U.S. and South Korean cyber agencies warned Monday about a ransomware-as-a-service outfit, Gunra, that reportedly recruits ethical hackers and penetration testers and benefits from North Korean government-linked hackers’ tools to target government and critical infrastructure organizations.

Gunra has gone after sectors such as academia, financial services and insurance, government services and facilities, healthcare, manufacturing and construction, media, retail, transportation and utilities. Its global scope is far-ranging, according to Monday’s alert: Africa, the Americas, the Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.

“Gunra is another variant in the ongoing trend of ransomware attacks causing disruption and harm to U.S. and international organizations,” said Chris Butera, acting assistant director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which produced the advisory with the Department of Defense’s Cyber Crime Center, FBI, National Security Agency, Secret Service and Republic of Korea’s National Police Agency.

The alert is part of the #StopRansomware series, a joint FBI-CISA project aimed at network defenders.

The FBI first took notice of Gunra in April of last year. The double-extortion group established a data leak site on Tor to list victims and publish purloined data. By January of this year, Gunra had launched a formal ransomware-as-a-service affiliate and was growing in its ambition, Monday’s alert states.

“The FBI observed the group adopting new branding aliases (notably operating under the name Golden Community) to support this expansion,” it reads. “Gunra has further commercialized its platform by actively recruiting penetration testers and ethical hackers to serve as initial access brokers, offering a share of the ransom profits in exchange for enterprise network access.”

Gunra seeks initial access with known vulnerabilities in internet-facing devices like firewalls or virtual private networks, and is based on or influenced by the Conti ransomware code leaked in 2022, according to the agencies.

Research published in July by a South Korean cybersecurity firm took note of Gunra overlap with Lazarus Group, although it doesn’t explicitly mention the latter group’s name.

“These commonalities suggest that although the state-sponsored threat group and the Gunra ransomware group appear to be separate threat actors with different ultimate objectives, they may have shared certain techniques, tools, and infrastructure or collaborated to a limited extent during the attacks,” AhnLab wrote in its report.

That kind of North Korean government-ransomware gang collaboration dates back to at least 2024. Nor is Gunra alone among ransomware-as-a-service outfits recruiting penetration testers.

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A 20-year-old man in the United Kingdom was sentenced to two years in prison Monday after admitting to running an online abuse campaign that affected 117 victims across multiple countries during his time in the loosely organized online criminal network known as The Com.

Justin Swaddle, who was a minor when committed the crimes, pleaded guilty last month to a series of child sexual abuse offenses and blackmail. He was sentenced Monday at the same court and will be required to register as a sex offender.

The National Crime Agency, the U.K.’s lead law enforcement agency, had been investigating Swaddle since January 2024 after local police arrested him in October 2023 on charges of possessing, making and distributing indecent images. Investigators eventually found a broad online presence on Snapchat, Telegram and Discord, where he operated under usernames including “Epstein,” “Rugen” and “Moscow.”

A search of his phone and computer also turned up hundreds of sexually explicit conversations with young females, according to the NCA. Investigators determined Swaddle was part of The Com, a sprawling cybercriminal network of minors and young adults who engage in violence, extortion, sextortion and various forms of cybercrime. 

The NCA identified 117 female victims worldwide between the ages of 13 and 17, eight of them in the United Kingdom. One victim, 17, told investigators she met Swaddle on Discord in November 2022 before their conversations moved to Snapchat. She said Swaddle obtained her name, address and school details, then used that information to pressure her into various acts, threatening to expose her personal information unless she provided further images and videos.

“Justin Swaddle targeted young and vulnerable victims all over the world to abuse and scare them into carrying out shocking self-harm and sexual activity, purely to gain popularity with his peers online,” Danielle Pownall, an operations manager from the NCA, said in a release. “While the number of people involved in Com groups are relatively small, the impact it has on victims is high and long-lasting, as Swaddle’s offending shows.”

Law enforcement in both the U.K. and United States has been extremely active over the past few months in bringing Com-affiliated members to justice. Last week, a Canadian man who was linked with the group pleaded guilty for the widespread compromise of more than 165 Snowflake customer environments. Last month, a pair of young men tied to the Com were sentenced in the U.K. to 66 months in jail for committing a cyberattack on the Transport for London in 2024. 

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Senators from both parties Thursday probed Trump administration officials about whether federal agencies and foreign governments are coordinated enough in the battle against scammers, something witnesses told the Foreign Relations Committee they were working to remedy.

At least 13 federal agencies have authorities to counter scams, raising questions about whether someone needs to be in charge of all those efforts. And while there was some bipartisan sentiment at Thursday’s hearing that the Trump administration has taken good actions to battle scammers, both lawmakers and administration officials said that scam operations have demonstrated that cracking down on them in one place often just leads to them going elsewhere.

Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., compared the situation to an international initiative that gained prominence in the 1990s to counter drug trafficking, Joint Interagency Task Force South.

“Given that today’s scam centers are similarly transnational, combining cybercrime, human trafficking, money laundering and cryptocurrency, has the threat reached the point that we should establish a comparable multinational coordination mechanism?” he asked.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., focused on federal coordination: She paraphrased a former federal official who said, “there is nobody that is heading that effort up across agencies. We need to treat this like combat, and so we need somebody in charge.”

Shaheen, the top Democrat on the panel, is a co-sponsor of the bipartisan Scam Compound Accountability and Mobilization (SCAM) Act, which seeks to unify federal efforts on the subject.

A State Department official told Shaeen scammers were a national security priority for President Donald Trump, and that his executive order on the topic sought to tackle coordination.

“I do understand that this is a whole-of-government approach, and many agencies are focused on this,” said David Bedard, deputy assistant secretary at State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs “The Action plan that was directed by the president is currently in the interagency review process to deconflict some of the concerns that you have raised. We certainly think the task force that will be implanted through the executive order will solve the problems you might be referencing.”

There’s also an international plan under the task force, he said. Currently, the administration shares intelligence on scammers with foreign allies, and Interpol has “productive” channels to work through there and is setting up its own task force, Bedard said, but there are concerns about other countries taking similar, duplicative action.

There have been signs of progress on the international front, Bedard and another State Department witness told the panel.

Michael DeSombre, assistant secretary at the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said Trump has raised the subject with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and that China has used its influence in Asia as its own citizens have become scam victims. Still, there’s been more progress in countries where the United States has stronger relations, such as Cambodia, than in those where ties aren’t as close, like Burma and Laos.

In Cambodia, one key has been pursuing scam center bosses first and foremost, Bedard said.

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A longtime cybercriminal was sentenced to 16 years in prison for creating and running Ransom Cartel, a ransomware strain linked to attacks on at least 18 companies between 2021 and 2023, the Justice Department said Wednesday. 

Maksim Silnikau, a Belarusian national, actively participated in Russian-speaking cybercrime forums since at least 2005, and was a member of the cybercrime site Direct Connection from 2011 to 2016, officials said. The 40-year-old created Ransom Cartel and began recruiting participants from cybercrime forums in 2021. 

