Authorities from multiple countries dismantled SocksEscort, a residential proxy network cybercriminals used to commit large-scale fraud, claiming access to about 369,000 IP addresses since 2020, the Justice Department said Thursday.

Europol, which aided the investigation alongside various law enforcement agencies, Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs and the Shadowserver Foundation, said the malicious proxy service compromised routers and IoT devices in 163 countries. Officials said the proxy network’s payment platform received about $5.8 million from its customers.

The globally coordinated action, dubbed Operation Lightning, took down and seized 34 domains and 23 servers in seven countries. U.S. officials froze a combined $3.5 million in cryptocurrency allegedly linked to the botnet that was created from infected devices.

“Cybercrime thrives on anonymity,” Catherine De Bolle, executive director at Europol, said in a statement. “Proxy services like SocksEscort provide criminals with the digital cover they need to launch attacks, distribute illegal content and evade detection.”

SocksEscort’s operators assembled the botnet by exploiting a vulnerability in residential modems from an unnamed vendor, according to officials.

The cybercrime operation defrauded Americans and U.S. businesses of millions of dollars, the Justice Department said. More than one-quarter of the 8,000 infected routers SocksEscort advertised in February were based in the United States.  

SocksEscort began operating in 2009 and its command-and-control infrastructure went undetected by most tools for a very long time, Ryan English, information security engineer at Black Lotus Labs, told CyberScoop.

The botnet’s infrastructure, which was powered by AVRecon malware, was elusive and maintained a consistently high volume, claiming an average 20,000 victims weekly since early 2024. Its impact peaked in January 2025 when it ensnared more than 15,000 victims daily, according to Black Lotus Labs’ research. 

The company said it observed 280,000 unique IPs as victims of the proxy network since early 2025, and more than half of SocksEscort’s victims were based in the United States and United Kingdom.

“Given the high volume of victim generation, it would not surprise me if they eventually hit something really important that moved them up the list of networks to go after,” Chris Formosa, senior lead information security engineer at Black Lotus Labs, told CyberScoop. 

“They were exclusively marketing to cybercriminals and nowhere else,” he added. “With a network like this, once law enforcement gains legal access to backend infrastructure it can give them a lot of intelligence on other threat actors besides the botnet operators.”

Various agencies from Austria, Bulgaria, Eurojust, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands and Romania assisted in the investigation and takedown.

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Authorities from 14 countries shut down LeakBase, seized its domains and arrested multiple people allegedly involved in the cybercrime marketplace for stolen data and hacking tools, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

LeakBase had more than 142,000 members, ranking it among the world’s largest forums for cybercriminals. The site, which was available on the open web, contained a massive archive of hacked databases including hundreds of millions of account credentials, officials said. 

The stolen databases, which included data from U.S. corporations and individuals, were linked to many high-profile attacks, according to officials. Data seized by authorities revealed a trove of credit and debit card numbers, banking account and routing information, credentials for account takeovers, sensitive business records and personally identifiable information. 

“The FBI, Europol, and law enforcement agencies from around the world executed a takedown of LeakBase, one of the largest online cybercriminal platforms, seizing users’ accounts, posts, credit details, private messages and IP logs for evidentiary purposes,” Brett Leatherman, assistant director at the FBI’s cyber division, said in a statement. 

Law enforcement agencies involved in the globally coordinated takedown operation, which began Tuesday, executed search warrants, made arrests and interviewed people in the United States, Australia, Belgium, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain and the United Kingdom.

Officials did not immediately name any suspects, but some of the activity occurred in San Diego and Provo, Utah. Officials said the FBI’s field offices in San Diego and Salt Lake City, which is investigating the case, participated in the operation domestically. The Provo Police Department was also involved.

“Hiding behind a screen does not shield cybercriminals from accountability,” Robert Bohls, special agent in charge at the FBI Salt Lake City field office, said in a statement.

Authorities identified multiple users who believed they were operating anonymously by seizing the forum’s database.

“This international operation demonstrates the strength of our global alliances and our shared commitment to disrupting platforms that facilitate the theft of data and the victimization of innocent people and organizations worldwide,” Bohls added. “Together, we will continue to identify, dismantle, and hold accountable those who seek to profit from cybercrime, no matter where they operate.”

