The Ongoing Fallout from a Breach at AI Chatbot Maker Salesloft

September 1, 2025
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The recent mass-theft of authentication tokens from Salesloft, whose AI chatbot is used by a broad swath of corporate America to convert customer interaction into Salesforce leads, has left many companies racing to invalidate the stolen credentials before hackers can exploit them. Now Google warns the breach goes far beyond access to Salesforce data, noting the hackers responsible also stole valid authentication tokens for hundreds of online services that customers can integrate with Salesloft, including Slack, Google Workspace, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and OpenAI.

Salesloft says its products are trusted by 5,000+ customers. Some of the bigger names are visible on the company’s homepage.

Salesloft disclosed on August 20 that, “Today, we detected a security issue in the Drift application,” referring to the technology that powers an AI chatbot used by so many corporate websites. The alert urged customers to re-authenticate the connection between the Drift and Salesforce apps to invalidate their existing authentication tokens, but it said nothing then to indicate those tokens had already been stolen.

On August 26, the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) warned that unidentified hackers tracked as UNC6395 used the access tokens stolen from Salesloft to siphon large amounts of data from numerous corporate Salesforce instances. Google said the data theft began as early as Aug. 8, 2025 and lasted through at least Aug. 18, 2025, and that the incident did not involve any vulnerability in the Salesforce platform.

Google said the attackers have been sifting through the massive data haul for credential materials such as AWS keys, VPN credentials, and credentials to the cloud storage provider Snowflake.

“If successful, the right credentials could allow them to further compromise victim and client environments, as well as pivot to the victim’s clients or partner environments,” the GTIG report stated.

The GTIG updated its advisory on August 28 to acknowledge the attackers used the stolen tokens to access email from “a very small number of Google Workstation accounts” that were specially configured to integrate with Salesloft. More importantly, it warned organizations to immediately invalidate all tokens stored in or connected to their Salesloft integrations — regardless of the third-party service in question.

“Given GTIG’s observations of data exfiltration associated with the campaign, organizations using Salesloft Drift to integrate with third-party platforms (including but not limited to Salesforce) should consider their data compromised and are urged to take immediate remediation steps,” Google advised.

On August 28, Salesforce blocked Drift from integrating with its platform, and with its productivity platforms Slack and Pardot.

The Salesloft incident comes on the heels of a broad social engineering campaign that used voice phishing to trick targets into connecting a malicious app to their organization’s Salesforce portal. That campaign led to data breaches and extortion attacks affecting a number of companies including Adidas, Allianz Life and Qantas.

On August 5, Google disclosed that one of its corporate Salesforce instances was compromised by the attackers, which the GTIG has dubbed UNC6040 (“UNC” is Google’s shorthand for “uncategorized threat group”). Google said the extortionists consistently claimed to be the threat group ShinyHunters, and that the group appeared to be preparing to escalate its extortion attacks by launching a data leak site.

ShinyHunters is an amorphous threat group known for using social engineering to break into cloud platforms and third-party IT providers, and for posting dozens of stolen databases to cybercrime communities like the now-defunct Breachforums.

The ShinyHunters brand dates back to 2020, and the group has been credited with or taken responsibility for dozens of data leaks that exposed hundreds of millions of breached records. The group’s member roster is thought to be somewhat fluid, drawing mainly from active denizens of the Com, a mostly English-language cybercrime community scattered across an ocean of Telegram and Discord servers.

Recorded Future’s Alan Liska told Bleeping Computer that the overlap in the “tools, techniques and procedures” used by ShinyHunters and the Scattered Spider extortion group likely indicate some crossover between the two groups.

To muddy the waters even further, on August 28 a Telegram channel that now has nearly 40,000 subscribers was launched under the intentionally confusing banner “Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters 4.0,” wherein participants have repeatedly claimed responsibility for the Salesloft hack without actually sharing any details to prove their claims.

