Hackers recently obtained non-sensitive customer information and other documents from the company.
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With the World Cup now complete, its biggest cybersecurity story may be what didn’t happen. While no major public cyber disruption has been reported, that shouldn’t be mistaken for a lack of risk.
In the run-up to the tournament, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) issued a public service announcement warning organizations and fans about fraudulent, spoofed websites impersonating the FIFA event – a reminder that the absence of a headline-grabbing breach doesn’t mean bad actors weren’t trying. In many ways, it’s evidence of the planning, coordination, and resilience required to keep an event of this scale running securely.
A global event like the World Cup depends on far more than what happens inside the stadium. It relies on local governments, venues, transportation systems, telecom providers, payment platforms, hotels, vendors, public safety agencies, and law enforcement, all working together.
When I worked at the FBI, I saw how fast major events test teamwork across agencies, regions, and businesses. The World Cup offered that test at a scale few events can match.
Successful major-event security depends on what happens long before there is a visible incident: trusted relationships, clear roles, shared intelligence and response plans. Planning becomes even more important when an event is not limited to a single city or venue.
In the past, event security consisted of guards, gates, and stadium perimeters. Those still matter, but they’re only part of the picture. Today, an event this big that brings millions of people together depends on many systems working in concert. No single organization owns the full risk picture, which means resilience depends on how well these groups can share information, coordinate response plans, and keep essential services operating under pressure. This means security can’t be planned around one perimeter. The real perimeter is the full event ecosystem.
Resilience starts much earlier, with planning across organizations that may not normally operate as one team. The real test for major events is whether public- and private-sector partners know their roles before pressure hits. That includes who shares information, who validates threats, who communicates with the public, who has decision-making authority and how quickly partners can act if a system slows down or becomes unavailable.
Attackers don’t need to compromise the most visible organization to create disruption. They can look for weaker points across the event ecosystem. A disruption may begin with a vendor, ticketing platform, transportation partner, payment provider, hotel, contractor or communications provider, but the impact can quickly become broader than any one organization.
Sports organizations now operate like large businesses, with ticketing systems, VIP data, sponsors, vendors, media partners, stadium operations, payment systems, and fan engagement platforms. They depend on networks of suppliers and partners, and that creates multiple possible entry points.
Operational technology (OT) deserves more attention than it typically gets in these conversations. A ransomware attack that disrupted stadium operations directly, rather than a ticketing site or a fan-facing app, would be one of the most damaging scenarios organizers could face. OT security has to sit alongside the more visible concerns like payment fraud and spoofed domains, not behind them.
Bad actors don’t let a good crisis go to waste. Fans are often an easy target. Excitement drives a fan to buy a last-minute ticket or check a score on an unknown site. That excitement is exactly what fraudsters count on.
This risk grows over time. As the event gets closer and attracts more eyes, it becomes a richer target. A fake FIFA ticket site is useless to a crook a month after the last game. Groups running these systems must act faster as opening day nears, and share threat intelligence without delay.
The World Cup may be over, but the work isn’t. Cities, governments, and private-sector organizations will continue supporting large-scale public events that depend on complex digital and physical ecosystems. The question isn’t whether another major event will face cyber threats, it’s whether the planning starts early enough.
Organizations involved in future major events should focus on resilience, not just prevention. That means planning for what happens if a critical system slows down, goes offline, or becomes unreliable, and ensuring partners know how to coordinate before an incident occurs.
Every major event forces defenders to prepare for known risks. The harder challenge is anticipating the ones that haven’t emerged yet.
The next major disruption may not come from the attack that organizations spent months preparing for. It could target a new dependency, exploit emerging technology, or capitalize on a moment when public attention is at its highest. That’s why resilience can’t be built around yesterday’s playbook. It has to be informed by continuous threat intelligence, regular coordination across public- and private-sector partners, and the flexibility to adapt as the threat landscape changes.
The World Cup demonstrated what’s possible when that preparation comes together. As cities, governments, and private organizations look ahead to future global events, success won’t be measured solely by the attacks they stop. It will be measured by how effectively they can maintain critical operations, share information, and adapt under pressure when the unexpected happens.
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State and local officials and election security experts largely panned a Thursday night primetime speech by President Donald Trump, saying it was reflective of White House “desperation” to find any credible evidence to support their claims that U.S. elections have been rigged against the two-term president.
While the White House teased explosive new claims about the potential compromise of U.S. elections by China, Trump’s speech was a rehash of claims that both have no supporting evidence and have been repeatedly debunked when investigated.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former voting and civil rights attorney at the Department of Justice, said none of Trump’s claims or allegations were new or substantively different from previous theories he’s been espousing over the past six years.
“The White House promised a bombshell and they delivered a dud,” Becker said on a call with reporters Friday. “There was nothing that even calls into question past elections — certainly not the 2020 election.”
