Krebs on Security 6 days ago

Who Benefited from the Aisuru and Kimwolf Botnets?

Our first story of 2026 revealed how a destructive new botnet called Kimwolf has infected more than two million devices by mass-compromising a vast number of unofficial Android TV streaming boxes . Today, we’ll dig through digital clues left behind by the hackers, network operators and services that appear to have benefitted from Kimwolf’s spread. On Dec. 17, 2025, the Chinese security firm XLab published a deep dive on Kimwolf , which forces infected devices to participate in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and to relay abusive and malicious Internet traffic for so-called “residential proxy” services. The software that turns one’s device into a residential proxy is often quietly bundled with mobile apps and games. Kimwolf specifically targeted residential proxy software that is factory installed on more than a thousand different models of unsanctioned Android TV streaming devices. Very quickly, the residential proxy’s Internet address starts funneling traffic that is linked to ad fraud, account takeover attempts and mass content scraping. The XLab report explained its researchers found “definitive evidence” that the same cybercriminal actors and infrastructure were used to deploy both Kimwolf and the Aisuru botnet — an earlier version of Kimwolf that also enslaved devices for use in DDoS attacks and proxy services. XLab said it suspected since October that Kimwolf and Aisuru had the same author(s) and operators, based in part on shared code changes over time. But it said those suspicions were confirmed on December 8 when it witnessed both botnet strains being distributed by the same Internet address at 93.95.112[.]59 . Image: XLab. Public records show the Internet address range flagged by XLab is assigned to Lehi, Utah-based Resi Rack LLC . Resi Rack’s website bills the company as a “Premium Game Server Hosting Provider.” Meanwhile, Resi Rack’s ads on the Internet moneymaking forum BlackHatWorld  refer to it as a “Premium Residential Proxy Hosting and Proxy Software Solutions Company.” Resi Rack co-founder Cassidy Hales told KrebsOnSecurity his company received a notification on December 10 about Kimwolf using their network “that detailed what was being done by one of our customers leasing our servers.” “When we received this email we took care of this issue immediately,” Hales wrote in response to an email requesting comment. “This is something we are very disappointed is now associated with our name and this was not the intention of our company whatsoever.” The Resi Rack Internet address cited by XLab on December 8 came onto KrebsOnSecurity’s radar more than two weeks before that. Benjamin Brundage is founder of Synthient , a startup that tracks proxy services. In late October 2025, Brundage shared that the people selling various proxy services which benefitted from the Aisuru and Kimwolf botnets were doing so at a new Discord server called resi[.]to . On November 24, 2025, a member of the resi-dot-to Discord channel shares an IP address responsible for proxying traffic over Android TV streaming boxes infected by the Kimwolf botnet. When KrebsOnSecurity joined the resi[.]to Discord channel in late October as a silent lurker, the server had fewer than 150 members, including “ Shox ” — the nickname used by Resi Rack’s co-founder Mr. Hales — and his business partner “ Linus ,” who did not respond to requests for comment. Other members of the resi[.]to Discord channel would periodically post new IP addresses that were responsible for proxying traffic over the Kimwolf botnet. As the screenshot from resi[.]to above shows, that Resi Rack Internet address flagged by XLab was used by Kimwolf to direct proxy traffic as far back as November 24, if not earlier. All told, Synthient said it tracked at least seven static Resi Rack IP addresses connected to Kimwolf proxy infrastructure between October and December 2025. Neither of Resi Rack’s co-owners responded to follow-up questions. Both have been active in selling proxy services via Discord for nearly two years. According to a review of Discord messages indexed by the cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint , Shox and Linus spent much of 2024 selling static “ISP proxies” by routing various Internet address blocks at major U.S. Internet service providers. In February 2025, AT&T announced that effective July 31, 2025, it would no longer originate routes for network blocks that are not owned and managed by AT&T (other major ISPs have since made similar moves). Less than a month later, Shox and Linus told customers they would soon cease offering static ISP proxies as a result of these policy changes. Shox and Linux, talking about their decision to stop selling ISP proxies. The stated owner of the resi[.]to Discord server went by the abbreviated username “D.” That initial appears to be short for the hacker handle “ Dort ,” a name that was invoked frequently throughout these Discord chats. Dort’s profile on resi dot to. This “Dort” nickname came up in KrebsOnSecurity’s recent conversations with “ Forky ,” a Brazilian man who acknowledged being involved in the marketing of the Aisuru botnet at its inception in late 2024. But Forky vehemently denied having anything to do with a series of massive and record-smashing DDoS attacks in the latter half of 2025 that were blamed on Aisuru, saying the botnet by that point had been taken over by rivals. Forky asserts that Dort is a resident of Canada and one of at least two individuals currently in control of the Aisuru/Kimwolf botnet. The other individual Forky named as an Aisuru/Kimwolf botmaster goes by the nickname “ Snow .” On January 2 — just hours after our story on Kimwolf was published — the historical chat records on resi[.]to were erased without warning and replaced by a profanity-laced message for Synthient’s founder. Minutes after that, the entire server disappeared. Later that same day, several of the more active members of the now-defunct resi[.]to Discord server moved to a Telegram channel where they posted Brundage’s personal information, and generally complained about being unable to find reliable “bulletproof” hosting for their botnet. Hilariously, a user by the name “Richard Remington” briefly appeared in the group’s Telegram server to post a crude “Happy New Year” sketch that claims Dort and Snow are now in control of 3.5 million devices infected by Aisuru and/or Kimwolf. Richard Remington’s Telegram account has since been deleted, but it previously stated its owner operates a website that caters to DDoS-for-hire or “stresser” services seeking to test their firepower. Reports from both Synthient and XLab found that Kimwolf was used to deploy programs that turned infected systems into Internet traffic relays for multiple residential proxy services. Among those was a component that installed a software development kit (SDK) called ByteConnect, which is distributed by a provider known as Plainproxies . ByteConnect says it specializes in “monetizing apps ethically and free,” while Plainproxies advertises the ability to provide content scraping companies with “unlimited” proxy pools. However, Synthient said that upon connecting to ByteConnect’s SDK they instead observed a mass influx of credential-stuffing attacks targeting email servers and popular online websites. A search on LinkedIn finds the CEO of Plainproxies is Friedrich Kraft , whose resume says he is co-founder of ByteConnect Ltd. Public Internet routing records show Mr. Kraft also operates a hosting firm in Germany called 3XK Tech GmbH . Mr. Kraft did not respond to repeated requests for an interview. In July 2025, Cloudflare reported that 3XK Tech (a.k.a. Drei-K-Tech) had become the Internet’s largest source of application-layer DDoS attacks . In November 2025, the security firm GreyNoise Intelligence found that Internet addresses on 3XK Tech were responsible for roughly three-quarters of the Internet scanning being done at the time for a newly discovered and critical vulnerability in security products made by Palo Alto Networks. Source: Cloudflare’s Q2 2025 DDoS threat report. LinkedIn has a profile for another Plainproxies employee, Julia Levi , who is listed as co-founder of ByteConnect. Ms. Levi did not respond to requests for comment. Her resume says she previously worked for two major proxy providers: Netnut Proxy Network, and Bright Data. Synthient likewise said Plainproxies ignored their outreach, noting that the Byteconnect SDK continues to remain active on devices compromised by Kimwolf. A post from the LinkedIn page of Plainproxies Chief Revenue Officer Julia Levi, explaining how the residential proxy business works. Synthient’s January 2 report said another proxy provider heavily involved in the sale of Kimwolf proxies was Maskify , which currently advertises on multiple cybercrime forums that it has more than six million residential Internet addresses for rent. Maskify prices its service at a rate of 30 cents per gigabyte of data relayed through their proxies. According to Synthient, that price range is insanely low and is far cheaper than any other proxy provider in business today. “Synthient’s Research Team received screenshots from other proxy providers showing key Kimwolf actors attempting to offload proxy bandwidth in exchange for upfront cash,” the Synthient report noted. “This approach likely helped fuel early development, with associated members spending earnings on infrastructure and outsourced development tasks. Please note that resellers know precisely what they are selling; proxies at these prices are not ethically sourced.” Maskify did not respond to requests for comment. The Maskify website. Image: Synthient. Hours after our first Kimwolf story was published last week, the resi[.]to Discord server vanished, Synthient’s website was hit with a DDoS attack, and the Kimwolf botmasters took to doxing Brundage via their botnet. The harassing messages appeared as text records uploaded to the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), a distributed system for supporting smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. As documented by XLab, in mid-December the Kimwolf operators upgraded their infrastructure and began using ENS to better withstand the near-constant takedown efforts targeting the botnet’s control servers. An ENS record used by the Kimwolf operators taunts security firms trying to take down the botnet’s control servers. Image: XLab. By telling infected systems to seek out the Kimwolf control servers via ENS, even if the servers that the botmasters use to control the botnet are taken down the attacker only needs to update the ENS text record to reflect the new Internet address of the control server, and the infected devices will immediately know where to look for further instructions. “This channel itself relies on the decentralized nature of blockchain, unregulated by Ethereum or other blockchain operators, and cannot be blocked,” XLab wrote. The text records included in Kimwolf’s ENS instructions can also feature short messages, such as those that carried Brundage’s personal information. Other ENS text records associated with Kimwolf offered some sage advice: “If flagged, we encourage the TV box to be destroyed.” An ENS record tied to the Kimwolf botnet advises, “If flagged, we encourage the TV box to be destroyed.” Both Synthient and XLabs say Kimwolf targets a vast number of Android TV streaming box models, all of which have zero security protections, and many of which ship with proxy malware built in. Generally speaking, if you can send a data packet to one of these devices you can also seize administrative control over it. If you own a TV box that matches one of these model names and/or numbers , please just rip it out of your network. If you encounter one of these devices on the network of a family member or friend, send them a link to this story (or to our January 2 story on Kimwolf ) and explain that it’s not worth the potential hassle and harm created by keeping them plugged in.