The Telegram group has been trying to attract media attention by threatening security researchers at Google and other firms. It also is using the channel’s sudden popularity to promote a new cybercrime forum called “Breachstars,” which they claim will soon host data stolen from victim companies who refuse to negotiate a ransom payment. Continue reading →

Affiliates Flock to ‘Soulless’ Scam Gambling Machine

August 28, 2025
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Last month, KrebsOnSecurity tracked the sudden emergence of hundreds of polished online gaming and wagering websites that lure people with free credits and eventually abscond with any cryptocurrency funds deposited by players. We’ve since learned that these scam gambling sites have proliferated thanks to a new Russian affiliate program called “Gambler Panel” that bills itself as a “soulless project that is made for profit.”

A machine-translated version of Gambler Panel’s affiliate website.

The scam begins with deceptive ads posted on social media that claim the wagering sites are working in partnership with popular athletes or social media personalities. The ads invariably state that by using a supplied “promo code,” interested players can claim a $2,500 credit on the advertised gaming website.

The gaming sites ask visitors to create a free account to claim their $2,500 credit, which they can use to play any number of extremely polished video games that ask users to bet on each action. However, when users try to cash out any “winnings” the gaming site will reject the request and prompt the user to make a “verification deposit” of cryptocurrency — typically around $100 — before any money can be distributed.

Those who deposit cryptocurrency funds are soon pressed into more wagering and making additional deposits. And — shocker alert — all players eventually lose everything they’ve invested in the platform.

The number of scam gambling or “scambling” sites has skyrocketed in the past month, and now we know why: The sites all pull their gaming content and detailed strategies for fleecing players straight from the playbook created by Gambler Panel, a Russian-language affiliate program that promises affiliates up to 70 percent of the profits.

Gambler Panel’s website gambler-panel[.]com links to a helpful wiki that explains the scam from cradle to grave, offering affiliates advice on how best to entice visitors, keep them gambling, and extract maximum profits from each victim.

“We have a completely self-written from scratch FAKE CASINO engine that has no competitors,” Gambler Panel’s wiki enthuses. “Carefully thought-out casino design in every pixel, a lot of audits, surveys of real people and test traffic floods were conducted, which allowed us to create something that has no doubts about the legitimacy and trustworthiness even for an inveterate gambling addict with many years of experience.”

Gambler Panel explains that the one and only goal of affiliates is to drive traffic to these scambling sites by any and all means possible.

A machine-translated portion of Gambler Panel’s singular instruction for affiliates: Drive traffic to these scambling sites by any means available.

“Unlike white gambling affiliates, we accept absolutely any type of traffic, regardless of origin, the only limitation is the CIS countries,” the wiki continued, referring to a common prohibition against scamming people in Russia and former Soviet republics in the Commonwealth of Independent States.

The program’s website claims it has more than 20,000 affiliates, who earn a minimum of $10 for each verification deposit. Interested new affiliates must first get approval from the group’s Telegram channel, which currently has around 2,500 active users.

The Gambler Panel channel is replete with images of affiliate panels showing the daily revenue of top affiliates, scantily-clad young women promoting the Gambler logo, and fast cars that top affiliates claimed they bought with their earnings. Continue reading →

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DSLRoot, Proxies, and the Threat of ‘Legal Botnets’

August 26, 2025
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The cybersecurity community on Reddit responded in disbelief this month when a self-described Air National Guard member with top secret security clearance began questioning the arrangement they’d made with company called DSLRoot, which was paying $250 a month to plug a pair of laptops into the Redditor’s high-speed Internet connection in the United States. This post examines the history and provenance of DSLRoot, one of the oldest “residential proxy” networks with origins in Russia and Eastern Europe.

The query about DSLRoot came from a Reddit user “Sacapoopie,” who did not respond to questions. This user has since deleted the original question from their post, although some of their replies to other Reddit cybersecurity enthusiasts remain in the thread. The original post was indexed here by archive.is, and it began with a question:

“I have been getting paid 250$ a month by a residential IP network provider named DSL root to host devices in my home,” Sacapoopie wrote. “They are on a separate network than what we use for personal use. They have dedicated DSL connections (one per host) to the ISP that provides the DSL coverage. My family used Starlink. Is this stupid for me to do? They just sit there and I get paid for it. The company pays the internet bill too.”