Europol, which hosted the coordinated operation in The Hague, described LeakBase as a “central hub in the cybercrime ecosystem” that specialized in leaked databases and stealer logs. The English-language site, which has been active since 2021, contained more than 32,000 posts and more than 215,000 private messages. 

Authorities collectively engaged in around 100 enforcement actions globally and took measures against 37 of the platform’s most active users Tuesday, according to Europol.

The technical disruption phase got underway Wednesday and the site now displays a seizure page. Officials from Canada, Germany, Greece, Kosovo, Malaysia and The Netherlands also support the investigation.

“Together with our partners, we are sending a message that no criminal is truly anonymous online and removing an easy point of access to stolen information on American businesses and individuals,” Leatherman said. “The FBI will continue to defend the homeland by dismantling the key services that cybercriminals use to facilitate their attacks.”

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Ivanti customers, including major government agencies, face mounting pressure as attackers expand their scope of targets to exploit a pair of vulnerabilities the vendor disclosed late January after in-the-wild attacks already occurred.

The Netherlands’ Dutch Data Protection Authority and the Council for the Judiciary confirmed both agencies were impacted by attacks linked to the Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) zero-day vulnerabilities, according to a notice sent to the country’s parliament Friday. The European Commission also said it found evidence of a cyberattack on its “central infrastructure managing mobile devices,” but it did not identify the vendor in a statement Thursday.

The attacks were publicly disclosed as researchers and threat hunters scrambled to assess the fallout and observed consistent waves of attacks linked to the Ivanti defects. As of Monday afternoon, Shadowserver scans identified 86 compromised instances based on artifacts of exploitation, Piotr Kijewski, CEO of the nonprofit, told CyberScoop.

Researchers last week warned that attacks involving the Ivanti zero-days would spread, repeating a common pattern following the vendor’s disclosure and a third party’s release of exploit code. The vulnerabilities — CVE-2026-1281 and CVE-2026-1340 — each carry a CVSS rating of 9.8 and allow unauthenticated users to execute code remotely in Ivanti EPMM.

Ivanti said a “very limited number of customers” were exploited before it disclosed the defects in a Jan. 29 security advisory, but has declined multiple requests to provide an updated victim count. 

The company released indicators of compromise and a detection script Friday to help customers hunt for potential impact, and thanked The Netherlands’ National Cyber Security Centre for contributing to the script’s development. “We are collaborating closely with our customers as well as trusted government and security partners,” a spokesperson for Ivanti said in a statement.

Attackers of various intents and origins are still compromising additional Ivanti EPMM instances, Kijewski said. Shadowserver is using initial artifacts provided by Saudi Arabia’s National Cybersecurity Authority to scan for webshells and other signs of exploitation, including system commands.

“These artifacts are likely not linked to the initial threat actor targeting the vulnerability. It is likely, however, these instances were compromised by multiple actors by now,” Kijewski said. “More is happening than what we are able to observe.”

Nearly 1,300 instances of Ivanti EPMM are still exposed to the internet, but it’s unknown how many of those are vulnerable or already compromised, according to Shadowserver.

Other researchers that have been tracking the vulnerabilities have also found evidence of heightened malicious activity targeting potential victims. 

During a 24-hour period, Rapid7’s Ivanti EPMM honeypot “recorded hundreds of inbound traffic connections from more than 130 unique IP addresses, with 58% directly attempting exploitation of the latest Ivanti EPMM vulnerabilities,” said Christiaan Beek, the company’s senior director of threat intelligence and analytics. 

Beek emphasized that the dominant payloads observed by Rapid7’s honeypot were not attributed to researchers, but rather built to gain rapid control via reverse shells, webshell deployment attempts and automated payload droppers. 

Ivanti has thus far declined to say when and how it first became aware of the vulnerabilities or when the first known date of exploitation occurred.

Attacks involving Ivanti defects are a recurring problem for the vendor’s customers and security practitioners at large.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has flagged 31 Ivanti defects on its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog since late 2021. At least 19 defects across Ivanti products have been exploited in the past two years.

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Microsoft announced Wednesday that it worked with international law enforcement to seize infrastructure used to run cybercrime subscription service RedVDS and organized civil actions in the United States and United Kingdom to disrupt its further use. 

