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.

CyberLeek’s conflicting motivations

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.

Different flavor, same crime

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. 

The subpoena that worries security experts

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.”

The post The GTA VI leaks are breaking the internet. Security researchers have seen this before. appeared first on CyberScoop.

It can be daunting to determine who’s responsible for showing ads on the websites we visit, or who’s harvesting data from the mobile apps we use every day. That information is already semi-public, but it is not easily parsed and traditionally much of it has remained walled away in the hands of large advertising platforms. Not anymore: A powerful and free new service called DecryptAds scrapes and correlates this adtech data and makes it simple to quickly learn a great deal about the entities that are tracking you.

The newly launched decryptads.com says it is constantly scraping the files that websites and apps make publicly available to disclose the companies that are permitted to run ads or collect user data. These files include:

–ads.txt: all of the adtech companies and data brokers that may run ads or harvest data from the site;
–app-ads.txt: entities that can harvest data from or display ads on mobile and smart TV apps;
–buyers.json/sellers.json: the entities buying, selling or reselling ad inventory for a given site or app.

Zach Edwards is chief research officer for DecryptAds and a threat researcher at the security company Infoblox. Edwards said he and two other founders decided the service was needed because the adtech data in these files is generally only useful when it can be cross-referenced to build a more complete picture of the advertising ecosystem for each website or app.

“It’s an adtech tool but we’re trying to approach adtech from a security perspective,” Edwards said. “It’s really built for a lot of privacy and security use cases that have been dramatically underserved.”

Those use cases, he said, include tracking down the source of malicious ads that try to foist malware on targeted users, identifying ad networks located in adversarial nations, and detecting the fast growing swarms of AI-generated slop websites and apps. And as decryptads.com demonstrates, these potential security and privacy threats are near impossible to detect just by viewing a single apps.txt or app-ads.txt file.

“Supply-chain integrity issues rarely live in a single file,” the site explains. “They show up as broken cross-references between ads.txt, app-ads.txt, and sellers.json files; as cloned declaration sets across unrelated domains; as seller removals that only make sense when viewed across exchanges; and even as supply paths in bid logs that never actually appear in any given publisher’s authorized-seller list.”

A search in DecryptAds for the hugely popular sports network espn.com reveals 143 ad partners and 19 registered data broker domains are listed within its ads.txt and app-ads.txt files. That data broker information is gradually becoming available because four states — California, Oregon, Texas and Vermont — have recently passed laws requiring data brokers to register if they buy or sell data on consumers from those states. DecryptAds reports that almost half of those data brokers are collecting geolocation data from espn.com visitors who aren’t blocking ads, while another three disclose that they collect device fingerprints and sensitive personal information.

HIGH-RISK AD PARTNERS

DecryptAds also makes it easy to learn the beneficiaries and national origins of the advertising firms lurking in apps and websites, displaying a conspicuous warning when adtech partners of an app or website are based in “geo-risk” areas like China and Russia, or in countries with strong financial and political ties to both — such as Cyprus and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

According to DecryptAds, espn.com works with four different advertising entities that are based in either Russia, China or the UAE, including the adtech firm Between Digital, which lists a New York address. However, the dossier on Between Digital flags them as a Russian firm, showing that their publisher offers (PDF) are processed through Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest private commercial bank and one of several financial institutions placed under U.S. sanctions in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine. KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from both Between Digital and the company’s founder, and will update this story in the event that either replies.

A search for several top U.S. military news websites — including armytimes.com, airforcetimes.com, defensenews.com, navytimes.com, marinecorpstimes.com and federaltimes.com — shows they all allow Between Digital to serve ads and track users, as well as two entities in the UAE and another in the ownership secrecy haven of Panama. DecryptAds reports that Between Digital is collecting ad data on approximately 55,000 partner websites.

Pivoting on Between Digital’s app-ads.txt file reveals hundreds of domains featuring simple web-based games that are frequently interrupted by ads. Edwards said Between Digital’s own declarations show the company is listed as both a publisher and a reseller on approximately two-thirds of their portfolio.

“It means they are basically playing both sides of the bidding equation, which creates opportunities to direct client spend at your owned and operated properties or client infrastructure, essentially creating opportunities for conflicts of interest,” Edwards told KrebsOnSecurity. “The problem we have right now is that for years we’ve had almost no one policing these ads.txt and app-ads.txt files.”