The administration declassified a huge tranche of documents from the intelligence agencies, and news outlets continue to sift through them, but thus far nothing has been found that remotely validates the administration’s claims about foreign interference from China costing Trump the 2020 election.
In fact, some of the most relevant documents found at this point have supported the opposite conclusion, with agencies assessing that while China engaged in influence campaigns around the election, it was not attempting to outright interfere with U.S. election infrastructure, hack voting machines or manipulate ballots.
John Solomon, a former journalist and opinion writer at The Hill brought in by the White House to lead the investigation, also told reporters Thursday that his search hasn’t turned up evidence that the 2020, 2022 or 2024 elections were affected by fraud.
The one new major claim by Trump — that the Department of Homeland Security determined hundreds of thousands of noncitizens were registered to vote across four states — is almost certainly false or overinflated, given that it contradicts post-election state audits that have routinely found single or double-digit numbers of noncitizens registered to vote within a single state across multiple elections.
Over the past six years, similar claims by GOP secretaries of state and political activists purporting to find mass numbers of noncitizens registered to vote have turned out to be grossly inflated due to shoddy data analysis, and the vast majority of cases involving “suspected noncitizens” turn out to be U.S. citizens who are legally registered to vote.
The White House has provided little to no information on the methodology used to flag and identify supposed noncitizen voters, other than alluding to the use of “commercial data” and federal databases. A federal court recently ordered DHS to dismantle the SAVE database, its primary database for verifying the citizenship status of U.S. voters, because it was unreliable and violated longstanding privacy laws.
Apart from DHS admitting its own data on citizenship is incomplete, Becker said using a list that relies on matching voter files with commercial data is not a reliable way of determining citizenship.
“It is impossible to take a public voter file with very little information that is uniquely identified, like a driver’s license number, and compare it to a commercial database and say for sure the Maria Rodriguez or the John Lee or the Shawn O’Hara you have on that is the same person,” he said.
Election officials also responded forcefully. Nevada Democratic Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar said that Trump has spent a decade attempting to manufacture a crisis around voter fraud and the president’s speech Thursday night was an extension of that effort.
“As Nevada’s chief elections officer, it’s my job to call balls and strikes — so when the President lies, I am obligated to call him out,” Aguilar said in a statement. “The facts have not changed: Nevada’s elections are among the safest, most secure and accessible in the nation.”
It’s not just Democrats that have objected to the administration’s efforts. GOP states have gone to court to block the Department of Justice from obtaining their voter data, and Idaho’s Republican secretary of state responded to a DOJ letter threatening prosecution of election officials as “not well met” and potentially illegal under state ethics laws.
Trump’s speech potentially casts additional light on recent White House decisions, such as firing all three commissioners on the Election Assistance Commission. The agency helps certify voting machines for security, and all three commissioners have served across administrations and maintain close relationships with state and local election officials.
Pamela Smith, CEO of the nonprofit Verified Voting, said that while the EAC can’t take certain actions that need commissioner approval, “critical functions like voting system testing and certification can continue under the existing framework and should not be affected.”
In 2020, Trump’s initial claims of widespread election fraud were undercut by leaders at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which said there was no evidence the election was compromised. The removal of EAC commissioners could represent an attempt to preempt any efforts to rebut or criticize White House claims that elections and voting machines have been compromised.
Some have worried that Trump could use the speech as a pretext to declare a national emergency or cancel elections.
Tom Lopach, CEO of the Voter Participation Center, said “you don’t dismantle election security infrastructure if you’re serious about protecting elections.”
“You dismantle it if you’re planning to claim, without evidence, that the system failed you,” he said.
While Becker takes Trump’s broadsides against state election authority seriously, he also said it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that, in his view, the administration is losing the argument across the board.
More than a dozen federal courts have unanimously rejected the federal government’s attempts to forcibly obtain state voter data, while other courts have rejected core pieces of his election-related executive orders. State officials have publicly — and at times, angrily — pushed back on the administration’s demands as blatant federal overreach.
Becker predicted that such an act would be quickly shot down by courts as well, noting that the U.S. has never canceled or postponed an election in its 250-year history, including when British troops were marauding on American soil during the War of 1812 or even at the height of the Civil War.
It’s important not to conflate the White House’s bluster and intentions with its actual authorities or capability to seize control of U.S. elections.
“This is what panic and desperation look like,” Becker said. “They’ve had 18 months in total control of the federal government and they have found nothing that would support President Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, and so they’re just trying to grab as much garbage as they can and throw it up against the wall, and it’s not sticking.”
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The Trump administration’s abrupt firing of Election Assistance Commission commissioners last week and a Department of Justice warning threatening states with criminal prosecution have created new legal peril for officials who run, administer and secure elections.
The EAC is an obscure but important agency that oversees testing and standards for voting machines, including around security. While federal certification is voluntary, states have until now relied upon their stamp of approval when purchasing voting machines.