Silnikau and his co-conspirators attempted to extort at least $5.2 million from victims during the multi-year scheme. 

Victims included a group of law firms, medium-sized businesses, a small medical technology startup, educational institutions and large multinational corporations based in California, New York, Nebraska and elsewhere. Some of the victims’ operations were disrupted for several months, officials said. 

Officials said Silnikau provided his co-conspirators information and tools to attack systems, including stolen credentials and mechanisms to encrypt compromised computers. He also built a site to monitor and control ongoing attacks, communicate with co-conspirators and victims, negotiate payment demands with victims and manage the distribution of funds between co-conspirators. 

Silnikau, also known as “J.P. Morgan,” “xxx,” and “lansky,” fled from Spain while awaiting extradition to the United States and was arrested in Poland in July 2023 as he tried to return to Belarus, according to court records. He was extradited to the United States in August 2023. 

Ransom Cartel’s operations ended when Silnikau was arrested. Authorities applauded his capture at the time, noting that Ransom Cartel didn’t grow large enough to inflict losses comparable to larger ransomware variants. 

Silnikau pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.

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A Canadian man pleaded guilty to playing a central role in one of the most far-reaching cyberattacks of 2024 — the widespread compromise of more than 165 Snowflake customer environments, resulting in massive data theft for extortion, the Justice Department said Wednesday. 

Connor Moucka earned $495,000 by extorting his victims, offering stolen data for sale online, and in one case re-extorted a victim with stolen data of a government official and members of a then-former government official’s immediate family, authorities said.

Moucka and his alleged co-conspirators John Binns and Cameron Wagenius stole billions of sensitive records and received more than $2.5 million in extortion payments combined, according to prosecutors. Victims of the attack spree included AT&T, Ticketmaster, Advance Auto Parts and Santander.

“Hiding behind a screen is no shield from justice,” Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, said in a statement. “Moucka learned that when he was arrested just months after he began targeting U.S. companies, stealing sensitive information, and extorting victims for millions of dollars.”

Authorities arrested Moucka relatively quickly because he caused significant damage, said Allison Nixon, chief research officer at Unit 221B. 

“His gang went on a spree of maximizing harm, which directly correlated to maximizing the resources devoted to stopping it,” she said. 

“His behavior was bizarre throughout. Even while stealing data and extorting victims, he did many unnecessary things like threatening me because he thought I was working on his case. I was not working on his case before he threatened me,” Nixon added.

Moucka, who used several aliases online, including “Waifu,” “Judische,” “Catist” and “Ellyel8,” was arrested Oct. 30, 2024, in Kitchener, a city in the Canadian province of Ontario, at the behest of U.S. authorities. He was extradited to the United States in March 2025.

Moucka and his co-conspirators used stolen credentials to access the data storage platform’s customers’ accounts en masse. Records of more than 100 million people were exposed by the data theft campaign, including call and text history records, banking and other financial information, payroll records, government ID numbers and other personally identifiable data. 

Officials said victim companies bore more than $9.5 million in losses combined, not including losses attributable to their respective customers. 

Moucka’s threats and re-extortion tactics were calculated and predatory, and his actions did real harm to his victims, be they companies targeted for theft and extortion or the millions of everyday people who are their customers,” W. Mike Herrington, special agent in charge of the FBI Seattle field office, said in a statement.

Researchers said Moucka and his co-conspirators are all associated with The Com, a sprawling cybercriminal network of minors and young adults who engage in violence, extortion, sextortion and various forms of cybercrime.

“His legacy is one of failure. He extorted and then scammed his victims by not deleting the data, casting doubt on all future pay-or-leak extortion gangs,” Nixon said. 

“The pay-or-leak business model was popularized by him and his gang,” and his claims of data deletion were a lie, she added. “With copycat gangs, defenders grapple with the uncertainty of whether the threat actors are honest.”

Moucka pleaded guilty to computer fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and a related conspiracy. He is scheduled for sentencing Oct. 27 and faces up to 32 years in prison.

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TeamPCP, the threat actor behind an unrelenting flurry of attacks on open-source software this year, has been active much longer than previously thought, according to research Oligo Security shared exclusively with CyberScoop. 

The threat actor, which gained notoriety and has captivated threat hunters as it compromised and injected malicious code into more than 1,000 software packages in less than four months earlier this year, was also responsible for attacks dating back to 2020, Oligo Security found. 

The security vendor’s research team found multiple attacks that bear the markings of TeamPCP, including a late 2025 campaign involving the exploitation of a ShadowRay vulnerability that resulted in the first self-propogating botnet running on hijacked AI infrastructure.

Evidence uncovered during that investigation into the ShadowRay 2.0 campaign was linked to more historical attacks originating from the same IPs, domains and other infrastructure TeamPCP used in attacks that captured widespread attention earlier this year. 

“The scariest thing in this campaign is the speed at which the payloads evolved and changed and adapted to the environment they run in. We saw changes in the speed that we’re not used to seeing in these kinds of attacks. They’re usually slow, careful,” said Uri Katz, director of research at Oligo Security. “This was clearly with the help of AI — the payloads changed rapidly to adjust and change to the environment that they were trying to attack.”

One of the domains that Oligo Security identified in July 2025 was in the profile of TeamPCP’s official GitHub account, said Avi Lumelsky, AI security researcher at Oligo Security. “It’s public, they’re not even trying to hide their identity,” he said. 

From there, Oligo linked TeamPCP to activity tracked under multiple names, including TA-NATALSTATUS and IronErn, spanning from 2020 to late 2025. Much of that activity was traced to the same IPs, domain names, a file server and command-and-control server, researchers said. 

TeamPCP emerged publicly as a brand in late 2025. Soon after, “TeamPCP started to go really broad and do campaigns, which are much more noisy,” said Gal Elbaz, co-founder and CTO at Oligo Security. 

Widespread adoption of AI and TeamPCP’s use of the technology supported this growth as the threat actor built a brand, got more active on social media and boasted publicly about its activities and claimed victims.

“The ability to control the infrastructure and orchestrate the attack with AI was also super new, and I’m sure it helps them,” Elbaz said. 

“All of the companies in the world are in this race to adopt AI because they are afraid their business will die, and they understand, of course, the opportunity. But it’s also what gives the attacker this power to go into it,” he added. “If you don’t really have visibility in what’s going on there or how it behaves, that’s exactly what attackers are after.”

TeamPCP’s more recent attacks have capitalized on new security gaps created by developers’ increasing reliance on AI and the automated systems companies use to deploy code. The threat actor is also consistently wrecking the open-source frameworks and software packages these systems rely on. 

“Most AI infrastructure is open source by design because nobody has the manpower and money to develop everything from scratch,” Lumelsky said. 

“We love open source. We use many of these products ourselves, but it’s all about reading the documentation, and I think many of these tools place the responsibility of using it right and security on the user, and developers are not used to these new kinds of animals,” he added. “That’s why the trust can be exploited at scale.”