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Krebs on Security 1 weeks ago

The Kimwolf Botnet is Stalking Your Local Network

The story you are reading is a series of scoops nestled inside a far more urgent Internet-wide security advisory. The vulnerability at issue has been exploited for months already, and it’s time for a broader awareness of the threat. The short version is that everything you thought you knew about the security of the internal network behind your Internet router probably is now dangerously out of date. The security company Synthient currently sees more than 2 million infected Kimwolf devices distributed globally but with concentrations in Vietnam, Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United States. Synthient found that two-thirds of the Kimwolf infections are Android TV boxes with no security or authentication built in. The past few months have witnessed the explosive growth of a new botnet dubbed Kimwolf , which experts say has infected more than 2 million devices globally. The Kimwolf malware forces compromised systems to relay malicious and abusive Internet traffic — such as ad fraud, account takeover attempts and mass content scraping — and participate in crippling distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks capable of knocking nearly any website offline for days at a time. More important than Kimwolf’s staggering size, however, is the diabolical method it uses to spread so quickly: By effectively tunneling back through various “ residential proxy ” networks and into the local networks of the proxy endpoints, and by further infecting devices that are hidden behind the assumed protection of the user’s firewall and Internet router. Residential proxy networks are sold as a way for customers to anonymize and localize their Web traffic to a specific region, and the biggest of these services allow customers to route their traffic through devices in virtually any country or city around the globe. The malware that turns an end-user’s Internet connection into a proxy node is often bundled with dodgy mobile apps and games. These residential proxy programs also are commonly installed via unofficial Android TV boxes  sold by third-party merchants on popular e-commerce sites like Amazon , BestBuy, Newegg , and Walmart . These TV boxes range in price from $40 to $400, are marketed under a dizzying range of no-name brands and model numbers , and frequently are advertised as a way to stream certain types of subscription video content for free . But there’s a hidden cost to this transaction: As we’ll explore in a moment, these TV boxes make up a considerable chunk of the estimated two million systems currently infected with Kimwolf. Some of the unsanctioned Android TV boxes that come with residential proxy malware pre-installed. Image: Synthient. Kimwolf also is quite good at infecting a range of Internet-connected digital photo frames that likewise are abundant at major e-commerce websites. In November 2025, researchers from Quokka published a report (PDF) detailing serious security issues in Android-based digital picture frames running the Uhale app — including Amazon’s bestselling digital frame as of March 2025. There are two major security problems with these photo frames and unofficial Android TV boxes. The first is that a considerable percentage of them come with malware pre-installed, or else require the user to download an unofficial Android App Store and malware in order to use the device for its stated purpose (video content piracy). The most typical of these uninvited guests are small programs that turn the device into a residential proxy node that is resold to others. The second big security nightmare with these photo frames and unsanctioned Android TV boxes is that they rely on a handful of Internet-connected microcomputer boards that have no discernible security or authentication requirements built-in. In other words, if you are on the same network as one or more of these devices, you can likely compromise them simultaneously by issuing a single command across the network. The combination of these two security realities came to the fore in October 2025, when an undergraduate computer science student at the Rochester Institute of Technology began closely tracking Kimwolf’s growth, and interacting directly with its apparent creators on a daily basis. Benjamin Brundage is the 22-year-old founder of the security firm Synthient , a startup that helps companies detect proxy networks and learn how those networks are being abused. Conducting much of his research into Kimwolf while studying for final exams, Brundage told KrebsOnSecurity in late October 2025 he suspected Kimwolf was a new Android-based variant of Aisuru , a botnet that was incorrectly blamed for a number of record-smashing DDoS attacks last fall. Brundage says Kimwolf grew rapidly by abusing a glaring vulnerability in many of the world’s largest residential proxy services. The crux of the weakness, he explained, was that these proxy services weren’t doing enough to prevent their customers from forwarding requests to internal servers of the individual proxy endpoints. Most proxy services take basic steps to prevent their paying customers from “going upstream” into the local network of proxy endpoints, by explicitly denying requests for local addresses specified in RFC-1918 , including the well-known Network Address Translation (NAT) ranges 10.0.0.0/8, 192.168.0.0/16, and 172.16.0.0/12. These ranges allow multiple devices in a private network to access the Internet using a single public IP address, and if you run any kind of home or office network, your internal address space operates within one or more of these NAT ranges. However, Brundage discovered that the people operating Kimwolf had figured out how to talk directly to devices on the internal networks of millions of residential proxy endpoints, simply by changing their Domain Name System (DNS) settings to match those in the RFC-1918 address ranges. “It is possible to circumvent existing domain restrictions by using DNS records that point to 192.168.0.1 or 0.0.0.0,” Brundage wrote in a first-of-its-kind security advisory sent to nearly a dozen residential proxy providers in mid-December 2025. “This grants an attacker the ability to send carefully crafted requests to the current device or a device on the local network. This is actively being exploited, with attackers leveraging this functionality to drop malware.” As with the digital photo frames mentioned above, many of these residential proxy services run solely on mobile devices that are running some game, VPN or other app with a hidden component that turns the user’s mobile phone into a residential proxy — often without any meaningful consent. In a report published today , Synthient said key actors involved in Kimwolf were observed monetizing the botnet through app installs, selling residential proxy bandwidth, and selling its DDoS functionality. “Synthient expects to observe a growing interest among threat actors in gaining unrestricted access to proxy networks to infect devices, obtain network access, or access sensitive information,” the report observed. “Kimwolf highlights the risks posed by unsecured proxy networks and their viability as an attack vector.” After purchasing a number of unofficial Android TV box models that were most heavily represented in the Kimwolf botnet, Brundage further discovered the proxy service vulnerability was only part of the reason for Kimwolf’s rapid rise: He also found virtually all of the devices he tested were shipped from the factory with a powerful feature called Android Debug Bridge (ADB) mode enabled by default. Many of the unofficial Android TV boxes infected by Kimwolf include the ominous disclaimer: “Made in China. Overseas use only.” Image: Synthient. ADB is a diagnostic tool intended for use solely during the manufacturing and testing processes, because it allows the devices to be remotely configured and even updated with new (and potentially malicious) firmware. However, shipping these devices with ADB turned on creates a security nightmare because in this state they constantly listen for and accept unauthenticated connection requests. For example, opening a command prompt and typing “adb connect” along with a vulnerable device’s (local) IP address followed immediately by “:5555” will very quickly offer unrestricted “super user” administrative access. Brundage said by early December, he’d identified a one-to-one overlap between new Kimwolf infections and proxy IP addresses offered for rent by China-based IPIDEA , currently the world’s largest residential proxy network by all accounts. “Kimwolf has almost doubled in size this past week, just by exploiting IPIDEA’s proxy pool,” Brundage told KrebsOnSecurity in early December as he was preparing to notify IPIDEA and 10 other proxy providers about his research. Brundage said Synthient first confirmed on December 1, 2025 that the Kimwolf botnet operators were tunneling back through IPIDEA’s proxy network and into the local networks of systems running IPIDEA’s proxy software. The attackers dropped the malware payload by directing infected systems to visit a specific Internet address and to call out the pass phrase “ krebsfiveheadindustries ” in order to unlock the malicious download. On December 30, Synthient said it was tracking roughly 2 million IPIDEA addresses exploited by Kimwolf in the previous week. Brundage said he has witnessed Kimwolf rebuilding itself after one recent takedown effort targeting its control servers — from almost nothing to two million infected systems just by tunneling through proxy endpoints on IPIDEA for a couple of days. Brundage said IPIDEA has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of new proxies, advertising access to more than 100 million residential proxy endpoints around the globe in the past week alone . Analyzing the exposed devices that were part of IPIDEA’s proxy pool, Synthient said it found more than two-thirds were Android devices that could be compromised with no authentication needed . After charting a tight overlap in Kimwolf-infected IP addresses and those sold by IPIDEA, Brundage was eager to make his findings public: The vulnerability had clearly been exploited for several months, although it appeared that only a handful of cybercrime actors were aware of the capability. But he also knew that going public without giving vulnerable proxy providers an opportunity to understand and patch it would only lead to more mass abuse of these services by additional cybercriminal groups. On December 17, Brundage sent a security notification to all 11 of the apparently affected proxy providers, hoping to give each at least a few weeks to acknowledge and address the core problems identified in his report before he went public. Many proxy providers who received the notification were resellers of IPIDEA that white-labeled the company’s service. KrebsOnSecurity first sought comment from IPIDEA in October 2025, in reporting on a story about how the proxy network appeared to have benefitted from the rise of the Aisuru botnet , whose administrators appeared to shift from using the botnet primarily for DDoS attacks to simply installing IPIDEA’s proxy program, among others. On December 25, KrebsOnSecurity received an email from an IPIDEA employee identified only as “ Oliver ,” who said allegations that IPIDEA had benefitted from Aisuru’s rise were baseless. “After comprehensively verifying IP traceability records and supplier cooperation agreements, we found no association between any of our IP resources and the Aisuru botnet, nor have we received any notifications from authoritative institutions regarding our IPs being involved in malicious activities,” Oliver wrote. “In addition, for external cooperation, we implement a three-level review mechanism for suppliers, covering qualification verification, resource legality authentication and continuous dynamic monitoring, to ensure no compliance risks throughout the entire cooperation process.” “IPIDEA firmly opposes all forms of unfair competition and malicious smearing in the industry, always participates in market competition with compliant operation and honest cooperation, and also calls on the entire industry to jointly abandon irregular and unethical behaviors and build a clean and fair market ecosystem,” Oliver continued. Meanwhile, the same day that Oliver’s email arrived, Brundage shared a response he’d just received from IPIDEA’s security officer, who identified himself only by the first name Byron . The security officer said IPIDEA had made a number of important security changes to its residential proxy service to address the vulnerability identified in Brundage’s report. “By design, the proxy service does not allow access to any internal or local address space,” Byron explained. “This issue was traced to a legacy module used solely for testing and debugging purposes, which did not fully inherit the internal network access restrictions. Under specific conditions, this module could be abused to reach internal resources. The affected paths have now been fully blocked and the module has been taken offline.” Byron told Brundage IPIDEA also instituted multiple mitigations for blocking DNS resolution to internal (NAT) IP ranges, and that it was now blocking proxy endpoints from forwarding traffic on “high-risk” ports “to prevent abuse of the service for scanning, lateral movement, or access to internal services.” An excerpt from an email sent by IPIDEA’s security officer in response to Brundage’s vulnerability notification. Click to enlarge. Brundage said IPIDEA appears to have successfully patched the vulnerabilities he identified. He also noted he never observed the Kimwolf actors targeting proxy services other than IPIDEA, which has not responded to requests for comment. Riley Kilmer is founder of Spur.us , a technology firm that helps companies identify and filter out proxy traffic. Kilmer said Spur has tested Brundage’s findings and confirmed that IPIDEA and all of its affiliate resellers indeed allowed full and unfiltered access to the local LAN. Kilmer said one model of unsanctioned Android TV boxes that is especially popular — the Superbox, which we profiled in November’s Is Your Android TV Streaming Box Part of a Botnet? — leaves Android Debug Mode running on localhost:5555. “And since Superbox turns the IP into an IPIDEA proxy, a bad actor just has to use the proxy to localhost on that port and install whatever bad SDKs [software development kits] they want,” Kilmer told KrebsOnSecurity. Superbox media streaming boxes for sale on Walmart.com. Both Brundage and Kilmer say IPIDEA appears to be the second or third reincarnation of a residential proxy network formerly known as 911S5 Proxy , a service that operated between 2014 and 2022 and was wildly popular on cybercrime forums. 