On July 10, Democratic Commissioners Ben Hovland and Thomas Hicks were fired by the White House, while reports indicate that a third Commissioner, Republican Christy McCormick, resigned. While Congress mandated the commission be bipartisan, the Supreme Court has recently given the President broad authority to fire executive branch officials at will.
In an interview with NPR, Hovland said he worried the firings would further erode trust that the commission was working in a bipartisan manner.
“And as you eliminate things – or if you get rid of commissioners, for example – or as you eliminate some of these other sort of safeguards or norms, it certainly strains the system,” said Hovland. “And it certainly also likely causes people to lose faith in our democracy and in the process and their confidence in our elections. And that’s very concerning.”
A letter also sent last week to all 50 states by the DOJ said the department will investigate and prosecute any election official “who knowingly retains non-citizens on the state’s voter registration list or facilitates noncitizens in receiving and casting ballots.”
CyberScoop spoke with several Secretaries of State who said that the number one threat facing elections in their state is not from a foreign country or AI but their own federal government.
Tobias Read, the Democratic Secretary of State for Oregon, told CyberScoop that his office is focused on providing the state’s 36 county clerks with the resources and support they need to carry out a smooth election. But he acknowledged that his office is “playing defense in a lot of ways [from] the intrusion from the federal government” that continues to assert its authority over local elections.
“If the president were actually serious about election security, he would be sending more resources to local election officials and bolstering the system rather than cutting it,” said Read.
This year, several counties in Oregon will offer voters access to a new ballot tracking system that provides text or email updates when a voter’s ballot is moving through mail and has been certified. Reed estimated at “pennies per voter per election” and called it a good option for cash-strapped counties to assure voters their ballots are secure and properly tracked.
At the same time, Read said federal agencies like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency – which once regularly deployed cybersecurity and technical expertise to help states fix vulnerabilities and share threat intelligence – have largely gone quiet.
Oregon ranks in the top ten states for voter participation and relies heavily on mail-in voting. However, state officials like Read lack confidence in the US Postal Service. Though a recent Supreme Court decision blocked an executive order giving the service control over mail-in ballot distribution, officials like Read are urging voters to take other measures to use drop boxes instead as a safer alternative to ensure their vote is counted.
Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Secretary of State and a Democrat running for reelection, said his office is focused on primary elections and processing the mail ballots that have been arriving “for a while.”
After Iranian hackers defaced Arizona’s candidate bio portal last year, Fontes moved to fill a widening gap: the Trump administration’s withdrawal of federal foreign interference training and support. His office is now directly supporting local jurisdictions on election security while coordinating more closely with state law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and other states.
But it’s being done with a fraction of the resources and coordination that the federal government brought to bear under both the Biden and first Trump administrations. While Fontes said he maintains positive personal relationships within the Department of Homeland Security, his office does not have a formal relationship with CISA.
“We’ve hobbled together a loose and often informal network of information sharing – that doesn’t violate any rules, it doesn’t break any laws – but it is certainly not anywhere near as robust as it would be if we had a responsible federal agency that was interested in the security of American elections,” said Fontes.
He said even if CISA offered such services today, he wouldn’t accept it, citing the lack of trust between states and the Trump administration.
“They have proven through their actions that they don’t want to be effective partners in protecting the American electorate and protecting American voters,” said Fontes. “Because of that, the clear answer, the only sensible answer for someone like me, would be to say ‘No, I don’t want the help of people I cannot trust.’ People who have demonstrably and explicitly threatened me and local election administrators of all political stripes with criminal prosecution.”
After this story’s initial publication, CISA acting director Nick Andersen said the agency remains committed working with “with critical infrastructure owners and operators to assist them in securing both the physical security and cybersecurity of the systems and assets that support the nation’s election process.”
“We provide state and local election officials, upon request, no-cost voluntary services such as the sharing of threat information, technical expertise, vulnerability scanning, and resilience-building support,” said Andersen in a statement sent to CyberScoop. “Our regional teams assist partners across the country by assessing risks, helping entities bolster defenses and improve resilience, and responding promptly to threats. We are committed to supporting state and local elections officials to protect election infrastructure and safeguard our democracy.”
Secretaries of State in Colorado, Nevada, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and others have also called the DOJ letters an attempt at federal intimidation of election officials.
Others, like West Virginia Republican Secretary of State Kris Warner, have reiterated their refusal to hand over state voter data. On Monday, a federal judge upheld his right to do so.
Warner wrote to the DOJ in response to say the state was “available to discuss our existing voter registration list maintenance” but “West Virginia law prohibits the disclosure of sensitive personally identifiable information contained in voter registration records.”
It’s leading some states to take new precautions.
Read said he was working with Oregon county officials to make sure “county clerks have the number of their county counsel on speed dial” and know how to distinguish between a legitimate and illegitimate federal warrant or subpoena.