As it uncovered a long operational history spanning multiple campaigns, Oligo Security has gained more confidence in understanding how TeamPCP operates. It also means TeamPCP was likely involved in other attacks that haven’t been attributed to it yet or attacks that haven’t been detected. 

“There’s a lot more out there that we haven’t caught or been able to prove up until now,” Elbaz said.

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In less than four hours early Tuesday, an attacker compromised a GitHub maintainer account and unleashed a self-replicating piece of malware which injected malicious code into more than 440 distinct npm packages, according to multiple security firms. 

The worm, built on the open-source Mini Shai-Hulud repository that TeamPCP published in May, was initially let loose in keyv, a data management interface software package with more than 600 million monthly downloads. The attacker spent the next 30 minutes compromising additional packages controlled by the same maintainer, including cacheable, flat-cache, file-entry-cache.

The attack spread to other maintainers, eventually compromising more than 860 packages with a “combined total of over 2 billion monthly installs,” Ilyas Makari, malware researcher at Aikido Security, wrote in a blog post. 

Wiz researchers told CyberScoop it hasn’t observed any new malicious packages since the initial wave moved through a massive footpoint of cloud and code environments in those first four hours. 

“This is the most critical initial compromise, with over 155 million weekly downloads on the root packages,” Wiz Research said in an email. 

Some of the compromised packages, including keyv, flat-cache and file-entry-cache, are present in more than 46% of all cloud environments, according to Wiz. “By comparison, back in the Shai-Hulud 2.0 campaign the most prevalent packages were only in about 28% of environments,” the company said. 

“Time will tell whether the eventual cost and impact outpaces past attacks, or whether adoption of hardening mechanisms such as package aging, and the usage of the relatively less aggressive Mini Shai-Hulud code as basis, will defray the final toll here,” Wiz Research added. 

Researchers from multiple firms sprung into action to monitor the widening attack spree and published indicators of compromise to help potential victims hunt for malicious activity in their systems. 

The Mini Shai-Hulud variant used in these attacks scoops up a trove of sensitive data, including npm, GitHub, AWS and continuous integration credentials. It also steals AI-related configuration files and cryptocurrency wallets, researchers said. 

Microsoft, Aikido, Socket and Wiz all said the same payload and pattern was observed across all affected packages, indicating a single attacker or threat cluster was behind the supply-chain attack and using multiple stolen tokens. 

The malware showcased a few pieces of new functionality, but retained the same core mechanisms that are hallmarks of Mini Shai-Hulud. 

“The evolution is consistent with what we’ve seen from them in past waves, however we don’t yet have the hard links” to confidently attribute the attacks to TeamPCP, Wiz Research said.

The notorious threat actor, which Google previously told CyberScoop it attributes to one core operator that was located in South Africa during at least some of the attacks, compromised and injected malicious code into more than 1,000 software packages in less than four months earlier this year.

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Researchers said INC ransomware, one of the most active ransomware groups globally, has been the main attacker exploiting a pair of SonicWall zero-days soon after they were disclosed last month.

The prolific ransomware-as-a-service operation wasn’t the first group to exploit the flaws, which were actively exploited for three weeks before the vendor disclosed and patched the defects July 14, but it has been the most assertive and concerning group to target and chain both vulnerabilities together for full access.

“Since public disclosure, INC ransomware has emerged as the most commonly named threat actor actively weaponizing this vulnerability chain,” Brett Deroche, director of incident response at Rapid7, told CyberScoop. “While Inc is the name driving the post-disclosure wave, we can’t attribute the full body of exploitation to INC specifically.”

SonicWall did not respond to a request for comment.

The SonicWall vulnerabilities — CVE-2026-15409 and CVE-2026-15410 — are the latest in a series of security issues confronting the vendor’s customers, including actively exploited zero-days, previously disclosed defects, and an attack last year that allowed a state-sponsored threat group to steal the firewall configurations of every SonicWall customer. 

Just last week, Huntress researchers spotted an attack spree that compromised 30 SonicWall customers in less than two days. 

Ransomware groups have taken a special interest in SonicWall. Ten of the 17 SonicWall defects added to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s known exploited vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog since late 2021 are known to be used in ransomware campaigns.

INC ransomware, which has claimed nearly 900 victims across 71 countries since it was first discovered three years ago, is just the latest financially-motivated group to target SonicWall customers. 

Researchers haven’t determined how many organizations have been impacted by the latest SonicWall zero-days, including attacks linked to INC ransomware. 

“Attribution here isn’t a single clean answer. The earliest exploitation we observed, beginning June 22, traced back to common hosted infrastructure, though those attacks were largely unsuccessful,” Deroche said. 

“INC’s confirmed activity that we’ve observed came after public disclosure, using different infrastructure and moving from initial access to ransomware deployment in short order. That’s a meaningfully different operational tempo and skill level than what we saw pre-disclosure,” he added. 

Deroche said Rapid7 has successfully prevented data theft and encryption in the majority of recent cases, yet noted ransomware was deployed in at least one case the security vendor observed.

Yet, there could be other attacks outside the purview of Rapid7’s telemetry. INC ransomware has listed multiple new alleged victims on its data leak site, including organizations and government agencies in Australia, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Colombia and Switzerland, Resecurity said in a blog post Saturday.

The company said it has aided several victims with incident response, and learned multiple victims received emails and phone calls from alleged hackers who pressured them to engage in negotiations.

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While AI is supposed to help defenders, it’s now creating more than twice as much noise as human-triggered incidents CrowdStrike detects as potentially malicious. The company’s threat hunting team and systems triaged an average of 14 million detection leads daily, resulting in about 36,000 customer alerts during the one-year period ending in June.

“AI agent-driven behaviors have surged past human triggers,” said Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike. “AI has driven the detections significantly above what humans are causing, and this gives you a sense of how frequently AI is being used, and really just that it’s being used everywhere.”

The threat posed by AI showed up incessantly during the past year, sparking alarming shifts and heightened targeting across software defects, open-source supply chains and AI tools themselves — all of which create greater difficulties for defenders, CrowdStrike said in its annual threat hunting report. 

“The AI tools that are being implemented by every enterprise across the globe right now are also creating an extended attack surface,” Meyers said during a press briefing. 

“AI is now a tool, a target, and a force multiplier for adversaries,” researchers wrote in the report, adding that AI-enabled malicious activity surged 89% during the past year as attackers used the technology to scale operations, hasten tradecraft and target AI infrastructure.

Attackers are using frontier AI models to uncover vulnerabilities and develop resources, including AI-generated scripts, payloads and commands that increase their effectiveness and efficiency. The technology also allows threat groups to design more creative ways to run automated attacks and boost impact by manipulating, interrupting or sabotaging AI systems and data.

“AI is both the weapon and the target,” Meyers said. 

Most organizations don’t view it as such, and thus far haven’t secured or put proper guardrails around the AI tools they use or address the ways attackers can use AI against them, he added. 