Many Redditors said they assumed Sacapoopie’s post was a joke, and that nobody with a cybersecurity background and top-secret (TS/SCI) clearance would agree to let some shady residential proxy company introduce hardware into their network. Other readers pointed to a slew of posts from Sacapoopie in the Cybersecurity subreddit over the past two years about their work on cybersecurity for the Air National Guard.

When pressed for more details by fellow Redditors, Sacapoopie described the equipment supplied by DSLRoot as “just two laptops hardwired into a modem, which then goes to a dsl port in the wall.”

“When I open the computer, it looks like [they] have some sort of custom application that runs and spawns several cmd prompts,” the Redditor explained. “All I can infer from what I see in them is they are making connections.”

When asked how they became acquainted with DSLRoot, Sacapoopie told another user they discovered the company and reached out after viewing an advertisement on a social media platform.

“This was probably 5-6 years ago,” Sacapoopie wrote. “Since then I just communicate with a technician from that company and I help trouble shoot connectivity issues when they arise.”

Reached for comment, DSLRoot said its brand has been unfairly maligned thanks to that Reddit discussion. The unsigned email said DSLRoot is fully transparent about its goals and operations, adding that it operates under full consent from its “regional agents,” the company’s term for U.S. residents like Sacapoopie.

“As although we support honest journalism, we’re against of all kinds of ‘low rank/misleading Yellow Journalism’ done for the sake of cheap hype,” DSLRoot wrote in reply. “It’s obvious to us that whoever is doing this, is either lacking a proper understanding of the subject or doing it intentionally to gain exposure by misleading those who lack proper understanding,” DSLRoot wrote in answer to questions about the company’s intentions.

“We monitor our clients and prohibit any illegal activity associated with our residential proxies,” DSLRoot continued. “We honestly didn’t know that the guy who made the Reddit post was a military guy. Be it an African-American granny trying to pay her rent or a white kid trying to get through college, as long as they can provide an Internet line or host phones for us — we’re good.” Continue reading →

SIM-Swapper, Scattered Spider Hacker Gets 10 Years

August 20, 2025
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A 20-year-old Florida man at the center of a prolific cybercrime group known as “Scattered Spider” was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison today, and ordered to pay roughly $13 million in restitution to victims.

Noah Michael Urban of Palm Coast, Fla. pleaded guilty in April 2025 to charges of wire fraud and conspiracy. Florida prosecutors alleged Urban conspired with others to steal at least $800,000 from five victims via SIM-swapping attacks that diverted their mobile phone calls and text messages to devices controlled by Urban and his co-conspirators.

A booking photo of Noah Michael Urban released by the Volusia County Sheriff.

Although prosecutors had asked for Urban to serve eight years, Jacksonville news outlet News4Jax.com reports the federal judge in the case today opted to sentence Urban to 120 months in federal prison, ordering him to pay $13 million in restitution and undergo three years of supervised release after his sentence is completed.

In November 2024 Urban was charged by federal prosecutors in Los Angeles as one of five members of Scattered Spider (a.k.a. “Oktapus,” “Scatter Swine” and “UNC3944”), which specialized in SMS and voice phishing attacks that tricked employees at victim companies into entering their credentials and one-time passcodes at phishing websites. Urban pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in the California case, and the $13 million in restitution is intended to cover victims from both cases.

The targeted SMS scams spanned several months during the summer of 2022, asking employees to click a link and log in at a website that mimicked their employer’s Okta authentication page. Some SMS phishing messages told employees their VPN credentials were expiring and needed to be changed; other missives advised employees about changes to their upcoming work schedule.

That phishing spree netted Urban and others access to more than 130 companies, including Twilio, LastPass, DoorDash, MailChimp, and Plex. The government says the group used that access to steal proprietary company data and customer information, and that members also phished people to steal millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency.

