When CISA issues an emergency directive, the message to every federal agency and every security team paying attention is to patch now. For CVE-2026-50751, a CVSS 9.3 authentication bypass in Check Point Remote Access VPN, that directive landed on June 21. despite exploitation beginning in early May. That, six-week active intrusion gap is not a footnote. It is the entire story.

The flaw itself is straightforward in the worst possible way. A logic error in the certificate-validation process, triggered when the deprecated IKEv1 key-exchange protocol is enabled, allows a remote attacker to establish a fully authenticated VPN session without a valid password. No phishing. No credential theft. No lateral movement required to reach the perimeter. The attacker walks through the front door, and the door logs it as a legitimate entry.

By the time Check Point disclosed the vulnerability on June 8, a Qilin ransomware affiliate had already used it to compromise a few dozen organizations worldwide. The post-access playbook was efficient, including Rclone for data exfiltration, the Tox protocol for command-and-control communication routed through disposable VPS infrastructure. Quiet, fast, and designed to complete the job before detection had a chance to matter.

The security product became the attack vector

There is a particular irony to CVE-2026-50751 that the industry needs to sit with. The device that was breached is not an unpatched workstation or a misconfigured cloud bucket. It is the VPN gateway, the product sold specifically to keep attackers outside the perimeter. The control designed to prevent unauthorized access became the mechanism of it.

This is not unique to Check Point, and it is not a criticism of any single vendor. It reflects a structural problem with perimeter-dependent security architecture. When the perimeter device is the trust anchor, compromising that device does not just breach the perimeter. It inherits the perimeter’s authority. Every downstream control, every identity verification, every behavior-based detection tool is now reasoning about a session it believes is legitimate, because the VPN said so.

That is the condition Qilin exploited. And patching the vulnerability, while absolutely necessary, does nothing to change the position of organizations that were breached during the May-June window. For them, the attacker is already operating as a trusted user. The CISA directive is not a remedy for those organizations. It is a message to everyone else.

Why the standard response falls short

The standard sequence after a disclosure like this is one we’ve all heard before—patch the affected systems, update detection signatures, review logs for indicators of compromise. While each of these steps is good practice, none of them solves the underlying problem.

Patching closes the door for future attackers, but it does not evict the ones already inside. Detection signatures help identify known post-exploitation behavior, but ransomware affiliates have demonstrated consistent operational discipline, using legitimate tools for exfiltration and standard protocols for command-and-control precisely because these approaches blend into normal traffic. Log review is valuable, but the attackers who exploited the vulnerability had weeks of access before anyone was looking.

The detect-and-respond model assumes that detection arrives before the damage is complete. Against a weaponized zero-day with a six-week head start, that assumption does not hold. By the time an alert fires, the data has moved. The ransomware is staged. The ransom clock has started.

Making the endpoint harder to exploit

The Check Point vulnerability forces a critical question: how do you stop payload execution when an attacker has already succeeded at authentication and bypassed every other defense?

It requires moving the defensive layer to the endpoint itself, at the point of execution, where the ransomware payload has to operate regardless of how access was obtained. Techniques that morph the runtime memory environment, transforming the structures that malware needs to find and use at execution time, stop the payload deterministically. The attacker can have authenticated credentials, a legitimate session, and weeks of undetected access. If the target environment does not look like what the payload expects, the payload fails.

This is not a replacement for patching. Organizations should apply the Check Point fix immediately, and they should treat any system with IKEv1 enabled during the May-June window as potentially compromised. But patching is the beginning, as the organizations that were inside the six-week exploitation window need a control that works after the perimeter is gone.

The lesson before the next directive

CISA will issue another emergency directive. There will be another authentication bypass, another perimeter device turned attack vector, another financially motivated threat actor with a head start measured in weeks. The patch-and-detect cycle will play out again, and organizations that had their exposure managed entirely at the perimeter will find themselves in the same position.

The lesson here is not that Check Point failed or that VPNs are over. It is that any architecture where a single authentication bypass gives an attacker operating authority over the entire environment has a structural problem that no patch resolves. Closing the door is necessary. Making sure the ransomware cannot detonate even after the attacker is inside is the part the industry still has not solved at scale.

That is the conversation the CISA directive should be starting, and mostly is not.

The post Why patch directives only go so far appeared first on CyberScoop.

Two men pleaded guilty in the United Kingdom this week to criminal charges stemming from an August 2024 cyberattack that crippled Transport for London, the entity responsible for the public transport network in the Greater London area. The duo were key members of a prolific cybercrime group known as Scattered Spider, and their guilty pleas came on the first day of what was expected to be a six-week trial.

Thalha Jubair, 20, of East London and 18-year-old Owen Flowers of Walsall admitted conspiring to commit unauthorized acts against Transport for London computer systems and causing risk of serious damage to human welfare. According to a report from the BBC, Flowers alone admitted to being part of a conspiracy to hack into U.S. based healthcare providers SSM Health Care Corporation and Sutter Health in September 2024.

Jubair is also wanted by U.S. law enforcement agencies. In September 2025, prosecutors in New Jersey unsealed an indictment alleging Jubair and other Scattered Spider members committed computer fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering in relation to 120 computer network intrusions involving 47 U.S. entities between May 2022 and September 2025, and that the group’s victims paid at least $115 million in ransom payments.

In July 2025, KrebsOnSecurity reported that Flowers and Jubair were arrested in the United Kingdom in connection with Scattered Spider ransom attacks against the retailers Marks & Spencer and Harrods, and the British food retailer Co-op Group. Multiple sources familiar with those investigations said Flowers was the Scattered Spider member who anonymously gave interviews to the media in the days after the group’s September 2023 ransomware attacks disrupted operations at Las Vegas casinos operated by MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment.

According to prosecutors, Jubair co-ran a bustling Telegram channel called Star Chat, the home of a SIM-swapping group that used voice- and SMS-based phishing attacks to steal credentials from employees at the major wireless providers in the U.S. and U.K. The group would then use that access to sell a service that could redirect a target’s phone number to a device the attackers controlled and intercept the victim’s calls and text messages (including one-time codes for multi-factor authentication).

New Jersey prosecutors also allege Jubair also was involved in a mass SMS phishing campaign during the summer of 2022 that stole single sign-on credentials from employees at hundreds of companies. That weeks-long SMS phishing campaign led to intrusions and data thefts at more than 130 organizations, including LastPass, DoorDash, Mailchimp, Plex and Signal.

KrebsOnSecurity reported last year that one of Jubair’s alter egos at age 15 was “Everlynn,” a hacker who sold fraudulent “emergency data requests” that used compromised police and government email addresses to demand subscriber data (e.g. username, IP/email address) from major tech companies, claiming the requests concerned urgent matters of life and death and could not wait for a court order.