AI’s mark on vulnerabilities is particularly concerning, as reflected by what Meyers described as “one of the scarier stats” in this year’s report: 88% of vulnerabilities were weaponized through AI within 48 hours. 

“This is creating a rich ecosystem of vulnerabilities for attackers to use against various systems,” he said. It also renders the 30-day patch window obsolete, forcing organizations to struggle under a new baseline patch cycle of 24 to 48 hours, according to Meyers.

The AI ecosystem also became the next software supply chain battleground during the past year, as evidenced by TeamPCP’s rampage through open-source software in the first half of this year. 

The threat cluster compromised more than 300 software dependencies in one day, Meyers said. 

AI tools are already in the crosshairs and the attack surface will continue to grow as agentic systems, AI application integrations and dependency managers for AI agents proliferate, the report concluded.

“The same AI tools driving modern businesses are creating under-defended attack surfaces that adversaries are exploiting,” Meyers said. “We have to secure AI. This is absolutely critical.”

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A 41-year-old Ghanaian national was sentenced to 85 months in prison for stealing more than $10 million from mostly older, lonely and vulnerable victims via romance scams, the Justice Department said Tuesday. 

Derrick Van Yeboah was a longtime and high-ranking member of a criminal organization primarily based in Ghana linked to more than $100 million stolen from romance scams and business email compromises, officials said. Van Yeboah served as a “sakawa boy,” impersonating fake romantic partners and directly interacting with victims online from February 2015 to October 2024.

“Romance scammers do not simply steal money — they weaponize trust,” Jay Clayton, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement. 

Van Yeboah was arrested in Ghana in June 2025, acting on a request from the Justice Department, and extradited to the United States two months later. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and agreed to forfeit $10.15 million in fraudulent proceeds as part of a plea agreement in March.

Authorities said they identified at least 20 of Van Yeboah’s victims, noting that some were deceived into sending their money to the criminal organization, creating companies and using those entities to unwittingly launder funds from other victims. 

Victims include a woman from Delaware who either sent or laundered $1.9 million, a woman from Ohio who sent or laundered $2.3 million and another woman who sent or laundered about $1 million. Van Yeboah also tricked a North Carolina man to send $123,000, claiming he needed a loan to pay for his mother’s funeral expenses and to remove imaginary gold and diamonds from storage in Italy, according to court records.

Officials said Van Yeboah received a substantial amount of money from his criminal acts. He told pretrial services his assets include a house worth $1.5 million and jewelry worth $515,000. When he was arrested, Ghanaian police found him in possession of two vehicles stolen from the United States and Canada.

“Victims lost large portions of their life savings, money they had counted on for retirement. They were emotionally devastated to learn that the personas they had been talking to every day, personas who claimed to be in love with them, were in fact frauds,” Clayton wrote in a pre-sentencing letter to the court. 

Van Yeboah’s conduct was cruel, and he fully understood the financial and emotional harm he was causing to his victims, he added. 

“Van Yeboah’s conduct was far from an aberration. Van Yeboah engaged in the fraud scheme for nine years. It wasn’t isolated conduct; it wasn’t a blip,” Clayton wrote. “Indeed, it appears to be the only real job Van Yeboah has ever had. Day after day, for years, he targeted vulnerable victims, lied to them, and stole from them.”

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Botnets powered by residential proxy networks are proliferating, enabling cybercriminals of all types to evade detection by blending in with seemingly legitimate traffic, Lumen Technology’s Black Lotus Labs said in a report Friday.

The global scale of botnets observed by Lumen is currently approaching 60 million victim IP addresses, Chris Formosa, senior lead information security engineer at Black Lotus Labs, told CyberScoop. Roughly 1 in 4 of those compromised IPs are based in the United States, and the true number of infected devices is much greater because there are networks beyond Lumen’s visibility and multiple devices are often unknowingly running a malicious proxy network on the same IP. 

Super-sized botnets are also gaining momentum, according to Lumen, with an average of 10 distinct botnets controlling their own populations of about 1 million active victims daily.

“The only reason these botnets keep getting more and more victims is because there is clearly a market. Aside from criminal activity, who wants access to millions of IPs regularly?” Formosa said. 

That demand for botnets fuels opportunities for growth, reselling, collaboration, and quick rebounds following massive disruptions.

IPIDEA, one of the largest residential proxy networks in operation when its infrastructure was disrupted by coordinated strikes in January, recovered at nearly half-strength within hours and earlier this surpassed its pre-disruption botnet size with a current botnet population of about 10 million IPs, researchers said.

“Their rebuild was eye-opening as they began to rebound from that interdiction,” Ryan English, information security engineer at Black Lotus Labs, told CyberScoop. “Even for how quickly some botnets can rebound, theirs was surprising. We’ve seen them all rebuild, but we haven’t seen anybody do it that fast.”

Meanwhile, botnets are continuously growing, as cybercriminals seek out the cover they provide, more cheap and poorly defended devices hit the market and vendors stop providing security updates for older but still usable products. 

“Your available pool for those proxy hunters grows every year, and it will continue to grow every year,” English said, adding that more than 1 billion devices are currently vulnerable and available to be unknowingly sucked up into botnets.

The challenge for defenders is lopsided, and while disruptions and seizures occur relatively often, botnet operators have formed a global supply chain with pathways that are difficult to break. 

“We have observed multiple residential proxy services collaborating to form what amounts to the largest cooperative network ever seen on the internet,” researchers wrote in the report.

Black Lotus Labs currently tracks more than 30 distinct malicious proxy botnet clusters, and most of those regularly boast more than 100,000 daily victims.

“Our understanding of the various botnets in this space, along with experience in multiple disruptions, leads us to a very important conclusion: taking down a single malicious proxy provider or their botnet in isolation is likely to result in a short-lived solution,” researchers wrote. 

“In recent years, the malicious proxy environment has essentially created the largest collective botnet currently active on the internet, capable of moving millions of IPs within hours to wherever they are needed,” they added. “Until the malicious proxy landscape is properly addressed and regulated on both the private industry and law enforcement sides, this issue will grow and, along with the DDoS botnet landscape, will most likely become a greater problem in the long term.”

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The State Department will restrict visas for cybercriminals like scammers to sextortionists, and in some cases even their family members, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday.

The Trump administration has sought to make a crackdown on foreign-based scams one of the signature issues of his second term. An executive order that the president signed in March indicated that visa restrictions would be on the table as one response.

“By restricting visa issuance to those who are responsible for or complicit in these criminal enterprises, we are sending a clear message: The United States will go after those who prey on our citizens,” Rubio said.

Other departments have also made efforts to reduce foreign-run scams. In June, the Department of Justice seized infrastructure used by subsidiaries of the Huione Group, a Cambodia-based corporate conglomerate tied to one of the world’s most prolific criminal marketplaces used to commit cyber scams and other crimes.