911S5 Proxy imploded a week after KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive on the service’s sketchy origins and leadership in China. In that 2022 profile, we cited work by researchers at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada who were studying the threat 911S5 could pose to internal corporate networks. The researchers noted that “the infection of a node enables the 911S5 user to access shared resources on the network such as local intranet portals or other services.” “It also enables the end user to probe the LAN network of the infected node,” the researchers explained . “Using the internal router, it would be possible to poison the DNS cache of the LAN router of the infected node, enabling further attacks.” 911S5 initially responded to our reporting in 2022 by claiming it was conducting a top-down security review of the service. But the proxy service abruptly closed up shop just one week later, saying a malicious hacker had destroyed all of the company’s customer and payment records. In July 2024, The U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned the alleged creators of 911S5 , and the U.S. Department of Justice arrested the Chinese national named in my 2022 profile of the proxy service. Kilmer said IPIDEA also operates a sister service called 922 Proxy , which the company has pitched from Day One as a seamless alternative to 911S5 Proxy. “You cannot tell me they don’t want the 911 customers by calling it that,” Kilmer said. Among the recipients of Synthient’s notification was the proxy giant Oxylabs . Brundage shared an email he received from Oxylabs’ security team on December 31, which acknowledged Oxylabs had started rolling out security modifications to address the vulnerabilities described in Synthient’s report. Reached for comment, Oxylabs confirmed they “have implemented changes that now eliminate the ability to bypass the blocklist and forward requests to private network addresses using a controlled domain.” But it said there is no evidence that Kimwolf or other other attackers exploited its network. “In parallel, we reviewed the domains identified in the reported exploitation activity and did not observe traffic associated with them,” the Oxylabs statement continued. “Based on this review, there is no indication that our residential network was impacted by these activities.” Consider the following scenario, in which the mere act of allowing someone to use your Wi-Fi network could lead to a Kimwolf botnet infection. In this example, a friend or family member comes to stay with you for a few days, and you grant them access to your Wi-Fi without knowing that their mobile phone is infected with an app that turns the device into a residential proxy node. At that point, your home’s public IP address will show up for rent at the website of some residential proxy provider. Miscreants like those behind Kimwolf then use residential proxy services online to access that proxy node on your IP, tunnel back through it and into your local area network (LAN), and automatically scan the internal network for devices with Android Debug Bridge mode turned on. By the time your guest has packed up their things, said their goodbyes and disconnected from your Wi-Fi, you now have two devices on your local network — a digital photo frame and an unsanctioned Android TV box — that are infected with Kimwolf. You may have never intended for these devices to be exposed to the larger Internet, and yet there you are. Here’s another possible nightmare scenario: Attackers use their access to proxy networks to modify your Internet router’s settings so that it relies on malicious DNS servers controlled by the attackers — allowing them to control where your Web browser goes when it requests a website. Think that’s far-fetched? Recall the DNSChanger malware from 2012 that infected more than a half-million routers with search-hijacking malware, and ultimately spawned an entire security industry working group focused on containing and eradicating it. Much of what is published so far on Kimwolf has come from the Chinese security firm XLab , which was the first to chronicle the rise of the Aisuru botnet in late 2024. In its latest blog post , XLab said it began tracking Kimwolf on October 24, when the botnet’s control servers were swamping Cloudflare’s DNS servers with lookups for the distinctive domain 14emeliaterracewestroxburyma02132[.]su. This domain and others connected to early Kimwolf variants spent several weeks topping Cloudflare’s chart of the Internet’s most sought-after domains , edging out Google.com and Apple.com of their rightful spots in the top 5 most-requested domains. That’s because during that time Kimwolf was asking its millions of bots to check in frequently using Cloudflare’s DNS servers. The Chinese security firm XLab found the Kimwolf botnet had enslaved between 1.8 and 2 million devices, with heavy concentrations in Brazil, India, The United States of America and Argentina. Image: blog.xLab.qianxin.com It is clear from reading the XLab report that KrebsOnSecurity (and security experts) probably erred in misattributing some of Kimwolf’s early activities to the Aisuru botnet, which appears to be operated by a different group entirely. IPDEA may have been truthful when it said it had no affiliation with the Aisuru botnet, but Brundage’s data left no doubt that its proxy service clearly was being massively abused by Aisuru’s Android variant, Kimwolf. XLab said Kimwolf has infected at least 1.8 million devices, and has shown it is able to rebuild itself quickly from scratch. “Analysis indicates that Kimwolf’s primary infection targets are TV boxes deployed in residential network environments,” XLab researchers wrote. “Since residential networks usually adopt dynamic IP allocation mechanisms, the public IPs of devices change over time, so the true scale of infected devices cannot be accurately measured solely by the quantity of IPs. In other words, the cumulative observation of 2.7 million IP addresses does not equate to 2.7 million infected devices.” XLab said measuring Kimwolf’s size also is difficult because infected devices are distributed across multiple global time zones. “Affected by time zone differences and usage habits (e.g., turning off devices at night, not using TV boxes during holidays, etc.), these devices are not online simultaneously, further increasing the difficulty of comprehensive observation through a single time window,” the blog post observed. XLab noted that the Kimwolf author shows an almost ‘obsessive’ fixation” on Yours Truly, apparently leaving “easter eggs” related to my name in multiple places through the botnet’s code and communications: Image: XLAB. One frustrating aspect of threats like Kimwolf is that in most cases it is not easy for the average user to determine if there are any devices on their internal network which may be vulnerable to threats like Kimwolf and/or already infected with residential proxy malware. Let’s assume that through years of security training or some dark magic you can successfully identify that residential proxy activity on your internal network was linked to a specific mobile device inside your house: From there, you’d still need to isolate and remove the app or unwanted component that is turning the device into a residential proxy. Also, the tooling and knowledge needed to achieve this kind of visibility just isn’t there from an average consumer standpoint. The work that it takes to configure your network so you can see and interpret logs of all traffic coming in and out is largely beyond the skillset of most Internet users (and, I’d wager, many security experts). But it’s a topic worth exploring in an upcoming story. Happily, Synthient has erected a page on its website that will state whether a visitor’s public Internet address was seen among those of Kimwolf-infected systems. Brundage also has compiled a list of the unofficial Android TV boxes that are most highly represented in the Kimwolf botnet. If you own a TV box that matches one of these model names and/or numbers, please just rip it out of your network. If you encounter one of these devices on the network of a family member or friend, send them a link to this story and explain that it’s not worth the potential hassle and harm created by keeping them plugged in. The top 15 product devices represented in the Kimwolf botnet, according to Synthient. Chad Seaman is a principal security researcher with Akamai Technologies . Seaman said he wants more consumers to be wary of these pseudo Android TV boxes to the point where they avoid them altogether. “I want the consumer to be paranoid of these crappy devices and of these residential proxy schemes,” he said. “We need to highlight why they’re dangerous to everyone and to the individual. The whole security model where people think their LAN (Local Internal Network) is safe, that there aren’t any bad guys on the LAN so it can’t be that dangerous is just really outdated now.” “The idea that an app can enable this type of abuse on my network and other networks, that should really give you pause,” about which devices to allow onto your local network, Seaman said. “And it’s not just Android devices here. Some of these proxy services have SDKs for Mac and Windows, and the iPhone. It could be running something that inadvertently cracks open your network and lets countless random people inside.” In July 2025, Google filed a “John Doe”  lawsuit (PDF) against 25 unidentified defendants collectively dubbed the “ BadBox 2.0 Enterprise ,” which Google described as a botnet of over ten million unsanctioned Android streaming devices engaged in advertising fraud. Google said the BADBOX 2.0 botnet, in addition to compromising multiple types of devices prior to purchase, also can infect devices by requiring the download of malicious apps from unofficial marketplaces. Google’s lawsuit came on the heels of a  June 2025 advisory  from the  Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which warned that cyber criminals were gaining unauthorized access to home networks by either configuring the products with malware prior to the user’s purchase, or infecting the device as it downloads required applications that contain backdoors — usually during the set-up process. The FBI said BADBOX 2.0 was discovered after the original BADBOX campaign was disrupted in 2024. The original BADBOX was identified in 2023, and primarily consisted of Android operating system devices that were compromised with backdoor malware prior to purchase. Lindsay Kaye is vice president of threat intelligence at HUMAN Security , a company that worked closely on the BADBOX investigations. Kaye said the BADBOX botnets and the residential proxy networks that rode on top of compromised devices were detected because they enabled a ridiculous amount of advertising fraud, as well as ticket scalping, retail fraud, account takeovers and content scraping. Kaye said consumers should stick to known brands when it comes to purchasing things that require a wired or wireless connection. “If people are asking what they can do to avoid being victimized by proxies, it’s safest to stick with name brands,” Kaye said. “Anything promising something for free or low-cost, or giving you something for nothing just isn’t worth it. And be careful about what apps you allow on your phone.” Many wireless routers these days make it relatively easy to deploy a “Guest” wireless network on-the-fly. Doing so allows your guests to browse the Internet just fine but it blocks their device from being able to talk to other devices on the local network — such as shared folders, printers and drives. If someone — a friend, family member, or contractor — requests access to your network, give them the guest Wi-Fi network credentials if you have that option. There is a small but vocal pro-piracy camp that is almost condescendingly dismissive of the security threats posed by these unsanctioned Android TV boxes. These tech purists positively chafe at the idea of people wholesale discarding one of these TV boxes. A common refrain from this camp is that Internet-connected devices are not inherently bad or good, and that even factory-infected boxes can be flashed with new firmware or custom ROMs that contain no known dodgy software. However, it’s important to point out that the majority of people buying these devices are not security or hardware experts; the devices are sought out because they dangle something of value for “free.” Most buyers have no idea of the bargain they’re making when plugging one of these dodgy TV boxes into their network. It is somewhat remarkable that we haven’t yet seen the entertainment industry applying more visible pressure on the major e-commerce vendors to stop peddling this insecure and actively malicious hardware that is largely made and marketed for video piracy. These TV boxes are a public nuisance for bundling malicious software while having no apparent security or authentication built-in, and these two qualities make them an attractive nuisance for cybercriminals. Stay tuned for Part II in this series, which will poke through clues left behind by the people who appear to have built Kimwolf and benefited from it the most.