Additionally, FBI raids of election offices around the country to seize ballots records related to the 2020 and 2024 elections have been a cause for Read’s concern. By state law, Oregon and other states must keep copies of the ballot records and other election data they receive from counties for a certain time according to state law, after which they must eventually archive or destroy them according to ballot retention schedules.
Read emphasized that “it’s important to destroy those ballots at the appropriate time,” The Trump administration has used the raids to further the impression of electoral fraud, despite the absence of credible evidence.
“We can see when people are not on top of that, then you expose yourself to other vulnerabilities like the federal government seizing those ballots in Maricopa County [Arizona] and Fulton County [Georgia] as well,” said Read.
A former CISA official estimated that on Election Day in 2024, more than 1,000 representatives from federal, state and local governments, election technology vendors and other election stakeholders sat together in a room to communicate and coordinate.
Less than two years later, Read called his office’s interactions with CISA “minimal.” He recalled that upon taking office as Secretary of State in Jan 2025, one of his first conversations was with one of CISA’s regional advisors. A week later, those advisors were summarily fired by the Trump administration.
UPDATE: 7/14/2026, 11:15 a.m.: Updated with comments from CISA acting director Nick Andersen.
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The Justice Department on Tuesday said it has seized infrastructure tied to what officials called one of the world’s most prolific criminal marketplaces, used to commit cyber scams and other crimes.
The seized cloud computing account hosted backend infrastructure used by subsidiaries of the Huione Group, a Cambodia-based corporate conglomerate.
At the same time, the Treasury Department announced fresh sanctions and more against Huione and affiliated companies. The administration actions Tuesday add to disruption efforts from last fall against pieces of the same network.
The Trump administration has placed an emphasis on combating transnational cybercrime and other kinds of scams and fraud.
The seized cloud computing account was used to operate Huione Guarantee, also known as Haowang Guarantee, according to Tuesday’s DOJ announcement.
“The Huione Group used this cloud computing account as part of a technological backbone that allowed billions in fraud proceeds to be transferred, moved, and concealed — much of it stolen through Southeast Asian scam centers,” said Tysen Duva, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “Seizures of these marketplaces is critical in the fight against fraud that affects so many Americans, and to stop avenues for criminal proceeds to be laundered.”
U.S. officials allege that Huione Guarantee operated Telegram channels with discussions about illicit goods and services, including the sale of stolen credit card and sensitive personal information, malware-enabled thefts, human trafficking schemes and the laundering of money from romance and investment scams. Huione Guarantee also allegedly offered escrow services for criminals such as money launderers for cryptocurrency.
Treasury took two steps Tuesday to build on its move in October to sever Huione Group from the U.S. financial system. One was to tack H-Pay Service onto its rule for Huione Group as a successor entity. And it slapped nine people and 26 entities linked to Prince Group with sanctions.
“Huione Group served as a critical node for laundering proceeds of cyber heists and virtual currency investment scams and was used by the Prince Group to transfer and consolidate scam-derived assets,” Treasury’s announcement states.
Also last October, the Justice Department said it seized bitcoin valued at $15 billion from the chairman of the Prince Group, Chen Zhi, and indicted him over alleged cryptocurrency crimes and other schemes.
An alleged key figure in Chen’s criminal network has been arrested in Cambodia and extradited to China.
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An Algerian man known online as “SPOX” was extradited from Spain and charged with running a black-market cybercrime operation that prosecutors say defrauded thousands of victims and funneled roughly $900,000 through a cryptocurrency account over a three-year period.
Abdellah Belmili, 26, made his initial appearance Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York in Buffalo. He faces a single count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison.
He was extradited from Spain earlier this month.
Federal investigators say Belmili allegedly created and administered at least two illicit online marketplaces, market0day.com and spoxy.us, that operated similarly to commercial e-commerce platforms. The marketplaces sold financial credentials, phishing kits, compromised email server access, and other tools used to carry out fraud. All transactions on the sites were conducted in Bitcoin.
According to court documents, the FBI became aware of the marketplaces in September 2020 through a confidential source. The site’s administrator was already known to investigators as a prolific creator of phishing kits targeting major U.S. financial institutions.
In 2020, undercover FBI agents used the marketplace to buy a phishing kit designed to replicate JPMorgan Chase’s login page and capture victims’ personal information. Agents also purchased access to a compromised email server. A third item — access to a website control panel — was paid for but never delivered, prompting customer complaints on Belmili’s Telegram channel.
Shortly after those complaints surfaced, Belmili announced he was closing market0day.com and redirecting customers to a new site, spoxy.us, which he described as a “new store for bulk sms,” which typically refers to mass phishing via text message.
The new site used the same template, color scheme, and navigation structure as its predecessor and was registered using the stolen identity of a 77-year-old Texas resident.