Rubio authorized the visa restrictions under a 1952 law that gives the State Department the ability to deport or rule as inadmissible someone who poses “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

Critics have accused the Trump administration of abusing that provision of the law for political purposes.

Rubio’s statement on the visa restrictions mentions “individuals responsible for, or complicit in, cybercrime and cyber-enabled crime, such as those involved in cyberscams, and sextortion.”  Furthermore, he said, “Immediate family members of individuals engaged in such illicit activities may also be subjected to visa restrictions.”

Betsy Cooper, Founding Director of the Aspen Policy Academy, said the visa restrictions on cybercriminals could be valuable, but offered a caveat.

“Scamming people is a growing global enterprise, and it is a laudable goal to penalize those who scam and defraud people since they so rarely suffer consequences for their actions,” she said in a statement to CyberScoop. “So long as the new visa controls are used narrowly and deployed only against verified scammers and fraudsters, this is a positive step toward combatting cyber-enabled crime.”

While some cyber experts have questioned how much visa restrictions, prosecutions and other punishments of cyber miscreants who are based overseas will affect them, others maintain that it can serve as a deterrent to those who would consider getting into the line of work but want freedom to travel the globe.

FightCyberCrime.org, a nonprofit that seeks to help cybercrime victims, applauded the restrictions on the cybercriminals.

“We welcome efforts to hold cybercriminals accountable across borders. Cryptocurrency investment scams, romance scams, and sextortion cause devastating financial and emotional harm to victims,” it said in a statement to CyberScoop. “Meaningful disruption of these transnational criminal networks is an essential part of the response.”

But there’s still a long way to go in the fight, the statement continued.

“At the same time, we must invest more in victim support, prevention, and recovery resources,” the organization said. “Accountability is critical, but ensuring victims have access to trauma-informed support and resources is equally important.”

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A pair of young men were sentenced to 66 months in jail for committing a cyberattack on the Transport for London that brought the network’s operations to a standstill in 2024, the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency said Thursday.

Thalha Jubair and Owen Flowers were arrested at their homes in September 2025, barely a year after the attack, and pleaded guilty last month just as their trials were set to begin. Flowers was previously arrested in connection with the attack in September, but was released after questioning by officers.

Jubair and Flowers were leading members and highly involved in Scattered Spider, a nebulous hacker subset of The Com, according to researchers. The 20-year-old Jubair was a prolific cybercriminal and core member of the unbound collective. 

U.S. authorities last year accused Jubair of direct, prominent involvement in at least 120 cyberattacks, including extortion of 47 U.S.-based organizations and the January 2025 attack on the federal court system. 

Officials said they traced a combined total of at least $89.5 million in cryptocurrency, at the time of payments, to Bitcoin addresses and servers controlled by Jubair. Two financial services firms paid Jubair $25 million and $36.2 million, respectively, in Bitcoin between June and November 2023, according to an unsealed criminal complaint against Jubair. 

At the time of Jubair’s arrest, “he was one of the four principal people that we associated with Scattered Spider,” and one of the two most core players, Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop. 

Jubair and Owens had significant resources and support, and “victim payments were reinvested back into the enterprise,” said Allison Nixon, chief research officer at Unit 221B. 

The lasting impact of Jubair and Owens’ capture and imprisonment remains hazy.

U.K. authorities insist Jubair and Owens’ arrests and punishment “effectively halted the group’s criminal activity,” yet they added that other cybercriminals continue to use the Scattered Spider brand in more recent attacks. 

Thursday’s announcement “represents a significant step in holding accountable two members of Scattered Spider, a group that has repeatedly relied on data extortion, SIM-swap attacks, and other social engineering techniques to infiltrate networks and undermine critical services,” Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI Cyber Division, said in a statement. 

The FBI also noted, in a LinkedIn post, that members of Scattered Spider “continue to victimize organizations around the world and cause significant financial and operational harm.”

When Owens, now 18, was first arrested for the Transport for London attack in 2024, investigators said he was “in the process of hacking the systems of U.S. health care companies SSM Health Care Corporation and Sutter Health, which had been infiltrated and damaged.”

Officials also said Jubair and Owens failed to cooperate after their arrests. 

“This is the largest cybercrime prosecution ever brought before the U.K. courts and the culmination of nearly two years of painstaking work,” Paul Foster, head of the National Crime Center’s National Cybercrime Unit, said in a statement. 

“Scattered Spider has been the most significant cybercrime threat to the U.K. in recent years. Through this investigation, we have severely disrupted that threat and brought key offenders to justice,” Foster added.

Despite the upbeat reaction from U.K. officials, Nixon said the punishment for Jubair and Owens is “remarkably lenient considering the period of continuous reoffending lasted longer than the sentence.”

Nixon hopes the United States will eventually extradite the pair to face additional charges. “If that happens, they won’t be able to use mental illness as a loophole to get back to harming society as soon as possible,” she added.

“No one who worked on their case was surprised they would reoffend, and there seems to be no allowance in the law to protect the public from what everyone knew was going to happen,” Nixon said. “I know the narrative in the cybercriminal culture will glorify them, but they wouldn’t if they knew the full story.”

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Three Russian nationals and a pair of bulletproof hosting providers directly supported a series of attacks on critical infrastructure in 21 states and several countries, according to a 2024 indictment unsealed in federal court Tuesday. 

Officials, who have been investigating the trio and their companies since 2019, said the attacks resulted in losses surpassing $62 million.

Alexander Alexandrovich Volosovik, the 43-year-old owner of Media Land; Yulia Vladimirovna Pankova, the 29-year-old owner of ML.Cloud; and 34-year-old Kirill Andreevich Zatolokin were charged with conspiracy to commit and aid computer fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The State Department also offered a reward up to $10 million for information on government-linked associates of the alleged cybercriminals and malicious use of Media Land or ML.Cloud. The Treasury Department and officials from the United Kingdom and Australia imposed sanctions on Volosovik, Zatolokin, Pankova, Media Land and ML.Cloud in November 2025. 

The three accused Russians, Media Land and ML.Cloud were all based in St. Petersburg as of 2024.

“With today’s actions, the FBI and our partners are striking at the core services that cybercriminals rely on to attack U.S. critical infrastructure,” Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI Cyber Division, said in a statement. “This is another step in our broader campaign to shrink the space in which these actors can operate, forcing them to work harder, take greater risks, and lose the anonymity they depend on.”

Media Land and ML.Cloud allegedly provided cybercriminals with infrastructure and technical support to infect systems with malware and ransomware for extortion. Officials said the organizations also supported criminal marketplaces, fraudulent domain registrations and platforms that cybercriminals used to commit phishing and brute-force attacks.

Officials said they identified a consistent and long-running pattern of criminal activities facilitated by Volosovik, Pankova, Zatolokin, Media Land and ML.Cloud.