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Krebs on Security 2 weeks ago

Happy 16th Birthday, KrebsOnSecurity.com!

KrebsOnSecurity.com celebrates its 16th anniversary today! A huge “thank you” to all of our readers — newcomers, long-timers and drive-by critics alike. Your engagement this past year here has been tremendous and truly a salve on a handful of dark days. Happily, comeuppance was a strong theme running through our coverage in 2025, with a primary focus on entities that enabled complex and globally-dispersed cybercrime services. Image: Shutterstock, Younes Stiller Kraske. In May 2024, we scrutinized the history and ownership of Stark Industries Solutions Ltd. , a “bulletproof hosting” provider that came online just two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine and served as a primary staging ground for repeated Kremlin cyberattacks and disinformation efforts. A year later, Stark and its two co-owners were sanctioned by the European Union, but our analysis showed those penalties have done little to stop the Stark proprietors from rebranding and transferring considerable network assets to other entities they control. In December 2024, KrebsOnSecurity profiled Cryptomus, a financial firm registered in Canada that emerged as the payment processor of choice for dozens of Russian cryptocurrency exchanges and websites hawking cybercrime services aimed at Russian-speaking customers. In October 2025, Canadian financial regulators ruled that Cryptomus had grossly violated its anti-money laundering laws, and levied a record $176 million fine against the platform. In September 2023, KrebsOnSecurity published findings from researchers who concluded that a series of six-figure cyberheists across dozens of victims resulted from thieves cracking master passwords stolen from the password manager service LastPass in 2022. In a court filing in March 2025, U.S. federal agents investigating a spectacular $150 million cryptocurrency heist said they had reached the same conclusion . Phishing was a major theme of this year’s coverage, which peered inside the day-to-day operations of several voice phishing gangs that routinely carried out elaborate, convincing, and financially devastating cryptocurrency thefts. A Day in the Life of a Prolific Voice Phishing Crew examined how one cybercrime gang abused legitimate services at Apple and Google to force a variety of outbound communications to their users, including emails, automated phone calls and system-level messages sent to all signed-in devices. Nearly a half-dozen stories in 2025 dissected the incessant SMS phishing or “smishing” coming from China-based phishing kit vendors , who make it easy for customers to convert phished payment card data into mobile wallets from Apple and Google. In an effort to wrest control over this phishing syndicate’s online resources, Google has since filed at least two John Doe lawsuits targeting these groups and dozens of unnamed defendants. In January, we highlighted research into a dodgy and sprawling content delivery network called Funnull that specialized in helping China-based gambling and money laundering websites distribute their operations across multiple U.S.-based cloud providers. Five months later, the U.S. government sanctioned Funnull , identifying it as a top source of investment/romance scams known as “ pig butchering .” Image: Shutterstock, ArtHead. In May, Pakistan arrested 21 people alleged to be working for Heartsender , a phishing and malware dissemination service that KrebsOnSecurity first profiled back in 2015 . The arrests came shortly after the FBI and the Dutch police seized dozens of servers and domains for the group . Many of those arrested were first publicly identified in a 2021 story here about how they’d inadvertently infected their computers with malware that gave away their real-life identities . In April, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted the proprietors of a Pakistan-based e-commerce company for conspiring to distribute synthetic opioids in the United States. The following month, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how the proprietors of the sanctioned entity are perhaps better known for operating an elaborate and lengthy scheme to scam westerners seeking help with trademarks, book writing, mobile app development and logo designs . Earlier this month, we examined an academic cheating empire turbocharged by Google Ads that earned tens of millions of dollars in revenue and has curious ties to a Kremlin-connected oligarch whose Russian university builds drones for Russia’s war against Ukraine . An attack drone advertised on a website hosted in the same network as Russia’s largest private education company — Synergy University. As ever, KrebsOnSecurity endeavored to keep close tabs on the world’s biggest and most disruptive botnets, which pummeled the Internet this year with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults that were two to three times the size and impact of previous record DDoS attacks . In June, KrebsOnSecurity.com was hit by the largest DDoS attack that Google had ever mitigated at the time (we are a grateful guest of Google’s excellent Project Shield offering). Experts blamed that attack on an Internet-of-Things botnet called Aisuru that had rapidly grown in size and firepower since its debut in late 2024. Another Aisuru attack on Cloudflare just days later practically doubled the size of the June attack against this website. Not long after that, Aisuru was blamed for a DDoS that again doubled the previous record. In October, it appeared the cybercriminals in control of Aisuru had shifted the botnet’s focus from DDoS to a more sustainable and profitable use: Renting hundreds of thousands of infected Internet of Things (IoT) devices to proxy services that help cybercriminals anonymize their traffic . However, it has recently become clear that at least some of the disruptive botnet and residential proxy activity attributed to Aisuru last year likely was the work of people responsible for building and testing a powerful botnet known as Kimwolf . Chinese security firm XLab, which was the first to chronicle Aisuru’s rise in 2024,  recently profiled Kimwolf as easily the world’s biggest and most dangerous collection of compromised machines — with approximately 1.83 million devices under its thumb as of December 17. XLab noted that the Kimwolf author “shows an almost ‘obsessive’ fixation on the well-known cybersecurity investigative journalist Brian Krebs, leaving easter eggs related to him in multiple places.” Image: XLab, Kimwolf Botnet Exposed: The Massive Android Botnet with 1.8 million infected devices. I am happy to report that the first KrebsOnSecurity stories of 2026 will go deep into the origins of Kimwolf, and examine the botnet’s unique and highly invasive means of spreading digital disease far and wide. The first in that series will include a somewhat sobering and global security notification concerning the devices and residential proxy services that are inadvertently helping to power Kimwolf’s rapid growth. Thank you once again for your continued readership, encouragement and support. If you like the content we publish at KrebsOnSecurity.com, please consider making an exception for our domain in your ad blocker. The ads we run are limited to a handful of static images that are all served in-house and vetted by me (there is no third-party content on this site, period). Doing so would help further support the work you see here almost every week. And if you haven’t done so yet, sign up for our email newsletter ! (62,000 other subscribers can’t be wrong, right?). The newsletter is just a plain text email that goes out the moment a new story is published. We send between one and two emails a week, we never share our email list, and we don’t run surveys or promotions. Thanks again, and Happy New Year everyone! Be safe out there.

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Krebs on Security 3 weeks ago

