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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A federal judge sentenced a Latvian national to 102 months in prison for his involvement in a series of ransomware attacks for more than two years prior to his arrest in 2023, the Justice Department said Monday.

Deniss Zolotarjovs, a resident of Moscow at the time, helped an organization led by former leaders of the Conti ransomware group extort payments from more than 54 companies. 

The 35-year-old was mostly tasked with putting pressure on the crew’s victims. In one case, Zolotarjovs urged co-conspirators to leak or sell children’s health records stolen from a pediatric healthcare company and ultimately sent a collection of sensitive data to “hundreds of patients,” according to court records. 

The ransomware crew identified itself in ransom notes under multiple names during Zolotarjovs’ involvement, including Conti, Karakurt, Royal, TommyLeaks, SchoolBoys Ransomware, Akira and others. 

Zolotarjov and his co-conspirators extorted nearly $16 million in confirmed ransom payments from their victims. Officials estimate the group’s crimes resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, not including the psychological and future financial exposure confronting tens of thousands of people whose personal data was stolen.

“Deniss Zolotarjovs helped his ransomware gang profit from hacks of dozens of companies, and even on a government entity whose 911 system was forced offline,” A. Tysen Duva, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in a statement. 

Officials said Zolotarjovs searched for points of leverage after researching victim companies and analyzing stolen data. Many of the victims impacted during his active participation between June 2021 and August 2023 were based in the United States.

Zolotarjov was arrested in the country of Georgia in December 2023 and extradited to the United States in August 2024. He pleaded guilty to money laundering and wire fraud in July 2025. 

“Cybercriminals might think they are invulnerable by hiding behind anonymizing tools and complex cryptocurrency patterns while they attack American victims from non-extradition countries,” Dominick S. Gerace II, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, said in a statement. “But Zolotarjovs’s prosecution shows that federal law enforcement also has a global reach, and we will hold accountable bad actors like Zolotarjovs, who will now spend significant time in prison.”

The Russian ransomware crew was prolific and spread across multiple teams, relying on companies registered in Russia, Europe and the United States to conceal its operations. Authorities said the group included former Russian law enforcement officers whose connections allowed members to access Russian government databases to harass detractors and identify potential new recruits.

Conti was among the most prolific ransomware groups globally for a time, 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.

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Two former cybersecurity professionals who moonlighted as cybercriminals, committing a series of ransomware attacks in 2023, were each sentenced to four years in prison, the Justice Department said Thursday.

Ryan Clifford Goldberg and Kevin Tyler Martin previously pleaded guilty to one of three charges brought against them in December and faced up to 20 years behind bars. 

Goldberg, who was a manager of incident response at Sygnia, and Martin, a ransomware negotiator at DigitalMint at the time, collaborated with Angelo John Martino III to attack victim computers and networks and use ALPHV, also known as BlackCat, ransomware to extort payments.

“These defendants exploited specialized cybersecurity knowledge not to protect victims, but to extort them,” Jason A. Reding Quiñones, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, said in a statement. “They used ransomware to lock down critical systems, steal sensitive data, and pressure American businesses into paying to regain access to their own information.”

Victims impacted by the attacks Goldberg and Martin participated in over a six-month period in 2023 included a medical company based in Florida, a pharmaceutical company based in Maryland, a California doctor’s office, an engineering company based in California and a drone manufacturer in Virginia. 

“They harmed important firms who were providing medical and engineering services. They played hardball with them, going so far as to cause the leak of patient data from a doctor’s office victim,” A. Tysen Duva, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said in a statement.

“These were supposed to be cybersecurity specialists who did good and helped businesses and people. Instead, they used their high-level cyber skills to feed their greed. Ransomware attackers like this should be punished and removed from society to serve their lawful sentences so they cannot harm others,” Duva added.

Goldberg and Martin received identical sentences for their crimes, despite significant differences surrounding their initial arrests. Martin was arrested without incident in October and freed on bond later that month.

