved with the formal investigation said ShinyHunters gained access to Canvas at least a few days earlier.

The follow-on malicious activity on May 7 — the defacement of public login pages — was tied to the same incident, the company said. 

“We have since confirmed that the unauthorized actor carried out this activity by exploiting an issue related to our Free-For-Teacher accounts. This is the same issue that led to the unauthorized access the prior week. As a result, we have made the difficult decision to temporarily shut down Free-For-Teacher accounts,” the company said in an updated post about the incident.

Instructure did not answer questions about the vulnerability or explain how attackers intruded its systems. The company said it also revoked privileged credentials and access tokens for affected systems, rotated internal keys, restricted token creation pathways, and deployed additional security controls and monitoring.

Canvas is fully operational and safe to use, the company said, adding that CrowdStrike has reviewed known indicators of compromise and “found no evidence that the threat actor currently has access to the platform.”

Access still remains spotty and unavailable for some Canvas users as school districts restore the platform in phases after conducting their own internal checks.

Halcyon published an alert about the attack Friday, including a screenshot of the message that some school staff, guardians and students encountered before Instructure took the learning management system offline.

ShinyHunters is a notorious data theft extortion group that previously hit major cloud platforms, including Salesforce and Snowflake, via voice phishing, credential theft and supply-chain attacks. 

Education is a recurring and consistent target for cybercriminals, accounting for more than 250 ransomware attacks globally last year, according to Halcyon. 

Yet, the scope of the attack on Canvas “makes this one of the largest single education-sector exposures we’ve tracked,” Kaiser said.

“By compromising a shared platform used across thousands of schools, ShinyHunters hit the entire education sector in one move, which is the same playbook Clop ran against Oracle EBS customers last fall,” she added. “Among 2026 incidents against critical infrastructure, this is at or near the top for education-sector impact, and it highlights a trend of third-party software vendors now being part of an attack surface, and causing cascading effects across an entire sector.”

Cybersecurity professionals focused on ransomware and data theft extortion consistently encourage victims to not pay ransoms, but they also often acknowledge that companies have to make tough decisions based on their own interests and the security of their customers or users caught up in the aftermath.

Allison Nixon, chief research officer at Unit 221B, said the threat group claiming responsibility for the attack should not be trusted. 

“They are claiming they will delete the data after they are paid, and if they are not paid that they will leak the data,” she told CyberScoop. “This is in line with the past data extortion scams run by the same and related Com actors, who have made false statements to victims and to the public in the past.”

Instructure acknowledged that its agreement with the attackers isn’t ironclad. “While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cybercriminals, we believe it was important to take every step within our control to give customers additional peace of mind, to the extent possible,” the company said.

Daly — a longtime security executive who was previously CEO at Ivanti — ended his mea culpa with a pledge to improve communications and provide a summary of a forensics report soon.

“Last week, we made a call to get the facts right before speaking publicly. That instinct isn’t wrong, but we got the balance wrong. We focused on fact-finding and went quiet when you needed consistent updates. You’ve been clear about that, and it’s fair feedback. We will change that moving forward,” he said. 

“Rebuilding trust takes time,” Daly added. “We’re going to earn it back through consistent action and honest communication.”

Update: May 12, 11:00 am: This story has been updated to reflect that Instructure announced they have reached a deal with ShinyHunters.

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A pair of persistent and problematic threat groups affiliated with The Com are actively targeting organizations across multiple critical infrastructure sectors for rapid data theft and extortion attacks, according to CrowdStrike.

The financially-motivated attackers, which CrowdStrike tracks as Cordial Spider and Snarky Spider, have used voice-phishing and social engineering attacks to break into victims’ identity platforms and traverse SaaS environments since at least October 2025, the company said in a report Thursday, which it shared exclusively with CyberScoop prior to release. 

Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, said the subgroups composed of native English speakers primarily target U.S.-based organizations in the academic, aviation, retail, hospitality, automotive, financial services, legal and technology sectors.

This “new wave of ecrime threat actors” are closely aligned with Scattered Spider and linked to other subsets of The Com, including SLSH and ShinyHunters, Meyers said. 

Because these attacks target identity systems and can expose data in other connected services beyond the initial breach point, it’s difficult to determine how many victims have been caught up in these campaigns. 