Dismantling Defenses: Trump 2.0 Cyber Year in Review

The Trump administration has pursued a staggering range of policy pivots this past year that threaten to weaken the nation’s ability and willingness to address a broad spectrum of technology challenges, from cybersecurity and privacy to countering disinformation, fraud and corruption. These shifts, along with the president’s efforts to restrict free speech and freedom of the press, have come at such a rapid clip that many readers probably aren’t even aware of them all. President Trump has repeatedly claimed that a primary reason he lost the 2020 election was that social media and Big Tech companies had conspired to silence conservative voices and stifle free speech. Naturally, the president’s impulse in his second term has been to use the levers of the federal government in an effort to limit the speech of everyday Americans, as well as foreigners wishing to visit the United States. In September, Donald Trump signed a national security directive known as NSPM-7 , which directs federal law enforcement officers and intelligence analysts to target “anti-American” activity, including any “tax crimes” involving extremist groups who defrauded the IRS. According to extensive reporting by journalist Ken Klippenstein , the focus of the order is on those expressing “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology,” as well as “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” and “anti-Christianity.” Earlier this month, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo advising the FBI to compile a list of Americans whose activities “may constitute domestic terrorism.” Bondi also ordered the FBI to establish a “ cash reward system ” to encourage the public to report suspected domestic terrorist activity. The memo states that domestic terrorism could include “opposition to law and immigration enforcement” or support for “radical gender ideology.” The Trump administration also is planning to impose social media restrictions on tourists as the president continues to ramp up travel restrictions for foreign visitors. According to a notice from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), tourists — including those from Britain, Australia, France, and Japan — will soon be required to provide five years of their social media history. The CBP said it will also collect “several high value data fields,” including applicants’ email addresses from the past 10 years, their telephone numbers used in the past five years, and names and details of family members. Wired reported in October that the US CBP executed more device searches at the border in the first three months of the year than any other previous quarter. The new requirements from CBP add meat to the bones of Executive Order 14161 , which in the name of combating “foreign terrorist and public safety threats” granted broad new authority that civil rights groups warn could enable a renewed travel ban and expanded visa denials or deportations based on perceived ideology. Critics alleged the order’s vague language around “public safety threats,” creates latitude for targeting individuals based on political views, national origin, or religion. At least 35 nations are now under some form of U.S. travel restrictions . In February, Trump ordered  executive branch agencies to stop enforcing the  U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act , which froze foreign bribery investigations, and even allows for “remedial actions” of past enforcement actions deemed “inappropriate.” The White House also disbanded the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative  and  KleptoCapture Task Force  — units which proved their value in corruption cases and in seizing the assets of sanctioned Russian oligarchs — and diverted resources away from investigating white-collar crime. Also in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi dissolved the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force , an entity created during Trump’s first term designed to counter the influence of foreign governments on American politics. In March 2025, Reuters reported that several U.S. national security agencies had halted work on a coordinated effort to counter Russian sabotage, disinformation and cyberattacks. Former President Joe Biden had ordered his national security team to establish working groups to monitor the issue amid warnings from U.S. intelligence that Russia was escalating a shadow war against Western nations. In a test of prosecutorial independence, Trump’s Justice Department ordered prosecutors to drop the corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams . The fallout was immediate: Multiple senior officials resigned in protest, the case was reassigned, and chaos engulfed the Southern District of New York (SDNY) – historically one of the nation’s most aggressive offices for pursuing public corruption, white-collar crime, and cybercrime cases. When it comes to cryptocurrency, the administration has shifted regulators at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) away from enforcement to cheerleading an industry that has consistently been plagued by scams, fraud and rug-pulls. The SEC in 2025 systematically retreated from enforcement against cryptocurrency operators, dropping major cases against Coinbase , Binance , and others. Perhaps the most troubling example involves Justin Sun , the Chinese-born founder of crypto currency company Tron . In 2023, the SEC charged Sun with fraud and market manipulation. Sun subsequently invested $75 million in the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial (WLF) tokens, became the top holder of the $TRUMP memecoin, and secured a seat at an exclusive dinner with the president. In late February 2025, the SEC dropped its lawsuit. Sun promptly took Tron public through a reverse merger arranged by Dominari Securities, a firm with Trump family ties. Democratic lawmakers have urged the SEC to investigate what they call “concerning ties to President Trump and his family” as potential conflicts of interest and foreign influence. In October, President Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao , the founder of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance . In 2023, Zhao and his company pled guilty to failing to prevent money laundering on the platform. Binance paid a $4 billion fine, and Zhao served a four-month sentence. As CBS News observed last month, shortly after Zhao’s pardon application, he was at the center of a blockbuster deal that put the Trump’s family’s WLF on the map. “Zhao is a citizen of the United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf and in May, an Emirati fund put $2 billion in Zhao’s Binance,” 60 Minutes reported . “Of all the currencies in the world, the deal was done in World Liberty crypto.” SEC Chairman Paul Atkins has made the agency’s new posture towards crypto explicit, stating “most crypto tokens are not securities.” At the same time, President Trump has directed the Department of Labor and the SEC to expand 401(k) access to private equity and crypto — assets that regulators have historically restricted for retail investors due to high risk, fees, opacity, and illiquidity. The executive order explicitly prioritizes “curbing ERISA litigation,” and reducing accountability for fiduciaries while shifting risk onto ordinary workers’ retirement savings. At the White House’s behest, the U.S. Treasury in March suspended the Corporate Transparency Act , a law that required companies to reveal their real owners. Finance experts warned the suspension would bring back shell companies and “ open the flood gates of dirty money ” through the US, such as funds from drug gangs, human traffickers, and fraud groups. Trump’s clemency decisions have created a pattern of freed criminals committing new offenses, including Jonathan Braun , whose sentence for drug trafficking was commuted during Trump’s first term, was found guilty in 2025 of violating supervised release and faces new charges. Eliyahu Weinstein , who received a commutation in January 2021 for running a Ponzi scheme, was sentenced in November 2025 to 37 years for running a new Ponzi scheme. The administration has also granted clemency to a growing list of white-collar criminals: David Gentile , a private equity executive sentenced to seven years for securities and wire fraud (functionally a ponzi-like scheme), and Trevor Milton , the Nikola founder sentenced to four years for defrauding investors over electric vehicle technology. The message: Financial crimes against ordinary investors are no big deal. At least 10 of the January 6 insurrectionists pardoned by President Trump have already been rearrested, charged or sentenced for other crimes , including plotting the murder of FBI agents, child sexual assault, possession of child sexual abuse material and reckless homicide while driving drunk. The administration also imposed sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC). On February 6, 2025, Executive Order 14203 authorized asset freezes and visa restrictions against ICC officials investigating U.S. citizens or allies, primarily in response to the ICC’s arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over alleged war crimes in Gaza. Earlier this month the president launched the “ Gold Card ,” a visa scheme established by an executive order in September that offers wealthy individuals and corporations expedited paths to U.S. residency and citizenship in exchange for $1 million for individuals and $2 million for companies , plus ongoing fees. The administration says it is also planning to offer a “platinum” version of the card that offers special tax breaks — for a cool $5 million. President Trump campaigned for a second term insisting that the previous election was riddled with fraud and had been stolen from him. Shortly after Mr. Trump took the oath of office for a second time, he fired the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — Chris Krebs (no relation) — for having the audacity to state publicly that the 2020 election was the most secure in U.S. history. Mr. Trump revoked Krebs’s security clearances, ordered a Justice Department investigation into his election security work, and suspended the security clearances of employees at SentinelOne , the cybersecurity firm where Krebs worked as chief intelligence and public policy officer. The executive order was the first direct presidential action against any US cybersecurity company. Krebs subsequently resigned from SentinelOne, telling The Wall Street Journal he was leaving to push back on Trump’s efforts “to go after corporate interests and corporate relationships.” The president also dismissed all 15 members of the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB), a nonpartisan government entity established in 2022 with a mandate to investigate the security failures behind major cybersecurity events — likely because those advisors included Chris Krebs. At the time, the CSRB was in the middle of compiling a much-anticipated report on the root causes of Chinese government-backed digital intrusions into at least nine U.S. telecommunications providers. Not to be outdone, the Federal Communication Commission quickly moved to roll back a previous ruling that required U.S. telecom carriers to implement stricter cybersecurity measures. Meanwhile, CISA has lost roughly a third of its workforce this year amid mass layoffs and deferred resignations. When the government shutdown began in October, CISA laid off even more employees and furloughed 65 percent of the remaining staff, leaving only 900 employees working without pay. Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security has reassigned CISA cyber specialists to jobs supporting the president’s deportation agenda. As Bloomberg reported earlier this year, CISA employees were given a week to accept the new roles or resign, and some of the reassignments included relocations to new geographic areas. The White House has signaled that it plans to cut an additional $491 million from CISA’s budget next year , cuts that primarily target CISA programs focused on international affairs and countering misinformation and foreign propaganda. The president’s budget proposal justified the cuts by repeating debunked claims about CISA engaging in censorship. The Trump administration has pursued a similar reorganization at the FBI: The Washington Post reported in October that a quarter of all FBI agents have now been reassigned from national security threats to immigration enforcement. Reuters reported last week that the replacement of seasoned leaders at the FBI and Justice Department with Trump loyalists has led to an unprecedented number of prosecutorial missteps, resulting in a 21 percent dismissal rate of the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office criminal complaints over eight weeks, compared to a mere .5% dismissal rate over the prior 10 years. “These mistakes are causing department attorneys to lose credibility with federal courts, with some judges quashing subpoenas, threatening criminal contempt and issuing opinions that raise questions about their conduct,” Reuters reported. “Grand juries have also in some cases started rejecting indictments, a highly unusual event since prosecutors control what evidence gets presented.” In August, the DHS banned state and local governments from using cyber grants on services provided by the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), a group that for more than 20 years has shared critical cybersecurity intelligence across state lines and provided software and other resources at free or heavily discounted rates. Specifically, DHS barred states from spending funds on services offered by the Elections Infrastructure ISAC , which was effectively shuttered after DHS pulled its funding in February. Cybersecurity Dive reports that the Trump administration’s massive workforce cuts, along with widespread mission uncertainty and a persistent leadership void, have interrupted federal agencies’ efforts to collaborate with the businesses and local utilities that run and protect healthcare facilities, water treatment plans, energy companies and telecommunications networks. The publication said the changes came after the US government eliminated CIPAC — a framework that allowed private companies to share cyber and threat intel without legal penalties. “Government leaders have canceled meetings with infrastructure operators, forced out their longtime points of contact, stopped attending key industry events and scrapped a coordination program that made companies feel comfortable holding sensitive talks about cyberattacks and other threats with federal agencies,” Cybersecurity Dive’s Eric Geller wrote. Both the National Security Agency (NSA) and U.S. Cyber Command have been without a leader since Trump dismissed Air Force General Timothy Haugh in April, allegedly for disloyalty to the president and at the suggestion of far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. The nomination of Army Lt. Gen. William Hartman for the same position fell through in October. The White House has ordered the NSA to cut 8 percent of its civilian workforce (between 1,500 and 2,000 employees). As The Associated Press reported in August, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence plans to dramatically reduce its workforce and cut its budget by more than $700 million annually. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said the cuts were warranted because ODNI had become “bloated and inefficient, and the intelligence community is rife with abuse of power, unauthorized leaks of classified intelligence, and politicized weaponization of intelligence.” The firing or forced retirements of so many federal employees has been a boon to foreign intelligence agencies. Chinese intelligence agencies, for example, reportedly moved quickly to take advantage of the mass layoffs, using a network of front companies to recruit laid-off U.S. government employees for “consulting work.” Former workers with the Defense Department’s Defense Digital Service who resigned en-masse earlier this year thanks to DOGE encroaching on their mission have been approached by the United Arab Emirates to work on artificial intelligence for the oil kingdom’s armed forces, albeit reportedly with the blessing of the Trump administration. President Trump has filed multibillion-dollar lawsuits against a number of major news outlets over news segments or interviews that allegedly portrayed him in a negative light, suing the networks ABC , the BBC , the CBS parent company Paramount , The Wall Street Journal , and The New York Times , among others. The president signed an executive order aimed at slashing public subsidies to PBS and NPR , alleging “bias” in the broadcasters’ reporting. In July, Congress approved a request from Trump to cut $1.1 billion in federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting , the nonprofit entity that funds PBS and NPR. Brendan Carr , the president’s pick to run the  Federal Communications Commission (FCC), initially pledged to “dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.” But on January 22, 2025, the FCC reopened complaints against ABC, CBS and  NBC  over their coverage of the 2024 election. The previous FCC chair had dismissed the complaints as attacks on the First Amendment and an attempt to weaponize the agency for political purposes. President Trump in February seized control of the White House Correspondents’ Association , the nonprofit entity that decides which media outlets should have access to the White House and the press pool that follows the president. The president invited an additional 32 media outlets, mostly conservative or right-wing organizations. According to the journalism group Poynter.org , there are three religious networks, all of which lean conservative, as well as a mix of outlets that includes a legacy paper, television networks, and a digital outlet powered by artificial intelligence.  Trump also barred The Associated Press from the White House over their refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Under Trump appointee Kari Lake , the U.S. Agency for Global Media moved to dismantle Voice of America , Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty , and other networks that for decades served as credible news sources behind authoritarian lines. Courts blocked shutdown orders, but the damage continues through administrative leave, contract terminations, and funding disputes. President Trump this term has fired most of the people  involved in processing  Freedom of Information Act  (FOIA) requests for government agencies. FOIA is an indispensable tool used by journalists and the public to request government records, and to hold leaders accountable. Petitioning the government, particularly when it ignores your requests, often requires challenging federal agencies in court. But that becomes far more difficult if the most competent law firms start to shy away from cases that may involve crossing the president and his administration. On March 22, the president issued a memorandum  that directs heads of the Justice and Homeland Security Departments to “seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable and vexatious litigation against the United States,” or in matters that come before federal agencies. The Trump administration announced increased vetting of applicants for H-1B visas for highly skilled workers, with an internal State Department memo saying that anyone involved in “censorship” of free speech should be considered for rejection. Executive Order 14161 , issued in 2025 on “foreign terrorist and public safety threats,” granted broad new authority that civil rights groups warn could enable a renewed travel ban and expanded visa denials or deportations based on perceived ideology. Critics charged that the order’s vague language around “public safety threats” creates latitude for targeting individuals based on political views, national origin, or religion. At the beginning of this year, President Trump ordered staffers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to stop most work. Created by Congress in 2011 to be a clearinghouse of consumer complaints, the CFPB has sued some of the nation’s largest financial institutions for violating consumer protection laws. The CFPB says its actions have put nearly $18 billion back in Americans’ pockets in the form of monetary compensation or canceled debts, and imposed $4 billion in civil money penalties against violators. The Trump administration said it planned to fire up to 90 percent of all CFPB staff, but a recent federal appeals court ruling in Washington tossed out an earlier decision that would have allowed the firings to proceed. Reuters reported this week that an employee union and others have battled against it in court for ten months, during which the agency has been almost completely idled. The CFPB’s acting director is Russell Vought , a key architect of the GOP policy framework Project 2025. Under Vought’s direction, the CFPB in May quietly withdrew a data broker protection rule intended to limit the ability of U.S. data brokers to sell personal information on Americans. Despite the Federal Reserve’s own post-mortem explicitly blaming Trump-era deregulation for the 2023 Silicon Valley Bank collapse, which triggered a fast-moving crisis requiring emergency weekend bailouts of banks, Trump’s banking regulators in 2025 doubled down. They loosened capital requirements, narrowed definitions of “unsafe” banking practices, and stripped specific risk categories from supervisory frameworks. The setup for another banking crisis requiring taxpayer intervention is now in place. The Privacy Act of 1974, one of the few meaningful federal privacy laws, was built on the principles of consent and separation in response to the abuses of power that came to light during the Watergate era. The law states that when an individual provides personal information to a federal agency to receive a particular service, that data must be used solely for its original purpose . Nevertheless, it emerged in June that the Trump administration has built a central database of all US citizens. According to NPR , the White House plans to use the new platform during upcoming elections to verify the identity and citizenship status of US voters. The database was built by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Governmental Efficiency and is being rolled out in phases to US states. Probably the biggest ungotten scoop of 2025 is the inside story of what happened to all of the personal, financial and other sensitive data that was accessed by workers at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). President Trump tapped Elon Musk to lead the newly created department, which was mostly populated by current and former employees of Musk’s various technology companies (including a former denizen of the cybercrime community known as the “Com” ). It soon emerged that the DOGE team was using artificial intelligence to surveil at least one federal agency’s communications for hostility to Mr. Trump and his agenda. DOGE employees were able to access and synthesize data taken from a large number of previously separate and highly guarded federal databases, including those at the Social Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Personnel Management, and the U.S. Department of the Treasury. DOGE staffers did so largely by circumventing or dismantling security measures designed to detect and prevent misuse of federal databases, including standard incident response protocols, auditing, and change-tracking mechanisms. For example, an IT expert with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleges that DOGE employees likely downloaded gigabytes of data from agency case files in early March, using short-lived accounts that were configured to leave few traces of network activity. The NLRB whistleblower said the large data outflows coincided with multiple blocked login attempts from addresses in Russia, which attempted to use valid credentials for a newly-created DOGE user account. The stated goal of DOGE was to reduce bureaucracy and to massively cut costs — mainly by eliminating funding for a raft of federal initiatives that had already been approved by Congress. The DOGE website claimed those efforts reduced “wasteful” and “fraudulent” federal spending by more than $200 billion. However, multiple independent reviews by news organizations determined the true “savings” DOGE achieved was off by a couple of orders of magnitude, and was likely closer to $2 billion. At the same time DOGE was slashing federal programs, President Trump fired at least 17 inspectors general at federal agencies — the very people tasked with actually identifying and stopping waste, fraud and abuse at the federal level. Those included several agencies (such as the NLRB) that had open investigations into one or more of Mr. Musk’s companies for allegedly failing to comply with protocols aimed at protecting state secrets. In September, a federal judge found the president unlawfully fired the agency watchdogs , but none of them have been reinstated. Where is DOGE now? Reuters reported last month that as far as the White House is concerned, DOGE no longer exists , even though it technically has more than half a year left to its charter. Meanwhile, who exactly retains access to federal agency data that was fed by DOGE into AI tools is anyone’s guess. KrebsOnSecurity would like to thank the anonymous researcher NatInfoSec for assisting with the research on this story.

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Krebs on Security 4 weeks ago

Most Parked Domains Now Serving Malicious Content

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. A lookalike domain to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center website, returned a non-threatening parking page (left) whereas a mobile user was instantly directed to deceptive content in October 2025 (right). Image: Infoblox. 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. Samples of redirection paths when visiting scotaibank dot com. Each branch includes a series of domains observed, including the color-coded landing page. Image: Infoblox. 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.