RedVDS has enabled at least $40 million in fraud losses in the U.S. since March 2025, according to Microsoft. Victims that are joining Microsoft as co-plaintiffs in the civil action include Alabama-based H2 Pharma, a pharmaceutical company that lost more than $7.3 million, and Florida-based Gatehouse Dock Condominium Association, which was tricked out of nearly $500,000. 

“For as little as US $24 a month, RedVDS provides criminals with access to disposable virtual computers that make fraud cheap, scalable and difficult to trace,” Steven Masada, assistant general counsel at Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, said in a blog post. “It provides access to cheap, effective, and disposable virtual computers running unlicensed software, including Windows, allowing criminals to operate quickly, anonymously and across borders.”

Microsoft said a joint operation with Europol and authorities in Germany allowed it to seize RedVDS’s infrastructure and take the marketplace offline. Cybercriminals used the site, which included a loyalty program and referral bonuses for customers, to send high-volume phishing attacks, host infrastructure for scams and facilitate fraud such as business email compromise.

Microsoft customers were among those impacted by RedVDS’s tools and services. 

“Since September 2025, RedVDS‑enabled attacks have led to the compromise or fraudulent access of more than 191,000 Microsoft email accounts across over 130,000 organizations worldwide,” Masada said in the blog post. “These figures represent only a subset of the impacted accounts across all technology providers, illustrating how quickly this infrastructure increases the scale of cyberattacks.”

Over the course of a month, more than 2,600 RedVDS virtual machines sent Microsoft customers an average of one million phishing messages per day, Masada added. 

RedVDS facilitated payment diversion fraud against organizations like H2 Pharma and the Gatehouse Dock Condominium Association through business email compromise. The marketplace was also used to compromise the accounts of realtors, escrow agents and title companies to divert payments, according to Microsoft.

More than 9,000 customers, many in Canada and Australia, were directly impacted by real estate-related fraud aided by RedVDS. Microsoft Threat Intelligence said other scams enabled by RedVDS hit organizations in construction, manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, education and legal services.

Researchers said the marketplace’s user interface was loaded with features that allowed eager cybercriminals to purchase unlicensed and inexpensive Windows-based remote desktop protocol servers with full administrator control. RedVDS reused a single, cloned Windows host image across the service, which allowed researchers to find unique technical fingerprints.

The group that develops and operates RedVDS is tracked by Microsoft as Storm-2470. At least five additional cybercrime groups and cybercriminals who used the Racoon0365 phishing service prior to its takedown in October were also using RedVDS infrastructure, according to Microsoft Threat Intelligence.

RedVDS’s site first launched in 2019 and has remained in operation since providing servers in the U.S., U.K., Canada, France, the Netherlands and Germany. The marketplace “has become a prolific tool for cybercriminals in the past year, facilitating thousands of attacks, including credential theft, account takeovers and mass phishing,” researchers said in a report.

RedVDS rented servers from third-party hosting providers, including at least five hosting companies in the U.S., Canada, U.K., France and the Netherlands. This allowed RedVDS to provision IP addresses in geolocations close to targets, allowing cybercriminals to evade location-based security filters and blend in with normal data center traffic, researchers added. 

“Cybercrime today is powered by shared infrastructure, which means disrupting individual attackers is not enough,” Masada said. “Through this coordinated action, Microsoft has disrupted RedVDS’s operations, including seizing two domains that host the RedVDS marketplace and customer portal, while also laying the groundwork to identify the individuals behind them.”

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Artem Aleksandrovych Stryzhak, a 35-year-old Ukrainian national, pleaded guilty Friday to multiple crimes stemming from his involvement in a string of ransomware attacks targeting U.S. and Europe-based organizations from mid 2018 to late 2021. He faces up to 10 years in jail for conspiracy to commit fraud, including extortion. 

Stryzhak was arrested in Spain in June 2024 and extradited to the United States in April. Authorities are still looking for his alleged co-conspirator Volodymyr Tymoshchuk and announced a $11 million reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction.

“The defendant used Nefilim ransomware to target high-revenue companies in the United States, steal data and extort victims,” Joseph Nocella, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement.

“We remain determined to capture Stryzhak’s codefendant and partner in crime, Volodymyr Tymoshchuk, and bring him to justice in a U.S. courtroom,” Nocella added. Officials accuse Tymoshchuk of acting as an administrator of the Nefilim ransomware group and described him as a serial cybercriminal associated with multiple ransomware strains.

