The private keys associated with eight certificates were compromised, and root programs and trust stores are blocking them.
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A joint international law enforcement and industry operation against scammers netted 28 arrests, rescued 117 trafficking victims and led to the takedown of more than 3.7 million accounts, the Justice Department announced Tuesday.
The crackdown, billed as “Joint Disruption Week,” focused on West Africa and also identified more than $11 million in freezable funds and led to the seizure of hundreds of electronic devices. The range of scams involved included law enforcement impersonation scams, digital arrest extortion schemes, pig butchering and other online fraud operations targeting victims around the world.
Participants heralded it as the largest joint scam operation to date, and the first focused on West Africa.
“For so long, the problem of international scams seemed impossible to tackle,” Kelly Milliron, acting chief of staff and counselor to the Assistant Attorney General leading the Criminal Division, told reporters. “But now, because of collaborations like Joint Disruption Week, we have a plan, a consolidated approach, bringing together people that can bring solutions and, most of all, safety for our citizens.”
It’s the latest effort in the Trump administration’s ongoing bid to make countering scam operations a theme of his term, and to make disrupting cyber adversaries and criminals a central focus of its cyber strategy.
Participating agencies in the London-hosted operation beyond the Justice Department were the Scam Center Strike Force under the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, the FBI, the Secret Service, the Treasury Department, Homeland Security Investigations, the Homeland Security Task Force, the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency, the Nigerian Joint Case Team on Cybercrimes, the Nigeria Police Force’s National Cybercrime Center and the Ghanaian Cyber Security Authority, INTERPOL and agencies from Australia, Canada, India and New Zealand also were involved.
Adobe, Binance, Coinbase, Cyjax, Elliptic, Chainalysis, Flashpoint, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Silent Push, Starlink and TRM Labs were companies that participated in the operation. Meta said it removed more than 3.7 million accounts, groups and pages from Facebook and Instagram based in West Africa, a majority of which targeted people in the United States and United Kingdom.
Some on Capitol Hill have raised concerns about whether U.S. operations to counter scams are coordinated enough.
The operation actually began in September, with a series of raids in Ghana before last week’s designated action. Jeanine Pirro, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, said Disruption Week occurred not long after a new partnership with the United Kingdom.
“The aim is to bring cases in parallel and also to combat fraud together through joint targeting,” she said. “This was the perfect time to continue that partnership.”
It’s not clear how many of the potentially freezable funds will actually be frozen as a result of the operation.
“Identifying the assets is the easy part, and tracing them, going after and developing probable cause within our investigations so that we can legally seize them does require a little bit of work,” said Matthew Floyd, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division. “So at this point, that’s why it’s much easier in these efforts to identify assets initially, and then they’ll fold into our investigations as we move forward.”
Disruption Week was the culmination of agencies meeting to combine forces, something that will happen on a regular basis, Floyd said, but at an interval to be determined going forward. The operation led to the sharing of more than 30 leads on scam centers, participants said.
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Grand Theft Auto VI, widely heralded as the game event of the decade, took a significant hit last week after a cybercriminal sent much of the internet into pandemonium after publishing gameplay footage a week before the game’s publisher planned to reveal core portions of the game to the public.
The files posted by the online persona “CyberLeek” indicate either a hacker had direct access to Rockstar Games’ most sensitive systems or was given proprietary data by an insider, eventually becoming one of the highest-profile data extortion attacks of the year — a vexing, almost-daily occurrence hitting industries of all types.
While most data extortion attacks rattle companies due to regulatory or privacy concerns, this particular incident has caused an outsized response from Rockstar’s parent company, Take-Two Interactive Software, because it has an audience. While no lives are at risk, as they would be in an attack on critical infrastructure, the financial and reputational stakes are magnified precisely because people are watching every drip of stolen footage become a news story or a trending topic.
“IP theft — whether it’s conducted by a cybercriminal, an insider, or even potentially [an artificial intelligence] model — rips away the hard work, passion, and livelihood among employees and companies that created the product in the first place,” Cynthia Kaiser, senior vice president of Halycon’s ransomware research center, told CyberScoop.
The game’s prior release, GTA V, along with its online component, has sold over 230 million copies and earned Take-Two over $11 billion since its release in 2013. Industry analysts say GTA VI is on pace to make between $3.3 billion to $5.2 billion in cumulative global sales by the end of its launch week in November.
“The crown jewels of a company are whatever makes it differentiated and special,” said Kaiser, the former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division. “For some, that means customer data or source. For a studio in the final stretch before launch, the crown jewel is the surprise.”
