Turla malware was deployed in February on select systems that Gamaredon had compromised in January.

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In May 2025, the European Union levied financial sanctions on the owners of Stark Industries Solutions Ltd., a bulletproof hosting provider that materialized two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine and quickly became a top source of Kremlin-linked cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns. But new findings show those sanctions have done little to stop Stark from simply rebranding and transferring their assets to other corporate entities controlled by its original hosting providers.

Materializing just two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Stark Industries Solutions became a frequent source of massive DDoS attacks, Russian-language proxy and VPN services, malware tied to Russia-backed hacking groups, and fake news. ISPs like Stark are called “bulletproof” providers when they cultivate a reputation for ignoring any abuse complaints or police inquiries about activity on their networks.

In May 2025, the European Union sanctioned one of Stark’s two main conduits to the larger Internet — Moldova-based PQ Hosting — as well as the company’s Moldovan owners Yuri and Ivan Neculiti. The EU Commission said the Neculiti brothers and PQ Hosting were linked to Russia’s hybrid warfare efforts.

But a new report from Recorded Future finds that just prior to the sanctions being announced, Stark rebranded to the[.]hosting, under control of the Dutch entity WorkTitans BV (AS209847) on June 24, 2025. The Neculiti brothers reportedly got a heads up roughly 12 days before the sanctions were announced, when Moldovan and EU media reported on the forthcoming inclusion of the Neculiti brothers in the sanctions package.

In response, the Neculiti brothers moved much of Stark’s considerable address space and other resources over to a new company in Moldova called PQ Hosting Plus S.R.L., an entity reportedly connected to the Neculiti brothers thanks to the re-use of a phone number from the original PQ Hosting.

“Although the majority of associated infrastructure remains attributable to Stark Industries, these changes likely reflect an attempt to obfuscate ownership and sustain hosting services under new legal and network entities,” Recorded Future observed.

Neither the Recorded Future report nor the May 2025 sanctions from the EU mentioned a second critical pillar of Stark’s network that KrebsOnSecurity identified in a May 2024 profile on the notorious bulletproof hoster: The Netherlands-based hosting provider MIRhosting.

MIRhosting is operated by 38-year old Andrey Nesterenko, whose personal website says he is an accomplished concert pianist who began performing publicly at a young age. DomainTools says mirhosting[.]com is registered to Mr. Nesterenko and to Innovation IT Solutions Corp, which lists addresses in London and in Nesterenko’s stated hometown of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.

According to the book Inside Cyber Warfare by Jeffrey Carr, Innovation IT Solutions Corp. was responsible for hosting StopGeorgia[.]ru, a hacktivist website for organizing cyberattacks against Georgia that appeared at the same time Russian forces invaded the former Soviet nation in 2008. That conflict was thought to be the first war ever fought in which a notable cyberattack and an actual military engagement happened simultaneously.

Mr. Nesterenko did not respond to requests for comment. In May 2024, Mr. Nesterenko said he couldn’t verify whether StopGeorgia was ever a customer because they didn’t keep records going back that far. But he maintained that Stark Industries Solutions was merely one client of many, and claimed MIRhosting had not received any actionable complaints about abuse on Stark.

However, it appears that MIRhosting is once again the new home of Stark Industries, and that MIRhosting employees are managing both the[.]hosting and WorkTitans — the primary beneficiaries of Stark’s assets.

A copy of the incorporation documents for WorkTitans BV obtained from the Dutch Chamber of Commerce shows WorkTitans also does business under the names Misfits Media and and WT Hosting (considering Stark’s historical connection to Russian disinformation websites, “Misfits Media” is a bit on the nose).

The incorporation document says the company was formed in 2019 by a y.zinad@worktitans.nl. That email address corresponds to a LinkedIn account for a Youssef Zinad, who says their personal websites are worktitans[.]nl and custom-solution[.]nl. The profile also links to a website (etripleasims dot nl) that LinkedIn currently blocks as malicious. All of these websites are or were hosted at MIRhosting.

Although Mr. Zinad’s LinkedIn profile does not mention any employment at MIRhosting, virtually all of his LinkedIn posts over the past year have been reposts of advertisements for MIRhosting’s services.

A Google search for Youssef Zinad reveals multiple startup-tracking websites that list him as the founder of the[.]hosting, which censys.io finds is hosted by PQ Hosting Plus S.R.L.

The Dutch Chamber of Commerce document says WorkTitans’ sole shareholder is a company in Almere, Netherlands called Fezzy B.V. Who runs Fezzy? The phone number listed in a Google search for Fezzy B.V. — 31651079755 — also was used to register a Facebook profile for a Youssef Zinad from the same town, according to the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence.

In a series of email exchanges leading up to KrebsOnSecurity’s May 2024 deep dive on Stark, Mr. Nesterenko included Mr. Zinad in the message thread (youssef@mirhosting.com), referring to him as part of the company’s legal team. The Dutch website stagemarkt[.]nl lists Youssef Zinad as an official contact for MIRhosting’s offices in Almere. Mr. Zinad did not respond to requests for comment.

Given the above, it is difficult to argue with the Recorded Future report on Stark’s rebranding, which concluded that “the EU’s sanctioning of Stark Industries was largely ineffective, as affiliated infrastructure remained operational and services were rapidly re-established under new branding, with no significant or lasting disruption.”

The Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against a Ukrainian national alleged to be central to a ransomware campaign affecting hundreds of companies worldwide. 

Volodymyr Viktorovych Tymoshchuk, known online as “deadforz,” “Boba,” “msfv,” and “farnetwork,” is accused of developing and deploying ransomware variants Nefilim, LockerGoga, and MegaCortex, all of which have been used in attacks on prominent organizations in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere since at least 2018.

According to the indictment, filed in the Eastern District of New York, Tymoshchuk and his alleged co-conspirators are believed to have extorted more than 250 companies across the U.S. and hundreds more globally, generating tens of millions of dollars in damages. Victims suffered not just the loss of data and disabling of business operations, but high mitigation and recovery costs. 

Among the targets were blue-chip corporations, health care institutions, and major industrial firms. Prosecutors detailed how the group tailored attacks to entities with annual revenues exceeding $100 million, sometimes specifically seeking out companies in the U.S., Canada, or Australia.

Additionally, the State Department announced rewards totaling up to $10 million for information leading to the arrest or conviction of Tymoshchuk, with a separate reward of up to $1 million for information on other key leaders of the groups deploying the ransomware variants.

“Volodymyr Tymoshchuk repeatedly used ransomware attacks to target hundreds of companies in the United States and around the globe in attempts to extort victims. Today’s announcement should serve as warning, cyber criminals may believe they act with impunity while conducting harmful cyber intrusions, but law enforcement is onto you and will hold you accountable,” said Christopher Raia, FBI assistant director in charge. “The FBI along with our law enforcement partners will continue to scour the globe to bring to justice any individual attempting to use the anonymity of the internet to commit crime.”

Authorities say the Nefilim variant operated in a “ransomware as a service” model. Tymoshchuk allegedly acted as an administrator, providing ransomware tools to affiliates — including co-defendant Artem Stryzhak, who was extradited from Spain in April and awaits trial in New York — in exchange for a share of payments.

Federal prosecutors reported that many attacks were thwarted after law enforcement warned potential victims their networks were compromised before ransomware was deployed. Still, ransomware groups continued to iterate with new malicious code after older versions had been unraveled by defenders.

The investigation was carried out by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York’s National Security and Cybercrime Section, alongside the Department of Justice’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. The Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs, FBI Legal Attachés, and authorities from more than 10 European countries played key roles in the case’s development.

Despite these efforts, Tymoshchuk remains a fugitive. 

You can read the full indictment on the Department of Justice’s website. 

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A Russian state-sponsored espionage group has been systematically compromising network devices worldwide for over a decade, exploiting a seven-year-old vulnerability to steal sensitive data and establish persistent access to organizations across multiple sectors, according to new research from Cisco Talos Intelligence.

The group, designated “Static Tundra” by Cisco Talos, is linked to the Russian Federal Security Service’s Center 16 unit and operates as a likely sub-cluster of the broader “Energetic Bear” threat group. The operation represents one of the most persistent network device compromise campaigns documented to date, with the group maintaining undetected access to victim systems for multiple years.

According to the researchers, the group has been leveraging CVE-2018-0171, a vulnerability in Cisco IOS software’s Smart Install feature that was patched when initially disclosed in 2018. Despite the availability of patches, the group continues to find success targeting organizations that have left devices unpatched or are running end-of-life equipment that cannot be updated.

The vulnerability allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on affected devices or trigger denial-of-service conditions. 

Researchers believe the group has developed automated tooling to exploit the vulnerability at scale, likely identifying targets through publicly available network scanning data from services such as Shodan or Censys.

Once initial access is gained, the group employs sophisticated techniques to extract device configuration data, which often contains credentials and network information valuable for further compromise. The attackers use a combination of Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) servers and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) tools to maintain access and collect intelligence.

The espionage campaign has affected organizations in telecommunications, higher education, and manufacturing sectors across North America, Asia, Africa, and Europe. Victim selection appears to align with Russia’s strategic interests, with researchers noting a significant escalation in operations against Ukrainian entities following the onset of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

“One of the clearer targeting shifts we observed was that Static Tundra’s operations against entities in Ukraine escalated at the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, and have remained high since then,” the Cisco Talos report states. The group expanded its targeting within Ukraine from selective, limited compromises to operations across multiple industry verticals.

The campaign exposes ongoing weaknesses in network infrastructure security, with attackers continuing to exploit a vulnerability patched in 2018. This persistence underscores widespread shortcomings in patch and device lifecycle management. The operation also illustrates the high strategic value nation-state actors place on compromising network devices, which offer access to broad organizational communications and facilitate further intrusions. 

Security researchers emphasize that Static Tundra is not unique in targeting network infrastructure. The report notes that “many other state-sponsored actors also covet the access these devices afford,” indicating that similar operations are likely being conducted by multiple nation-state groups.

Cisco Talos assesses with high confidence that Static Tundra operates as a Russian state-sponsored group specializing in network device exploitation based on tactical overlaps with previously identified Russian operations and targeting patterns consistent with Russian strategic interests. The FBI has corroborated connections between Static Tundra and the broader Energetic Bear group, which was formally linked to Russia’s FSB Center 16 unit in a 2022 Department of Justice indictment.

FSB Center 16 is a unit within Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). The center is believed to oversee signals intelligence and cyber operations on behalf of the Russian government. Another group linked to the center known as Turla has been spotted waging its own espionage campaigns by Microsoft.