In April 2026, 24-year-old British national and Scattered Spider member Tyler “Tylerb” Buchanan pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy and aggravated identity theft for participating in the group’s SMS phishing spree in the summer of 2022. The government said Buchanan, Jubair and others used the credentials harvested in that phishing campaign to steal at least $8 million in cryptocurrency from victims throughout the United States. Buchanan is currently scheduled to be sentenced on October 2.

In August 2025, 20-year-old Scattered Spider member from Florida named Noah Michael Urban was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison and ordered to pay $13 million in restitution, after pleading guilty to charges of wire fraud and conspiracy.

The U.S. Department of Justice says three alleged Scattered Spider defendants indicted along with Buchanan still face charges, including Ahmed Hossam Eldin Elbadawy, 24, a.k.a. “AD,” of College Station, Texas; Evans Onyeaka Osiebo, 21, of Dallas, Texas; and Joel Martin Evans, 26, a.k.a. “joeleoli,” of Jacksonville, North Carolina.

Flowers and Jubair are slated to be sentenced in a London court on July 15, 2026.

Authorities on Thursday disrupted a botnet, a malware framework and seized infrastructure that Evil Corp and other cybercrime groups used to steal data and break into various networks.

The globally coordinated effort targeted SocGholish, multi-stage malware that has compromised websites, redirected users to traffic distribution systems (TDS) and slipped malware into their networks since 2017.

“The malware establishes an initial foothold into victim computers, collectively known as a botnet, and is then used by threat actors for further targeting with ransomware campaigns and espionage,” the FBI’s cyber division said in a statement. 

Cybersecurity firms, researchers and officials from the United States, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and Europol took down 106 servers and remediated nearly 15,000 sites that were infected with the malware. Officials also disabled the botnet and notified victims.

Sites infected with SocGholish, which are primarily hosted on WordPress, were widespread and provided everyday services including restaurants and auto repair shops, according to the Dutch National Police. 

The botnet, also known as “FakeUpdates,” is linked to the Russian cybercrime group Evil Corp. It also provided initial access to other ransomware variants, including DoppelPaymer, WastedLoocker, Hades Ransomware, LockBit, RansomHub and others, according to Infoblox, which participated in the takedown. 

Proofpoint, which also participated in the disruption, described Evil Corp as one of the most prominent cybercrime groups in operation and the “grandfather” of a threat type that compromises websites and uses TDS to redirect users to malware.

Following the takedown, the FBI issued a public service announcement warning about cybercriminals using TDS to break into victim networks for ransomware or other financial scams. 

Cybercriminals redirect traffic from sites to bypass firewalls, obscure their activity, identify potential victims and send them to phishing pages to steal credentials, initiate financial scams, access networks, deliver other malware, and sell access to other cybercriminals, officials said.

The law enforcement action was part of Operation Endgame, a multinational effort targeting cybercrime since 2024, and more narrowly for the FBI part of Operation Riptide, an ongoing campaign targeting cybercriminals and the infrastructure and financial networks they use to commit fraud.

The post Authorities disrupt Evil Corp’s SocGholish botnet appeared first on CyberScoop.

TeamPCP is on a rampage through open-source software.

In less than four months, the threat actor has compromised and injected malicious code into more than 1,000 software packages. The extraordinary spree has transformed how software developers and maintainers distribute and manage their code, as their dependencies and repositories have become one of the most effective and prevalent attack vectors this year.

While there has been a host of technical exploits, TeamPCP’s greatest attack has been the uprooting of trust — repeatedly proving that most organizations fail to verify the code they ingest into their systems is legitimate, abusing a nearly blind faith that much of the software development industry relies on to power today’s modern economy.

Starting with Trivy in February, TeamPCP’s attacks have shaken that trust many times over.

The scale of TeamPCP’s attacks lies partly in the automated systems companies use to deploy code, like CI/CD pipelines. It is also capitalizing on new security gaps created by developers’ increasing reliance on AI. Yet, with relatively low effort and unoriginal tactics, TeamPCP is wrecking open-source frameworks and underlying systems at levels the technology community has rarely reckoned with.

“Developers didn’t do a great job of analyzing the security of their open-source dependencies before but, now with AI, there’s in some cases virtually no human in the loop or any kind of sanity check on what these tools are doing,” Feross Aboukhadijeh, founder and CEO at Socket, told CyberScoop.

“You have agents installing packages that haven’t been vetted,” he said. “When an attacker gets in, the impact is even broader because there’s less checks and balances to stop it from affecting everybody.”

TeamPCP hasn’t identified a new problem or proved anything novel. The crux of these attacks hinge on a central theme — defensive vulnerabilities the entire software industry has known about for years. Researchers and developers know the open source trust model is broken and susceptible to sabotage. Yet, the software industry has not fixed this problem. 

“The speed and scale of these attacks is what makes it most notable, not necessarily the methodology behind it, because at the core it is really about exploiting third-party trusts that we have,” said Kimberly Goody, senior manager at Google Threat Intelligence Group.

Software packages are typically subjected to intensive security monitoring to test for vulnerabilities and poisoned updates before they are released to live environments. 

Yet, the real vulnerability highlighted by TeamPCP lies further up the chain of command with the organizations or individuals that publish these packages to the wider market, according to Nathaniel Quist, manager of cloud threat intelligence at Palo Alto Networks.

“It is their responsibility to secure their credentials and not provide a jump off point to trigger a supply-chain event,” he said. “Everything that interacts with or crosses through that zone must be highly monitored and controlled to ensure a compromise can be contained quickly and easily.”

TeamPCP’s motivation

TeamPCP, like any prolific cybercriminal, has captured significant attention from threat hunters since it emerged in late 2025. Google attributes the activity to one core operator.

The company said it traced TeamPCP’s residential and mobile IP address connections to South Africa, indicating the primary operator was located there during at least some of its attacks.

“We don’t believe that there’s an established core group, at least not yet, and that a lot of this has been conducted by an individual,” Goody said. Google declined to name the core operator or confirm it knows the person’s true identity. 

Palo Alto Networks said the core manager of TeamPCP uses the “ResoluteXBF” handle on multiple platforms. The cybersecurity firm is also tracking two additional core members: “diencracked” and “Shinigami.”

If TeamPCP is primarily run by one person, law enforcement has a rare opportunity to make a lasting impact with a single arrest.

TeamPCP has collaborated with other cybercriminals, but most of those partnerships were short-lived and ended in a public feud or otherwise failed to get off the ground in any meaningful way, Goody said.