While Take-Two hasn’t said anything publicly about the leaks, it has responded feverishly via its legal team. The company petitioned a federal court for subpoenas under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act against Discord, Google, Microsoft and X, seeking the identity of CyberLeeks and other user accounts it accuses of copyright infringement.
Federal judges granted the subpoenas against Discord, Microsoft and X, but the petition against Google remained unapproved as of Monday. Take-Two’s legal representatives also sent copyright notices to the four companies, informing them of the copyrighted material published on their platforms, but it’s unclear if any of the tech companies have been formally served with the signed subpoenas.
Take-Two and Rockstar did not respond to a request for comment.
The subpoenas may have been enough to spook those responsible for the leaked footage. As of Monday, the websites where those behind CyberLeek were posting leaked information and links to a memecoin were offline.
Zach Edwards, staff threat researcher at Infoblox and a self-proclaimed fan of the series, initially thought the leaks were part of a Rockstar guerrilla marketing campaign. But the company’s response “confirms that this is a real investigation, and the content being shared is likely real to some degree,” he said.
Take-Two’s actions thus far indicate the company is approaching the breach and leaks like an insider threat investigation, Edwards said. Whoever leaked the footage may have had access to an actual build of the game, he added. That could point to an insider, someone who could have saved a copy to a cloud service, uploaded it to a file-hosting site, or walked out with it on an external drive.
The hacker or group behind CyberLeek claim they are releasing the gameplay videos to protest Rockstar’s decision to not release physical copies of the game. Yet, watermarks on the leaked videos include addresses to crypto wallets, which indicate CyberLeek is also, and perhaps primarily, seeking a payout.
“The persona behind the leaks, CyberLeek, published an anti-corporate manifesto targeting digital pre-orders and disc-less releases to frame the breach as hacktivism,” Ben Bernstein, manager of Huntress’ cybersecurity advisors team, told CyberScoop. “Yet behind the political posturing, there’s clear financial monetization and clout-chasing.”
Kaiser draws the same conclusion. “Let’s separate stated motive from observed behavior,” she said. “Threat actors who talk about principle while running a monetization channel are usually only telling you what they think will land with an audience, not actually what is driving them.”
Katie Moussouris said “this is what the alternative vulnerability economy looks like.” The founder and CEO at Luta Security has spent decades building legitimate channels for people who find security problems to get paid without turning to crime.
“The leaker launched a cryptocurrency token, watermarked stolen footage with a buy link, and offered to sell ad space on future leaks. Each of those pays out in proportion to how many people are watching. The manifesto is what keeps them watching,” Moussouris said.
“That is a genuinely new monetization model for stolen pre-release content, and it means the usual playbook of negotiating a ransom payment quietly or paying to make it stop won’t work,” she added.
Despite its unique characteristics, the rhythm of the attack and its fallout is familiar territory for cybersecurity experts.
“Steal, publish a sample, promise more, deliver, repeat. Just like ransomware attacks, in cases like these criminals use every lever of pressure they can against a company — including the fear of what is coming next — to profit from their actions,” Kaiser said.
“The attackers are crowdsourcing their pressure tactics. A meaningful share of the player base is treating the leaks as free content and amplifying them,” she added.
Kaiser also sees some clear parallels with previous attacks targeting major entertainment companies, including the 2014 attack on Sony Pictures and the HBO hack in 2017.
“The Sony comparison is useful for how these things escalate, but this incident reminds me more of the Iranian hackers’ leak of ‘Game of Thrones’ episodes a few years back,” she said. “North Korea attacked Sony for political purposes, destroying its data along the way; Iranian threat actors compromised HBO, along with hundreds of universities and over forty other companies, in a hacking-for-hire scheme stealing American intellectual property.”
Federal authorities earlier this month unsealed a second wave of indictments against 17 Iranians affiliated with the tech firm Mabna Institute who allegedly stole troves of data from government agencies and dozens of companies, including HBO.
This isn’t the first time Rockstar has been hit with a security incident. In 2022, an 18-year old British man who was a member of the Lapsus$ cybercriminal gang was sentenced to an indefinite hospital order after leaking gameplay footage. According to the BBC, the incident cost Rockstar, along with ridehauling company Uber and chipmaker Nvidia, over $10 million.
Security professionals expect the situation to escalate on all sides. Leaks have hit the internet daily for the past eight days, including a series of leaks Tuesday morning. Meanwhile, Take-Two has not relented on its subpoenas. Its broadest move was a subpoena against Discord, seeking identifying data on CyberLeek, two other users and every member of three Discord servers where the copyrighted material was posted.