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BlackSuit’s technical infrastructure was seized in a globally coordinated takedown operation last month that authorities touted as a significant blow in the fight against cybercrime. The ransomware group’s leak site has displayed a seizure notice since July 24.

The takedown followed a long investigation, which allowed authorities to confiscate “considerable amounts of data,” and identify 184 victims, German officials said in a news release last week. The group’s total extortion demands surpassed $500 million by August 2024, with demands typically in the range of $1 million to $10 million, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in an advisory last year. 

U.S. authorities were heavily involved in the operation, but have yet to share details about the investigation or its results. BlackSuit’s extortion site was seized by the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigation department, a unit of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

A spokesperson for ICE told CyberScoop the Justice Department has been waiting for court documents to be unsealed before releasing any information about the law enforcement action dubbed “Operation Checkmate.” The FBI, Secret Service, Europol and cyber authorities from the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Ireland, Ukraine, Lithuania and Romania-based cybersecurity firm Bitdefender were also involved in the operation. 

German officials said the takedown prevented the spread of malware and disrupted BlackSuit’s servers and communication. BlackSuit’s data leak site contained more than 150 entries before the takedown, Bitdefender said in a blog post. 

The majority of BlackSuit’s victims were based in the U.S. and the industries most impacted by the ransomware group’s attacks included manufacturing, education, health care and construction, according to Bitdefender. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

While BlackSuit once commanded outsized attention for its consistent spree of attacks, researchers said the ransomware group’s activities significantly decreased starting in December and remained low until its infrastructure was disrupted last month.

BlackSuit associates were already dispersed prior to the global law enforcement action on the group’s operations. 

The impact from the takedown will be limited because members already abandoned the BlackSuit brand early this year, Yelisey Boguslavskiy, co-founder and partner at RedSense, told CyberScoop. 

BlackSuit’s reputation plummeted as victims learned of the group’s Russian cybercrime lineage and declined to pay extortion demands out of fear that any financial support would evade sanctions imposed by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, he said.

As part of that pivot, former BlackSuit members have primarily used INC ransomware and its associated infrastructure this year. 

“It’s not that they were concisely preparing for the takedown. Instead, they just felt brand fatigue,” Boguslavskiy said. “They are very prone to rebranding often. It was two years without a rebrand, so the one was coming, and in the meantime, they were using INC as a newer name without baggage.”

BlackSuit emerged from the Conti ransomware group after a major leak of Conti’s internal messages led to a break up in 2022. Members of the Russian-language ransomware collective rebranded under three subgroups: Zeon, Black Basta and Quantum, which quickly rebranded to Royal before rebranding again to BlackSuit in 2024.

The empowerment of INC is the “most important development in the Russian-speaking ransomware landscape, and the fact that now BlackSuit will double down on using their infrastructure is very concerning,” Boguslavskiy said. 

The ransomware syndicate is composed of about 40 people, led by “Stern,” who has established a massive system of alliances, forming a decentralized collective with links to other ransomware groups, including Akira, ALPHV, REvil, Hive and LockBit, according to Boguslaviskiy. 

INC is currently the second largest Russian-speaking ransomware collective behind DragonForce, he said. 

BlackSuit was prolific, claiming more than 180 victims on its dedicated leak site dating back to May 2023, according to researchers at Sophos Counter Threat Unit. 

The ransomware group’s main members have demonstrated their ability to rebrand and relaunch operations with ease. “It is likely that this latest takedown will have minimal impact on the ability of the individuals behind it to reorganize under a new banner,” Sophos CTU said in a research note.

Former members of BlackSuit emerged under a new ransomware group, Chaos, as early as February, Cisco Talos Incident Response researchers said in a blog post released the same day BlackSuit’s technical infrastructure was seized. Chaos targets appear to be opportunistic and victims are primarily based in the U.S., according to Talos.

The FBI seized cryptocurrency allegedly controlled by a member of the Chaos ransomware group in April, the Justice Department said in a civil complaint seeking the forfeiture of the cryptocurrency last month. Officials said the seized cryptocurrency was valued at more than $1.7 million when it was seized in mid-April.

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Ukrainian authorities Tuesday arrested the alleged administrator of XSS.is, a Russian-language cybercrime forum, following a four-year investigation by the Paris public prosecutor’s office. 

Law enforcement officials from France and Europol seized the domain of the influential forum following the arrest. Authorities have not named the suspected administrator of XSS.is.

The forum, which was active since 2013, had more than 50,000 registered users and was a key marketplace for stolen data, malware, access to compromised systems and ransomware services, officials said. “It has long been a central platform for some of the most active and dangerous cybercriminal networks, used to coordinate, advertise and recruit,” Europol said in a news release.

Officials accuse the forum’s administrator of running technical operations and playing a central role in enabling cybercrime. Messages intercepted by authorities during the investigation revealed the suspect made more than $8.2 million in advertising and facilitation fees.

“Investigators believe he has been active in the cybercrime ecosystem for nearly two decades, and maintained close ties to several major threat actors over the years,” Europol said in the new release about the arrest and takedown operation. Authorities also accuse the suspect of running thesecure.biz, a Jabber-powered private messaging service for cybercrime that remains online as of press time.

The cybercrime unit of the Paris public prosecutor’s office opened an investigation into XSS.is in July 2021 and deployed French police investigators on the ground in Ukraine, with Europol’s support, in September 2024. 