For many years, Urban’s online hacker aliases “King Bob” and “Sosa” were fixtures of the Com, a mostly Telegram and Discord-based community of English-speaking cybercriminals wherein hackers boast loudly about high-profile exploits and hacks that almost invariably begin with social engineering. King Bob constantly bragged on the Com about stealing unreleased rap music recordings from popular artists, presumably through SIM-swapping attacks. Many of those purloined tracks or “grails” he later sold or gave away on forums.

Noah “King Bob” Urban, posting to Twitter/X around the time of his sentencing today.

Sosa also was active in a particularly destructive group of accomplished criminal SIM-swappers known as “Star Fraud.” Cyberscoop’s AJ Vicens reported in 2023 that individuals within Star Fraud were likely involved in the high-profile Caesars Entertainment and MGM Resorts extortion attacks that same year.

The Star Fraud SIM-swapping group gained the ability to temporarily move targeted mobile numbers to devices they controlled by constantly phishing employees of the major mobile providers. In February 2023, KrebsOnSecurity published data taken from the Telegram channels for Star Fraud and two other SIM-swapping groups showing these crooks focused on SIM-swapping T-Mobile customers, and that they collectively claimed internal access to T-Mobile on 100 separate occasions over a 7-month period in 2022. Continue reading →

Oregon Man Charged in ‘Rapper Bot’ DDoS Service

August 19, 2025
25 Comments

A 22-year-old Oregon man has been arrested on suspicion of operating “Rapper Bot,” a massive botnet used to power a service for launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against targets — including a March 2025 DDoS that knocked Twitter/X offline. The Justice Department asserts the suspect and an unidentified co-conspirator rented out the botnet to online extortionists, and tried to stay off the radar of law enforcement by ensuring that their botnet was never pointed at KrebsOnSecurity.

The control panel for the Rapper Bot botnet greets users with the message “Welcome to the Ball Pit, Now with refrigerator support,” an apparent reference to a handful of IoT-enabled refrigerators that were enslaved in their DDoS botnet.

On August 6, 2025, federal agents arrested Ethan J. Foltz of Springfield, Ore. on suspicion of operating Rapper Bot, a globally dispersed collection of tens of thousands of hacked Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

The complaint against Foltz explains the attacks usually clocked in at more than two terabits of junk data per second (a terabit is one trillion bits of data), which is more than enough traffic to cause serious problems for all but the most well-defended targets. The government says Rapper Bot consistently launched attacks that were “hundreds of times larger than the expected capacity of a typical server located in a data center,” and that some of its biggest attacks exceeded six terabits per second.

Indeed, Rapper Bot was reportedly responsible for the March 10, 2025 attack that caused intermittent outages on Twitter/X. The government says Rapper Bot’s most lucrative and frequent customers were involved in extorting online businesses — including numerous gambling operations based in China.

The criminal complaint was written by Elliott Peterson, an investigator with the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS), the criminal investigative division of the Department of Defense (DoD) Office of Inspector General. The complaint notes the DCIS got involved because several Internet addresses maintained by the DoD were the target of Rapper Bot attacks.

Peterson said he tracked Rapper Bot to Foltz after a subpoena to an ISP in Arizona that was hosting one of the botnet’s control servers showed the account was paid for via PayPal. More legal process to PayPal revealed Foltz’s Gmail account and previously used IP addresses. A subpoena to Google showed the defendant searched security blogs constantly for news about Rapper Bot, and for updates about competing DDoS-for-hire botnets.

According to the complaint, after having a search warrant served on his residence the defendant admitted to building and operating Rapper Bot, sharing the profits 50/50 with a person he claimed to know only by the hacker handle “Slaykings.” Foltz also shared with investigators the logs from his Telegram chats, wherein Foltz and Slaykings discussed how best to stay off the radar of law enforcement investigators while their competitors were getting busted.