Researchers have linked TeamPCP to extortion crews, dark web forums and affiliates including Lapsus$, ShinyHunters, Vect, DragonForce, BreachForums and “HasanBroker.” TeamPCP listed about 4,000 private code repositories on a dark web forum with an asking price of $95,000.

The actions to date, including unpredictable behavior, indicate motivations beyond financial gain and a “clear desire for notoriety,” Goody said. “They seem to like to make chaos.”

Quist draws the same conclusion from his months-long investigation, noting that it encourages other cybercriminals to get in on the action, at one point offering financial rewards for the largest software supply-chain attack. 

TeamPCP isn’t in the game for extortion payments, he said. “These actors are more interested in the underground street cred they are gaining” and “causing as much damage and mayhem as possible.”

Victims abound, but exposure limited

TeamPCP has been remarkably noisy, opportunistically injecting malware into open-source software for the purpose of stealing credentials for Kubernetes environments, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and many other connected services.

The group’s claimed victim list is staggering: Checkmarx, Bitwarden, LiteLLM, Telnyx, Mercor AI, PyTorch Lightning, AntV, SAP, GitHub, TanStack, UiPath, MistralAI, Microsoft DurableTask, Red Hat and Nx Console.

The full collection of packages compromised or poisoned by TeamPCP to date accounts for roughly 500 million weekly downloads combined, according to Quist.

While the breadth of potential downstream compromise flowing from those downloads is substantial, many endpoints infected with those malware-riddled packages aren’t exposed to the internet and less susceptible to attack, he added.

“I don’t think there’s going to be a very extremely large number of victims,” Quist said. “There’s going to be a lot of people who potentially could be compromised and have potentially vulnerable packages in their environment, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re in an exploitable position.”

While these incidents have grabbed headlines, TeamPCP hasn’t accumulated payouts nearly as large as other cybercriminals. The broader reputational impact it has wrought, however, is massive.

TeamPCP has publicly claimed more than 10,000 victims and about $90,000 in extortions, according to Quist.

“They might not be making a lot of money, but they are causing a lot of impact,” Goody said. “Their campaigns have been very disruptive.”

How TeamPCP’s operating model targets development

TeamPCP’s victim list has grown as its hijacked open-source repositories on npm, PyPI, GitHub and other outsourced developer tools that are incorporated into upstream code running in production environments.

Developer laptops and other endpoints that are assigned to install, build and publish software widely contain keys and access to source code that create incredibly valuable supply-chain targets for attackers, Amitai Cohen, head of the attack vector intel team at Wiz, explained during a June presentation on TeamPCP at SleuthCon in Arlington, Va. 

The group targets CI runners, which are automated systems that build, test, and publish code. TeamPCP injects malware into the code repositories these runners maintain. When other developers pull that code into their own systems, they unknowingly download the malware alongside it. 

Some of these artifacts, including Python libraries, npm registries and GitHub Actions, are downloaded almost immediately by thousands or millions of developers who’ve set their runners up to consistently pull the latest version, according to Cohen. “We as a security industry have taught them that that is the right thing to do. You want to use the latest version because you want to be protected against vulnerabilities, and obviously you want to benefit from all the latest features.”

That instinct is exactly what TeamPCP exploits. By compromising one company’s CI/CD workflow, the group gains access to every downstream user who automatically pulls that infected code. “This is what allows [TeamPCP] to leverage initial access to some patient zero, some company that had a vulnerability in their CI/CD workflow, in order to gain access to their downstream users,” Cohen said. “That’s just how the software supply chain works. Everything has dependencies upon dependencies upon dependencies.”

Some of the packages compromised by TeamPCP were live for almost 13 hours, but security practitioners have responded by identifying code-injection attacks much quicker now, pulling some compromised repositories within 15 minutes, said Ben Read, director of strategic intelligence at Wiz.

The threat group’s operations remain high-tempo. TeamPCP infects new software packages almost daily, validates compromises and captures sensitive data within 24 hours, according to Wiz researchers.

The threat group has consistently evolved its tactics, developing payloads in JavaScript and Python while spreading from local files to Kubernetes application programming interfaces and bundled software development kits. Most recently, it’s been stealing credentials via custom protocols. 

The group’s ambitions have expanded beyond its own attacks. TeamPCP is also responsible for a self-replicating piece of malware known as Mini Shai-Hulud, which infected hundreds of software packages across open-source registries in back-to-back attack sprees last month. A TeamPCP affiliate published the full source code for the malware on GitHub last month and encouraged other cybercriminals to use it for their own campaigns.

“TeamPCP is going for volume. They are not being discriminating, they’re not necessarily trying to be stealthy or trying to maximize ROI. They’re going for an all-of-the-above strategy,” Read said during the Sleuthcon presentation.

Defensive gaps create openings for attack

TeamPCP’s attack spree has also underscored how difficult it is for organizations to revoke compromised secrets. Multiple victims have experienced recurring infections, sometimes falling prey to TeamPCP three times within a month, because they didn’t rotate secrets properly, Cohen said. 

At its core, these attacks highlight a direct trade-off organizations accept when they update software quickly to fix vulnerabilities, but learn that doing so too quickly could expose them to illegitimate registries containing malware.

TeamPCP has targeted what Aboukhadijeh describes as a “public good,” open-source registries that were never perfect but widely trusted and rarely turned into a point of entry for supply-chain attacks. 

Rapid open source software installation is one of the most dangerous things an organization can do right now, he said, adding that there’s a roughly 1 in 10 chance that any package installed by an organization could trigger an active attack. 

TeamPCP has compromised security scanners, password managers, automation tools, data visualization software, and CI/CD infrastructure across various environments.

And it’s lifted a trove of credentials and other sensitive data from victims.

Researchers like Cohen at Wiz, who have been tracking this attack spree since the beginning, are nearing a breaking point. 

“This is also too hard on us. We’re very tired. I’m sure a lot of people working on this problem space are very tired, and it’s just kind of become untenable,” Cohen said.

“You can’t keep existing in a world where you wake up every morning and some super prevalent package is compromised and everybody’s just going to be using it like nothing,” he added. “We need to start taking this a bit more seriously.”

The post How software development’s speed obsession enabled TeamPCP’s chaos crusade appeared first on CyberScoop.

Here is a ransomware trend that is becoming more frequent in 2026: The same victim organizations are posted twice, under two different flags. This is occurring frequently enough that we stopped treating it as a curiosity and went looking for the why behind this trend. We expected one answer, but we found at least five.Our team discussed this increasing trend during our Ctrl-Alt-DECODE ep. 10 livestream and in our monthly Threat Debrief, which ranks the most active ransomware groups and recent ransomware news. Now, let's take an in-depth look.