The arrest in Kyiv, Ukraine, followed a series of coordinated law enforcement actions, including evidence gathering and the dismantling of the cybercrime forum’s infrastructure. Authorities said data seized during the investigation will be analyzed to support ongoing investigations across Europe and elsewhere.

The Paris public prosecutor’s office said the alleged administrator of XSS.is was identified as part of a wiretap.

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The U.S. is stepping into a new cyber era, and it comes not a moment too soon.

With the Trump administration’s sweeping $1 billion cyber initiative in the “Big Beautiful Bill” and growing congressional momentum under the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to strengthen cyber deterrence, we’re seeing a shift in posture that many in the security community have long anticipated, although often debated: a decisive pivot toward more robust offensive cyber operations.

While many may disagree with the decision to “go on offense,” we need to recognize the changing threat landscape and the failure of our previous restrained approach. The U.S. has the most advanced cyber capabilities in the world. Yet for the past two decades, our posture has been dominated by defense, deterrence-by-denial, and diplomatic restraint. This strategy has not yielded peace or dissuaded our adversaries. On the contrary, it has only served to embolden them.

With geopolitical tensions now at a boiling point and adversaries escalating both the scale and ambition of their cyber campaigns, it is time to remove the handcuffs. This doesn’t mean acting recklessly, but it does mean meeting our adversaries on the same battlefield so that we can use our unmatched capabilities to hold them at risk.

The strategic landscape has changed

The cyber threat environment in 2025 is fundamentally different from what it was even five years ago. Operations like China’s Volt Typhoon and Russia’s relentless campaigns against Ukraine’s infrastructure illustrate a broader shift: our adversaries are no longer limiting themselves to espionage or IP theft. They are actively preparing for conflict.

Volt Typhoon, in particular, marks a strategic evolution as Chinese state actors are actively prepositioning in U.S. critical infrastructure not for surveillance, but for disruption. Salt Typhoon’s operations, targeting civilian infrastructure with apparent tolerance for detection, suggest a loosening of China’s risk calculus. Meanwhile, Russia’s destructive malware targeting industrial control system (ICS) environments, and Iran’s growing reliance on cyber proxies, show how aggressive and emboldened our rivals have become.

Offensive capabilities are a military imperative

The proposed $1 billion investment isn’t about launching retaliatory attacks. It’s about building the infrastructure, tools, and talent needed to make cyber a fully integrated and reliable component of U.S. military and intelligence operations.

While the U.S. possesses world-class cyber capabilities, current policies have kept these tools locked behind layers of classification, bureaucracy, and operational disconnect. As a result, offensive cyber operations have been limited to highly targeted missions. While they’re often executed with surgical precision, they usually lack the speed, adaptability, or scale demonstrated by our adversaries.

When a U.S. technique is exposed, it can take months to retool and mount another operation. In contrast, our adversaries rely on publicly known vulnerabilities, social engineering, and agile teams that can quickly weaponize newly disclosed exploits.

Zero-days are among our most valuable (and expensive) cyber assets. But having the exploit isn’t enough. Effective use requires real-time intelligence, targeting infrastructure, trained operators, and a legal framework that enables rapid deployment.

This new investment represents a serious effort to evolve our approach. It will enable the Department of Defense, U.S. Cyber Command, and the intelligence community to proactively shape the digital battlefield, both independently and in coordination with conventional military operations.

Adversaries respond to force, not diplomacy

Over the past 15 years, we’ve watched top adversaries China and Russia test, prod, and exploit our most sensitive networks, from government systems to critical infrastructure companies, often with minimal consequence. We’ve also sustained numerous damaging attacks, from the massive OPM and Equifax breaches to SolarWinds, NotPetya and Colonial Pipeline. The list goes on and on.

In all of these cases, we’ve responded, at best, with indictments, sanctions, or strongly worded statements. In the meantime, our adversaries have only grown bolder and more sophisticated. Their actions suggest one conclusion: they don’t believe we’ll strike back.

This lack of proportional response is viewed as weakness, not restraint. Deterrence only works when the adversary believes you will act. That belief is fading. But a more muscular cyber posture, backed by operational capacity and political will, can restore it.

Ransomware is now a national security threat

The line between criminal and nation-state activity is becoming blurred amid rising geopolitical tensions. Ransomware, once seen as a law enforcement issue, now poses one of the most serious threats to national infrastructure.

We’ve already seen its disruptive power in attacks on Colonial Pipeline, JBS Foods, Mondelez International, and United Natural Foods Inc. However, as damaging as those were, they pale in comparison to what a determined adversary — especially one that is backed by a state — could accomplish.

Essential services like electricity, water, health care, and transportation are increasingly vulnerable. Many ransomware groups operate in jurisdictions that ignore or even support their activities. U.S. adversaries are now integrating these actors into broader state-aligned campaigns, using them as asymmetric tools of disruption.

The weaponization of ransomware and other destructive malware like “wipers” is a clear and present danger. Countering it requires more than law enforcement.

While the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI play vital roles in tracking threats, they lack the global reach and strategic authority of the military. Offensive cyber capabilities are needed to disrupt operations, dismantle infrastructure, and impose real costs.

There are risks with doing nothing, too

Critics of these operations rightly point out there are plenty of risks: escalation, unintended consequences, and blowback. Yes, these risks are real. Any use of cyber capabilities, especially against state-linked infrastructure, must be carefully weighed, governed by rules of engagement, and aligned with broader geopolitical strategy. 