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Krebs on Security 1 months ago

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, December 2025 Edition

Microsoft today pushed updates to fix at least 56 security flaws in its Windows operating systems and supported software. This final Patch Tuesday of 2025 tackles one zero-day bug that is already being exploited, as well as two publicly disclosed vulnerabilities. Despite releasing a lower-than-normal number of security updates these past few months, Microsoft patched a whopping 1,129 vulnerabilities in 2025, an 11.9% increase from 2024. According to Satnam Narang at Tenable , this year marks the second consecutive year that Microsoft patched over one thousand vulnerabilities, and the third time it has done so since its inception. The zero-day flaw patched today is CVE-2025-62221 , a privilege escalation vulnerability affecting Windows 10 and later editions. The weakness resides in a component called the “ Windows Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver ” — a system driver that enables cloud applications to access file system functionalities. “This is particularly concerning, as the mini filter is integral to services like OneDrive, Google Drive, and iCloud, and remains a core Windows component, even if none of those apps were installed,” said Adam Barnett , lead software engineer at Rapid7 . Only three of the flaws patched today earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating: Both CVE-2025-62554 and CVE-2025-62557 involve Microsoft Office , and both can exploited merely by viewing a booby-trapped email message in the Preview Pane. Another critical bug — CVE-2025-62562 — involves Microsoft Outlook , although Redmond says the Preview Pane is not an attack vector with this one. But according to Microsoft, the vulnerabilities most likely to be exploited from this month’s patch batch are other (non-critical) privilege escalation bugs, including: – CVE-2025-62458 — Win32k – CVE-2025-62470 — Windows Common Log File System Driver – CVE-2025-62472 — Windows Remote Access Connection Manager – CVE-2025-59516 — Windows Storage VSP Driver – CVE-2025-59517 — Windows Storage VSP Driver Kev Breen , senior director of threat research at Immersive , said privilege escalation flaws are observed in almost every incident involving host compromises. “We don’t know why Microsoft has marked these specifically as more likely, but the majority of these components have historically been exploited in the wild or have enough technical detail on previous CVEs that it would be easier for threat actors to weaponize these,” Breen said. “Either way, while not actively being exploited, these should be patched sooner rather than later.” One of the more interesting vulnerabilities patched this month is CVE-2025-64671 , a remote code execution flaw in the Github Copilot Plugin for Jetbrains AI-based coding assistant that is used by Microsoft and GitHub. Breen said this flaw would allow attackers to execute arbitrary code by tricking the large language model (LLM) into running commands that bypass the user’s “auto-approve” settings. CVE-2025-64671 is part of a broader, more systemic security crisis that security researcher Ari Marzuk has branded IDEsaster (IDE  stands for “integrated development environment”), which encompasses more than 30 separate vulnerabilities reported in nearly a dozen market-leading AI coding platforms, including Cursor , Windsurf , Gemini CLI , and Claude Code . The other publicly-disclosed vulnerability patched today is CVE-2025-54100 , a remote code execution bug in Windows Powershell on Windows Server 2008 and later that allows an unauthenticated attacker to run code in the security context of the user. For anyone seeking a more granular breakdown of the security updates Microsoft pushed today, check out the roundup at the SANS Internet Storm Center . As always, please leave a note in the comments if you experience problems applying any of this month’s Windows patches.

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Krebs on Security 1 months ago

Drones to Diplomas: How Russia’s Largest Private University is Linked to a $25M Essay Mill

A sprawling academic cheating network turbocharged by Google Ads that has generated nearly $25 million in revenue has curious ties to a Kremlin-connected oligarch whose Russian university builds drones for Russia’s war against Ukraine. The Nerdify homepage. The link between essay mills and Russian attack drones might seem improbable, but understanding it begins with a simple question: How does a human-intensive academic cheating service stay relevant in an era when students can simply ask AI to write their term papers? The answer – recasting the business as an AI company – is just the latest chapter in a story of many rebrands that link the operation to Russia’s largest private university. Search in Google for any terms related to academic cheating services — e.g., “help with exam online” or “term paper online” — and you’re likely to encounter websites with the words “nerd” or “geek” in them, such as thenerdify[.]com and geekly-hub[.]com . With a simple request sent via text message, you can hire their tutors to help with any assignment. These nerdy and geeky-branded websites frequently cite their “honor code,” which emphasizes they do not condone academic cheating, will not write your term papers for you, and will only offer support and advice for customers. But according to This Isn’t Fine , a Substack blog about contract cheating and essay mills, the Nerdify brand of websites will happily ignore that mantra. “We tested the quick SMS for a price quote,” wrote This Isn’t Fine author Joseph Thibault . “The honor code references and platitudes apparently stop at the website. Within three minutes, we confirmed that a full three-page, plagiarism- and AI-free MLA formatted Argumentative essay could be ours for the low price of $141.” A screenshot from Joseph Thibault’s Substack post shows him purchasing a 3-page paper with the Nerdify service. Google prohibits ads that “enable dishonest behavior.” Yet, a sprawling global essay and homework cheating network run under the Nerdy brands has quietly bought its way to the top of Google searches – booking revenues of almost $25 million through a maze of companies in Cyprus, Malta and Hong Kong, while pitching “tutoring” that delivers finished work that students can turn in. When one Nerdy-related Google Ads account got shut down, the group behind the company would form a new entity with a front-person (typically a young Ukrainian woman), start a new ads account along with a new website and domain name (usually with “nerdy” in the brand), and resume running Google ads for the same set of keywords. UK companies belonging to the group that have been shut down by Google Ads since Jan 2025 include: – Proglobal Solutions LTD (advertised nerdifyit[.]com); – AW Tech Limited (advertised thenerdify[.]com); – Geekly Solutions Ltd (advertised geekly-hub[.]com). Currently active Google Ads accounts for the Nerdify brands include: -OK Marketing LTD (advertising geekly-hub[.]net⁩), formed in the name of Olha Karpenko , a young Ukrainian woman; – Two Sigma Solutions LTD (advertising litero[.]ai), formed in the name of Olekszij (Alexey) Pokatilo . Google’s Ads Transparency page for current Nerdify advertiser OK Marketing LTD. Mr. Pokatilo has been in the essay-writing business since at least 2009, operating a paper-mill enterprise called Livingston Research alongside Alexander Korsukov , who is listed as an owner. According to a lengthy account from a former employee , Livingston Research mainly farmed its writing tasks out to low-cost workers from Kenya, Philippines, Pakistan, Russia and Ukraine. Pokatilo moved from Ukraine to the United Kingdom in Sept. 2015 and co-founded a company called Awesome Technologies , which pitched itself as a way for people to outsource tasks by sending a text message to the service’s assistants. The other co-founder of Awesome Technologies is 36-year-old Filip Perkon , a Swedish man living in London who touts himself as a serial entrepreneur and investor. Years before starting Awesome together, Perkon and Pokatilo co-founded a student group called Russian Business Week while the two were classmates at the London School of Economics. According to the Bulgarian investigative journalist Christo Grozev , Perkon’s birth certificate was issued by the Soviet Embassy in Sweden. Alexey Pokatilo (left) and Filip Perkon at a Facebook event for startups in San Francisco in mid-2015. Around the time Perkon and Pokatilo launched Awesome Technologies, Perkon was building a social media propaganda tool called the Russian Diplomatic Online Club , which Perkon said would “turbo-charge” Russian messaging online. The club’s newsletter urged subscribers to install in their Twitter accounts a third-party app called Tweetsquad that would retweet Kremlin messaging on the social media platform. Perkon was praised by the Russian Embassy in London for his efforts: D uring the contentious Brexit vote that ultimately led to the United Kingdom leaving the European Union, the Russian embassy in London used this spam tweeting tool to auto-retweet the Russian ambassador’s posts from supporters’ accounts . Neither Mr. Perkon nor Mr. Pokatilo replied to requests for comment. A review of corporations tied to Mr. Perkon as indexed by the business research service North Data finds he holds or held director positions in several U.K. subsidiaries of Synergy University , Russia’s largest private education provider. Synergy has more than 35,000 students, and sells T-shirts with patriotic slogans such as “Crimea is Ours,” and “The Russian Empire — Reloaded.” The president of Synergy University is Vadim Lobov , a Kremlin insider whose headquarters on the outskirts of Moscow reportedly features a wall-sized portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the pop-art style of Andy Warhol. For a number of years, Lobov and Perkon co-produced a cross-cultural event in the U.K. called Russian Film Week . Synergy President Vadim Lobov and Filip Perkon, speaking at a press conference for Russian Film Week, a cross-cultural event in the U.K. co-produced by both men. Mr. Lobov was one of 11 individuals reportedly hand-picked by the convicted Russian spy Marina Butina to attend the 2017 National Prayer Breakfast held in Washington D.C. just two weeks after President Trump’s first inauguration. While Synergy University promotes itself as Russia’s largest private educational institution, hundreds of international students tell a different story. Online reviews from students paint a picture of unkept promises: Prospective students from Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and other nations paying thousands in advance fees for promised study visas to Russia, only to have their applications denied with no refunds offered. “My experience with Synergy University has been nothing short of heartbreaking,” reads one such account. “When I first discovered the school, their representative was extremely responsive and eager to assist. He communicated frequently and made me believe I was in safe hands. However, after paying my hard-earned tuition fees, my visa was denied. It’s been over 9 months since that denial, and despite their promises, I have received no refund whatsoever. My messages are now ignored, and the same representative who once replied instantly no longer responds at all. Synergy University, how can an institution in Europe feel comfortable exploiting the hopes of Africans who trust you with their life savings? This is not just unethical — it’s predatory.” This pattern repeats across reviews by multilingual students from Pakistan, Nepal, India, and various African nations — all describing the same scheme: Attractive online marketing, promises of easy visa approval, upfront payment requirements, and then silence after visa denials. Reddit discussions in r/Moscow and r/AskARussian are filled with warnings. “It’s a scam, a diploma mill,” writes one user. “They literally sell exams. There was an investigation on Rossiya-1 television showing students paying to pass tests.” The Nerdify website’s “About Us” page says the company was co-founded by Pokatilo and an American named Brian Mellor . The latter identity seems to have been fabricated, or at least there is no evidence that a person with this name ever worked at Nerdify. Rather, it appears that the SMS assistance company co-founded by Messrs. Pokatilo and Perkon (Awesome Technologies) fizzled out shortly after its creation, and that Nerdify soon adopted the process of accepting assignment requests via text message and routing them to freelance writers. A closer look at an early “About Us” page for Nerdify in The Wayback Machine suggests that Mr. Perkon was the real co-founder of the company: The photo at the top of the page shows four people wearing Nerdify T-shirts seated around a table on a rooftop deck in San Francisco, and the man facing the camera is Perkon. Filip Perkon, top right, is pictured wearing a Nerdify T-shirt in an archived copy of the company’s About Us page. Image: archive.org. Where are they now? Pokatilo is currently running a startup called Litero.Ai , which appears to be an AI-based essay writing service. In July 2025, Mr. Pokatilo received pre-seed funding of $800,000 for Litero from an investment program backed by the venture capital firms AltaIR Capital, Yellow Rocks, Smart Partnership Capital, and I2BF Global Ventures. Meanwhile, Filip Perkon is busy setting up toy rubber duck stores in Miami and in at least three locations in the United Kingdom . These “Duck World” shops market themselves as “the world’s largest duck store.” This past week, Mr. Lobov was in India with Putin’s entourage on a charm tour with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Although Synergy is billed as an educational institution, a review of the company’s sprawling corporate footprint (via DNS) shows it also is assisting the Russian government in its war against Ukraine. Synergy University President Vadim Lobov (right) pictured this week in India next to Natalia Popova, a Russian TV presenter known for her close ties to Putin’s family, particularly Putin’s daughter, who works with Popova at the education and culture-focused Innopraktika Foundation. The website bpla.s ynergy[.]bot , for instance, says the company is involved in developing combat drones to aid Russian forces and to evade international sanctions on the supply and re-export of high-tech products. A screenshot from the website of synergy,bot shows the company is actively engaged in building armed drones for the war in Ukraine. KrebsOnSecurity would like to thank the anonymous researcher NatInfoSec for their assistance in this investigation. Update, Dec. 8, 10:06 a.m. ET: Mr. Pokatilo responded to requests for comment after the publication of this story. Pokatilo said he has no relation to Synergy nor to Mr. Lobov, and that his work with Mr. Perkon ended with the dissolution of Awesome Technologies. “I have had no involvement in any of his projects and business activities mentioned in the article and he has no involvement in Litero.ai,” Pokatilo said of Perkon. Mr. Pokatilo said his new company Litero “does not provide contract cheating services and is built specifically to improve transparency and academic integrity in the age of universal use of AI by students.” “I am Ukrainian,” he said in an email. “My close friends, colleagues, and some family members continue to live in Ukraine under the ongoing invasion. Any suggestion that I or my company may be connected in any way to Russia’s war efforts is deeply offensive on a personal level and harmful to the reputation of Litero.ai, a company where many team members are Ukrainian.” Update, Dec. 11, 12:07 p.m. ET: Mr. Perkon responded to requests for comment after the publication of this story. Perkon said the photo of him in a Nerdify T-shirt (see screenshot above) was taken after a startup event in San Francisco, where he volunteered to act as a photo model to help friends with their project. “I have no business or other relations to Nerdify or any other ventures in that space,” Mr. Perkon said in an email response. “As for Vadim Lobov, I worked for Venture Capital arm at Synergy until 2013 as well as his business school project in the UK, that didn’t get off the ground, so the company related to this was made dormant. Then Synergy kindly provided sponsorship for my Russian Film Week event that I created and ran until 2022 in the U.K., an event that became the biggest independent Russian film festival outside of Russia. Since the start of the Ukraine war in 2022 I closed the festival down.” “I have had no business with Vadim Lobov since 2021 (the last film festival) and I don’t keep track of his endeavours,” Perkon continued. “As for Alexey Pokatilo, we are university friends. Our business relationship has ended after the concierge service Awesome Technologies didn’t work out, many years ago.”