The attackers deployed a new Go-based backdoor that uses Microsoft Teams servers for command-and-control.

The post Microsoft Teams Relay Servers Abused in DragonForce Ransomware Attack appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Mackay Sugar was targeted in a cyberattack carried out by a threat group known as The Gentlemen.

The post Ransomware Attack Shuts Down Mills of Australia’s Second-Largest Sugar Producer appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Oleksii Oleksiyovych Lytvynenko admitted to working on the development of a loader for the Conti gang.

The post Ukrainian Man Pleads Guilty in US to Conti Ransomware Charges appeared first on SecurityWeek.

A longtime former member of Conti, a ransomware group that attacked more than 1,000 organizations globally before it disbanded in 2022, pleaded guilty to participating in some of those attacks in federal court Wednesday, the Justice Department said.

Oleksii Oleksiyovych Lytvynenko, also known as Alexsey Alexseevich Litvinenko, admitted he joined the prolific cybercrime group in September 2021 and held data on 12 victims, including eight based in the United States. The 44-year-old told the court he developed malware that Conti used in some of its attacks, according to officials. 

“The defendant and his conspirators used the Conti ransomware to terrorize people and businesses in the United States and around the world, causing millions of dollars in damage,” A. Tysen Duva, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said in a statement.

Lytvynenko and his co-conspirators used the ransomware to attack more than 1,000 victims globally, ensnaring victims in 47 states, Washington, Puerto Rico and about 31 countries, according to the Justice Department. The FBI estimates Conti extorted more than $150 million in ransom payments from victims.

The Ukrainian national pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and faces up to 20 years in prison upon sentencing, which is scheduled for Sept. 10. 

Lytvynenko was arrested in Ireland in July 2023, extradited to the United States in October 2025, and remains in federal custody in Tennessee where at least three of his victims are based. He left Ukraine in 2022 and obtained temporary protective status in Ireland, residing in Cork at the time of his arrest. 

Prosecutors said Lytvynenko and his co-conspirators extorted about $634,000 in Bitcoin from two victims in Tennessee, including an undisclosed government entity that resulted in the compromise of a sheriff’s department, local emergency medical services and a local police department. According to an indictment that was unsealed last fall, Lytvynenko and his co-conspirators also leaked data they stole from another Tennessee-based victim after it refused to pay a $3 million ransom demand.

Four of Lytvynenko’s alleged co-conspirators — Maksim Galochkin, Maksim Rudenskiy, Mikhail Mikhailovich Tsarev and Andrey Yuryevich Zhuykov — were indicted in 2023 in the same federal court for crimes related to their suspected involvement in Conti attacks from 2020 to 2022. 

Authorities said Lytvynenko engaged in cybercrime after Conti disbanded and its members splintered off into new groups, adding that he “was asleep but within arms’ reach of an open laptop running Cobalt Strike” at the time of his arrest.

At one point, Conti was among the most prolific ransomware groups globally, impacting hundreds of critical infrastructure providers, Costa Rica’s government in 2022, and ultimately leading the State Department to offer a $10 million reward for information related to Conti’s leaders. The group was notoriously resilient, bouncing back with new infrastructure and hitting new targets after a massive leak exposed chats between the group’s members in 2022.

Conti disbanded later that year, but members of the Cyrillic-language group rebranded under three subgroups: Zeon, Black Basta and Quantum, which quickly rebranded to Royal, before rebranding again to BlackSuit in 2024.

“Lytvynenko’s guilty plea is a significant step toward holding cyber criminals accountable for the damage they inflict on victims worldwide,” Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division, said in a statement “Lytvynenko profited from fear and coercion, conspiring to use Conti ransomware to extort victims and steal their data.”

The post Conti ransomware group member pleads guilty, faces up to 20 years in prison appeared first on CyberScoop.

Why Are Leading Ransomware Groups Claiming the Same Victims?

A cybercrime group known as The Gentlemen has emerged as the second most active ransomware gang by victim count, rapidly attracting a talented pool of hackers through an aggressive recruitment strategy that promises affiliates 90 percent of any ransom paid by victims. This post examines clues pointing to a real life identity for the administrator of The Gentlemen ransomware group.

Experts at the security firm Check Point Software have been closely covering exploits of The Gentlemen, a so-called “ransomware-as-a-service” (RaaS) offering that pays affiliates handsomely to help spread the group’s malware.

“A 90/10 affiliate revenue split — compared to the industry standard 80/20 — is accelerating the group’s growth by attracting experienced operators from competing programs,” the researchers wrote in April.

Check Point found The Gentlemen are the second most active ransomware group by victim count so far this year, claiming at least 332 published victims since the group’s inception in mid-2025 and more than 240 in 2026 alone.

According to Check Point, the group targets Internet-facing devices (VPNs, firewalls) as their entry point, and once inside moves quickly to encrypt entire networks within hours.

Check Point says the administrator and primary operator of the ransomware group uses the nickname Zeta88 on the Russian-language cybercrime forums, and that this individual was previously known under the moniker Hastalamuerte. Check Point noted that a breach of the group’s backend infrastructure made it clear that Hastalamuerte/Zeta88 is the person who assembles the locker and RaaS panel, manages payments, and is essentially the administrator of the entire program who receives 10 percent of all ransoms.

WHO IS HASTALAMUERTE?

The cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 shows that the user Hastalamuerte is a Russian and English speaking person who registered on almost a dozen cybercrime forums between 2019 and the present day, including Exploit, Breachforums, Ramp_V2, BHF, Raidforums, and Nulled.

Intel 471 reveals that Hastalamuerte registered on Breachforums in January 2025 from an Internet address in Izhevsk, the capital city of Russia’s Udmurt Republic. Likewise, the user Zeta88 signed up at the English-language cybercrime forum Breached in August 2022 from a different Internet address in Izhevsk.

Intel 471 finds Hastalamuerte registered on Raidforums in 2020 using the email address hastalamuerte1488@protonmail.com (1488 is a common combination of two numeric symbols associated with white supremacy). A lookup on this address at the open source intelligence service Epieos shows it is connected to an account at Apple and to a phone number ending in 04.

Epieos says that Protonmail address is also linked to a GitHub account under the username SantaMuerte. That account is marked private, but a history of this user’s activity shows they are watching and developing a number of malware tools and exploits.

In April 2020, Hastalamuerte said on the crime forum Nulled that they could be contacted at the Telegram instant messenger name @hastalamuerte18, and the threat intelligence company Flashpoint finds this username is assigned the unique Telegram ID number 30907522 [full disclosure: Flashpoint is an advertiser on this blog].