CrowdStrike’s warning closely follows research Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 and the Retail & Hospitality Information Sharing and Analysis Center shared last week about Cordial Spider’s string of attacks targeting organizations in the retail and hospitality industry, among others. 

Cordial and Snarky Spider have set lures via voice calls, text messages and emails directing targeting employees to phishing pages posing as their employer’s legitimate single sign-on page or primary identity provider, researchers said. 

These phishing pages, which capture credentials, session keys or tokens, depending on the workflow, provide attackers an entry point into systems, which they exploit for widespread access across victims’ entire SaaS ecosystems.

Attackers use these initial hooks to remove and establish multi-factor authentication devices, then delete emails and other alerts that would otherwise warn organizations of potential malicious activity, researchers said. 

The data theft for extortion campaigns share striking similarities, but CrowdStrike said the tactics, techniques and procedures for each subgroup are distinct. These variances include hours of operation, different phishing domain providers, preferred operating systems, data leak sites, and the tools or devices they used to register for multi-factor authentication. 

The domain for BlackFile, Cordial Spider’s data-leak site, was offline as of Wednesday, according to Meyers.

CrowdStrike declined to put a range on the groups’ extortion demands, but Unit 42 previously said Cordial Spider, which is also tracked as CL-CRI-1116 and UNC6671, are typically in the seven-figure range.

Some victims that didn’t pay extortion demands have been subjected to DDoS attacks, and Snarky Spider has used more aggressive follow-on harassment tactics, including the swatting of victim organizations’ employees, Meyers said. 

CrowdStrike said Cordial and Snarky Spider also use residential proxy networks — including Mullvad, Oxylabs, NetNut, 9Proxy, Infatica and NSOCKS — to evade IP-based detection and blend in with typical traffic. 

Residential proxy networks, which rely on IP addresses assigned to real home users, can serve a legitimate purpose, but researchers have been warning that unethical or outright criminal operators are abusing these networks to build and support botnets, cybercrime campaigns, espionage and other malicious activity.

Cordial and Snarky Spider haven’t achieved the impact or technical capability of Scattered Spider, but the groups share many commonalities and objectives, Meyers said. 

“They’ve kind of taken their playbook and they’re using a lot of their techniques, but we haven’t really seen the technical sophistication demonstrated by them that we saw from Scattered Spider,” he said. “It’s kind of the new generation of Scattered Spider.”

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CrowdStrike has fixed a critical LogScale vulnerability, while Tenable addressed a high-severity Nessus flaw.

The post Vulnerabilities Patched in CrowdStrike, Tenable Products appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Vercel customers are at risk of compromise after an attacker hopped through multiple internal systems to steal credentials and other sensitive data, the company said in a security bulletin Sunday. 

The attack, which didn’t originate at Vercel, showcases the pitfalls of interconnected cloud applications and SaaS integrations with overly privileged permissions. 

An attacker traversed third-party systems and connections left exposed by employees before it hit the San Francisco-based company that created and maintains Next.js and other popular open-source libraries. 

Researchers at Hudson Rock said the seeds of the attack were planted in February when a Context.ai employee’s computer was infected with Lumma Stealer malware after they searched for Roblox game exploits, a common vector for infostealer deployments.

Each of the companies are pinning at least some blame for the attack on the other vendor.

Context.ai on Sunday said that breach allowed the attacker to access its AWS environment and OAuth tokens for some users, including a token for a Vercel employee’s Google Workspace account. Vercel is not a Context customer, but the Vercel employee was using Context AI Office Suite and granted it full access, the artificial intelligence agent company said. 

“The attacker used that access to take over the employee’s Vercel Google Workspace account, which enabled them to gain access to some Vercel environments and environment variables that were not marked as sensitive,” Vercel said in its bulletin. 

The company said a limited number of its customers are impacted and were immediately advised to rotate credentials. Vercel, which declined to answer questions, did not specify which internal systems were accessed or fully explain how the attacker gained access to Vercel customers’ credentials. 

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch said customer data stored by the company is fully encrypted, yet the attacker got further access through enumeration, or by counting and inventorying specific variables. 

“We believe the attacking group to be highly sophisticated and, I strongly suspect, significantly accelerated by AI,” he said in a post on X. “They moved with surprising velocity and in-depth understanding of Vercel.”

A threat group identifying itself as ShinyHunters took responsibility for the attack in a post on Telegram and is attempting to sell the stolen data, which they claim includes access keys, source code and databases.