The Opera Web browser remains quite popular, and probably many users are unaware that since 2016 it has been majority owned and controlled by the Chinese company Kunlun Tech (the operational headquarters of Opera remain in Oslo, Norway).

Opera.com’s profile at DecryptAds identifies 27 registered data brokers collecting information, including 15 adtech partners in the UAE, six in China, three in Cyprus, two in Russia and one each in Hong Kong and Ukraine. DecryptAds makes clear, however, that these companies represent just seven percent of the adtech partners specified in Opera.com’s ads.txt and app-ads.txt files.

LEGAL DOSSIERS

One feature of DecryptAds that sent this author down multiple hours-long research rabbit holes is its Legal Dossier lookup, which takes several minutes for each search but eventually churns out oodles of useful information about who owns a particular domain or app, when it was registered, and any aliases or relationships it may have to adtech companies and other websites or apps.

For example, last month KrebsOnSecurity wrote about researchers from Bitsight who found that an extremely popular line of TV streaming sticks called H96 quietly rent out each user’s Internet connection to strangers. Bitsight also discovered that when these devices aren’t being used to stream pirated video content, they are spoofing themselves as mobile phones clicking ads on AI-generated slop websites.

Bitsight concluded that the same Chinese company that made several of the malicious apps common to all of these H96 streaming sticks — the Fengwo Group — also also ran the network of ads and AI slop websites being clicked on by tens of thousands of these devices that are pretending to be mobile phones.

A DecryptAds legal dossier on the (now dormant) Fengwo Group domain name for the AI slop website pictured on the left in the screenshot above (medicalbeautyhub dot com) shows it shares a seller ID (1674071) with a gaming website — giacoloredstones[.]com — which features yet another seller ID (103488000).

Pivoting on that latter seller ID reveals hundreds of active websites within Russia’s Yandex ad system featuring extremely low-quality games or simple utilities that pepper visitors with ads.

QUIET REMOVALS

Edwards said that when advertising networks suspect a given advertiser is engaged in unauthentic clicks or displaying malicious ads, very often those networks will quietly remove the offender from their list of approved partners without letting anyone else know about their suspicions.

This practice, he said, makes it easier for dodgy adtech firms to avoid accountability and continue victimizing others. To address that visibility gap, DecryptAds features a quiet removals feed that records and correlates all of the sellers.json removals across ad exchanges for the same seller domain or name.

“The way the adtech industry works, someone will write a report about ad fraud and only share it with their own clients and they won’t make it public,” Edwards said. “The ban is just removing them from the sellers.json file, but they told nobody. One day it was there, the next it was gone. So if you’re trying to navigate who is suspicious, that’s usually tough to do because there are a lot of adtech companies removing things all at once.”

MALVERTISING AND AI SLOP

Malvertising, the term given to the practice of inserting malicious ads that foist malware or redirect visitors to phishing pages, remains an all-too-frequent occurrence in the modern adtech industry. But Edwards said these malicious ads are far more commonly found now on newly generated AI slop websites than on high traffic destinations that typically employ a variety of technologies and third party tools to quickly flag bad ads.

“None of these slop AI content farms are paying for that kind of protection,” he said. “They’re just signing up the lowest quality partners, and it essentially becomes a greased rail to target the users of those sites with malicious ads. Most malvertising attacks don’t happen on espn.com or huffpost.com, but rather [on] some lower quality content farm and someone just went there because it came up in a search.”

Edwards said the AI slop websites are populated with machine-generated blog posts and images, and cover a wide array of themes from home improvement and decorating to food recipes, hunting, cars and consumer technology. He said organizations that get hit with malicious ads are often at a loss for what to do next, unaware that in most cases the answer is one of the entities listed inside the website’s ads.txt or app-ads.txt file.

“A lot of serious organizations are starting to understand that if we’re not breaking down this ad data, we’re not going to know who’s targeting government people with zero-click payloads on an almost daily basis,” he said.

Edwards maintains that truly getting a handle on the malvertising and AI slop problems will require more data-sharing by the major ad networks. Specifically, he says those platforms do not broadly share what’s known as the “supply chain object” or SCO, structured data attached to each advertising bid request that lets buyers see every seller, reseller and intermediary involved in passing an ad impression from the publisher to the final buyer.