Goldberg fled the country in June, 10 days after he was interviewed by the FBI. He was arrested Sept. 22 and ordered to remain in custody pending trial due to flight risk. 

Goldberg and his wife boarded a one-way flight to Paris from Atlanta on June 27 and remained in Europe until Sept. 21. When Goldberg flew directly from Amsterdam to Mexico City, he was arrested upon landing and deported to the United States.

“When Goldberg sought to flee abroad and escape prosecution, the FBI tracked him through 10 countries, demonstrating the lengths we will go to hold cyber criminals accountable and protect victims,” Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, said in a statement.

The cases against Golberg, Martin and their co-conspirator Martino showcase 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.

Goldberg, 40, and Martin, 36, extorted a $1.3 million ransom payment from the medical company with Martino in May 2023, but did not receive ransom payments from their other victims.

Martino’s ransomware scheme went much further and caused significantly more damage, helping accomplices extort a combined $75.3 million in ransom payments. 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.

He pleaded guilty earlier this month to sharing confidential information about victim organizations’ internal negotiating positions and insurance policy limits he gained from his work as a ransomware negotiator to extract the maximum ransom payment for himself and other BlackCat affiliates.

The five U.S.-based victims that hired DigitalMint and unwittingly tapped Martino to allegedly conduct ransomware negotiations with himself and his co-conspirators include a nonprofit and companies in the hospitality, financial services, retail and medical industries. All five of those victims paid a ransom.

Martino surrendered in March to the U.S. Marshals in Miami and was released on a $500,000 bond. He faces up to 20 years in federal prison and is scheduled for sentencing July 9.

Sygnia and DigitalMint are not accused of any knowledge or involvement in the crimes, and both previously said they fired their former employees once federal authorities alerted the companies to their alleged crimes. 

ALPHV/BlackCat was a notorious ransomware and extortion group linked to a series of attacks on critical infrastructure providers. The ransomware variant first appeared in late 2021, and was later used in dozens of attacks on organizations in the health care sector.

The group behind the ransomware strain also claimed responsibility for the February 2024 attack on UnitedHealth Group subsidiary Change Healthcare, which paid a $22 million ransom and became the largest health care data breach on record, compromising data on about 190 million people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A South Florida man pleaded guilty to conspiring with multiple ransomware affiliates to commit attacks against and extort payments from the same U.S. companies he represented as a ransomware negotiator for DigitalMint in 2023, the Justice Department said Monday.

Angelo John Martino III shared confidential information about victim organizations’ internal negotiating positions and insurance policy limits he gained from his work as a ransomware negotiator to extract the maximum ransom payment for himself and other BlackCat affiliates, according to his plea agreement.

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. DigitalMint, which is not accused of any knowledge or involvement in the crimes, fired Martino the day after the Justice Department informed the company they were investigating him in April 2025. 

The five U.S.-based victims that hired DigitalMint and unwittingly tapped Martino to allegedly conduct ransomware negotiations with himself and his co-conspirators include a nonprofit and companies in the hospitality, financial services, retail and medical industries. All five of those victims paid a ransom.

Prosecutors previously said Martino helped accomplices extort a combined $75.3 million in ransom payments, including a nearly $26.8 million payment from the unnamed nonprofit, and a nearly $25.7 million payment from the unnamed financial services company. 

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 and Martin pleaded guilty in December to participating in a series of ransomware attacks and are scheduled for sentencing April 30.

“Angelo Martino’s clients trusted him to respond to ransomware threats and help thwart and remedy them on behalf of victims,” A. Tysen Duva, assistant attorney general at the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in a statement. “Instead, he betrayed them and began launching ransomware attacks himself by assisting cybercriminals and harming victims, his own employer, and the cyber incident response industry itself.”

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

DigitalMint did not respond to a request for comment on Martino’s guilty plea.