The attacker “is likely an imposter attempting to use an established name to inflate their notoriety,” Austin Larsen, principal threat analyst at Google Threat Intelligence, wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Regardless of the threat actor involved, the exposure risk is real.”

Vercel also warned that the attack on Context’s Google Workspace OAuth app “was the subject of a broader compromise, potentially affecting its hundreds of users across many organizations.” It published indicators of compromise and encouraged customers to review activity logs, review and rotate variables containing secrets.

Context and Vercel said their separate and coordinated investigations into the attack aided by CrowdStrike and Mandiant remain underway.

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Major technology companies have joined forces in an effort to use advanced artificial intelligence to identify and address security flaws in the world’s most critical software systems, marking a significant shift in how the industry approaches cybersecurity threats.

Anthropic announced Project Glasswing on Tuesday, bringing together Amazon, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, and Palo Alto Networks. The initiative centers on Claude Mythos Preview, an unreleased AI model that Anthropic will make available exclusively to project partners and approximately 40 additional organizations responsible for critical software infrastructure.

The model has already identified thousands of previously unknown vulnerabilities in its initial testing phase, including security flaws that have existed in widely used systems for decades, according to Anthropic. Among the discoveries is a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD, an operating system known primarily for its security focus, and a 16-year-old vulnerability in FFmpeg, a widely used video software program that automated testing tools had failed to detect despite running the affected code line five million times. The company has been in contact with the maintainers of the relevant software, and all found vulnerabilities have been patched. 

Anthropic will commit up to $100 million in usage credits for the project, along with $4 million in direct donations to open-source security organizations. The company has stated it does not plan to make Mythos Preview available to the general public, citing concerns about the model’s potential misuse.

The initiative reflects growing concerns within the technology sector about the dual-use nature of advanced AI systems. While Mythos Preview was not trained specifically for cybersecurity purposes, its coding and reasoning capabilities have proven effective at identifying subtle security flaws that have eluded human analysts and conventional automated tools.

“Although the risks from AI-augmented cyberattacks are serious, there is reason for optimism: the same capabilities that make AI models dangerous in the wrong hands make them invaluable for finding and fixing flaws in important software—and for producing new software with far fewer security bugs,” the company said in a blog post. “Project Glasswing is an important step toward giving defenders a durable advantage in the coming AI-driven era of cybersecurity.”

The project comes as the industry has predicted that similar AI capabilities will soon become more widespread. Anthropic executives have indicated that without coordinated action, such tools could eventually reach actors who might deploy them for malicious purposes rather than defensive security work.

Participating organizations will be required to share their findings with the broader industry. The project places particular emphasis on open-source software, which forms the foundation of most modern systems, including critical infrastructure, yet whose maintainers have historically lacked access to sophisticated security resources.

“Open source software constitutes the vast majority of code in modern systems, including the very systems AI agents use to write new software. By giving the maintainers of these critical open source codebases access to a new generation of AI models that can proactively identify and fix vulnerabilities at scale, Project Glasswing offers a credible path to changing that equation,” said Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation. “This is how AI-augmented security can become a trusted sidekick for every maintainer, not just those who can afford expensive security teams.” 

Additionally, Anthropic says it has engaged in ongoing discussions with U.S. government officials regarding Mythos Preview’s capabilities. The company has framed the project in national security terms, arguing that maintaining leadership in AI technology represents a strategic priority for the United States and its allies. Anthropic has been locked in a high-stakes dispute with the Department of Defense about the U.S. military’s use of the startup’s Claude AI model in real-world operations. 

The project’s success will depend partly on whether the collaborative approach can keep pace with rapid advances in AI capabilities. Anthropic has indicated that frontier AI systems are likely to advance substantially within months, potentially creating a dynamic environment where defensive and offensive capabilities evolve in parallel.

“Project Glasswing is a starting point,” Anthropic wrote in a blog post. “No one organization can solve these cybersecurity problems alone: frontier AI developers, other software companies, security researchers, open-source maintainers, and governments across the world all have essential roles to play. The work of defending the world’s cyber infrastructure might take years; frontier AI capabilities are likely to advance substantially over just the next few months. For cyber defenders to come out ahead, we need to act now.”