“That SCO tells you who sold it or resold it, and who was the final entity that bought the impression that served that malware payload,” Edwards explained. “You may see the malicious zero-click redirection, but without the supply chain object — which is only served server side — you won’t know who targeted your people with malware and won’t have a way to try and prevent it properly. But if we can encourage the adtech industry to expose that SCO, it will get easier to find the culprit behind any one bad ad.”

DecryptAds also offers an application programming interface (API) that allows researchers to automate queries and integrate the site’s functionality into popular AI platforms.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

The only sane reaction to the examples described above is to block all online ads outright. This approach is broadly endorsed by security experts because it also makes it more difficult for adtech firms and data brokers to build detailed profiles on you and track your movements around the web and in the real world.

However, much depends on how you normally prefer to browse the Internet, and how much trust you place in third party browser plugins and extensions. For those primarily surfing via a regular desktop or laptop Web browser, uBlock Origin Lite is an excellent free and well-maintained open source option. uBlock Origin also should work with mobile browsers like Firefox, but apparently only on Android-based devices.

Adblock Plus is a decent option for iPhone and iPad users. For power users, Adblock and uBlock Origin both support custom blocking rules from easylist.to, which publishes a frequently updated list that removes most advertisements from webpages.

The well established browser extension NoScript blocks all non-approved Javascript code, and it generally does a fine job blocking most ads from loading. However, script blockers like NoScript may not be suitable for average users who don’t enjoy constantly having to referee which scripts should be allowed to load so that each site displays properly.

More technically inclined/adventuresome readers should strongly consider a hardware approach to blocking ads at the local network level, because that is easily the cheapest, most secure and scalable way to do it. A tiny, low-cost and broadly available computer known as a Raspberry Pi can be turned into a powerful ad blocker for all devices on a local network when fitted with a microSD memory card and a free program called Pi-hole. Once you’ve set it up properly and changed your router’s network settings to use the Pi-hole’s DNS sinkhole and DHCP servers, it should prevent ads from displaying on any devices connected to that network.

Bear in mind that ad blockers often do little to block ads and/or tracking that occurs from within mobile apps that users have chosen to install on their devices. Many websites now push users to install a mobile app, supposedly in order to more fully access and enjoy the site’s services and content. But in my experience, they’re not doing this because the user experience is somehow way better on the app (as LinkedIn tries to convince us non-app users several times a week via email). On the contrary, I find most mobile apps to be horribly designed, annoying, and/or completely unnecessary, and when given the option I will almost always choose to interact with a website or service directly in a Web browser.

No, the cold truth is that big web destinations tend to get pushy with their apps because they make it easier for these companies to keep you on their platforms longer and to collect (and in many cases resell) far more precise data about who, what and where their users are. Also, companies pushing customers the hardest to install mobile apps always seem to liberally opt everyone in to having their data used to train large language models these days. So be cautious about the apps you install on your mobile devices (including any smart TVs!), and poke around their listings at DecryptAds if you want to learn more about their privacy practices and any relationships they may have to adtech firms.

A new Internet-of-Things (IoT) botnet called Kimwolf has spread to more than 2 million devices, forcing infected systems to participate in massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and to relay other malicious and abusive Internet traffic. Kimwolf’s ability to scan the local networks of compromised systems for other IoT devices to infect makes it a sobering threat to organizations, and new research reveals Kimwolf is surprisingly prevalent in government and corporate networks.

Kimwolf grew rapidly in the waning months of 2025 by tricking various “residential proxy” services into relaying malicious commands to devices on the local networks of those proxy endpoints. Residential proxies are sold as a way to anonymize and localize one’s Web traffic to a specific region, and the biggest of these services allow customers to route their Internet activity through devices in virtually any country or city around the globe.

The malware that turns one’s Internet connection into a proxy node is often quietly bundled with various mobile apps and games, and it typically forces the infected device to relay malicious and abusive traffic — including ad fraud, account takeover attempts, and mass content-scraping.

Kimwolf mainly targeted proxies from IPIDEA, a Chinese service that has millions of proxy endpoints for rent on any given week. The Kimwolf operators discovered they could forward malicious commands to the internal networks of IPIDEA proxy endpoints, and then programmatically scan for and infect other vulnerable devices on each endpoint’s local network.