Negotiation chats exemplify Martino’s crimes

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. The two other victims Martino represented via DigitalMint at the time paid $6.1 million and $213,000 ransoms for similar commitments.

“Ransomware victims turned to this defendant for help, and he sold them out from the inside,” Jason A. Reding Quiñones, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, said in a statement.

Martino received a portion of the ransomware payments for his involvement in the conspiracy.

Authorities have seized $10 million in assets and cryptocurrency wallets controlled by Martino. Law enforcement seized multiple vehicles, a food truck and a 29-foot luxury fishing boat that he obtained using proceeds from his crimes.

Officials also seized two properties owned by Martino in Nokomis, Florida, including a bayfront home with an estimated value of $1.68 million and a second single-family home with an estimated value of $396,000. 

Martino surrendered in March to the U.S. Marshals in Miami and was released on a $500,000 bond.

“The FBI works every day to dismantle the ransomware ecosystem,” Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, said in a statement. “That includes apprehending key facilitators like Angelo Martino, who abused the trust placed in him as a private sector negotiator by collaborating with ransomware criminals.”

ALPHV/BlackCat was a notorious ransomware and extortion group linked to a series of attacks on critical infrastructure providers. The ransomware variant first appeared in late 2021, and was later used in dozens of attacks on organizations in the health care sector.

The group behind the ransomware strain also claimed responsibility for the February 2024 attack on UnitedHealth Group subsidiary Change Healthcare, which paid a $22 million ransom and became the largest health care data breach on record, compromising data on about 190 million people.

Martino pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct, delay or affect commerce or the movement of any article or commodity in commerce by extortion. He faces up to 20 years in federal prison and is scheduled for sentencing July 9.

You can read Martino’s plea agreement below.

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Lawmakers at a hearing Tuesday explored ways to beef up punishments for ransomware attacks against hospitals, possibly by labeling them as more severe crimes.

One proposal floated at the House Homeland Security Committee hearing, to treat ransomware attacks as terrorism, is an idea Congress has flirted with before. Another would be to press prosecutors to pursue homicide charges in attacks on hospitals where death resulted — something German authorities also once pondered.

A former top FBI cyber official, Cynthia Kaiser, put forward both ideas at the hearing, a joint meeting of the subcommittees on Border Security and Enforcement and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection on cybercrime, drawing questions and interest from members.

“I believe there are no penalties too severe for individuals that would target our health care system,” said Mississippi Rep. Michael Guest, chair of the border subcommittee, whose home state of Mississippi’s health care clinics closed following a February ransomware attack.

The suggestions stem from a growing focus by ransomware attackers on the health care sector, with incidents doubling from 238 in 2024 to 460 in 2025 according to FBI statistics, making it the top targeted sector.

Kaiser, now senior vice of the Halcyon ransomware research center, said terrorism designations from the State, Treasury and Justice departments could lead to further sanctions, restricted travel and other punishments. Justice Department guidance on homicide charges could clarify its authorities, she said.

“It sounds like the language is there, it just has not been applied in these circumstances,” said Rep. Lou Correa of California, the top Democrat on Guest’s subpanel.

The notion of more closely entwining cyberattacks and terrorism is something both Congress and the executive branch have examined recently.

The fiscal 2025 Senate intelligence authorization bill would have directly linked ransomware to terrorism, although the final version of the bill that became law was less explicit than the original Senate language. The Treasury Department last month asked for public feedback on changing a terrorism risk insurance program to address cyber-related losses.

A University of Minnesota study from 2023 estimated that hospital ransomware attacks were responsible for dozens of deaths of Medicare patients. German authorities in 2020 opened a negligent homicide investigation following a death in the aftermath of a ransomware attack, but ultimately decided against charges.

The Trump administration’s national cyber strategy advocates for taking a more offensive approach to hackers. It released an executive order on cybercrime and fraud the same day it published the strategy. Kaiser said the proposals are in line with those approaches.

Hackers know their attacks could end lives, she said. “They have simply decided these deaths are someone else’s problem,” Kaiser said.