The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence reports that Hastalamuerte’s Telegram ID is connected to another username — “bu4vs” — and to the Russian phone number 79127650004. Pivoting on this phone number in Constella fetches multiple records from hacked Russian government databases showing it is assigned to one Alexander Andreevich Yapaev, a 36-year-old from Izhevsk.

Constella reveals that phone number was used to create an account at the Russian social media platform Pikabu under the name “4apai18,” and shows Mr. Yapaev has signed up at a number of websites using the common surname Ivanov, or else “Chapaev” (the numeral 4 is often used as shorthand for a “ch” sound in Russian).

A search in Intel 471 for cybercrime forum members with the nickname SantaMuerte unearths an account by the same name created in 2020 on the Russian hacking forum Codeby. Intel 471 shows this user originally registered on Codeby with the not-so-subtle nickname Alexandr 4apaev.

Constella finds Mr. Yapaev regularly used the email address bu4vs@mail.ru. Meanwhile, Epieos shows this address is connected to a LinkedIn account for Alexander Yapaev, who lists himself as the head of B2B marketing at the company Uralenergo Udmurtia, one of Russia’s largest suppliers of electrotechnical and lighting products.

Mr. Yapaev did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Nearly every time we publish one of these Breadcrumbs stories, readers are curious to know why it seems like so many cybercriminals from Russia apparently do little to hide their real life identities. The truth is that — Russian or not — most didn’t exactly set out to be arch criminals, but instead got drawn into the scene gradually over several years as their skills broadened and sharpened.

Another important dynamic is that the Russian government generally either co-opts or ignores cybercriminal activity within its borders so long as the hackers do not steal from or attack Russian businesses and citizens. As a result, successful cybercriminals in Russia are usually insulated from prosecution and arrest by foreign law enforcement agencies provided they occasionally pay off the right people and do not travel abroad. And cybercriminals who intend to strictly adhere to those unwritten rules may (at least initially) be less concerned about covering their tracks online.

But the simplest explanation is that cybercriminals of all nationalities tend to make a number of basic operational security mistakes early in their careers, when they are less savvy and have far less to lose by their carelessness. A review of Hastalamuerte’s early posts on the crime forums (circa 2019-2020) shows a relatively unsophisticated and low-skilled hacker still trying to learn the ropes and earn a positive reputation on these communities.

For example, in June 2020 Hastalamuerte’s Telegram account joined a multi-month training program (@pntst) to learn how to use popular penetration testing tools, and their candid posts to this hacker training camp show Hastalamuerte struggling to use these tools effectively. A Google-translated record of Hastalmuerte’s posts to @pntst is here.

Update, June 11, 10:23 a.m. ET:  The threat research group PRODAFT has released a detailed writeup on the history and current operations of The Gentlemen. PRODAFT said its findings match the same persona with “high confidence,” and found the administrator (Zeta88/Hastalamuerte) supplies affiliates with initial access directly, primarily Fortinet SSL-VPN credentials obtained through brute-force attacks or sourced from the group’s own leak database. They also discovered the administrator is using AI to develop and maintain the ransomware and associated tooling, as well as to assist with post-exploitation activity.

Focusing on hacking law firms in the US, the ransomware group relies on fast flux to hide its C&C infrastructure.

The post Silent Ransom Group Uses DNS Fast Flux in Attacks appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Silent Ransom Group, a long-running data extortion operation, continues to hit U.S.-based law firms by impersonating IT support and, in some cases, visiting victims in person to gain physical access to computers, the FBI said in an alert Tuesday.

The closed group, which likely operates from Russia and emerged in 2022 after Conti disbanded, has claimed responsibility for more than 100 attacks with activity surging during the past few months, according to researchers.

The FBI’s warning comes exactly one year after the agency released a previous alert about Silent Ransom Group consistently targeting law firms since mid-2023. The group doesn’t deploy encryption, but its dual use of social engineering and in-person visits for data theft is extremely rare with no known parallels across the vast cybercrime ecosystem, multiple experts told CyberScoop.

“There were probably a lot of times that this failed before it started succeeding because there’s a lot of trial-and-error involved,” said Allan Liska, field chief information security officer at Recorded Future. Whereas other ransomware groups would rather move on to other tactics or targets, “Silent Ransom Group has seen the value especially in going after law firms, and so they’re willing to put the extra effort into it,” he added. 

The data extortion group, which is also tracked as Chatty Spider, UNC3753 and Storm-0252, isn’t as prolific as more high-tempo ransomware groups. Yet, it’s having a noticeable impact due to its proven knack for attacking organizations in the legal sector.

Halcyon tracked 134 ransomware incidents against law firms and legal services during the first quarter of this year, making it the fourth-most targeted industry accounting for more than 6% of all ransomware attacks the company tracked during the period. 

Silent Ransom Group and Inc, a ransomware-as-a-service operation dating back to mid-2023, are largely responsible for that uptick, said Cynthia Kaiser, senior vice president at Halycon’s Ransomware Research Center.

“Silent was the first group to really just be targeting law firms, and they’ve targeted major law firms” with a clear understanding of what’s most problematic for organizations in that segment, she added. “The theft of data in and of itself is the biggest issue for the law firms, so they’re tailoring a lot of their operations around what they know about the sector.”

Law firms are a rich target because data theft creates huge privilege and reputational problems, which creates the perception they might be more willing to pay high extortion demands, Kaiser said.

Silent Ransom Group’s social engineering scheme involves phone calls or phishing emails that urge employees to call one of the group’s associates posing as IT support, the FBI said. If the group’s attempt to gain access to the employee’s computer via remote access tools fails, it sends an associate to the victim’s location to physically attach a storage device to the victim’s workstation. 

This extra step is unique and places Silent Ransom Group in a completely different mode of operation than its peers in ransomware and data theft extortion. Some aggressive data theft extortion groups have harassed and threatened executives and employees with physical violence, but in-person visits for data theft are extraordinary.

“While Flashpoint has observed threat actors soliciting or co-opting both witting and unwitting insiders, we have not observed them physically sending attackers to victim locations. This tactic carries significant risk, as threat actors are able to use technology to obscure their real-world identities,” said Ian Gray, vice president of cyber threat intelligence operations at Flashpoint. 

Joe Slowik, director of cybersecurity alerting strategy at Dataminr, said it’s easy to question why potential victims would fall for this tactic. “However, humans in the workplace need to implicitly trust others to get their jobs done,” he said. 

“Questioning everything, while seemingly desirable, introduces significant friction and distrust in workplace environments and limits productivity in arbitrary ways,” Slowik added. “Criminal entities will continue to prey on human weaknesses and dependencies for success, and placing the burden solely on employees to defend against this is unfair and unreasonable.”