Most of the systems compromised through Kimwolf’s local network scanning have been unofficial Android TV streaming boxes. These are typically Android Open Source Project devices — not Android TV OS devices or Play Protect certified Android devices — and they are generally marketed as a way to watch unlimited (read:pirated) video content from popular subscription streaming services for a one-time fee.

However, a great many of these TV boxes ship to consumers with residential proxy software pre-installed. What’s more, they have no real security or authentication built-in: If you can communicate directly with the TV box, you can also easily compromise it with malware.

While IPIDEA and other affected proxy providers recently have taken steps to block threats like Kimwolf from going upstream into their endpoints (reportedly with varying degrees of success), the Kimwolf malware remains on millions of infected devices.

Kimwolf’s close association with residential proxy networks and compromised Android TV boxes might suggest we’d find relatively few infections on corporate networks. However, the security firm Infoblox said a recent review of its customer traffic found nearly 25 percent of them made a query to a Kimwolf-related domain name since October 1, 2025, when the botnet first showed signs of life.

Infoblox found the affected customers are based all over the world and in a wide range of industry verticals, from education and healthcare to government and finance.

“To be clear, this suggests that nearly 25% of customers had at least one device that was an endpoint in a residential proxy service targeted by Kimwolf operators,” Infoblox explained. “Such a device, maybe a phone or a laptop, was essentially co-opted by the threat actor to probe the local network for vulnerable devices. A query means a scan was made, not that new devices were compromised. Lateral movement would fail if there were no vulnerable devices to be found or if the DNS resolution was blocked.”

Synthient, a startup that tracks proxy services and was the first to disclose on January 2 the unique methods Kimwolf uses to spread, found proxy endpoints from IPIDEA were present in alarming numbers at government and academic institutions worldwide. Synthient said it spied at least 33,000 affected Internet addresses at universities and colleges, and nearly 8,000 IPIDEA proxies within various U.S. and foreign government networks.

In a webinar on January 16, experts at the proxy tracking service Spur profiled Internet addresses associated with IPIDEA and 10 other proxy services that were thought to be vulnerable to Kimwolf’s tricks. Spur found residential proxies in nearly 300 government owned and operated networks, 318 utility companies, 166 healthcare companies or hospitals, and 141 companies in banking and finance.

“I looked at the 298 [government] owned and operated [networks], and so many of them were DoD [U.S. Department of Defense], which is kind of terrifying that DoD has IPIDEA and these other proxy services located inside of it,” Spur Co-Founder Riley Kilmer said. “I don’t know how these enterprises have these networks set up. It could be that [infected devices] are segregated on the network, that even if you had local access it doesn’t really mean much. However, it’s something to be aware of. If a device goes in, anything that device has access to the proxy would have access to.”

Kilmer said Kimwolf demonstrates how a single residential proxy infection can quickly lead to bigger problems for organizations that are harboring unsecured devices behind their firewalls, noting that proxy services present a potentially simple way for attackers to probe other devices on the local network of a targeted organization.

“If you know you have [proxy] infections that are located in a company, you can chose that [network] to come out of and then locally pivot,” Kilmer said. “If you have an idea of where to start or look, now you have a foothold in a company or an enterprise based on just that.”

This is the third story in our series on the Kimwolf botnet. Next week, we’ll shed light on the myriad China-based individuals and companies connected to the Badbox 2.0 botnet, the collective name given to a vast number of Android TV streaming box models that ship with no discernible security or authentication built-in, and with residential proxy malware pre-installed.

Further reading:

The Kimwolf Botnet is Stalking Your Local Network

Who Benefitted from the Aisuru and Kimwolf Botnets?

A Broken System Fueling Botnets (Synthient).

Direct navigation — the act of visiting a website by manually typing a domain name in a web browser — has never been riskier: A new study finds the vast majority of “parked” domains — mostly expired or dormant domain names, or common misspellings of popular websites — are now configured to redirect visitors to sites that foist scams and malware.

When Internet users try to visit expired domain names or accidentally navigate to a lookalike “typosquatting” domain, they are typically brought to a placeholder page at a domain parking company that tries to monetize the wayward traffic by displaying links to a number of third-party websites that have paid to have their links shown.