Investigators located victims across 21 states, including nine cities in the Northern District of Ohio, where the indictment was filed. Additional victims were located in Australia, the European Union, the United Arab Emirates, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Bulletproof hosting providers are increasingly used by cybercriminals to obfuscate their activities, deliver malware, phishing, and host content and services that support ransomware, data extortion and denial-of-service attacks.

“From their overseas safe haven, these defendants ran the criminal infrastructure that powered attacks on critical institutions across our nation,” A. Tysen Duva, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in a statement. “Their actions put the American public at risk. We will continue to dismantle these networks and protect our critical infrastructure from cybercriminals at home and abroad.”

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An Armenian national who was extradited from Ukraine to the United States last year pleaded guilty to participating in a series of attacks in 2019 and 2020 involving Ryuk ransomware, the Justice Department said Thursday.

Karen Serobovich Vardanyan pleaded guilty to computer fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud and extortion. He agreed to pay nearly $1.2 million million in restitution and faces up to 15 years in jail.

The 34-year-old admitted to participating in cybercrime from November 2019 to April 2020 when he and his co-conspirators deployed Ryuk ransomware against three U.S.-based organizations while living in Ukraine and Russia.

Vardanyan’s victims include a Michigan-based company that paid a ransom of nearly $1.2 million in January 2020, a Watsonville, Oregon-based technology company that was attacked in December 2019 and a Texas-based school breached in February 2020.

Prosecutors previously accused Vardanyan and his co-conspirators — Ukrainian nationals Oleg Nikolayevich Lyulyava and Andrii Leonydovich Prykhodchenko, and Armenian national Levon Georgiyovych Avetisyan — of illegally accessing computer networks to deploy Ryuk ransomware on hundreds of compromised servers and workstations between March 2019 and September 2020.

Ryuk ransomware was prevalent in 2019 and 2020, infecting thousands of victims globally across the private sector, state and local municipalities, local school districts and critical infrastructure, including a wave of attacks on U.S. hospitals.

Victims of Ryuk ransomware attacks include Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, Universal Health Services, Electronic Warfare Associates, a North Carolina water utility and multiple U.S. newspapers.

Ryuk ransomware operators extorted victim companies by demanding ransom payments in Bitcoin in exchange for decryption keys. Justice Department officials said Vardanyan and his co-conspirators received about 1,160 bitcoins — valued at more than $15 million at the time — in ransom payments from victim companies.

Vardanyan, as part of his guilty plea, also acknowledged that his conviction will have immigration consequences resulting in removal from the United States after serving his sentence. 

The U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon has yet to schedule his sentencing.

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A former ransomware negotiator for DigitalMint was sentenced to 70 months in jail for deceiving his employer’s clients and conspiring with ransomware affiliates to extort a combined $75.3 million from five U.S. companies he was entrusted to aid during their moments of extreme crisis, the Justice Department said Thursday. 

Angelo John Martino III shared confidential information he gained from his work as a ransomware negotiator, including victim organizations’ negotiating positions and insurance policy limits, to extract the maximum payment for himself and other BlackCat affiliates he colluded with in backchannels.

Five of Martino’s victims hired DigitalMint, which assigned the 41-year-old to conduct ransomware negotiations on their clients’ behalf — a rare position he exploited to play both sides, effectively conducting ransomware negotiations with himself and his co-conspirators.

The five victims, all of which paid a ransom between April 2023 and September 2023, include a nonprofit that paid a nearly $26.8 million ransom, a financial services company that paid nearly $25.7 million, and a hospitality company that paid almost $16.5 million. 

DigitalMint hired the South Florida-based man in 2022 after he was already engaging in criminal activity, according to court records. The husband and father of two young children had a long history as a cybersecurity professional, dating back to at least 2015, with previous stints at Booz Allen Hamilton, Tracepoint and TRM Labs.

Martino surrendered to U.S. Marshals in March, was released on a $500,000 bond, and pleaded guilty in April to conspiracy to obstruct, delay or affect commerce or the movement of any article or commodity in commerce by extortion. He faced up to 20 years in prison.

Martino also admitted to conspiring with Kevin Tyler Martin, another former ransomware negotiator at DigitalMint, and Ryan Clifford Goldberg, a former manager of incident response at Sygnia, to deploy BlackCat ransomware, also known as ALPHV, against five additional U.S. companies between April and November 2023. 

Goldberg, Martin and Martino split proceeds from a nearly $1.3 million ransom payment they received from a medical company in May 2023, but did not successfully extort a financial payment from the other four victims.

Goldberg and Martin pleaded guilty in December to participating in a series of ransomware attacks and were each sentenced in April to four years in prison. 

DigitalMint insists it had no knowledge of Martino’s criminal acts. “The actions of Martino and his co-conspirators were deliberately concealed from DigitalMint and were in clear violation of the company’s values, ethical standards and the law,” a company spokesperson told CyberScoop in a statement.

The company also reiterated that it immediately terminated Martino and suspended his access to systems when the Justice Department notified the company it was investigating him in April 2025.

“DigitalMint maintained controls consistent with industry standards, including background checks and compliance procedures, but Martino intentionally hid his conduct from the company, including through separate, unauthorized communication channels that the government’s filings describe as accessible only to Martino and the BlackCat negotiators and affiliates,” the spokesperson added.

DigitalMint has yet to directly answer questions about whether it refunded its clients who were victimized by Martino. 

“We are not able to discuss specific client relationships or fee arrangements due to confidentiality obligations,” the spokesperson said. “We remain committed to our clients and will continue to maintain strict confidentiality on all commercial matters.”

The case against Martino showcases an extreme, albeit rare, example of the dark underbelly of ransomware negotiation as a practice. The pitfalls of ransomware negotiation are excessive and these backchannel negotiations, which remain largely unscrutinized, can go awry for various reasons.

Officials describe Martino as a ‘double agent’ driven by greed

Prosecutors said Martino obtained an ALPHV affiliate account that he shared with his co-conspirators and received a portion of the ransomware payments for his involvement in the conspiracy.

Authorities have seized $10 million in assets, including a bayfront home with an estimated value of $1.68 million, a second single-family home with an estimated value of $396,000, and cryptocurrency wallets controlled by Martino. Law enforcement also seized multiple vehicles, a food truck and a 29-foot luxury fishing boat that Martino obtained using proceeds from his crimes.

“Angelo Martino’s victims shared heartbreaking accounts of how their businesses were nearly destroyed, while the people they hired to help them instead betrayed them to ransomware gangs,” A. Tysen Duva, assistant attorney general at the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in a statement. “Today’s sentence accounts for the harm Martino caused and demonstrates that the Department of Justice can and will identify and prosecute cybercriminals to the fullest extent of the law.”

Court records include a series of chats Martino held with co-conspirators and victims that exemplify the lengths he went to betray DigitalMint’s clients and empower his accomplices with crucial tips for a successful negotiation strategy.

During an incident response with one of his victims, Martino told a BlackCat affiliate the company’s insurance carrier “was only approving small accounts,” according to his plea agreement. “Keep denying our offers and I will let you know once I find out the max the[y] want to pay,” he added.