Historically, cyber has not had clear rules for what constitutes “crossing the line,” though the general assumption has been that loss of life or large-scale disruptions to critical infrastructure would qualify. 

But inaction has its own risks. If we continue playing defense while our adversaries go on offense, we are signaling that they can operate with impunity. This is not de-escalation; it’s appeasement. And it will only invite more aggression. 

On the other hand, offensive action may at times be the most effective path to de-escalation, by showing that the U.S. is both willing and able to impose real costs.

It’s time for real deterrence

Cyber deterrence has long been an elusive concept. Unlike nuclear deterrence, which relies on mutually assured destruction, cyber deterrence is far more ambiguous. The lack of clear red lines, uncertain attribution, and the diverse range of actors all complicate strategy.

But these are not reasons to avoid building deterrence. This is why it’s even more important to build smarter, more flexible capabilities that combine intelligence, cyber offense, and traditional diplomacy to manage escalation while signaling resolve.

The shift we’re seeing now, both from Congress and the administration, is a necessary first step. However, in order to be effective, it must be followed by clear doctrine, strong oversight, and close coordination between military, intelligence, and homeland security stakeholders. 

Offensive cyber operations are not a silver bullet, but they are an essential tool of statecraft in the modern world. 

Dave Kennedy is the founder of TrustedSec and Binary Defense.

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As the U.S. government contemplates additional sanctions on Moscow, the United Kingdom went ahead and levied its own Friday against what it said was a group of Russia’s hackers and spies. 

The sanctions target 18 military intelligence officers and three divisions of the Russian military unit known as the GRU. Cyber operations in support of Russia’s war against Ukraine drew the U.K. targeting of the hackers.

“The GRU routinely uses cyber and information operations to sow chaos, division and disorder in Ukraine and across the world with devastating real-world consequences,” reads a news release.

But the sanctions also go after the use of malware tied to an attempted assassination of a former Russian double agent residing on U.K. soil and the related poisoning of his daughter.

“Today’s action also hits GRU military intelligence officers responsible for historically targeting Yulia Skripal’s device with malicious malware known as X-Agent — five years before GRU military intelligence officers’ failed attempt to murder Yulia and Sergei Skripal with the deadly Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury,” the release states.

According to a 2018 U.S. grand jury indictment, X-Agent is custom malware that Russia developed to hack the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to interfere in the 2016 election.

The U.K. sanctioned some of the military officers for spying operations like those involved in the 2022 bombing of Mauripol Theatre, which had been sheltering Ukrainian civilians.

In the U.S. Congress, lawmakers have been demonstrating some rare bipartisan consensus on the notion of slapping Moscow with more sanctions. That legislation would likewise seek to punish Russian cyber operations in Ukraine, among other Russian aggression in the former Soviet satellite nation.

President Donald Trump, too, has grown impatient with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the Ukraine war and has threatened further sanctions against Moscow and its trade partners.

The United Kingdom warned in a separate alert Friday that GRU cyber operations could spill over from the Ukraine war.

“The future trajectory of this threat remains uncertain and international partners need to prepare for its redirection and a range of potential scenarios,” the alert states.

The three units drawing U.K. sanctions have been connected to a range of hacking activity, from meddling in elections across the globe to the massive 2017 NotPetya attack.

“GRU spies are running a campaign to destabilise Europe, undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty and threaten the safety of British citizens,” said U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy. “The Kremlin should be in no doubt: we see what they are trying to do in the shadows and we won’t tolerate it. …  Putin’s hybrid threats and aggression will never break our resolve.”

Also Friday, the European Union agreed to sanctions targeting Russia’s energy and banking sectors, the bloc’s 18th set of sanctions against Moscow.

You can read the full list of those sanctioned on the U.K. government’s website.

This article has been updated to reflect news about the additional EU sanctions.

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An Armenian national is in federal custody and faces charges stemming from their alleged involvement in a spree of attacks in 2019 and 2020 involving Ryuk ransomware, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

Karen Serobovich Vardanyan, 33, was extradited from Ukraine to the United States on June 18 and pleaded not guilty to the charges in his first appearance in federal court June 20. Vardanyan is awaiting a seven-day jury trial scheduled to begin Aug. 26.

Prosecutors charged Vardanyan with conspiracy, fraud in connection with computers and extortion in connection with computers. He faces a maximum of five years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000 for each charge.

Vardanyan and his co-conspirators — a pair of 53-year-old Ukrainian nationals, Oleg Nikolayevich Lyulyava and Andrii Leonydovich Prykhodchenko, and 45-year-old Armenian national Levon Georgiyovych Avetisyan — are accused of illegally accessing computer networks to deploy Ryuk ransomware on hundreds of compromised servers and workstations between March 2019 and September 2020.

Avetisyan is awaiting a U.S. extradition request in France, while Lyulyava and Prykhodchenko remain at large. 

Ryuk ransomware was prevalent in 2019 and 2020, infecting thousands of victims globally across the private sector, state and local municipalities, local school districts and critical infrastructure, according to authorities. This includes a wave of attacks on U.S. hospitals and a technology company based in Oregon, where federal prosecutors are trying their case against Vardanyan. 

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

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

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An international law enforcement operation conducted this week targeted the members of and infrastructure used by NoName057(16), a pro-Russian hacktivist group that has conducted distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks across Europe since early 2022.