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A small group of former Black Basta affiliates have targeted more than 100 employees across dozens of organizations to intrude network systems for potential data theft, ransomware deployment and extortion, according to ReliaQuest.

The social engineering campaign, which involves mass email bombing and Microsoft Teams help desk impersonation, surged last month and dates back to at least May 2025, ReliaQuest said in a report Tuesday. 

Attackers have primarily targeted senior leadership to gain highly privileged access. “Roughly three-quarters of targeted users were executives, directors, managers or similarly high-value roles,” researchers who worked on the report told CyberScoop via email. 

Cybercriminals involved in Black Basta, an offshoot of Conti, scattered after the threat group’s internal chat logs leaked online in February 2025, providing threat researchers and authorities key details about the group’s operations. 

German police publicly identified Oleg Evgenievich Nefedov, a Russian national, as Black Basta’s alleged leader in January. Nefedov, a 35-year-old who was subsequently added to the most-wanted lists of Europol and Interpol, allegedly formed and ran Black Basta since 2022, authorities said. 

He is accused of extorting more than 100 companies in Germany and about 600 other countries globally.

ReliaQuest said the recently observed campaign shares many similarities with previous Black Basta activity and follows the same playbook — tooling, targeting and execution style — associated with the once-prolific ransomware group. 

“That includes the repeated use of remote access tools, a strong concentration in sectors Black Basta historically favored, and a level of speed and coordination that suggests experienced operators are building on a playbook they already know works,” researchers said. 

“We’re careful not to treat any one artifact as definitive proof, but taken together, the similarities are strong enough that we assess it is highly likely former affiliates or closely aligned operators are involved,” ReliaQuest researchers added. 

Black Basta’s data leak site was shut down shortly after its internal chats were leaked last year, but uncaptured cybercriminals typically scatter and join new groups in the wake of a takedown or disbandment. Threat hunters warned that former members were still actively targeting additional victims earlier this year. 

ReliaQuest released its report, including indicators of compromise, after it observed a particularly sharp spike in activity in March, noting that the group’s targeting was more focused on senior employees.

“The operators are moving very quickly, with parts of the workflow becoming more automated or highly streamlined, which makes the campaign easier to scale and harder for defenders to interrupt before remote access is established,” researchers said.

The top-five sectors targeted in recent Black Basta-style attacks include manufacturing, professional services, finance and insurance, construction and technology, according to ReliaQuest.

Attackers typically bombard targeted employees with hundreds of emails within minutes and then contact targeted users, posing at IT support via direct messages on Microsoft Teams or a phone call. ReliaQuest said it’s observed some attackers achieve remote access minutes after the first sign of an email bomb.

Researchers did not say how many organizations have been successfully intruded as a result of this campaign thus far. 

While extortion appears to be the most likely objective, ReliaQuest cautioned against assuming every attack results in ransomware encryption.

“Based on what we’ve observed, the intrusion chain is built to gain access quickly, understand the environment, and create options for follow-on monetization,” researchers said. “That could lead to data theft, extortion without encryption, or ransomware deployment, depending on the victim and the opportunity.”

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Cybercrime remains a booming business. 

Annual cybercrime losses amounted to almost $20.9 billion last year, reflecting a 26% increase from 2024, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) said in its annual report Tuesday.

The comprehensive study exposes a worsening digital crime environment that is driving financial losses, with momentum moving in the wrong direction and compounding at an alarming rate. Annual cybercrime losses have jumped almost 400% from $4.2 billion in 2020, and cumulative losses in that five-year period surpassed $71.3 billion.

The FBI’s IC3, which formed as the country’s central hub for cybercrime reporting in 2000, is busier than ever. “We now average almost 3,000 complaints per day,” Jose Perez, the FBI’s operations director for its criminal and cyber branch, wrote in the report. 