Attacks involving Nefilim ransomware caused millions of dollars in losses from extortion payments and damage to victim networks, officials said. Stryzhak and his co-conspirators allegedly customized executable ransomware files for each victim, creating unique decryption keys and unique ransom notes. 

The ransomware group primarily targeted companies located in the United States, Canada and Australia with more than $100 million in annual revenue, and extorted victims by threatening to publish stolen data. The crew researched companies after they broke into their networks to determine their net worth, size and contact information.

Stryzhak’s victims in the U.S. include an engineering consulting company based in France, an aviation industry company in New York, a chemical company in Ohio, an insurance company in Illinois, a company in the construction industry in Texas, a pet care company in Missouri, an international eyewear company and a company in the oil and gas transportation industry. 

Stryzhak and his co-conspirators also used Nefilim ransomware to encrypt victim networks in Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland, prosecutors said. 

Officials said Stryzhak’s crimes began when he gained access to the Nefilim ransomware code in June 2021 in exchange for 20% of his ransom proceeds.

“Cybercriminals may hide behind screens, but they leave digital footprints everywhere,” Christopher Johnson, special agent in charge of the FBI’s field office in Springfield, Illinois, said in a statement. 

“The FBI follows these digital trails relentlessly — across networks, borders, and time — until those responsible are held accountable,” Johnson added. “Today is a remarkable accomplishment, but we will not stop until we have captured all those responsible for the Nefilim ransomware.”

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Federal cyber authorities shared new details Thursday about the Akira ransomware group’s techniques, the tools it uses and vulnerabilities it exploits for initial access alongside the release of a joint cybersecurity advisory.

Members of the financially motivated group, which initially appeared in March 2023, are associated with other threat groups, including Storm-1567, Howling Scorpius, Punk Spider, Gold Sahara, and may have connections with the disbanded Conti ransomware group, officials said. Akira uses a double-extortion model, encrypting systems after stealing data to amplify pressure on victims.

Akira ransomware has claimed more than $244 million in ransomware proceeds as of late September, the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security agency said in the joint advisory. The group primarily targets small- and medium-sized businesses with many victims impacted in the manufacturing, education, IT, health care, financial and agriculture sectors.

“For the FBI, it is within the top five variants that we investigate,” Brett Leatherman, assistant director at the FBI Cyber Division, said during a media briefing Thursday. “It’s consequential. This group is very consequential that they fall likely within our top five.”

Ransomware is the FBI’s top cybercriminal threat, which is “enormous in terms of the amount of losses, the number of active variants and its disruptive effect,” he said. “The FBI is investigating over 130 ransomware variants targeting U.S. businesses in just about any critical infrastructure sector you can think of.”

The advisory, which was also supported by Europol and cyber authorities in France, Germany and the Netherlands, included six new vulnerabilities Akira is known to exploit, including defects affecting Cisco firewalls and virtual private networks, Windows, VMware ESXi, Veeam Backup and Replication and SonicWall firewalls.

“We know that they are actively looking at the vulnerabilities disclosed in [the joint advisory] in order to monetize their activity,” Leatherman said. 

Researchers previously warned that Akira hit about 40 victims by exploiting CVE-2024-40766, a year-old vulnerability, between mid-July and early August. That burst was followed by another wave of ransomware attacks linked to active exploits of the defect.

The joint advisory, which updates previous guidance around hunting for and defending against Akira, was not in response to any specific attack, said Nick Andersen, executive assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA. 

“It’s more a reflection of the reality that our nation’s ransomware adversaries are continuously evolving their tactics and therefore it’s critical that we improve our defenses as well,” he said. 

Akira operates with quickness, exfiltrating data in just over two hours from initial access in some incidents, according to the advisory. 

The FBI and researchers have observed Akira break into systems using stolen credentials, vulnerabilities, brute-force and password-spraying attacks. Authorities said Akira has abused remote access tools such as AnyDesk and LogMeIn to maintain persistence, created new accounts to establish footholds, and leveraged tools to escalate privileges. 

Some of the indicators of compromise were observed as recently as this month, Leatherman said. 

“Actors are incredibly adaptable and are emphasizing operational security in their actions. Their attacks are increasingly becoming more sophisticated, complex and layered,” he added. “They can be extremely costly for victims, often with remediation costs far outpacing those of the original demand.”

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