Investigators identified Belmili through a combination of open-source research, search warrants, and records obtained from technology and financial companies. Early versions of his phishing kit code contained his full name, “Dila Belmili,” embedded in the source alongside his Telegram handle and a link to the marketplaces. Facebook accounts linked to the alias “spox_coder” listed “Dila Belmili (spox)” as the display name, and customers had posted complaints about phishing kit purchases directly on his profile.
Records obtained from Google showed that Belmili used his personal email account to search for financial institution logos, hacking tools, and methods for generating fake identities and credit card numbers. The same account received approximately 1,400 emails containing victims’ stolen personal information from active phishing kits targeting American Express, Bank of America, Cash App, JP Morgan Chase, PayPal, and Wells Fargo.
Investigators also found that Belmili had built hidden backdoors into phishing kits he sold to other criminals, allowing him to continue harvesting victim data even after the kits changed hands.
Records from cryptocurrency exchange Binance showed approximately $900,000 deposited into an account registered to Belmili between Jan. 2020 and Jan. 2023. Of that amount, roughly $760,000 was transferred to other accounts or converted into other forms of cryptocurrency, while approximately $41,000 was withdrawn from ATMs.
In total, investigators identified approximately 595 distinct phishing kits created by Belmili. Analysis of victim data exported to Telegram pages and email accounts linked to the operation identified roughly 5,600 victims in the United States and internationally.
“This defendant thought that he could get away with defrauding thousands of victims out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by using fake names and hiding behind a keyboard to steal bank account and credit card numbers,” said U.S. Attorney Michael DiGiacomo in a release. “This arrest makes clear that, regardless of where you operate, our law enforcement partners will find you – and when they do, you will face the full consequences of your actions.”
You can read the court documents below.
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A federal court ruled Monday that the Trump administration’s national voter database violates federal privacy laws, interferes with Americans’ right to vote, and must be dismantled.
In the ruling, Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan of the District Court of Washington D.C. wrote that records reviewed by the court show federal agencies knew that the SAVE voter database violated federal laws like the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, but were “scrambling” to comply with President Trump’s executive order to create a system for mass voter verification.
That pressure resulted in agencies “haphazardly” combining and repurposing the personal information of millions of Americans from different government databases, including citizenship data they knew was unreliable.
“The Court therefore sets aside and vacates the 2025 SAVE modified system and the related notices because they were contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious, in excess of statutory authority, and without observance of procedure required by law,” Sooknanan wrote.
The League of Women Voters, its local affiliate groups and the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed the lawsuit last year. They argued the administration violated privacy laws that restrict the government’s ability to collect or combine private data without congressional authorization.
Sooknanan wrote that the SAVE database violates a prohibition in the Social Security Act against the disclosure of Social Security numbers and other related SSA records as well as substantive and procedural protections in the Privacy Act, which prevent the non-consensual disclosure of certain information both by federal agencies and between federal agencies and require notice and comment.
The court also ruled that SAVE violates the Administrative Procedures Act, which governs how the federal government develops regulations and makes official decisions to ensure they’re fair and impartial.
Sooknanan had earlier declined to rule the database illegal under the Administrative Procedures Act, saying the plaintiffs had failed to prove the data would cause irreparable harm. In her final ruling, she changed course, writing that the states have since run their voter rolls through the federal government’s modified SAVE system, and some voters have been wrongfully identified as non-citizens and had their voter registrations canceled.
“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Sooknanan wrote. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”
The ruling reinforces longstanding objections from former government officials and privacy experts over the past year, who have said Congress has repeatedly passed privacy laws explicitly to prevent the executive branch from using Americans’ data in ways not proscribed through law. That is what DHS did last year when it took SAVE, a database meant to process government benefits for legal immigrants, and combined it with data from the Social Security Administration and other agencies to create a new massive database of American voters and their citizenship status.
John Davisson, deputy director of enforcement at EPIC, celebrated the decision in a statement, saying the ruling “underscores that government agencies must follow the law, defend privacy and remain accountable to the public they serve.”
“Today’s decision is a victory for us all. By halting the illegal consolidation of sensitive personal data across federal agencies, the court has safeguarded not only our privacy rights but also the bedrock of our democracy: the right to vote,” said Davisson.
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A Google security engineer was arrested in New York and charged with crimes related to bets he allegedly placed on Polymarket using confidential information he pulled from Google systems, the Justice Department said Wednesday.
Michele Spagnuolo, a 36-year-old Italian citizen who lives in Switzerland, is accused of placing multiple trades on the prediction marketplace last year that netted him a profit of more than $1.2 million. He allegedly abused internal access to Google’s nonpublic Year in Search data and placed a series of bets on the most searched people on Google in 2025.