Operation Eastwood disrupted over 100 servers worldwide and resulted in two arrests, seven international arrest warrants, and 24 house searches across multiple jurisdictions. The operation, coordinated by Europol and Eurojust with participation from 12 countries, broke up a cybercrime network that had mobilized an estimated 4,000 members who conducted attacks against entities in countries across Europe and in Israel.

NoName057(16) used Telegram channels, specialized forums, and messaging applications to distribute attack tools, tutorials, and plans. The group employed gamification techniques including leaderboards, badges, and cryptocurrency rewards to keep members active, particularly targeting younger individuals by claiming the group was defending or working on behalf of Russia.

Group members relied on the open-source “DDoSia” platform and a botnet comprising several hundred servers, which allowed the group to scale attack capacity. Participants downloaded malware that enabled them to contribute computing resources to coordinated attacks, with the most active contributors receiving financial incentives in cryptocurrency.

The group chose its targets based on political events. At first, they attacked websites in Ukraine. Later, they expanded their attacks to countries in NATO and organizations that support Ukraine. Some of their attacks took place during the European elections, affecting Swedish government agencies and bank websites. They also timed attacks with major political events, including the Ukrainian president’s speech to the Swiss parliament and the NATO summit in the Netherlands.

Germany issued six of the seven arrest warrants, with two suspects identified as primary operators residing in Russia. The operation involved help from law enforcement agencies in Czechia, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States.

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Ukraine has seen nearly one-fifth of its Internet space come under Russian control or sold to Internet address brokers since February 2022, a new study finds. The analysis indicates large chunks of Ukrainian Internet address space are now in the hands of shadowy proxy and anonymity services that are nested at some of America’s largest Internet service providers (ISPs).

The findings come in a report examining how the Russian invasion has affected Ukraine’s domestic supply of Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) addresses. Researchers at Kentik, a company that measures the performance of Internet networks, found that while a majority of ISPs in Ukraine haven’t changed their infrastructure much since the war began in 2022, others have resorted to selling swathes of their valuable IPv4 address space just to keep the lights on.

For example, Ukraine’s incumbent ISP Ukrtelecom is now routing just 29 percent of the IPv4 address ranges that the company controlled at the start of the war, Kentik found. Although much of that former IP space remains dormant, Ukrtelecom told Kentik’s Doug Madory they were forced to sell many of their address blocks “to secure financial stability and continue delivering essential services.”

“Leasing out a portion of our IPv4 resources allowed us to mitigate some of the extraordinary challenges we have been facing since the full-scale invasion began,” Ukrtelecom told Madory.

Madory found much of the IPv4 space previously allocated to Ukrtelecom is now scattered to more than 100 providers globally, particularly at three large American ISPs — Amazon (AS16509), AT&T (AS7018), and Cogent (AS174).

Another Ukrainian Internet provider — LVS (AS43310) — in 2022 was routing approximately 6,000 IPv4 addresses across the nation. Kentik learned that by November 2022, much of that address space had been parceled out to over a dozen different locations, with the bulk of it being announced at AT&T.

Ditto for the Ukrainian ISP TVCOM, which currently routes nearly 15,000 fewer IPv4 addresses than it did at the start of the war. Madory said most of those addresses have been scattered to 37 other networks outside of Eastern Europe, including Amazon, AT&T, and Microsoft.

The Ukrainian ISP Trinity (AS43554) went offline in early March 2022 during the bloody siege of Mariupol, but its address space eventually began showing up in more than 50 different networks worldwide. Madory found more than 1,000 of Trinity’s IPv4 addresses suddenly appeared on AT&T’s network.

Why are all these former Ukrainian IP addresses being routed by U.S.-based networks like AT&T? According to spur.us, a company that tracks VPN and proxy services, nearly all of the address ranges identified by Kentik now map to commercial proxy services that allow customers to anonymously route their Internet traffic through someone else’s computer.

From a website’s perspective, the traffic from a proxy network user appears to originate from the rented IP address, not from the proxy service customer. These services can be used for several business purposes, such as price comparisons, sales intelligence, web crawlers and content-scraping bots. However, proxy services also are massively abused for hiding cybercrime activity because they can make it difficult to trace malicious traffic to its original source.

IPv4 address ranges are always in high demand, which means they are also quite valuable. There are now multiple companies that will pay ISPs to lease out their unwanted or unused IPv4 address space. Madory said these IPv4 brokers will pay between $100-$500 per month to lease a block of 256 IPv4 addresses, and very often the entities most willing to pay those rental rates are proxy and VPN providers.

A cursory review of all Internet address blocks currently routed through AT&T — as seen in public records maintained by the Internet backbone provider Hurricane Electric — shows a preponderance of country flags other than the United States, including networks originating in Hungary, Lithuania, Moldova, Mauritius, Palestine, Seychelles, Slovenia, and Ukraine.

Asked about the apparent high incidence of proxy services routing foreign address blocks through AT&T, the telecommunications giant said it recently changed its policy about originating routes for network blocks that are not owned and managed by AT&T. That new policy, spelled out in a February 2025 update to AT&T’s terms of service, gives those customers until Sept. 1, 2025 to originate their own IP space from their own autonomous system number (ASN), a unique number assigned to each ISP (AT&T’s is AS7018).