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Krebs on Security 1 months ago

SMS Phishers Pivot to Points, Taxes, Fake Retailers

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.

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Krebs on Security 1 months ago

Meet Rey, the Admin of ‘Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters’

A prolific cybercriminal group that calls itself “ Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters ” has dominated headlines this year by regularly stealing data from and publicly mass extorting dozens of major corporations. But the tables seem to have turned somewhat for “Rey,” the moniker chosen by the technical operator and public face of the hacker group: Earlier this week, Rey confirmed his real life identity and agreed to an interview after KrebsOnSecurity tracked him down and contacted his father. Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters (SLSH) is thought to be an amalgamation of three hacking groups — Scattered Spider , LAPSUS$ and ShinyHunters . Members of these gangs hail from many of the same chat channels on the Com , a mostly English-language cybercriminal community that operates across an ocean of Telegram and Discord servers. In May 2025, SLSH members launched a social engineering campaign that used voice phishing to trick targets into connecting a malicious app to their organization’s Salesforce portal. The group later launched a data leak portal that threatened to publish the internal data of three dozen companies that allegedly had Salesforce data stolen, including Toyota ,  FedEx ,  Disney/Hulu , and  UPS . The new extortion website tied to ShinyHunters, which threatens to publish stolen data unless Salesforce or individual victim companies agree to pay a ransom. Last week, the SLSH Telegram channel featured an offer to recruit and reward “insiders,” employees at large companies who agree to share internal access to their employer’s network for a share of whatever ransom payment is ultimately paid by the victim company. SLSH has solicited insider access previously, but their latest call for disgruntled employees started making the rounds on social media at the same time news broke that the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike had fired an employee for allegedly sharing screenshots of internal systems with the hacker group (Crowdstrike said their systems were never compromised and that it has turned the matter over to law enforcement agencies). The Telegram server for the Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters has been attempting to recruit insiders at large companies. Members of SLSH have traditionally used other ransomware gangs’ encryptors in attacks, including malware from ransomware affiliate programs like ALPHV/BlackCat, Qilin, RansomHub, and DragonForce. But last week, SLSH announced on its Telegram channel the release of their own ransomware-as-a-service operation called ShinySp1d3r . The individual responsible for releasing the ShinySp1d3r ransomware offering is a core SLSH member who goes by the handle “Rey” and who is currently one of just three administrators of the SLSH Telegram channel. Previously, Rey was an administrator of the data leak website for Hellcat , a ransomware group that surfaced in late 2024 and was involved in attacks on companies including Schneider Electric , Telefonica , and Orange Romania . A recent, slightly redacted screenshot of the Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters Telegram channel description, showing Rey as one of three administrators. Also in 2024, Rey would take over as administrator of the most recent incarnation of BreachForums , an English-language cybercrime forum whose domain names have been seized on multiple occasions by the FBI and/or by international authorities. In April 2025, Rey posted on Twitter/X about another FBI seizure of BreachForums. On October 5, 2025, the FBI announced it had once again seized the domains associated with BreachForums, which it described as a major criminal marketplace used by ShinyHunters and others to traffic in stolen data and facilitate extortion. “This takedown removes access to a key hub used by these actors to monetize intrusions, recruit collaborators, and target victims across multiple sectors,” the FBI said. Incredibly, Rey would make a series of critical operational security mistakes last year that provided multiple avenues to ascertain and confirm his real-life identity and location. Read on to learn how it all unraveled for Rey. According to the cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 , Rey was an active user on various BreachForums reincarnations over the past two years, authoring more than 200 posts between February 2024 and July 2025. Intel 471 says Rey previously used the handle “ Hikki-Chan ” on BreachForums, where their first post shared data allegedly stolen from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In that February 2024 post about the CDC, Hikki-Chan says they could be reached at the Telegram username @wristmug . In May 2024, @wristmug posted in a Telegram group chat called “Pantifan” a copy of an extortion email they said they received that included their email address and password. The message that @wristmug cut and pasted appears to have been part of an automated email scam that claims it was sent by a hacker who has compromised your computer and used your webcam to record a video of you while you were watching porn. These missives threaten to release the video to all your contacts unless you pay a Bitcoin ransom, and they typically reference a real password the recipient has used previously. “Noooooo,” the @wristmug account wrote in mock horror after posting a screenshot of the scam message. “I must be done guys.” A message posted to Telegram by Rey/@wristmug. In posting their screenshot, @wristmug redacted the username portion of the email address referenced in the body of the scam message. However, they did not redact their previously-used password, and they left the domain portion of their email address (@proton.me) visible in the screenshot. Searching on @wristmug’s rather unique 15-character password in the breach tracking service Spycloud finds it is known to have been used by just one email address: [email protected] . According to Spycloud, those credentials were exposed at least twice in early 2024 when this user’s device was infected with an infostealer trojan that siphoned all of its stored usernames, passwords and authentication cookies (a finding that was initially revealed in March 2025 by the cyber intelligence firm KELA ). Intel 471 shows the email address [email protected] belonged to a BreachForums member who went by the username o5tdev . Searching on this nickname in Google brings up at least two website defacement archives showing that a user named o5tdev was previously involved in defacing sites with pro-Palestinian messages . The screenshot below, for example, shows that 05tdev was part of a group called Cyb3r Drag0nz Team . Rey/o5tdev’s defacement pages. Image: archive.org. A 2023 report from SentinelOne described Cyb3r Drag0nz Team as a hacktivist group with a history of launching DDoS attacks and cyber defacements as well as engaging in data leak activity. “Cyb3r Drag0nz Team claims to have leaked data on over a million of Israeli citizens spread across multiple leaks,” SentinelOne reported . “To date, the group has released multiple .RAR archives of purported personal information on citizens across Israel.” The cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint finds the Telegram user @05tdev was active in 2023 and early 2024, posting in Arabic on anti-Israel channels like “Ghost of Palestine” [full disclosure: Flashpoint is currently an advertiser on this blog]. Flashpoint shows that Rey’s Telegram account (ID7047194296) was particularly active in a cybercrime-focused channel called Jacuzzi , where this user shared several personal details, including that their father was an airline pilot. Rey claimed in 2024 to be 15 years old, and to have family connections to Ireland. Specifically, Rey mentioned in several Telegram chats that he had Irish heritage, even posting a graphic that shows the prevalence of the surname “ Ginty .” Rey, on Telegram claiming to have association to the surname “Ginty.” Image: Flashpoint. Spycloud indexed hundreds of credentials stolen from [email protected], and those details indicate that Rey’s computer is a shared Microsoft Windows device located in Amman, Jordan. The credential data stolen from Rey in early 2024 show there are multiple users of the infected PC, but that all shared the same last name of Khader and an address in Amman, Jordan. The “autofill” data lifted from Rey’s family PC contains an entry for a 46-year-old Zaid Khader that says his mother’s maiden name was Ginty. The infostealer data also shows Zaid Khader frequently accessed internal websites for employees of Royal Jordanian Airlines . The infostealer data makes clear that Rey’s full name is Saif Al-Din Khader . Having no luck contacting Saif directly, KrebsOnSecurity sent an email to his father Zaid. The message invited the father to respond via email, phone or Signal, explaining that his son appeared to be deeply enmeshed in a serious cybercrime conspiracy. Less than two hours later, I received a Signal message from Saif, who said his dad suspected the email was a scam and had forwarded it to him. “I saw your email, unfortunately I don’t think my dad would respond to this because they think its some ‘scam email,'” said Saif, who told me he turns 16 years old next month. “So I decided to talk to you directly.” Saif explained that he’d already heard from European law enforcement officials, and had been trying to extricate himself from SLSH. When asked why then he was involved in releasing SLSH’s new ShinySp1d3r ransomware-as-a-service offering, Saif said he couldn’t just suddenly quit the group. “Well I cant just dip like that, I’m trying to clean up everything I’m associated with and move on,” he said. The former Hellcat ransomware site. Image: Kelacyber.com He also shared that ShinySp1d3r is just a rehash of Hellcat ransomware, except modified with AI tools. “I gave the source code of Hellcat ransomware out basically.” Saif claims he reached out on his own recently to the Telegram account for Operation Endgame, the codename for an ongoing law enforcement operation targeting cybercrime services, vendors and their customers . “I’m already cooperating with law enforcement,” Saif said. “In fact, I have been talking to them since at least June. I have told them nearly everything. I haven’t really done anything like breaching into a corp or extortion related since September.” Saif suggested that a story about him right now could endanger any further cooperation he may be able to provide. He also said he wasn’t sure if the U.S. or European authorities had been in contact with the Jordanian government about his involvement with the hacking group. “A story would bring so much unwanted heat and would make things very difficult if I’m going to cooperate,” Saif said. “I’m unsure whats going to happen they said they’re in contact with multiple countries regarding my request but its been like an entire week and I got no updates from them.” Saif shared a screenshot that indicated he’d contacted Europol authorities late last month. But he couldn’t name any law enforcement officials he said were responding to his inquiries, and KrebsOnSecurity was unable to verify his claims. “I don’t really care I just want to move on from all this stuff even if its going to be prison time or whatever they gonna say,” Saif said.

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Krebs on Security 1 months ago

Is Your Android TV Streaming Box Part of a Botnet?