The FBI did not provide details about the people Silent Ransom Group uses to initiate the fake IT support calls or visit victims in person. Yet, with the group’s operators based in Russia, researchers speculate gig workers or subcontractors are playing a critical role by placing voice-based phishing calls in a common language and visiting victims at their workplace. 

Liska said he’s under the impression the group is using freelance taskers that don’t necessarily know they are committing a crime. “They may be suspicious, but you know, they need the money,” he said. 

“It’s kind of like a Doordash person that delivers Arby’s,” Liska said. “You know you’re doing really bad things to people, but you know what, they’re paying you to deliver.”

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European authorities took down a prominent virtual private network service and arrested the alleged administrator behind an operation that cybercriminals used to steal data, commit fraud and ransomware attacks, Europol said Thursday. 

First VPN, which was promoted on Russian-speaking cybercrime forums, gained popularity for providing services that allowed users to hide their infrastructure and identities. Officials said the service was entrenched in the cybercrime world and appeared in almost every major recent cybercrime investigation aided by Europol.

“For years, cybercriminals saw this VPN service as a gateway to anonymity,” Edvardas Šileris, head of Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, said in a statement. 

“They believed it would keep them beyond the reach of law enforcement,” Šileris added. “This operation proves them wrong. Taking it offline removes a critical layer of protection that criminals depended on to operate, communicate and evade law enforcement.”

The operation stretched over two days earlier this week, led by France and the Netherlands, with support from Europol, Eurojust and eight additional countries. 

Authorities said they arrested the alleged administrator and searched their residence in Ukraine, but declined to name the person. Officials also dismantled 33 servers linked to the service and seized multiple domains, including 1vpns.com, 1vpns.net and 1vpns.org.

Investigators obtained First VPN’s user database and identified VPN connections used by alleged cybercriminals. Intelligence gathered during the operation uncovered thousands of users linked to cybercrime and formed additional leads connected to ransomware attacks and fraud schemes, officials said. 

Europol said First VPN’s users were notified of the shutdown and warned that their identities are now known to authorities. 

French and Dutch authorities started investigating First VPN in earnest in November 2023 and shared evidence with 16 countries to coordinate data analysis and support other ongoing investigations. Officials across multiple jurisdictions are using intelligence gathered during the operation to aid 21 additional inquiries globally.

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The first quarter of 2026 reinforced that attackers are moving faster, operating with greater coordination, and exploiting weaknesses before most organizations can respond effectively. From escalating geopolitical tensions to increasingly aggressive ransomware operations, the latest quarterly Threat Landscape Report highlights a security environment where reactive defense strategies are becoming unsustainable.

Quarterly Threat Landscape Report findings

Exploits unseat social engineering for top initial access vector (IAV)

One of the biggest takeaways is that vulnerability exploitation surpassed social engineering as the largest initial access vector with 38% of the total. This would be interesting on its own, but when coupled with more than 50% of all exploited vulnerabilities actively being zero-click, network facing vulnerabilities, it indicates that, at least in the short term, attackers are finding AI-enabled vulnerability exploitation easier to accomplish than exploiting human behavior. These types of vulnerabilities require no authentication and no user interaction, giving attackers rapid pathways into exposed systems and edge infrastructure. At the same time, exploitation activity was frequently preceded by large spikes in public discussion across forums, blogs, and social media platforms, demonstrating how quickly threat actors operationalize publicly available information once vulnerabilities gain visibility.

Geopolitics and FBI takedowns in the threat landscape

Geopolitical instability also continued to shape cyber operations throughout the quarter, particularly in the Middle East, where cyber activity was increasingly synchronized with military escalation. Iranian state-aligned groups targeted government infrastructure, financial services, and industrial systems, while Russian and Chinese campaigns focused heavily on intelligence collection, telecommunications infrastructure, and persistent access operations designed to remain undetected over long periods of time. The result is a threat landscape where organizations must prepare not only for immediate disruption, but also for long-term persistence inside enterprise environments.

Meanwhile, law enforcement operations targeting underground criminal infrastructure disrupted several major ransomware and credential marketplaces during Q1, including the seizure of RAMP and LeakBase. These takedowns have created operational pressure for cybercriminal groups, pushing threat actors toward smaller, decentralized communities and increasing internal distrust.

A marked shift towards "pure extortion"

The report also highlights the continued evolution of ransomware operations, particularly the growing shift toward “pure extortion” tactics focused on rapid data theft rather than traditional encryption-based attacks. Threat actors increasingly leveraged zero-click vulnerabilities to gain initial access, exfiltrate sensitive data, and pressure victims without deploying ransomware payloads that create additional operational risk and visibility.

Taken together, the findings from Q1 2026 show that organizations can no longer rely on periodic assessments and reactive workflows alone. Security teams need continuous visibility into their attack surface, better prioritization around exploitable risk, and the ability to move at a pace that matches modern attackers before small exposures become large-scale incidents.

Download the full report here.

Attackers couldn’t get enough of the vulnerabilities at their disposal last year, making exploits the top initial access vector across more than 22,000 breaches Verizon analyzed in its latest Data Breach Investigations Report released Tuesday.

The massive annual study uncovered a surge of exploited vulnerabilities during a one-year period ending in October 2025. Exploited defects accounted for 31% of all known initial access vectors, jumping from 20% the previous year. 

The uptick in exploited vulnerabilities is a reflection of the “sisyphean cause” of vulnerability management, researchers wrote in the report. “Put quite simply, there are often too many vulnerabilities and not enough time for patching all of them.”

Organizations are struggling to keep up with the torrent of vulnerabilities affecting technology across their systems. This slide is especially worrisome, and declining, among defects in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s known exploited vulnerabilities catalog.

Only 26% of the critical vulnerabilities in CISA’s catalog were fully remediated by more than 13,000 organizations Verizon studied in 2025, marking a drop from 38% the year prior. 

“There is also a worse result for the median time elapsed for a vulnerability to be fully patched by detection,” researchers wrote in the report. “Our new median time is 43 days, almost two weeks longer than last year’s 32 days.”

Verizon also noted that the median number of KEV vulnerabilities that organizations had to patch jumped from 11 in 2024 to 16 in 2025.

CISA’s KEV catalog contained more than 1,500 CVEs as of February, and 65% of those were exploited during the previous year, according to the report.

Verizon identified the five most common weaknesses of CISA KEV CVEs in its report as out-of-bounds read, heap-based buffer overflow, use after free, external control of file name or path and access of resource using incompatible type.

Attacker motivations remained relatively consistent last year, with financially-motivated cybercriminals accounting for 88% of all breaches. Espionage-driven attacks from state-affiliated groups made up the remainder.