“To ensure our customers receive the best quality of service, we changed our terms for dedicated internet in February 2025,” an AT&T spokesperson said in an emailed reply. “We no longer permit static routes with IP addresses that we have not provided. We have been in the process of identifying and notifying affected customers that they have 90 days to transition to Border Gateway Protocol routing using their own autonomous system number.”

Ironically, the co-mingling of Ukrainian IP address space with proxy providers has resulted in many of these addresses being used in cyberattacks against Ukraine and other enemies of Russia. Earlier this month, the European Union sanctioned Stark Industries Solutions Inc., an ISP that surfaced two weeks before the Russian invasion and quickly became the source of large-scale DDoS attacks and spear-phishing attempts by Russian state-sponsored hacking groups. A deep dive into Stark’s considerable address space showed some of it was sourced from Ukrainian ISPs, and most of it was connected to Russia-based proxy and anonymity services.

Spur’s Chief Technology Officer Riley Kilmer said AT&T’s policy change will likely force many proxy services to migrate to other U.S. providers that have less stringent policies.

“AT&T is the first one of the big ISPs that seems to be actually doing something about this,” Kilmer said. “We track several services that explicitly sell AT&T IP addresses, and it will be very interesting to see what happens to those services come September.”

Still, Kilmer said, there are several other large U.S. ISPs that continue to make it easy for proxy services to bring their own IP addresses and host them in ranges that give the appearance of residential customers. For example, Kentik’s report identified former Ukrainian IP ranges showing up as proxy services routed by Cogent Communications (AS174), a tier-one Internet backbone provider based in Washington, D.C.

Kilmer said Cogent has become an attractive home base for proxy services because it is relatively easy to get Cogent to route an address block.

“In fairness, they transit a lot of traffic,” Kilmer said of Cogent. “But there’s a reason a lot of this proxy stuff shows up as Cogent: Because it’s super easy to get something routed there.”

Cogent declined a request to comment on Kentik’s findings.

The U.S. government today unsealed criminal charges against 16 individuals accused of operating and selling DanaBot, a prolific strain of information-stealing malware that has been sold on Russian cybercrime forums since 2018. The FBI says a newer version of DanaBot was used for espionage, and that many of the defendants exposed their real-life identities after accidentally infecting their own systems with the malware.

Initially spotted in May 2018 by researchers at the email security firm Proofpoint, DanaBot is a malware-as-a-service platform that specializes in credential theft and banking fraud.

Today, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed a criminal complaint and indictment from 2022, which said the FBI identified at least 40 affiliates who were paying between $3,000 and $4,000 a month for access to the information stealer platform.

The government says the malware infected more than 300,000 systems globally, causing estimated losses of more than $50 million. The ringleaders of the DanaBot conspiracy are named as Aleksandr Stepanov, 39, a.k.a. “JimmBee,” and Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin, 34, a.k.a. “Onix”, both of Novosibirsk, Russia. Kalinkin is an IT engineer for the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. His Facebook profile name is “Maffiozi.”

According to the FBI, there were at least two major versions of DanaBot; the first was sold between 2018 and June 2020, when the malware stopped being offered on Russian cybercrime forums. The government alleges that the second version of DanaBot — emerging in January 2021 — was provided to co-conspirators for use in targeting military, diplomatic and non-governmental organization computers in several countries, including the United States, Belarus, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Russia.

“Unindicted co-conspirators would use the Espionage Variant to compromise computers around the world and steal sensitive diplomatic communications, credentials, and other data from these targeted victims,” reads a grand jury indictment dated Sept. 20, 2022. “This stolen data included financial transactions by diplomatic staff, correspondence concerning day-to-day diplomatic activity, as well as summaries of a particular country’s interactions with the United States.”

The indictment says the FBI in 2022 seized servers used by the DanaBot authors to control their malware, as well as the servers that stored stolen victim data. The government said the server data also show numerous instances in which the DanaBot defendants infected their own PCs, resulting in their credential data being uploaded to stolen data repositories that were seized by the feds.

“In some cases, such self-infections appeared to be deliberately done in order to test, analyze, or improve the malware,” the criminal complaint reads. “In other cases, the infections seemed to be inadvertent – one of the hazards of committing cybercrime is that criminals will sometimes infect themselves with their own malware by mistake.”

A statement from the DOJ says that as part of today’s operation, agents with the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) seized the DanaBot control servers, including dozens of virtual servers hosted in the United States. The government says it is now working with industry partners to notify DanaBot victims and help remediate infections. The statement credits a number of security firms with providing assistance to the government, including ESET, Flashpoint, Google, Intel 471, Lumen, PayPal, Proofpoint, Team CYMRU, and ZScaler.

It’s not unheard of for financially-oriented malicious software to be repurposed for espionage. A variant of the ZeuS Trojan, which was used in countless online banking attacks against companies in the United States and Europe between 2007 and at least 2015, was for a time diverted to espionage tasks by its author.

As detailed in this 2015 story, the author of the ZeuS trojan created a custom version of the malware to serve purely as a spying machine, which scoured infected systems in Ukraine for specific keywords in emails and documents that would likely only be found in classified documents.

The public charging of the 16 DanaBot defendants comes a day after Microsoft joined a slew of tech companies in disrupting the IT infrastructure for another malware-as-a-service offering — Lumma Stealer, which is likewise offered to affiliates under tiered subscription prices ranging from $250 to $1,000 per month. Separately, Microsoft filed a civil lawsuit to seize control over 2,300 domain names used by Lumma Stealer and its affiliates.