The annual internet crime report highlights growing and sustaining trends. Yet, the scope of the study is limited and relies entirely on cybercrime incidents submitted to the FBI. 

The full impact of cybercrime remains murky, as an unknown number of victims suffer in the shadows and never report the crimes they endure.

The FBI received more than 1 million complaints last year, with victims aged over 60 reporting the largest amount of crimes that also resulted in the greatest amount of total losses by age group. Victims at least 60 years old filed 201,000 complaints with losses totaling nearly $7.75 billion, or about 37% of all cybercrime-related losses last year.

Investment-related fraud remained the largest component of cybercrime losses in 2025, reaching almost $8.65 billion. Business email compromise took the No. 2 spot with almost $3.05 billion in losses, followed by tech support scams at more than $2.1 billion. 

Cryptocurrency was the primary conduit for fraud linked to investment and tech support scams last year, while wire transfers composed the bulk of fraud resulting from business email compromise, according to the report.

Phishing was the most commonly reported type of cybercrime last year, followed by extortion, investment scams and personal data breaches. The FBI tallied losses amounting to $122.5 million from extortion and $32.3 million from ransomware last year.

The FBI also received more than 75,000 reports of sextortion last year, including more than 5,700 submissions that were referred to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The top five cyber threats reported to IC3 in 2025 included data breaches at 39%, ransomware at 36%, SIM swapping at 10%, malware at 9% and botnets at 7%. 

The FBI received more than 3,600 complaints reporting ransomware last year. The five most reported variants included Akira, Qilin, INC, BianLian and Play.

Each of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors reported ransomware attacks last year, and the most heavily targeted included health care, manufacturing, financial services, government and IT.

The IC3 primarily receives complaints from U.S. residents and businesses, but it also received complaints from more than 200 countries last year, which accounted for nearly $1.6 billion in total losses. 

While losses and the sheer amount of cybercrime continued to climb last year, “the FBI continues to disrupt and deter malicious cyber actors — and shift the cost from victims to our adversaries,” Perez wrote in the report.

“It has never been more important to be diligent with your cybersecurity, social media footprint, and electronic interactions,” he added. “Cyber threats and cyber-enabled crime will continue to evolve as the world embraces emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.”

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The Akira ransomware group has compromised hundreds of victims over the past year with a well-honed attack lifecycle that has whittled down the time from initial access to encryption of data in less than four hours, according to cybersecurity firm Halcyon.

Akira has been active since 2023, racking up at least $245 million in ransom payments from victims through September 2025. The cybercriminal outfit likely includes former members and affiliates of the now-defunct Conti ransomware group, and is known for its polished approach to digital extortion.

A primary example can be found in the efficiency of Akira’s infection cycle, which has reduced incident response times to hours. According to Halcyon, Akira is known for using zero-day vulnerabilities, buying exploits from initial access brokers and exploiting VPNs lacking multifactor authentication to infect their victims. Akira also uses a process known as “intermittent encryption,” whereby large files can be encrypted faster in smaller blocks.

“Akira is more stealthy and less aggressive allowing the ransomware to move swiftly through the entire ransomware attack kill chain from initial access to exfiltration, and encryption in as little as 1 hour without detection,” Halcyon wrote in a blog published Thursday. “In most cases, the time from initial access to encryption was less than four hours.” 

Additionally, while most ransomware operators tend to spend “about 90-95%” of their time developing their encryption malware and 5-10% on crafting decryptors, Halcyon said Akira has made “extensive efforts to ensure the recovery of large files, like server images,” going so far as to temporarily auto-save files with custom .akira extensions to ensure they can be recovered if the encryption process is interrupted.

Halcyon’s blog notes that these efforts are likely less due to ethical principles than because the group believes offering functional decryptors increases the chance that a business will pay the ransom. Akira’s combination of rapid infection while offering firms a more reliable way to recover their data is something that “sets it apart from many ransomware operators.”