“Ransomware continues to be among the most disruptive and impactful types of breaches we see. Not unlike the price of everything from fast food to adult beverages in ballparks, it continues to trend upward,” researchers wrote in the report.

Ransomware accounted for 48% of all breaches last year, up from 44% in 2024. Yet, Verizon observed some positive trends in ransomware as well.

Ransom payments continued to decline, with 69% of victims reporting they didn’t pay, and the median payment slid from $150,000 in 2024 to almost $140,000 last year.

Tracking ransomware remains a challenge for researchers and authorities. 

“There is a growing disconnect between what is being reported and the reality of what has occurred, in no small part due to threat actors reusing old breaches, reposting breaches from other criminal partners and making up breaches out of whole cloth to help increase their notoriety in the criminal world,” Verizon wrote in the report. “We’re beginning to think that these cybercriminals might not be entirely trustworthy.”

Yet, despite the lack of indisputable data on ransomware activity, researchers concluded: “Ransomware is still the yoga pants of cybersecurity — ubiquitous, stubbornly popular and appearing in unexpected places near you.”

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Microsoft seized infrastructure and disrupted a cybercrime service that created and sold more than 1,000 code-signing certificates that other cybercriminals used to make malware-riddled software appear trusted and legitimate for follow-on cyberattacks, including ransomware, the company said Tuesday.

The financially-motivated threat group, which Microsoft tracks as Fox Tempest, provided the malware-signing-as-a-service to multiple ransomware groups, including Rhysida, Vanilla Tempest, Storm-0501, Storm-2561 and Storm-0249 for at least a year before Microsoft was granted a court order to dismantle the operation. 

Fox Tempest, which Microsoft has been tracking since September 2025, abused Microsoft’s Artifact Signing system by fabricating identities and impersonating legitimate organizations to access the code-signing services of Microsoft, Steven Masada, assistant general counsel at Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, said during a media briefing Monday.  

Cybercriminals paid Fox Tempest up to $9,500 to get their malicious code signed, allowing them to slip software through defenses and bypass controls designed to confirm programs are authentic and linked to a trusted source. 

“This isn’t the obvious knockoff you might find on a street corner. It’s more like a counterfeit product that’s so precise that even the experts have trouble distinguishing it from the real thing,” Masada said. “It acts as a fake ID that lets cybercriminals get into systems by walking right through the front door.”

While attackers and defenders have historically focused on the entry points of attacks, Fox Tempest’s operation exemplifies a broader move upstream to how attacks are built in the first place, he added. 

“It’s no longer just about tricking users to click on a link, it’s about exploiting the very systems that we rely on to decide what is and what isn’t safe,” Masada said. 

Cybercriminals have been reselling code-signing certificates for a least a decade, but Fox Tempest’s operation was unique in providing a massively scalable service for extortion, phishing, SEO poisoning or malware-laced advertising, said Maurice Mason, who led the investigation into Fox Tempest as principal cybercrime investigator at Microsoft’s DCU. 

Mason said ransomware operators and other threat groups primarily deployed these fraudulent certificates in ads or SEO poisoning, which brought their malicious software and infostealers to the top of search rankings, ensnaring unsuspecting victims who thought they were downloading and running legitimate applications. 

Fox Tempest’s operation, which included an authenticated portal and a drag-and-drop feature that allowed customers to get their code signed, was directly linked to the deployment of dozens of malware families, including Oyster, Lumma Stealer, MuddyWater and Vidar, he added. 

Microsoft said the threat group is also linked to ransomware affiliates for INC, Qilin, Akira and others. The operation had a global impact, resulting in attacks on the healthcare, education, government and financial services sectors, and most heavily targeted organizations and people in the United States, France, India and China.

“Why wouldn’t you pay those thousands of dollars if you’re a threat actor and you’re getting it back in extortion and ransomware worth millions? This is like chump change to you,” Mason said. 

Microsoft said it evicted or deleted more than 1,000 accounts and subscriptions Fox Tempest used to provide its services. The company also seized the threat group’s website, took hundreds of virtual machines offline and blocked access to a site hosting the underlying code. 

“This disruption likely is going to raise the cost for attackers, and we’re hoping that they move off of using these services,” Mason said. “Obviously it’s just a disruption and there’s other things that they’ll probably move to, or someone might try to do this a different way next time.”

Fox Tempest is an example of the fully developed cybercrime economy defenders confront now, Masada said. 

“In many cases, an actor no longer needs to build an attack from scratch. They can simply assemble one by purchasing its components — a phish kit from one vendor, malware from another, infrastructure and optimization tools from yet others, and so on,” he said. 

“As we focus more of our recent disruptions on marketplaces and service providers, we’re getting a much clearer picture of how the economy actually functions, and what’s emerging is a stratified ecosystem,” Masada added. 

“At one end, you have commoditized tools that are mass produced and built for scale, things like turnkey phishing kits or credential harvesting services,” he said. “But above that, we’re seeing a more sophisticated tier of operators, highly specialized services focused on evasion, durability, and optimization. These are not just enabling attacks, they’re engineering them to succeed against modern defenses.”

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Earlier this month, ShinyHunters breached Instructure’s Canvas platform twice within a single week — stealing 3.65 terabytes of data from approximately 275 million users across more than 8,000 institutions. The group defaced login pages at hundreds of schools during final exam periods, forced Canvas offline, and extracted a ransom payment before Congress opened a formal investigation. The attack did not require exotic malware or zero-day exploits. Attackers entered through compromised “Free-For-Teacher” accounts, escalated rapidly, and exfiltrated sensitive data at scale before Instructure could contain them.

That sequence — entry through weak identity controls, rapid lateral movement, mass exfiltration, extortion, disruption — is now the standard playbook. It will happen again, unless the priority for security and technology leaders becomes reducing the blast radius of every intrusion before it happens.

The problem with how enterprises think about SaaS risk

Modern organizations have consolidated critical operations inside shared SaaS platforms, creating enormous concentrations of risk in single points of failure. When Canvas went down, thousands of students could not access coursework, faculty lost contact with their classes, and administrators scrambled to postpone exams. The scale of disruption came from how deeply institutions depended on Canvas, not from the vulnerability alone.

That asymmetry is the defining feature of SaaS risk in 2026. A single compromised account at a shared platform can trigger sector-wide operational failure. Yet most enterprise security frameworks still treat SaaS platforms primarily as availability problems — measured by uptime, recovery time objectives, and business continuity plans. Canvas exposed the gap in that thinking. Availability means nothing when the platform is operational but the data inside it has already been stolen.