Further reading:

Danabot: Analyzing a Fallen Empire

ZScaler blog: DanaBot Launches DDoS Attack Against the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense

Flashpoint: Operation Endgame DanaBot Malware

Team CYMRU: Inside DanaBot’s Infrastructure: In Support of Operation Endgame II

March 2022 criminal complaint v. Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin

September 2022 grand jury indictment naming the 16 defendants

Many successful phishing attacks result in a financial loss or malware infection. But falling for some phishing scams, like those currently targeting Russians searching online for organizations that are fighting the Kremlin war machine, can cost you your freedom or your life.

Researchers at the security firm Silent Push mapped a network of several dozen phishing domains that spoof the recruitment websites of Ukrainian paramilitary groups, as well as Ukrainian government intelligence sites.

The website legiohliberty[.]army features a carbon copy of the homepage for the Freedom of Russia Legion (a.k.a. “Free Russia Legion”), a three-year-old Ukraine-based paramilitary unit made up of Russian citizens who oppose Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine.

The phony version of that website copies the legitimate site — legionliberty[.]army — providing an interactive Google Form where interested applicants can share their contact and personal details. The form asks visitors to provide their name, gender, age, email address and/or Telegram handle, country, citizenship, experience in the armed forces; political views; motivations for joining; and any bad habits.

“Participation in such anti-war actions is considered illegal in the Russian Federation, and participating citizens are regularly charged and arrested,” Silent Push wrote in a report released today. “All observed campaigns had similar traits and shared a common objective: collecting personal information from site-visiting victims. Our team believes it is likely that this campaign is the work of either Russian Intelligence Services or a threat actor with similarly aligned motives.”

Silent Push’s Zach Edwards said the fake Legion Liberty site shared multiple connections with rusvolcorps[.]net. That domain mimics the recruitment page for a Ukrainian far-right paramilitary group called the Russian Volunteer Corps (rusvolcorps[.]com), and uses a similar Google Forms page to collect information from would-be members.

Other domains Silent Push connected to the phishing scheme include: ciagov[.]icu, which mirrors the content on the official website of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency; and hochuzhitlife[.]com, which spoofs the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine & General Directorate of Intelligence (whose actual domain is hochuzhit[.]com).

According to Edwards, there are no signs that these phishing sites are being advertised via email. Rather, it appears those responsible are promoting them by manipulating the search engine results shown when someone searches for one of these anti-Putin organizations.

In August 2024, security researcher Artem Tamoian posted on Twitter/X about how he received startlingly different results when he searched for “Freedom of Russia legion” in Russia’s largest domestic search engine Yandex versus Google.com. The top result returned by Google was the legion’s actual website, while the first result on Yandex was a phishing page targeting the group.

“I think at least some of them are surely promoted via search,” Tamoian said of the phishing domains. “My first thread on that accuses Yandex, but apart from Yandex those websites are consistently ranked above legitimate in DuckDuckGo and Bing. Initially, I didn’t realize the scale of it. They keep appearing to this day.”

Tamoian, a native Russian who left the country in 2019, is the founder of the cyber investigation platform malfors.com. He recently discovered two other sites impersonating the Ukrainian paramilitary groups — legionliberty[.]world and rusvolcorps[.]ru — and reported both to Cloudflare. When Cloudflare responded by blocking the sites with a phishing warning, the real Internet address of these sites was exposed as belonging to a known “bulletproof hosting” network called Stark Industries Solutions Ltd.

Stark Industries Solutions appeared two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, materializing out of nowhere with hundreds of thousands of Internet addresses in its stable — many of them originally assigned to Russian government organizations. In May 2024, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive on Stark, which has repeatedly been used to host infrastructure for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, phishing, malware and disinformation campaigns from Russian intelligence agencies and pro-Kremlin hacker groups.

In March 2023, Russia’s Supreme Court designated the Freedom of Russia legion as a terrorist organization, meaning that Russians caught communicating with the group could face between 10 and 20 years in prison.

Tamoian said those searching online for information about these paramilitary groups have become easy prey for Russian security services.

“I started looking into those phishing websites, because I kept stumbling upon news that someone gets arrested for trying to join [the] Ukrainian Army or for trying to help them,” Tamoian told KrebsOnSecurity. “I have also seen reports [of] FSB contacting people impersonating Ukrainian officers, as well as using fake Telegram bots, so I thought fake websites might be an option as well.”

Tamoian said reports surface regularly in Russia about people being arrested for trying carry out an action requested by a “Ukrainian recruiter,” with the courts unfailingly imposing harsh sentences regardless of the defendant’s age.

“This keeps happening regularly, but usually there are no details about how exactly the person gets caught,” he said. “All cases related to state treason [and] terrorism are classified, so there are barely any details.”

Tamoian said while he has no direct evidence linking any of the reported arrests and convictions to these phishing sites, he is certain the sites are part of a larger campaign by the Russian government.

“Considering that they keep them alive and keep spawning more, I assume it might be an efficient thing,” he said. “They are on top of DuckDuckGo and Yandex, so it unfortunately works.”

Further reading: Silent Push report, Russian Intelligence Targeting its Citizens and Informants.

Lisa Woody // On the 23rd of December, a cyber attack left hundreds of thousands of people in the Ukrainian region of Ivano-Frankivsk without power. This was the first confirmed […]

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