“The group’s ability to move from initial access to full encryption in under an hour, while maintaining recovery guarantees that incentivize victim payment, reflects a mature, business-driven criminal enterprise,” Halcyon said.

The group has been observed exploiting vulnerabilities in Veeam backup and replication servers, Cisco VPNs and SonicWall appliances. Like other ransomware groups, Akira uses a double-extortion model against victims, stealing their data before encrypting it, then threatening to publish the stolen data online if businesses don’t pay.

Last year, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency flagged Akira as one of the top ransomware criminal groups in the world, primarily targeting small- and medium-sized businesses in the manufacturing, education, IT, health care, financial and agricultural sectors.

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A hacker briefly delivered malware this week through a popular open-source project for software developers that has an estimated 100 million weekly downloads, raising the possibility of compromises spreading widely through a supply-chain attack.

Axios is a JavaScript client library used in web requests. The unknown attacker hijacked the npm account — npm being a package manager for JavaScript — of the lead axios maintainer, and then published malicious versions of axios with remote access trojans to npm. That happened on Sunday night going into Monday morning, cybersecurity firm Huntress said, before the poisoned versions were pulled.

Aikido, another security firm, called it “one of the most impactful npm supply chain attacks on record.” Researchers at a large number of cyber companies have sounded alarms about the attack, including Step Security, Socket, Endor Labs and others.

According to Step Security, the malicious “axios@1.14.1” and “axios@0.30.4” versions inject a new software dependency, plain-crypto-js@4.2.1, that acts as a loader for the malware. It targets MacOS, Windows and Linux devices.

But, while the researchers describe it as malware, they note that “there are zero lines of malicious code inside axios itself.” Rather, the software is simply functioning as designed — or redesigned.

“Both poisoned releases inject a fake dependency… never imported anywhere in the axios source, whose sole purpose is to run a [post installation] script that deploys a cross-platform remote access trojan,” wrote Ashish Kurmi, chief technology officer and founder of Step Security.

Feross Aboukhadijeh, CEO and founder of Socket, called the situation “a live compromise” with a wide potential blast radius.

“This is textbook supply chain installer malware,” Aboukhadijeh wrote on X Monday evening, adding about the malicious versions that “Every npm install pulling the latest version is potentially compromised right now.”

The software package pulled in by the malicious versions of axios has embedded payloads that evade static cybersecurity analysis methods and confound human reviewers, and deletes and renames artifacts to destroy forensic evidence.

Aboukhadijeh gave blunt advice for anyone who had downloaded or used axios in the past week at least.

“If you use axios, pin your version immediately and audit your lockfiles,” he wrote. “Do not upgrade.”

Kurmi described the attack as “precision,” noting that the malicious dependency was staged less than 24 hours in advance and both malicious versions were poisoned within the same hour. 

Given the timeframe during which the malicious axios versions were online, that could translate into approximately 600,000 downloads, said Joshua Wright, SANS Institute faculty fellow and senior technical director at Counter Hack Innovations. 

“That’s a large number of compromises, and as soon as you install the software, it scrapes access credentials, and so now threat actors could pivot to AWS, other GitHub packages through scraped GitHub keys, and that’s the part that’s really difficult to articulate,” he told CyberScoop, warning that the fallout could stretch for weeks. “We’re going to see more and more stories about people that realize they’ve gotten breached, as today they’re trying to figure out what the impact is of that.”

The attack follows closely on the heels of other cases of developer-oriented targeting.

Google Threat Intelligence Group said the attack wasn’t related to the recent TeamPCP attacks, however, instead saying it had attributed the axios attack to a suspected North Korean hacking group it labels UNC1069.

“Korean hackers have deep experience with supply chain attacks, which they’ve historically used to steal cryptocurrency,” said John Hultquist, the unit’s chief analyst. “The full breadth of this incident is still unclear, but given the popularity of the compromised package, we expect it will have far reaching impacts.”

This story was updated March 31, 2026, with comments from Google Threat Intelligence Group.

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