Specifically, the two hackers chatted about a May 20 attack against KrebsOnSecurity.com that clocked in at more than 6.3 terabits of data per second. The brief attack was notable because at the time it was the largest DDoS that Google had ever mitigated (KrebsOnSecurity sits behind the protection of Project Shield, a free DDoS defense service that Google provides to websites offering news, human rights, and election-related content).

The May 2025 DDoS was launched by an IoT botnet called Aisuru, which I discovered was operated by a 21-year-old man in Brazil named Kaike Southier Leite. This individual was more commonly known online as “Forky,” and Forky told me he wasn’t afraid of me or U.S. federal investigators. Nevertheless, the complaint against Foltz notes that Forky’s botnet seemed to diminish in size and firepower at the same time that Rapper Bot’s infection numbers were on the upswing.

“Both FOLTZ and Slaykings were very dismissive of attention seeking activities, the most extreme of which, in their view, was to launch DDoS attacks against the website of the prominent cyber security journalist Brian Krebs,” Peterson wrote in the criminal complaint.

“You see, they’ll get themselves [expletive],” Slaykings wrote in response to Foltz’s comments about Forky and Aisuru bringing too much heat on themselves.

“Prob cuz [redacted] hit krebs,” Foltz wrote in reply.

“Going against Krebs isn’t a good move,” Slaykings concurred. “It isn’t about being a [expletive] or afraid, you just get a lot of problems for zero money. Childish, but good. Let them die.”

“Ye, it’s good tho, they will die,” Foltz replied.

The government states that just prior to Foltz’s arrest, Rapper Bot had enslaved an estimated 65,000 devices globally. That may sound like a lot, but the complaint notes the defendants weren’t interested in making headlines for building the world’s largest or most powerful botnet.

Quite the contrary: The complaint asserts that the accused took care to maintain their botnet in a “Goldilocks” size — ensuring that “the number of devices afforded powerful attacks while still being manageable to control and, in the hopes of Foltz and his partners, small enough to not be detected.”

The complaint states that several days later, Foltz and Slaykings returned to discussing what that they expected to befall their rival group, with Slaykings stating, “Krebs is very revenge. He won’t stop until they are [expletive] to the bone.”

“Surprised they have any bots left,” Foltz answered.

“Krebs is not the one you want to have on your back. Not because he is scary or something, just because he will not give up UNTIL you are [expletive] [expletive]. Proved it with Mirai and many other cases.” Continue reading →

Mobile Phishers Target Brokerage Accounts in ‘Ramp and Dump’ Cashout Scheme

August 15, 2025
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Cybercriminal groups peddling sophisticated phishing kits that convert stolen card data into mobile wallets have recently shifted their focus to targeting customers of brokerage services, new research shows. Undeterred by security controls at these trading platforms that block users from wiring funds directly out of accounts, the phishers have pivoted to using multiple compromised brokerage accounts in unison to manipulate the prices of foreign stocks.

Image: Shutterstock, WhataWin.

This so-called ‘ramp and dump‘ scheme borrows its name from age-old “pump and dump” scams, wherein fraudsters purchase a large number of shares in some penny stock, and then promote the company in a frenzied social media blitz to build up interest from other investors. The fraudsters dump their shares after the price of the penny stock increases to some degree, which usually then causes a sharp drop in the value of the shares for legitimate investors.

With ramp and dump, the scammers do not need to rely on ginning up interest in the targeted stock on social media. Rather, they will preposition themselves in the stock that they wish to inflate, using compromised accounts to purchase large volumes of it and then dumping the shares after the stock price reaches a certain value. In February 2025, the FBI said it was seeking information from victims of this scheme.

“In this variation, the price manipulation is primarily the result of controlled trading activity conducted by the bad actors behind the scam,” reads an advisory from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a private, non-profit organization that regulates member brokerage firms. “Ultimately, the outcome for unsuspecting investors is the same—a catastrophic collapse in share price that leaves investors with unrecoverable losses.”

Ford Merrill is a security researcher at SecAlliance, a CSIS Security Group company. Merrill said he has tracked recent ramp-and-dump activity to a bustling Chinese-language community that is quite openly selling advanced mobile phishing kits on Telegram.