Moussouris said the scope of that inquiry should worry people well beyond this case.
“Take-Two asked for Windows device identifiers, login records, and cloud storage contents for every person who spoke in three Discord servers going back to June,” she said. “The people with the best chance of uncovering the culprits are those doing the unglamorous investigation forensics work of figuring out how the build may have leaked.”
Discord would not say whether it had been formally served or what it has done in response. A company spokesperson said it reviews and complies with valid subpoenas when they are received.
While the breach and leak of ‘GTA VI’ material is a serious matter, Edwards noted that Take-Two is also benefiting from greater interest in the unreleased game on a daily basis.
“The threat actor leaking these videos has failed by essentially creating a successful underground marketing campaign for the game while also putting themselves at serious risk of being eventually caught,” he said.
“This incident is playing out like a classic insider threat exploitation scheme. Someone got access to sensitive data, they had a political agenda which clashed with the owner of the sensitive data, and they decided to do something stupid to try and force a change,” Edwards added. “This attack has done nothing but spread ‘GTA VI’ content further than it would have otherwise, and it’s creating ripples across other industries like cybersecurity who would have never covered ‘GTA 6’ issues previously.”
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A bill to battle organized retail theft has wide bipartisan support and momentum on Capitol Hill, even as opponents say it threatens to dangerously expand surveillance centered in Immigration and Customs Enforcement at a time when the agency’s aggressive conduct is under scrutiny.
Backers counter that critics are wrong about the bill that they say only would enhance existing information sharing arrangements, and could play a role in fighting cyber-enabled crime, too.
At its core, the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA) establishes an Organized Retail and Supply Chain Crime Coordination Center within ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division. It also would create criminal penalties for money laundering proceeds from selling stolen goods, and a $5,000 threshold for the combined total value of stolen property over a year for charging purposes.
It passed the House in June by a vote of 348-60, and Senate supporters are pushing for its inclusion in the annual defense policy bill, considered “must-pass” legislation that Congress has cleared for more than 60 consecutive years.
Opponents are trying to beat back CORCA, which arose from fears of mass theft during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Its design actually creates a very large and very dangerous surveillance network,” said Nina Patel, senior policy counsel at the justice division of the American Civil Liberties Union. “You would hear the words ‘organized retail crime’ and think that this might be about shoplifting, and you would be surprised to learn that much of the apparatus is concentrated within the Department of Homeland Security.”
Patel and Jina John, her colleague at the ACLU, said the bill inadequately defines key terms: “organized retail crime,” even, as well as “retailers,” and what kind of data can be shared.
“It’s very broadly and vaguely drafted, and so the way it’s done is that it establishes all these mechanisms for data sharing among these entities, including getting data directly from retailers,” said John, senior policy counsel for AI, privacy and technology. “The data sharing is for any threats related to retail and supply chain crime. That’s it, just: threats. …That’s the biggest concern, is that this is basically giving DHS access to retail surveillance,” she said, like surveillance cameras at malls and train stations, Flock cameras and automated license plate readers.
Rather than the federal government purchasing data from brokers for surveillance purposes — already a contentious practice — CORCA gives them an avenue to get it freely, John said.
A variety of civil liberties and civil rights organizations are among the coalition trying to defeat CORCA. A key issue for many of them is the fusion center at ICE, which has collated data like cell phone location, health and other information, said Spencer Reynolds, senior counsel at the Justice in Public Safety Project at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Adding retail data makes that worse, he said.
“Together, this information allows ICE to hunt down people, find their families and associates, and pull them from their communities,” he said. “The agency, over the last couple of years, especially, has been openly engaging in racial profiling, and poor Black and Brown people are likely to feel the impact of this the most.”
Reynolds continued: “The entire model that CORCA is going to impose allows government and industry participants to overcome protections, safeguards, guardrails, and use government to target their opposition.”
Backers argue that the bill poses no risk to anyone but organized retail crime leaders.
“Over the years, organized retail crime has evolved into a deadly, multi-jurisdictional threat to American lives, the United States’ economy and our national security,” Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said in a statement. “My Combating Organized Retail Crime Act is a targeted, bipartisan bill that would crack down on large-scale retail theft by coordinating federal, state and local law enforcement efforts, while aligning existing resources.”
A Senate Judiciary Committee spokesperson said the bill doesn’t give DHS any additional enforcement authorities, and is housed within DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations to build on the role they currently have in addressing transnational and organized criminal activity.
The American Trucking Associations supports the bill, and its legislative director Alex Rosen disputed opponents’ claims about its surveillance risks.