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A prolific cybercriminal group that calls itself “Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters” has dominated headlines this year by regularly stealing data from and publicly mass extorting dozens of major corporations. But the tables seem to have turned somewhat for “Rey,” the moniker chosen by the technical operator and public face of the hacker group: Earlier this week, Rey confirmed his real life identity and agreed to an interview after KrebsOnSecurity tracked him down and contacted his father.

Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters (SLSH) is thought to be an amalgamation of three hacking groups — Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$ and ShinyHunters. Members of these gangs hail from many of the same chat channels on the Com, a mostly English-language cybercriminal community that operates across an ocean of Telegram and Discord servers.

In May 2025, SLSH members launched a social engineering campaign that used voice phishing to trick targets into connecting a malicious app to their organization’s Salesforce portal. The group later launched a data leak portal that threatened to publish the internal data of three dozen companies that allegedly had Salesforce data stolen, including Toyota, FedEx, Disney/Hulu, and UPS.

Last week, the SLSH Telegram channel featured an offer to recruit and reward “insiders,” employees at large companies who agree to share internal access to their employer’s network for a share of whatever ransom payment is ultimately paid by the victim company.

SLSH has solicited insider access previously, but their latest call for disgruntled employees started making the rounds on social media at the same time news broke that the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike had fired an employee for allegedly sharing screenshots of internal systems with the hacker group (Crowdstrike said their systems were never compromised and that it has turned the matter over to law enforcement agencies).

Members of SLSH have traditionally used other ransomware gangs’ encryptors in attacks, including malware from ransomware affiliate programs like ALPHV/BlackCat, Qilin, RansomHub, and DragonForce. But last week, SLSH announced on its Telegram channel the release of their own ransomware-as-a-service operation called ShinySp1d3r.

The individual responsible for releasing the ShinySp1d3r ransomware offering is a core SLSH member who goes by the handle “Rey” and who is currently one of just three administrators of the SLSH Telegram channel. Previously, Rey was an administrator of the data leak website for Hellcat, a ransomware group that surfaced in late 2024 and was involved in attacks on companies including Schneider Electric, Telefonica, and Orange Romania.

Also in 2024, Rey would take over as administrator of the most recent incarnation of BreachForums, an English-language cybercrime forum whose domain names have been seized on multiple occasions by the FBI and/or by international authorities. In April 2025, Rey posted on Twitter/X about another FBI seizure of BreachForums.

On October 5, 2025, the FBI announced it had once again seized the domains associated with BreachForums, which it described as a major criminal marketplace used by ShinyHunters and others to traffic in stolen data and facilitate extortion.

“This takedown removes access to a key hub used by these actors to monetize intrusions, recruit collaborators, and target victims across multiple sectors,” the FBI said.

Incredibly, Rey would make a series of critical operational security mistakes last year that provided multiple avenues to ascertain and confirm his real-life identity and location. Read on to learn how it all unraveled for Rey.

WHO IS REY?

According to the cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, Rey was an active user on various BreachForums reincarnations over the past two years, authoring more than 200 posts between February 2024 and July 2025. Intel 471 says Rey previously used the handle “Hikki-Chan” on BreachForums, where their first post shared data allegedly stolen from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In that February 2024 post about the CDC, Hikki-Chan says they could be reached at the Telegram username @wristmug. In May 2024, @wristmug posted in a Telegram group chat called “Pantifan” a copy of an extortion email they said they received that included their email address and password.

The message that @wristmug cut and pasted appears to have been part of an automated email scam that claims it was sent by a hacker who has compromised your computer and used your webcam to record a video of you while you were watching porn. These missives threaten to release the video to all your contacts unless you pay a Bitcoin ransom, and they typically reference a real password the recipient has used previously.

“Noooooo,” the @wristmug account wrote in mock horror after posting a screenshot of the scam message. “I must be done guys.”

In posting their screenshot, @wristmug redacted the username portion of the email address referenced in the body of the scam message. However, they did not redact their previously-used password, and they left the domain portion of their email address (@proton.me) visible in the screenshot.

O5TDEV

Searching on @wristmug’s rather unique 15-character password in the breach tracking service Spycloud finds it is known to have been used by just one email address: cybero5tdev@proton.me. According to Spycloud, those credentials were exposed at least twice in early 2024 when this user’s device was infected with an infostealer trojan that siphoned all of its stored usernames, passwords and authentication cookies (a finding that was initially revealed in March 2025 by the cyber intelligence firm KELA).