“Today’s charges reinforce a decades-old message: corporate insiders cannot use confidential information to turn a profit in our markets,” Jay Clayton, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement Wednesday. “Insider trading compromises the integrity of our markets, and the American people want this greed-driven conduct investigated and prosecuted.”
Spagnuolo was charged with violating the Commodity Exchange Act, wire fraud and money laundering, which carry a combined maximum sentence up to 50 years in prison.
He was also served with a civil complaint by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that accused him of insider trading. The government agency is seeking restitution, disgorgement, civil monetary penalties, trading and registration bans and a permanent injunction against further regulation violations.
Spagnuolo has been employed as a security engineer at Google since 2014, where he built products, specifications and led multiple projects in the information security unit, according to his company bio, which has since been taken down.
A Google spokesperson said the company is working with law enforcement on its investigation. “The employee accessed our marketing material using a tool available to all employees, but using such confidential information to place bets is a serious breach of our policies,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “We’ve placed the employee on leave and will take the appropriate action.”
Spagnuolo did not respond to a request for comment.
In a complaint unsealed Wednesday, a federal investigator said Spagnulo, who used the “AlphaRaccoon” user name on Polymarket, took deliberate steps to conceal his use of nonpublic information, including efforts to obscure the source and ownership of his proceeds.
Prosecutors noted that Google’s internal software tool, which provided Spagnuolo access to search trends, bore a banner that stated “Google Confidential” in red text, adding that Spagnuolo confirmed he understood the company’s various confidentiality and ethics policies to access the data.
Spagnuolo allegedly created his Polymarket account in May 2024 and placed a series of trades between later that year risking approximately $2.75 million on 25 outcomes that the market treated as unlikely.
The FBI said it traced Spagnuolo’s Polymarket account to a cryptocurrency wallet he allegedly used to fund the account and initiate multiple transfers. Spagnuolo is also accused of sending multiple transactions through a cryptocurrency swapping service that were received by an account in his name linked to his Italian government ID card.
Spagnuolo allegedly changed his Polymarket username to an alphanumeric wallet address in early December, after Google released its Year in Search results and multiple users on Discord and X speculated the person between the account was a Google insider.
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Today’s enterprise executives are navigating a complex landscape of AI-driven challenges, but none is more urgent than the rapid escalation of AI-generated fraud.
Fraudsters are weaponizing generative AI to automate impersonation and mass-produce synthetic identities at a scale and pace that is rendering enterprises’ long-standing defenses obsolete. This is no longer a slow-moving game of cat and mouse; it is a high-velocity arms race.
To protect the integrity of their platforms, enterprise leaders — particularly in critical infrastructure sectors — must move beyond periodic risk assessments and begin leveraging a new generation of tools that enable defenses to iterate in days rather than months.
Generative AI as a fraud multiplier
While legitimate businesses use generative AI for efficiency, fraudsters exploit it to scale their attacks. We are witnessing a 100-fold increase in synthetic identities and a sevenfold rise in deepfake-driven impersonations over the past 24 months. Deloitte’s Center for Financial Services predicts AI-enabled fraud losses could reach $40 billion in the U.S. by 2027, up from $12.3 billion in 2023.
This is no longer just a back-office technical issue; it has become a top concern for leadership across banks, fintechs, and telcos. Three-quarters (72%) of business leaders anticipate AI-generated fraud, including deepfakes, will be a top operational challenge in 2026, according to an Experian report. Nearly half (46%) of businesses surveyed by Incode in 2025 reported an annual increase in deepfake and generative AI fraud.
Bad actors can now perpetrate fraud at scale by targeting multiple victims at the same time using the same or fewer resources. Consequently, the stakes have escalated rapidly. Enterprises must now find more effective ways to distinguish between reality and fiction before these attacks compromise trust, revenue, and operational continuity.
The new arms race
Fraud prevention has always been a constant game of leapfrog. Now, however, enterprises must adopt highly advanced defenses as they work to thwart fraudsters who have access to the same AI tools and no legal guardrails.
By some estimates, 80% of fraud is easily detectable, while the remaining 20% requires high-level expertise. That’s where most vendors’ performance fails. Sophisticated fraudsters are not only more capable of impersonating identities but are also increasingly networked, sharing intelligence on how to bypass specific company defenses.
Agility as the primary security metric
In this environment, the “7-Day Benchmark” is essential. A defense model must be able to identify a new attack vector, retrain its data sets, and deploy an updated mitigation model within 7 to 10 days.
One reason so many organizations remain vulnerable to this new generation of attacks is that they rely on third-party vendors whose update cycles can take months to test and deploy. Modern defense requires an approach like Deepsight: a combination of machine learning, behavior checks, and device checks that identify camera injections and synthetic document fraud and verify that the user is a real person.