“We don’t know how you came up with your demand but we are losing money operationally and all of our loans are going to turnover on us this year at double the interest rates,” Martino said in a negotiation chat visible to DigitalMint and the victim organization in the hospitality industry. “We are able to give you $1 million now, which is a very serious offer.”

Following Martino’s instructions, the BlackCat accomplice responded: “Well, you can keep that for the penalties and lawsuits which are coming your way in case we expose you. Time is ticking — we know how much you can pay. Contact your insurance. We know about them also. Stop wasting time.”

That victim company ultimately paid a ransom worth nearly $16.5 million at the time to receive a decryptor and the BlackCat affiliate’s commitment to not publish stolen data. Two other victims Martino represented via DigitalMint at the time paid $6.1 million and $213,000 ransoms for similar commitments.

“Angelo Martino sold out the very victims he was hired to represent, handing their confidential negotiating positions to BlackCat actors to drive up ransoms and enrich himself,” Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, said in a statement.

In a sentencing memo, federal prosecutors described Martino as a “double agent working to maximize the harm to his clients and the financial gain to cybercriminals who paid him a part of the ransom.”

Prosecutors added: “This was not a crime of opportunity or momentary weakness; it was a sustained abuse of a fiduciary-like relationship driven by a single purpose: greed.”

ALPHV/BlackCat, which first appeared in late 2021, was a notorious ransomware variant linked to a series of attacks on critical infrastructure providers. The Justice Department disrupted BlackCat in December 2023, seized sites operated by some of its affiliates, and said the FBI developed a decryption tool that helped hundreds of victims restore their systems and save about $99 million in ransom payments at the time. 

Martino is scheduled to return to court Sept. 17 to determine the amount of restitution ordered against him for his crimes.

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Authorities arrested more than 5,800 alleged cybercriminals and seized $293 million in a global operation targeting social-engineering scams and money laundering across 97 countries, Interpol said Thursday.

The anti-fraud crackdown, dubbed Operation First Light, identified more than 142,000 victims, including people, businesses and governments, officials said. 

“Social engineering scams continue to pose a significant threat to our society. Criminal syndicates exploit human psychology to manipulate their targets, and no nation can stay safe unless all countries are equipped and committed to jointly fighting back,” Tomonobu Kaya, director of Interpol’s Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre, said in a statement.

Police identified more than 15,500 cybercrime suspects during the operation, which spanned more than three months ending in late April, according to Interpol. Officials also analyzed more than 152,800 cases of cybercrime, including business email compromise, sextortion, romance scams, impersonation and investment schemes. 

Interpol said nearly 24,000 cases of cybercrime were solved and investigators blocked more than 31,000 bank accounts linked to malicious activity during the crackdown.

Authorities involved in the globally coordinated operation seized a high volume of devices and other equipment used to allegedly facilitate cybercrime. 

In Eswatini, police seized a replica of a Brazilian police station, including fake uniforms, signage and equipment that cybercriminals allegedly used to deceive targets into thinking they were victims of a crime, duping them into transferring funds.

While uncovering a romance scam money laundering operation in Thailand, investigators identified a 20-year-old suspect that allegedly processed more than $122.5 million in 10 months, according to Interpol. Officials in Palau identified and deported 22 people allegedly involved in a pair of scam centers operating from hotels.

“Interpol is dedicated to supporting member countries in building a comprehensive, coordinated strategy to tackle cyber-enabled financial crimes, organized criminal networks and the money laundering that fuels them,” Kaya said.

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A San Antonio man who sexually exploited children while leading 8884, an offshoot of the notorious violent extremist collective 764, was sentenced to 40 years in prison in federal court Wednesday, the Justice Department said. 

Alexis Aldair Chavez began associating with 764 as a child in 2022 when a co-conspirator introduced him to 7997, one of many 764 offshoots affiliated with the Com. The sprawling nihilistic network of thousands of people, typically between 11 and 25 years old, seek to foster social unrest by destroying civilized society through the corruption and exploitation of children and other vulnerable populations.

The 19-year-old, also known as “Zack” and “Zack8884,” attempted to coerce a girl to commit suicide and blackmailed another girl into self-mutiliation, animal torture and illicit content production in late 2023, according to court records. He later worked with multiple co-conspirators and blackmailed some of his victims to coerce other girls to degrade themselves on camera and produce child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

Chavez was arrested and has been detained without bail since October 2024. He pleaded guilty to multiple crimes involving the sexual exploitation of children in December 2025 and faced up to 60 years in prison for racketeering, distribution and possession of CSAM.

“Chavez’s crimes reveal the ruthless exploitation and manipulation at the core of nihilistic violent extremist groups,” John A. Eisenberg, assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement. 

“These organizations target children as part of their broader mission to spread terror. These groups ultimately seek nothing less than the destruction of our society,” he added. “The National Security Division will use every resource at its disposal to identify and prosecute 764-linked criminality and to protect the most innocent among us from these predators.”

The indictment filed against Chavez in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas details a series of horrifying crimes he committed with co-conspirators and some of his victims. 

Prosecutors said Chavez and a co-conspirator coerced a girl to cut her tongue, and torture and kill a cat on a live video call in late 2023. He and co-conspirators also, that same month, groomed and extorted several other girls to commit self harm and degrade themselves on camera.

Allison Nixon, chief research officer at Unit 221B, told CyberScoop the sentence is appropriate even if people understandably dislike imprisoning young people. 

“In this space, a certain personality profile is highly predictive of who will risk a prison sentence like this: an obsession with maximizing harm,” she said. 

“Reoffending after release is a huge problem. All major global hacking incidents from the Com are done by serial reoffenders — all obsessed with harmfulness, some graduated from the 764 sextortion space,” Nixon added.

Too many jurisdictions are naive in how they handle cases involving members or associates of the Com, allowing these criminals to go home to parents who won’t supervise them, she said.

Officials pressed on this in their reaction to Chavez’s sentencing as well. “Parents need to know what their children are doing online and must stay engaged, ask difficult questions, and not fall into the trap of believing their child is ‘just playing games’ or ‘just talking with their friends,’” Justin R. Simmons, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, said in a statement. 

“There is darkness present within many people in this world that want nothing more than to see the United States and western civilization fail. There is no limit to the actions these individuals will take to accomplish that goal, including torturing and abusing children,” Simmons added.

Chavez, who was also ordered to pay $10,000 in restitution and serve lifetime supervised release, joins other 764 members already serving long sentences for similar crimes. Bradley Chance Cadenhed, who founded 764 as a 15-year-old in 2021, was arrested later that year and sentenced to 80 years in prison in 2023. 

When the FBI executed a search warrant at Chavez’s residence in July 2024, prosecutors said he came out the backdoor and threw his phone over a neighbor’s fence in an attempt to hide evidence.