Resilience in SaaS environments requires a harder and more honest premise: treat compromise as continuous and expected. Attackers will reach critical systems. The real test is how much they can take, how far they can move, and how long they can persist before detection and containment.

Identity is the perimeter now

The Canvas attack followed a pattern that has repeated across sectors for years. By compromising legitimate accounts with excessive standing privileges, the attackers moved laterally through Canvas infrastructure, maintained persistence, and exfiltrated data at a scale that took days to quantify.

Too many organizations still operate with fragmented identity controls, inconsistent privilege management, and limited visibility into how accounts interact across SaaS integrations. When attackers compromise a legitimate account, they inherit whatever access that account holds — and in most environments, that access far exceeds what the user actually needs. The result is that identity has become the most reliable attack surface in the modern enterprise, and most organizations are still treating it as a secondary concern.

Strong passwords and multifactor authentication are necessary but no longer sufficient. Enterprises need continuous identity verification, tightly scoped privileges, aggressive governance over third-party integrations, and real-time visibility into anomalous access patterns across SaaS systems. Identity governance cannot be a compliance checkbox. In cloud-native environments, it should be the primary control that determines how far an attacker can travels if they manage to get inside.

Data protection cannot stop at the application layer

Even organizations with strong identity controls face a second, underappreciated problem: the data stored inside SaaS platforms is often far less protected than the credentials used to access it.

Enterprises accumulate vast repositories of sensitive information inside SaaS environments — private messages, accommodation requests, financial records, personal disclosures — while relying almost entirely on application-level access controls to protect it. When those controls fail, as they did at Canvas, the data is immediately readable, searchable, and monetizable. 

Attackers do not need to crack anything. They simply take it.

Cryptographic protections — including encryption strategies that preserve organizational control over sensitive data even after it leaves the platform — directly reduce the value of a successful exfiltration. Stolen data that cannot be read or used is far less valuable as an extortion instrument. That distinction matters significantly in today’s threat environment, where the leverage attackers extract from stolen data often outlasts the breach itself.

The threat does not expire when the incident ends 

The “agreement” between Canvas’s parent company and attackers illustrates a risk that most organizations have not yet fully priced in. While Instructure received digital confirmation that the stolen data was destroyed, Congress opened an investigation anyway. The Instructure CEO has been called to testify before the House Homeland Security Committee. Affected institutions — many of which had no visibility into Instructure’s security posture or incident response capabilities — remain accountable for protecting student data they can no longer control.

That accountability gap will not close after Congress concludes its inquiry. Sensitive data stolen during incidents like Canvas retains value long after the breach itself. Adversaries increasingly collect encrypted data today with the expectation that it can be decrypted later as cryptographic standards age or quantum computing capabilities mature. This “harvest now, decrypt later” approach means that encryption protecting data only in the present still leaves organizations exposed downstream.

Strong cryptographic protection must therefore be paired with crypto-agility and post-quantum readiness. Security leaders should assume that any sensitive data exfiltrated during a SaaS breach may remain a target for years, not days. If stolen data remains immediately usable, attackers retain leverage indefinitely. If it does not, the economics of extortion shift.

What the Canvas breach actually demands

The lesson from Canvas is not that SaaS platforms are inherently insecure. They remain foundational to how modern organizations operate and scale. The lesson is that the assumptions underlying most enterprise security strategies — that prevention is the primary objective, that access controls are sufficient data protection, that recovery means restoring uptime — no longer match the realities of today’s threat environment.

Attackers have already internalized this. They target SaaS platforms precisely because the concentration of data and operational dependency makes them extraordinarily high-value targets. They exploit identity weaknesses because those weaknesses are pervasive and reliable. They apply extortion pressure because stolen data retains leverage long after technical remediation.

The organizations that close this gap — by treating identity governance as mission-critical infrastructure, implementing cryptographic protections that survive exfiltration, building recovery discipline alongside prevention, and planning for post-quantum exposure — will be significantly better positioned when the next breach arrives. And it will arrive. The only variable is how much it costs.

Rishi Kaushal is the CIO of Entrust, a company that helps organizations fight fraud and cyber threats with identity-centric security.

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The non-bank lender discovered a ransomware attack nearly one year ago, but only recently completed its investigation.

The post American Lending Center Data Breach Affects 123,000 Individuals appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Foxconn, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of electronics sold by major tech vendors, is recovering from a cyberattack that disrupted some of the company’s factories in North America.

Nitrogen, a ransomware group that’s known for targeting organizations in the manufacturing, construction and technology sectors, claimed responsibility for the attack on its data leak site and said it stole 8 terabytes of data spanning more than 11 million files. 

The threat group posted screenshots of some of the allegedly stolen data and claimed it compromised “confidential instructions, projects and drawings from Intel, Apple, Google, Dell, Nvidia and many other projects.” 

Foxconn is famously known as the primary assembler of Apple iPhones. Apple and the other companies allegedly impacted by the attack did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for Foxconn confirmed some of its factories in North America suffered a cyberattack, and said its cybersecurity team immediately responded to the breach by implementing additional “measures to ensure the continuity of production and delivery.”

The spokesperson did not answer questions about when the attack occurred or what systems or data was impacted, but noted that “affected factories are currently resuming normal production” as of Tuesday. 

Nitrogen was first observed in 2023, using ALPHV, one of the most prevalent ransomware variants at that time, Cynthia Kaiser, senior vice president at Halcyon’s Ransomware Research Center, told CyberScoop. The group started using stolen code from Conti, another formerly prolific ransomware variant, in 2024 to build its own custom attack tools to hit Windows and VMware server environments, she added.

The threat group has most recently focused on companies in the manufacturing and technology sectors. “However, the most recent cases of claims by Nitrogen do not include a working file listing on the leak site and include mostly older images of files,” Kaiser said. “This raises questions about whether Nitrogen is inflating data-theft claims in an attempt to pressure victims into paying higher ransoms.”

Foxconn hasn’t described the nature of the attack or confirmed the existence of a ransom demand. 

Ismael Valenzuela, vice president of threat research and intelligence at Arctic Wolf Labs, said Nitrogen follows a “consistent playbook, stealing data before encrypting systems so they have leverage on multiple fronts, combining operational disruption with the threat of sensitive information being exposed.”

The threat group’s tactics indicate it’s not opportunistic, but rather “operating with a defined model, focusing on organizations that are easier to access but still critical enough to drive pressure and payment,” Valenzuela added. 

Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry with headquarters in Taiwan, is among the world’s largest companies with $259 billion in revenue last year, the company said. Foxconn’s North American footprint includes multiple factories in Mexico, Wisconsin, Ohio, Texas, Virginia and Indiana.

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