Defense checklist: 4 questions for every vendor
To narrow this “velocity gap,” executives need to take a closer look at how well equipped their providers are to address this new generation of threats. Here are four pointed questions to explore:
(For a more complete guide on selecting an identity verification vendor, we recommend getting a complimentary copy of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Identity Verification.)
Secure your defenses against AI-enabled fraudsters
The era of treating identity verification as a static compliance checkbox is over. As the internet makes identity spoofing easier than ever before, the burden is on leadership to ensure their defenses can evolve at the speed of the adversary.
Audit your vendor ecosystem today: Demand proprietary technology that iterates in days, insist on top-tier independent certifications for mobile environments, and prioritize networks that share real-time intelligence. Organizations that treat trust as a core strategic capability will thrive; those that remain reactive will find themselves increasingly vulnerable in a world where reality is becoming ever more malleable.
Fernanda Sottil is Senior Director of Strategy at Incode Technologies, a leading identity verification company.
Learn more: Find out how Incode helps leading organizations eliminate fraud before it happens.
The post Weaponized AI: The new frontier of fraud and identity spoofing appeared first on CyberScoop.
China-based phishing groups blamed for non-stop scam SMS messages about a supposed wayward package or unpaid toll fee are promoting a new offering, just in time for the holiday shopping season: Phishing kits for mass-creating fake but convincing e-commerce websites that convert customer payment card data into mobile wallets from Apple and Google. Experts say these same phishing groups also are now using SMS lures that promise unclaimed tax refunds and mobile rewards points.
Over the past week, thousands of domain names were registered for scam websites that purport to offer T-Mobile customers the opportunity to claim a large number of rewards points. The phishing domains are being promoted by scam messages sent via Apple’s iMessage service or the functionally equivalent RCS messaging service built into Google phones.
An instant message spoofing T-Mobile says the recipient is eligible to claim thousands of rewards points.
The website scanning service urlscan.io shows thousands of these phishing domains have been deployed in just the past few days alone. The phishing websites will only load if the recipient visits with a mobile device, and they ask for the visitor’s name, address, phone number and payment card data to claim the points.
A phishing website registered this week that spoofs T-Mobile.
If card data is submitted, the site will then prompt the user to share a one-time code sent via SMS by their financial institution. In reality, the bank is sending the code because the fraudsters have just attempted to enroll the victim’s phished card details in a mobile wallet from Apple or Google. If the victim also provides that one-time code, the phishers can then link the victim’s card to a mobile device that they physically control.
Pivoting off these T-Mobile phishing domains in urlscan.io reveals a similar scam targeting AT&T customers:
An SMS phishing or “smishing” website targeting AT&T users.
Ford Merrill works in security research at SecAlliance, a CSIS Security Group company. Merrill said multiple China-based cybercriminal groups that sell phishing-as-a-service platforms have been using the mobile points lure for some time, but the scam has only recently been pointed at consumers in the United States.
“These points redemption schemes have not been very popular in the U.S., but have been in other geographies like EU and Asia for a while now,” Merrill said.
A review of other domains flagged by urlscan.io as tied to this Chinese SMS phishing syndicate shows they are also spoofing U.S. state tax authorities, telling recipients they have an unclaimed tax refund. Again, the goal is to phish the user’s payment card information and one-time code.
A text message that spoofs the District of Columbia’s Office of Tax and Revenue.
Many SMS phishing or “smishing” domains are quickly flagged by browser makers as malicious. But Merrill said one burgeoning area of growth for these phishing kits — fake e-commerce shops — can be far harder to spot because they do not call attention to themselves by spamming the entire world.
Merrill said the same Chinese phishing kits used to blast out package redelivery message scams are equipped with modules that make it simple to quickly deploy a fleet of fake but convincing e-commerce storefronts. Those phony stores are typically advertised on Google and Facebook, and consumers usually end up at them by searching online for deals on specific products.
A machine-translated screenshot of an ad from a China-based phishing group promoting their fake e-commerce shop templates.
With these fake e-commerce stores, the customer is supplying their payment card and personal information as part of the normal check-out process, which is then punctuated by a request for a one-time code sent by your financial institution. The fake shopping site claims the code is required by the user’s bank to verify the transaction, but it is sent to the user because the scammers immediately attempt to enroll the supplied card data in a mobile wallet.
According to Merrill, it is only during the check-out process that these fake shops will fetch the malicious code that gives them away as fraudulent, which tends to make it difficult to locate these stores simply by mass-scanning the web. Also, most customers who pay for products through these sites don’t realize they’ve been snookered until weeks later when the purchased item fails to arrive.
“The fake e-commerce sites are tough because a lot of them can fly under the radar,” Merrill said. “They can go months without being shut down, they’re hard to discover, and they generally don’t get flagged by safe browsing tools.”