Chavez’s sentencing follows a period of heightened law enforcement activity, which has netted arrests of multiple alleged 764 leaders and members. Some of the alleged 764 members arrested since 2025  include: Leonidas Varagiannis and Prasan Nepal, Baron Cain Martin, Tony Christopher Long, Erik Lee Madison, Zachary Sweeney and Aaron Corey. 

“True rehabilitation is the best outcome, but no one knows how,” Nixon said. 

“The total number of offenders who fit this harm-obsessed profile is vanishingly small. Giving them maximum sentences won’t overflow jails,” she added. 

Law enforcement and judges have to be realistic about what it takes to prevent the victimization of children, and handing down lifelong or lengthy prison sentences strikes the right balance between the rights of the offender and society, Nixon said.

FBI officials and agents who track these offenders and gather evidence on their crimes draw similar conclusions. 

“Nothing is more abhorrent than those who prey on children and other vulnerable members of our society and this defendant will pay a steep price for doing just that,” Coult Markovsky, acting assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, said in a statement.

“This sentencing demonstrates the FBI’s unwavering resolve to identify, hunt down, investigate, and prosecute criminals like Chavez who prey on children through violent online networks, including 764, and orchestrate horrific, unspeakable acts of exploitation and violence,” Daniel Faith, special agent in charge of the FBI San Antonio field office, said in a statement. 

“These predators use social media, messaging apps, gaming platforms, chat rooms, and video services to groom vulnerable children,” Faith added. “Staying engaged in your child’s online life, maintaining open communication, recognizing the warning signs, and reporting suspicious online activity to law enforcement are critical to stopping these offenders.”

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Authorities arrested an alleged member of Cyber Army of Russia Reborn, a pro-Russian hacktivist group accused of committing multiple attacks against critical infrastructure providers in the United States and Europe. 

Spain’s national police announced the arrest Monday but said it occurred back in March. Officials did not name the man who was detained at his home in Palencia following an investigation triggered by a tip from the FBI in August 2025.

FBI agents in the Los Angeles field office coordinated with Spanish officials to capture the alleged cybercriminal, the agency’s cyber division said in a LinkedIn post Monday. The FBI said the arrest was part of Operation Riptide, an ongoing global campaign targeting cybercriminals and the infrastructure and financial networks they use to commit fraud.

“Together, we will continue to impose costs on cybercriminals wherever they operate,” the FBI said.

Spanish officials said the arrested man provided logistical support to a Ukrainian hacker linked to Cyber Army of Russia Reborn, also known as Z-Pentest, facilitating the Ukrainian’s escape to Russia via Poland and Belarus. 

The arrested man also “participated in actions attributed to the pro-Russian hacktivist group NoName057(16), whose operations were later claimed in specialized portals related to geopolitics, with the aim of spreading pro-Russian and anti-Western narratives,” Spanish authorities said.

Police investigators searched the suspect’s home and seized computers and cryptocurrency storage devices, later freezing a cryptocurrency wallet he allegedly used to receive payment for his alleged crimes. 

Officials said the nearly year-long investigation recently concluded but did not announce specific charges, other than accusing him of collaborating with a terrorist organization, glorifying terrorism and damaging computers.

Authorities have been targeting Cyber Army of Russia Reborn and its alleged members for years. The Russian state-sponsored group has been active since 2022, officials said. 

The Treasury Department sanctioned the pro-Russian hacktivist group’s alleged leader and primary hacker, Yuliya Vladimirovna Pankratova and Denis Olegovich Degtyarenko, in July 2024.

In December 2025, the Justice Department indicted Ukrainian national Victoria Eduardovna Dubranova, accusing her of participating in attacks against critical infrastructure and other victims in support of Russia’s geopolitical interests as part of Cyber Army of Russia Reborn and NoName057(16). Dubranova was extradited to the United States last year and pleaded guilty in two federal cases brought against her. 

The State Department since late 2025 has been offering potential rewards for up to $2 million for information on individuals associated with Cyber Army of Russia Reborn and up to $10 million for information on individuals associated with NoName. NoName057(16), also known as NoName, was established by Russian President Vladimir Putin in October 2018, according to the Justice Department.

Multiple federal agencies and international partners issued a joint cybersecurity advisory in December 2025 about threats posed by pro-Russian hacktivist groups, including Cyber Army of Russia Reborn and NoName.

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Artificial intelligence is claiming many firsts as it permeates every layer of technology, including the tools cybercriminals use to break into networks, steal sensitive data, hop into connected systems and deploy malware. 

This includes, for the first time, according to Sysdig researchers, a case of agentic ransomware managing an extortion operation spanning reconnaissance, credential theft, lateral movement, persistence, encryption, destruction and the delivery of the ransom note itself.

The AI agent didn’t accomplish every step in the late June 2026 attack, but it allowed the threat actor, which Sysdig tracks as JadePuffer, to significantly reduce complexity, speed up the tempo and gain operational advantages. 

“We have seen attackers script attacks for years, and we have seen AI speed up individual steps of attack chains,” Michael Clark, senior director of threat research at Sysdig, told CyberScoop. However, this recent attack was “driven end-to-end by the model’s own decision-making, rather than a human at the keyboard,” he added.

The AI-aided attack achieved initial access by exploiting a Langflow vulnerability — CVE-2025-3248 — before moving on to its intended target: a production server running MySQL and Alibaba Nacos. 

Sysdig observed multiple factors that bolstered what it described as the first documented use of agentic ransomware.

The payloads involved in the attack narrated their objectives in plain language and identified high-value databases, details that large-language models annotate by default, according to Clark. The AI agent also quickly diagnosed problems and worked around obstacles — in one case redeploying a corrected payload 31 seconds after it originally encountered an error.

Before it was all over, the AI agent ran more than 600 distinct, purposeful payloads in rapid succession.

“The model closed loops that used to require a skilled human,” Clark said. “The 31-second failure-to-fix cycle on the Nacos backdoor is the clearest example of where agentic AI gave the attacker an advantage. The agent read the error, switched its approach from subprocess calls to direct library imports, and redeployed at a speed no human matches.”

Sysdig researchers found evidence that multiple models were used in the attack. The agent accessed keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek and Gemini as it gathered information on the victim’s systems. The cybersecurity vendor did not name the victim.

The AI agent played a crucial role in the attack, but a person was still heavily involved, Clark said. “A human still set up and pointed the operation and provisioned the infrastructure behind it, the command-and-control server, the staging server used for the stolen data and chose a victim,” he added.

The agent also connected to the victim’s MySQL server with root credentials that were not lifted from the victim’s environment, indicating a person gained access to the credential through a prior compromise. 

The origins of JadePuffer, a financially motivated threat actor, are unknown and it doesn’t overlap with any established ransomware group or nation state, researchers said.

For Clark, there is a clear uncomfortable takeaway from this attack: “The skill floor for running a full ransomware operation just dropped to whatever it costs to run an agent,” he said. 

“We have not yet seen operations against other victims, and given how cheap this agentic ransomware operation is to run, I would expect this will not be the last.”

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