“They will often coordinate with other actors and will wait until a certain time to buy a particular Chinese IPO [initial public offering] stock or penny stock,” said Merrill, who has been chronicling the rapid maturation and growth of the China-based phishing community over the past three years.

“They’ll use all these victim brokerage accounts, and if needed they’ll liquidate the account’s current positions, and will preposition themselves in that instrument in some account they control, and then sell everything when the price goes up,” he said. “The victim will be left with worthless shares of that equity in their account, and the brokerage may not be happy either.”

Merrill said the early days of these phishing groups — between 2022 and 2024 — were typified by phishing kits that used text messages to spoof the U.S. Postal Service or some local toll road operator, warning about a delinquent shipping or toll fee that needed paying. Recipients who clicked the link and provided their payment information at a fake USPS or toll operator site were then asked to verify the transaction by sharing a one-time code sent via text message.

In reality, the victim’s bank is sending that code to the mobile number on file for their customer because the fraudsters have just attempted to enroll that victim’s card details into a mobile wallet. If the visitor supplies that one-time code, their payment card is then added to a new mobile wallet on an Apple or Google device that is physically controlled by the phishers.

The phishing gangs typically load multiple stolen cards to digital wallets on a single Apple or Android device, and then sell those phones in bulk to scammers who use them for fraudulent e-commerce and tap-to-pay transactions.

An image from the Telegram channel for a popular Chinese mobile phishing kit vendor shows 10 mobile phones for sale, each loaded with 4-6 digital wallets from different financial institutions.

This China-based phishing collective exposed a major weakness common to many U.S.-based financial institutions that already require multi-factor authentication: The reliance on a single, phishable one-time token for provisioning mobile wallets. Happily, Merrill said many financial institutions that were caught flat-footed on this scam two years ago have since strengthened authentication requirements for onboarding new mobile wallets (such as requiring the card to be enrolled via the bank’s mobile app).

But just as squeezing one part of a balloon merely forces the air trapped inside to bulge into another area, fraudsters don’t go away when you make their current enterprise less profitable: They just shift their focus to a less-guarded area. And lately, that gaze has settled squarely on customers of the major brokerage platforms, Merrill said.

THE OUTSIDER

Merrill pointed to several Telegram channels operated by some of the more accomplished phishing kit sellers, which are full of videos demonstrating how every feature in their kits can be tailored to the attacker’s target. The video snippet below comes from the Telegram channel of “Outsider,” a popular Mandarin-speaking phishing kit vendor whose latest offering includes a number of ready-made templates for using text messages to phish brokerage account credentials and one-time codes.

According to Merrill, Outsider is a woman who previously went by the handle “Chenlun.” KrebsOnSecurity profiled Chenlun’s phishing empire in an October 2023 story about a China-based group that was phishing mobile customers of more than a dozen postal services around the globe. In that case, the phishing sites were using a Telegram bot that sent stolen credentials to the “@chenlun” Telegram account.

Chenlun’s phishing lures are sent via Apple’s iMessage and Google’s RCS service and spoof one of the major brokerage platforms, warning that the account has been suspended for suspicious activity and that recipients should log in and verify some information. The missives include a link to a phishing page that collects the customer’s username and password, and then asks the user to enter a one-time code that will arrive via SMS.

The new phish kit videos on Outsider’s Telegram channel only feature templates for Schwab customers, but Merrill said the kit can easily be adapted to target other brokerage platforms. One reason the fraudsters are picking on brokerage firms, he said, has to do with the way they handle multi-factor authentication. Continue reading →

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, August 2025 Edition

August 12, 2025
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Microsoft today released updates to fix more than 100 security flaws in its Windows operating systems and other software. At least 13 of the bugs received Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating, meaning they could be abused by malware or malcontents to gain remote access to a Windows system with little or no help from users.