Happily, reporting these SMS phishing lures and websites is one of the fastest ways to get them properly identified and shut down. Raymond Dijkxhoorn is the CEO and a founding member of SURBL, a widely-used blocklist that flags domains and IP addresses known to be used in unsolicited messages, phishing and malware distribution. SURBL has created a website called smishreport.com that asks users to forward a screenshot of any smishing message(s) received.
“If [a domain is] unlisted, we can find and add the new pattern and kill the rest” of the matching domains, Dijkxhoorn said. “Just make a screenshot and upload. The tool does the rest.”
The SMS phishing reporting site smishreport.com.
Merrill said the last few weeks of the calendar year typically see a big uptick in smishing — particularly package redelivery schemes that spoof the U.S. Postal Service or commercial shipping companies.
“Every holiday season there is an explosion in smishing activity,” he said. “Everyone is in a bigger hurry, frantically shopping online, paying less attention than they should, and they’re just in a better mindset to get phished.”
As we can see, adopting a shopping strategy of simply buying from the online merchant with the lowest advertised prices can be a bit like playing Russian Roulette with your wallet. Even people who shop mainly at big-name online stores can get scammed if they’re not wary of too-good-to-be-true offers (think third-party sellers on these platforms).
If you don’t know much about the online merchant that has the item you wish to buy, take a few minutes to investigate its reputation. If you’re buying from an online store that is brand new, the risk that you will get scammed increases significantly. How do you know the lifespan of a site selling that must-have gadget at the lowest price? One easy way to get a quick idea is to run a basic WHOIS search on the site’s domain name. The more recent the site’s “created” date, the more likely it is a phantom store.
If you receive a message warning about a problem with an order or shipment, visit the e-commerce or shipping site directly, and avoid clicking on links or attachments — particularly missives that warn of some dire consequences unless you act quickly. Phishers and malware purveyors typically seize upon some kind of emergency to create a false alarm that often causes recipients to temporarily let their guard down.
But it’s not just outright scammers who can trip up your holiday shopping: Often times, items that are advertised at steeper discounts than other online stores make up for it by charging way more than normal for shipping and handling.
So be careful what you agree to: Check to make sure you know how long the item will take to be shipped, and that you understand the store’s return policies. Also, keep an eye out for hidden surcharges, and be wary of blithely clicking “ok” during the checkout process.
Most importantly, keep a close eye on your monthly statements. If I were a fraudster, I’d most definitely wait until the holidays to cram through a bunch of unauthorized charges on stolen cards, so that the bogus purchases would get buried amid a flurry of other legitimate transactions. That’s why it’s key to closely review your credit card bill and to quickly dispute any charges you didn’t authorize.
Lawrence Hoffmann // Election fraud is something I’ve mentioned here recently. The reality we must face here is that any time a digital system is used for voting there is […]
The post Lawrence’s List 090216 appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..
Recently, Constella Intelligence has observed an increase in attacks and data breaches resulting in cryptocurrency leaks. This surge could be partly attributed to comments made by former President Donald Trump in support of Bitcoin, which may have heightened hackers’ interest in these sites.
Former President Donald Trump has recently positioned himself as a pro-crypto presidential candidate. During his keynote speech at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville, Tennessee, held from July 25-27, 2024, Trump emphasized the transformative potential of cryptocurrencies. He pledged to make the United States a leader in Bitcoin mining and digital asset management.
These comments could have caused crypto-related sites to increase in value, making them more attractive targets for cybercriminals. As Bitcoin prices surge, the incentive for attacks on these platforms grows, highlighting the need for robust security measures.
In the first half of 2024, over 250 possible breaches or leaks related to cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and Bitcoin have been reported. These potential breaches could have affected users of various cryptocurrency platforms, including Bitcointalk, Crypto.com, Binance, eToro, and others.
Below are examples of how threat actors are offering information about these crypto-related sites on the Dark Web
This information was published on March 31, 2024. According to the threat actor the data includes:
The post was made on May 27, 2024. The exposed information includes:
The threat actor “whix” published this on March 26, 2024. The exposed information includes:
The same threat actor also reported this on March 25, 202, where the following information could be found:
According to the threat actor on March 25, 2024, a database exposing the following information was published:
These platforms are integral to the crypto ecosystem, providing services such as trading, wallet management, and social interaction for crypto enthusiasts.
Constella Intelligence has checked if the information published could have been produced as the effect of infostealer infections. This check resulted in nearly 4 million users of these cryptocurrency companies being exposed to infostealer data. Most exposures have impacted major cryptocurrency exchange platforms:
Digging into the infostealer exposures, Constella Intelligence also identified what seems to be infostealer infections of potential employees of some of those companies, including Binance.com, eToro.com, Crypto.com, and Localbitcoins.com, among others.
The exposure of such extensive and sensitive information has significant and far-reaching implications as it endangers the financial security and privacy of millions of users. The compromised data can be exploited for various malicious activities:
To mitigate the risks associated with the recent breaches, users should adopt the following security practices:
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