“When you can’t argue the merits of the legislation, it’s easy to revert back to stale, overused buzzwords and an attempt to rile up opposition,” she said. “The idea that this would increase government surveillance is nutty because what this does is it creates within HSI a kind of central reporting repository for industry to report high-level crimes, crimes that are part of big organized criminal theft groups … The idea that this would somehow give the government more authority to surveil Americans is crazy because nowhere in the text does it say that.”
David Johnston, vice president of asset protection and retail operations for the National Retail Federation, noted the difference between ICE’s HSI, focused on a variety of criminal investigations including cybercrime, and its Enforcement and Removal Operations division that’s focused on finding and evicting those who violate U.S. immigration laws.
The bill could be one answer to rising cybercrime, he said.
“There has really been a substantial increase in not only the activity but the methods, the tactics, and as retail has evolved into the digital environment as much as it is in the physical store environment — we’ve seen the criminal, the organization, the structure, the convergence between how cyber and physical thieves operate,” he said, mentioning gift card fraud, or e-commerce fraud that started from a phishing or account takeover. “It’s really become a substantial issue for retailers, consumers, communities across the board.”
Cyber means have also aided cargo theft with the creation of false personas and more, Johnston said: “They’re not going and stealing these trucks with physical violence. They’re driving them right out of the yard, waving to the security officer because they’ve got this whole organization behind them that are using these cybercriminal tactics.”
Both sides are optimistic that they’re making progress on the bill. Kristina Roth, the senior policy associate leading the NAACP LDF’s criminal legal system policy portfolio, said a number of lawmakers who actually sponsored the legislation voted against it on the floor.
That points to lawmakers becoming more educated on the bill, which moved swiftly this year from committee to a full vote. “I think the connections that this legislation has through DHS were maybe not well enough described as they could have been,” Roth said.
Patel said there’s more work to be done.
“What is really disturbing about this bill is the way it’s been presented to a number of legislators, and it keeps getting this moniker of being a bipartisan bill,” she said. “But I think few people recognize just how much power is being given to ICE, the complete lack of accountability from DHS and ICE under this administration and in the past, and empowering them to reach into Main Street and into consumer spaces.”
Rosen pointed to the wide House vote as well as bipartisan support from leaders of key committees, such as the Judiciary and the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs committees, to include the bill in the annual National Defense Authorization Act. The nature of the support has supporters optimistic about the chances for CORCA to become law.
The defense legislation often wins passage around the end of each calendar year.
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U.S. and South Korean cyber agencies warned Monday about a ransomware-as-a-service outfit, Gunra, that reportedly recruits ethical hackers and penetration testers and benefits from North Korean government-linked hackers’ tools to target government and critical infrastructure organizations.
Gunra has gone after sectors such as academia, financial services and insurance, government services and facilities, healthcare, manufacturing and construction, media, retail, transportation and utilities. Its global scope is far-ranging, according to Monday’s alert: Africa, the Americas, the Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.
“Gunra is another variant in the ongoing trend of ransomware attacks causing disruption and harm to U.S. and international organizations,” said Chris Butera, acting assistant director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which produced the advisory with the Department of Defense’s Cyber Crime Center, FBI, National Security Agency, Secret Service and Republic of Korea’s National Police Agency.
The alert is part of the #StopRansomware series, a joint FBI-CISA project aimed at network defenders.
The FBI first took notice of Gunra in April of last year. The double-extortion group established a data leak site on Tor to list victims and publish purloined data. By January of this year, Gunra had launched a formal ransomware-as-a-service affiliate and was growing in its ambition, Monday’s alert states.
“The FBI observed the group adopting new branding aliases (notably operating under the name Golden Community) to support this expansion,” it reads. “Gunra has further commercialized its platform by actively recruiting penetration testers and ethical hackers to serve as initial access brokers, offering a share of the ransom profits in exchange for enterprise network access.”
Gunra seeks initial access with known vulnerabilities in internet-facing devices like firewalls or virtual private networks, and is based on or influenced by the Conti ransomware code leaked in 2022, according to the agencies.
Research published in July by a South Korean cybersecurity firm took note of Gunra overlap with Lazarus Group, although it doesn’t explicitly mention the latter group’s name.
“These commonalities suggest that although the state-sponsored threat group and the Gunra ransomware group appear to be separate threat actors with different ultimate objectives, they may have shared certain techniques, tools, and infrastructure or collaborated to a limited extent during the attacks,” AhnLab wrote in its report.
That kind of North Korean government-ransomware gang collaboration dates back to at least 2024. Nor is Gunra alone among ransomware-as-a-service outfits recruiting penetration testers.
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