On the surface, the Superbox media streaming devices for sale at retailers like BestBuy and Walmart may seem like a steal: They offer unlimited access to more than 2,200 pay-per-view and streaming services like Netflix , ESPN and Hulu , all for a one-time fee of around $400. But security experts warn these TV boxes require intrusive software that forces the user’s network to relay Internet traffic for others, traffic that is often tied to cybercrime activity such as advertising fraud and account takeovers. Superbox media streaming boxes for sale on Walmart.com. Superbox bills itself as an affordable way for households to stream all of the television and movie content they could possibly want, without the hassle of monthly subscription fees — for a one-time payment of nearly $400. “Tired of confusing cable bills and hidden fees?,” Superbox’s website asks in a recent blog post titled, “Cheap Cable TV for Low Income: Watch TV, No Monthly Bills.” “Real cheap cable TV for low income solutions does exist,” the blog continues. “This guide breaks down the best alternatives to stop overpaying, from free over-the-air options to one-time purchase devices that eliminate monthly bills.” Superbox claims that watching a stream of movies, TV shows, and sporting events won’t violate U.S. copyright law. “SuperBox is just like any other Android TV box on the market, we can not control what software customers will use,” the company’s website maintains. “And you won’t encounter a law issue unless uploading, downloading, or broadcasting content to a large group.” A blog post from the Superbox website. There is nothing illegal about the sale or use of the Superbox itself, which can be used strictly as a way to stream content at providers where users already have a paid subscription. But that is not why people are shelling out $400 for these machines. The only way to watch those 2,200+ channels for free with a Superbox is to install several apps made for the device that enable them to stream this content. Superbox’s homepage includes a prominent message stating the company does “not sell access to or preinstall any apps that bypass paywalls or provide access to unauthorized content.” The company explains that they merely provide the hardware, while customers choose which apps to install. “We only sell the hardware device,” the notice states. “Customers must use official apps and licensed services; unauthorized use may violate copyright law.” Superbox is technically correct here, except for maybe the part about how customers must use official apps and licensed services: Before the Superbox can stream those thousands of channels, users must configure the device to update itself, and the first step involves ripping out Google’s official Play store and replacing it with something called the “App Store” or “Blue TV Store.” Superbox does this because the device does not use the official Google-certified Android TV system, and its apps will not load otherwise. Only after the Google Play store has been supplanted by this unofficial App Store do the various movie and video streaming apps that are built specifically for the Superbox appear available for download (again, outside of Google’s app ecosystem). Experts say while these Android streaming boxes generally do what they advertise — enabling buyers to stream video content that would normally require a paid subscription — the apps that enable the streaming also ensnare the user’s Internet connection in a distributed residential proxy network that uses the devices to relay traffic from others. Ashley is a senior solutions engineer at Censys , a cyber intelligence company that indexes Internet-connected devices, services and hosts. Ashley requested that only her first name be used in this story. In a recent video interview, Ashley showed off several Superbox models that Censys was studying in the malware lab — including one purchased off the shelf at BestBuy. “I’m sure a lot of people are thinking, ‘Hey, how bad could it be if it’s for sale at the big box stores?'” she said. “But the more I looked, things got weirder and weirder.” Ashley said she found the Superbox devices immediately contacted a server at the Chinese instant messaging service Tencent QQ , as well as a residential proxy service called Grass IO . Also known as getgrass[.]io, Grass says it is “a decentralized network that allows users to earn rewards by sharing their unused Internet bandwidth with AI labs and other companies.” “Buyers seek unused internet bandwidth to access a more diverse range of IP addresses, which enables them to see certain websites from a retail perspective,” the Grass website explains. “By utilizing your unused internet bandwidth, they can conduct market research, or perform tasks like web scraping to train AI.” Reached via Twitter/X, Grass founder Andrej Radonjic told KrebsOnSecurity he’d never heard of a Superbox, and that Grass has no affiliation with the device maker. “It looks like these boxes are distributing an unethical proxy network which people are using to try to take advantage of Grass,” Radonjic said. “The point of grass is to be an opt-in network. You download the grass app to monetize your unused bandwidth. There are tons of sketchy SDKs out there that hijack people’s bandwidth to help webscraping companies.” Radonjic said Grass has implemented “a robust system to identify network abusers,” and that if it discovers anyone trying to misuse or circumvent its terms of service, the company takes steps to stop it and prevent those users from earning points or rewards. Superbox’s parent company, Super Media Technology Company Ltd. , lists its street address as a UPS store in Fountain Valley, Calif. The company did not respond to multiple inquiries. According to this teardown by behindmlm.com , a blog that covers multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes, Grass’s compensation plan is built around “grass points,” which are earned through the use of the Grass app and through app usage by recruited affiliates. Affiliates can earn 5,000 grass points for clocking 100 hours usage of Grass’s app, but they must progress through ten affiliate tiers or ranks before they can redeem their grass points (presumably for some type of cryptocurrency). The 10th or “Titan” tier requires affiliates to accumulate a whopping 50 million grass points, or recruit at least 221 more affiliates . Radonjic said Grass’s system has changed in recent months, and confirmed the company has a referral program where users can earn Grass Uptime Points by contributing their own bandwidth and/or by inviting other users to participate. “Users are not required to participate in the referral program to earn Grass Uptime Points or to receive Grass Tokens,” Radonjic said. “Grass is in the process of phasing out the referral program and has introduced an updated Grass Points model.” A review of the Terms and Conditions page for getgrass[.]io at the Wayback Machine shows Grass’s parent company has changed names at least five times in the course of its two-year existence. Searching the Wayback Machine on getgrass[.]io shows that in June 2023 Grass was owned by a company called Wynd Network . By March 2024, the owner was listed as Lower Tribeca Corp. in the Bahamas. By August 2024, Grass was controlled by a Half Space Labs Limited , and in November 2024 the company was owned by Grass OpCo (BVI) Ltd . Currently, the Grass website says its parent is just Grass OpCo Ltd (no BVI in the name). Radonjic acknowledged that Grass has undergone “a handful of corporate clean-ups over the last couple of years,” but described them as administrative changes that had no operational impact. “These reflect normal early-stage restructuring as the project moved from initial development…into the current structure under the Grass Foundation,” he said. Censys’s Ashley said the phone home to China’s Tencent QQ instant messaging service was the first red flag with the Superbox devices she examined. She also discovered the streaming boxes included powerful network analysis and remote access tools, such as Tcpdump and Netcat . “This thing DNS hijacked my router, did ARP poisoning to the point where things fall off the network so they can assume that IP, and attempted to bypass controls,” she said. “I have root on all of them now, and they actually have a folder called ‘secondstage.’ These devices also have Netcat and Tcpdump on them, and yet they are supposed to be streaming devices.” A quick online search shows various Superbox models and many similar Android streaming devices for sale at a wide range of top retail destinations, including Amazon , BestBuy , Newegg , and Walmart . Newegg.com, for example, currently lists more than three dozen Superbox models. In all cases, the products are sold by third-party merchants on these platforms, but in many instances the fulfillment comes from the e-commerce platform itself. “Newegg is pretty bad now with these devices,” Ashley said. “Ebay is the funniest, because they have Superbox in Spanish — the SuperCaja — which is very popular.” Superbox devices for sale via Newegg.com. Ashley said Amazon recently cracked down on Android streaming devices branded as Superbox, but that those listings can still be found under the more generic title “ modem and router combo ” (which may be slightly closer to the truth about the device’s behavior). Superbox doesn’t advertise its products in the conventional sense. Rather, it seems to rely on lesser-known influencers on places like Youtube and TikTok to promote the devices. Meanwhile, Ashley said, Superbox pays those influencers 50 percent of the value of each device they sell. “It’s weird to me because influencer marketing usually caps compensation at 15 percent, and it means they don’t care about the money,” she said. “This is about building their network.” A TikTok influencer casually mentions and promotes Superbox while chatting with her followers over a glass of wine. As plentiful as the Superbox is on e-commerce sites, it is just one brand in an ocean of no-name Android-based TV boxes available to consumers. While these devices generally do provide buyers with “free” streaming content, they also tend to include factory-installed malware or require the installation of third-party apps that engage the user’s Internet address in advertising fraud. In July 2025, Google filed a “John Doe” lawsuit (PDF) against 25 unidentified defendants dubbed the “ BadBox 2.0 Enterprise ,” which Google described as a botnet of over ten million Android streaming devices that engaged in advertising fraud. Google said the BADBOX 2.0 botnet, in addition to compromising multiple types of devices prior to purchase, can also infect devices by requiring the download of malicious apps from unofficial marketplaces. Some of the unofficial Android devices flagged by Google as part of the Badbox 2.0 botnet are still widely for sale at major e-commerce vendors. Image: Google. Several of the Android streaming devices flagged in Google’s lawsuit are still for sale on top U.S. retail sites. For example, searching for the “ X88Pro 10 ” and the “ T95 ” Android streaming boxes finds both continue to be peddled by Amazon sellers. Google’s lawsuit came on the heels of a June 2025 advisory from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which warned that cyber criminals were gaining unauthorized access to home networks by either configuring the products with malicious software prior to the user’s purchase, or infecting the device as it downloads required applications that contain backdoors, usually during the set-up process. “Once these compromised IoT devices are connected to home networks, the infected devices are susceptible to becoming part of the BADBOX 2.0 botnet and residential proxy services known to be used for malicious activity,” the FBI said. The FBI said BADBOX 2.0 was discovered after the original BADBOX campaign was disrupted in 2024. The original BADBOX was identified in 2023, and primarily consisted of Android operating system devices that were compromised with backdoor malware prior to purchase. Riley Kilmer is founder of Spur , a company that tracks residential proxy networks. Kilmer said Badbox 2.0 was used as a distribution platform for IPidea , a China-based entity that is now the world’s largest residential proxy network. Kilmer and others say IPidea is merely a rebrand of 911S5 Proxy , a China-based proxy provider sanctioned last year by the U.S. Department of the Treasury for operating a botnet that helped criminals steal billions of dollars from financial institutions, credit card issuers, and federal lending programs (the U.S. Department of Justice also arrested the alleged owner of 911S5). How are most IPidea customers using the proxy service? According to the proxy detection service Synthient , six of the top ten destinations for IPidea proxies involved traffic that has been linked to either ad fraud or credential stuffing (account takeover attempts). Kilmer said companies like Grass are probably being truthful when they say that some of their customers are companies performing web scraping to train artificial intelligence efforts , because a great deal of content scraping which ultimately benefits AI companies is now leveraging these proxy networks to further obfuscate their aggressive data-slurping activity. By routing this unwelcome traffic through residential IP addresses, Kilmer said, content scraping firms can make it far trickier to filter out. “Web crawling and scraping has always been a thing, but AI made it like a commodity, data that had to be collected,” Kilmer told KrebsOnSecurity. “Everybody wanted to monetize their own data pots, and how they monetize that is different across the board.” Products like Superbox are drawing increased interest from consumers as more popular network television shows and sportscasts migrate to subscription streaming services, and as people begin to realize they’re spending as much or more on streaming services than they previously paid for cable or satellite TV. These streaming devices from no-name technology vendors are another example of the maxim, “If something is free, you are the product,” meaning the company is making money by selling access to and/or information about its users and their data. Superbox owners might counter, “Free? I paid $400 for that device!” But remember: Just because you paid a lot for something doesn’t mean you are done paying for it, or that somehow you are the only one who might be worse off from the transaction. It may be that many Superbox customers don’t care if someone uses their Internet connection to tunnel traffic for ad fraud and account takeovers; for them, it beats paying for multiple streaming services each month. My guess, however, is that quite a few people who buy (or are gifted) these products have little understanding of the bargain they’re making when they plug them into an Internet router. Superbox performs some serious linguistic gymnastics to claim its products don’t violate copyright laws, and that its customers alone are responsible for understanding and observing any local laws on the matter. However, buyer beware: If you’re a resident of the United States, you should know that using these devices for unauthorized streaming violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and can incur legal action, fines, and potential warnings and/or suspension of service by your Internet service provider. According to the FBI, there are several signs to look for that may indicate a streaming device you own is malicious, including: -The presence of suspicious marketplaces where apps are downloaded. -Requiring Google Play Protect settings to be disabled. -Generic TV streaming devices advertised as unlocked or capable of accessing free content. -IoT devices advertised from unrecognizable brands. -Android devices that are not Play Protect certified. -Unexplained or suspicious Internet traffic. This explainer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation delves a bit deeper into each of the potential symptoms listed above.

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