A decade ago, ending up at one of these parked domains came with a relatively small chance of being redirected to a malicious destination: In 2014, researchers found (PDF) that parked domains redirected users to malicious sites less than five percent of the time — regardless of whether the visitor clicked on any links at the parked page.

But in a series of experiments over the past few months, researchers at the security firm Infoblox say they discovered the situation is now reversed, and that malicious content is by far the norm now for parked websites.

“In large scale experiments, we found that over 90% of the time, visitors to a parked domain would be directed to illegal content, scams, scareware and anti-virus software subscriptions, or malware, as the ‘click’ was sold from the parking company to advertisers, who often resold that traffic to yet another party,” Infoblox researchers wrote in a paper published today.

Infoblox found parked websites are benign if the visitor arrives at the site using a virtual private network (VPN), or else via a non-residential Internet address. For example, Scotiabank.com customers who accidentally mistype the domain as scotaibank[.]com will see a normal parking page if they’re using a VPN, but will be redirected to a site that tries to foist scams, malware or other unwanted content if coming from a residential IP address. Again, this redirect happens just by visiting the misspelled domain with a mobile device or desktop computer that is using a residential IP address.

According to Infoblox, the person or entity that owns scotaibank[.]com has a portfolio of nearly 3,000 lookalike domains, including gmai[.]com, which demonstrably has been configured with its own mail server for accepting incoming email messages. Meaning, if you send an email to a Gmail user and accidentally omit the “l” from “gmail.com,” that missive doesn’t just disappear into the ether or produce a bounce reply: It goes straight to these scammers. The report notices this domain also has been leveraged in multiple recent business email compromise campaigns, using a lure indicating a failed payment with trojan malware attached.

Infoblox found this particular domain holder (betrayed by a common DNS server — torresdns[.]com) has set up typosquatting domains targeting dozens of top Internet destinations, including Craigslist, YouTube, Google, Wikipedia, Netflix, TripAdvisor, Yahoo, eBay, and Microsoft. A defanged list of these typosquatting domains is available here (the dots in the listed domains have been replaced with commas).

David Brunsdon, a threat researcher at Infoblox, said the parked pages send visitors through a chain of redirects, all while profiling the visitor’s system using IP geolocation, device fingerprinting, and cookies to determine where to redirect domain visitors.

“It was often a chain of redirects — one or two domains outside the parking company — before threat arrives,” Brunsdon said. “Each time in the handoff the device is profiled again and again, before being passed off to a malicious domain or else a decoy page like Amazon.com or Alibaba.com if they decide it’s not worth targeting.”

Brunsdon said domain parking services claim the search results they return on parked pages are designed to be relevant to their parked domains, but that almost none of this displayed content was related to the lookalike domain names they tested.

Infoblox said a different threat actor who owns domaincntrol[.]com — a domain that differs from GoDaddy’s name servers by a single character — has long taken advantage of typos in DNS configurations to drive users to malicious websites. In recent months, however, Infoblox discovered the malicious redirect only happens when the query for the misconfigured domain comes from a visitor who is using Cloudflare’s DNS resolvers (1.1.1.1), and that all other visitors will get a page that refuses to load.

The researchers found that even variations on well-known government domains are being targeted by malicious ad networks.

“When one of our researchers tried to report a crime to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), they accidentally visited ic3[.]org instead of ic3[.]gov,” the report notes. “Their phone was quickly redirected to a false ‘Drive Subscription Expired’ page. They were lucky to receive a scam; based on what we’ve learnt, they could just as easily receive an information stealer or trojan malware.”

The Infoblox report emphasizes that the malicious activity they tracked is not attributed to any known party, noting that the domain parking or advertising platforms named in the study were not implicated in the malvertising they documented.

However, the report concludes that while the parking companies claim to only work with top advertisers, the traffic to these domains was frequently sold to affiliate networks, who often resold the traffic to the point where the final advertiser had no business relationship with the parking companies.

Infoblox also pointed out that recent policy changes by Google may have inadvertently increased the risk to users from direct search abuse. Brunsdon said Google Adsense previously defaulted to allowing their ads to be placed on parked pages, but that in early 2025 Google implemented a default setting that had their customers opt-out by default on presenting ads on parked domains — requiring the person running the ad to voluntarily go into their settings and turn on parking as a location.