Intel 471 shows the email address cybero5tdev@proton.me belonged to a BreachForums member who went by the username o5tdev. Searching on this nickname in Google brings up at least two website defacement archives showing that a user named o5tdev was previously involved in defacing sites with pro-Palestinian messages. The screenshot below, for example, shows that 05tdev was part of a group called Cyb3r Drag0nz Team.

A 2023 report from SentinelOne described Cyb3r Drag0nz Team as a hacktivist group with a history of launching DDoS attacks and cyber defacements as well as engaging in data leak activity.

“Cyb3r Drag0nz Team claims to have leaked data on over a million of Israeli citizens spread across multiple leaks,” SentinelOne reported. “To date, the group has released multiple .RAR archives of purported personal information on citizens across Israel.”

The cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint finds the Telegram user @05tdev was active in 2023 and early 2024, posting in Arabic on anti-Israel channels like “Ghost of Palestine” [full disclosure: Flashpoint is currently an advertiser on this blog].

‘I’M A GINTY’

Flashpoint shows that Rey’s Telegram account (ID7047194296) was particularly active in a cybercrime-focused channel called Jacuzzi, where this user shared several personal details, including that their father was an airline pilot. Rey claimed in 2024 to be 15 years old, and to have family connections to Ireland.

Specifically, Rey mentioned in several Telegram chats that he had Irish heritage, even posting a graphic that shows the prevalence of the surname “Ginty.”

Spycloud indexed hundreds of credentials stolen from cybero5dev@proton.me, and those details indicate that Rey’s computer is a shared Microsoft Windows device located in Amman, Jordan. The credential data stolen from Rey in early 2024 show there are multiple users of the infected PC, but that all shared the same last name of Khader and an address in Amman, Jordan.

The “autofill” data lifted from Rey’s family PC contains an entry for a 46-year-old Zaid Khader that says his mother’s maiden name was Ginty. The infostealer data also shows Zaid Khader frequently accessed internal websites for employees of Royal Jordanian Airlines.

MEET SAIF

The infostealer data makes clear that Rey’s full name is Saif Al-Din Khader. Having no luck contacting Saif directly, KrebsOnSecurity sent an email to his father Zaid. The message invited the father to respond via email, phone or Signal, explaining that his son appeared to be deeply enmeshed in a serious cybercrime conspiracy.

Less than two hours later, I received a Signal message from Saif, who said his dad suspected the email was a scam and had forwarded it to him.

“I saw your email, unfortunately I don’t think my dad would respond to this because they think its some ‘scam email,'” said Saif, who told me he turns 16 years old next month. “So I decided to talk to you directly.”

Saif explained that he’d already heard from European law enforcement officials, and had been trying to extricate himself from SLSH. When asked why then he was involved in releasing SLSH’s new ShinySp1d3r ransomware-as-a-service offering, Saif said he couldn’t just suddenly quit the group.

“Well I cant just dip like that, I’m trying to clean up everything I’m associated with and move on,” he said.

He also shared that ShinySp1d3r is just a rehash of Hellcat ransomware, except modified with AI tools. “I gave the source code of Hellcat ransomware out basically.”

Saif claims he reached out on his own recently to the Telegram account for Operation Endgame, the codename for an ongoing law enforcement operation targeting cybercrime services, vendors and their customers.

“I’m already cooperating with law enforcement,” Saif said. “In fact, I have been talking to them since at least June. I have told them nearly everything. I haven’t really done anything like breaching into a corp or extortion related since September.”

Saif suggested that a story about him right now could endanger any further cooperation he may be able to provide. He also said he wasn’t sure if the U.S. or European authorities had been in contact with the Jordanian government about his involvement with the hacking group.

“A story would bring so much unwanted heat and would make things very difficult if I’m going to cooperate,” Saif said. “I’m unsure whats going to happen they said they’re in contact with multiple countries regarding my request but its been like an entire week and I got no updates from them.”

Saif shared a screenshot that indicated he’d contacted Europol authorities late last month. But he couldn’t name any law enforcement officials he said were responding to his inquiries, and KrebsOnSecurity was unable to verify his claims.

“I don’t really care I just want to move on from all this stuff even if its going to be prison time or whatever they gonna say,” Saif said.