August’s patch batch from Redmond includes an update for CVE-2025-53786, a vulnerability that allows an attacker to pivot from a compromised Microsoft Exchange Server directly into an organization’s cloud environment, potentially gaining control over Exchange Online and other connected Microsoft Office 365 services. Microsoft first warned about this bug on Aug. 6, saying it affects Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2019, as well as its flagship Exchange Server Subscription Edition.

Ben McCarthy, lead cyber security engineer at Immersive, said a rough search reveals approximately 29,000 Exchange servers publicly facing on the internet that are vulnerable to this issue, with many of them likely to have even older vulnerabilities.

McCarthy said the fix for CVE-2025-53786 requires more than just installing a patch, such as following Microsoft’s manual instructions for creating a dedicated service to oversee and lock down the hybrid connection.

“In effect, this vulnerability turns a significant on-premise Exchange breach into a full-blown, difficult-to-detect cloud compromise with effectively living off the land techniques which are always harder to detect for defensive teams,” McCarthy said.

CVE-2025-53779 is a weakness in the Windows Kerberos authentication system that allows an unauthenticated attacker to gain domain administrator privileges. Microsoft credits the discovery of the flaw to Akamai researcher Yuval Gordon, who dubbed it “BadSuccessor” in a May 2025 blog post. The attack exploits a weakness in “delegated Managed Service Account” or dMSA — a feature that was introduced in Windows Server 2025.

Some of the critical flaws addressed this month with the highest severity (between 9.0 and 9.9 CVSS scores) include a remote code execution bug in the Windows GDI+ component that handles graphics rendering (CVE-2025-53766) and CVE-2025-50165, another graphics rendering weakness. Another critical patch involves CVE-2025-53733, a vulnerability in Microsoft Word that can be exploited without user interaction and triggered through the Preview Pane. Continue reading →

KrebsOnSecurity in New ‘Most Wanted’ HBO Max Series

August 8, 2025
21 Comments

A new documentary series about cybercrime airing next month on HBO Max features interviews with Yours Truly. The four-part series follows the exploits of Julius Kivimäki, a prolific Finnish hacker recently convicted of leaking tens of thousands of patient records from an online psychotherapy practice while attempting to extort the clinic and its patients.

The documentary, “Most Wanted: Teen Hacker,” explores the 27-year-old Kivimäki’s lengthy and increasingly destructive career, one that was marked by cyber attacks designed to result in real-world physical impacts on their targets.

By the age of 14, Kivimäki had fallen in with a group of criminal hackers who were mass-compromising websites and milking them for customer payment card data. Kivimäki and his friends enjoyed harassing and terrorizing others by “swatting” their homes — calling in fake hostage situations or bomb threats at a target’s address in the hopes of triggering a heavily-armed police response to that location.

On Dec. 26, 2014, Kivimäki and fellow members of a group of online hooligans calling themselves the Lizard Squad launched a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against the Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox Live platforms, preventing millions of users from playing with their shiny new gaming rigs the day after Christmas. The Lizard Squad later acknowledged that the stunt was planned to call attention to their new DDoS-for-hire service, which came online and started selling subscriptions shortly after the attack.

Finnish investigators said Kivimäki also was responsible for a 2014 bomb threat against former Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley that grounded an American Airlines plane. That incident was widely reported to have started with a Twitter post from the Lizard Squad, after Smedley mentioned some upcoming travel plans online. But according to Smedley and Finnish investigators, the bomb threat started with a phone call from Kivimäki.

Julius “Zeekill” Kivimaki, in December 2014.

The creaky wheels of justice seemed to be catching up with Kivimäki in mid-2015, when a Finnish court found him guilty of more than 50,000 cybercrimes, including data breaches, payment fraud, and operating a global botnet of hacked computers. Unfortunately, the defendant was 17 at the time, and received little more than a slap on the wrist: A two-year suspended sentence and a small fine. Continue reading →

Who Got Arrested in the Raid on the XSS Crime Forum?

August 6, 2025
22 Comments

On July 22, 2025, the European police agency Europol said a long-running investigation led by the French Police resulted in the arrest of a 38-year-old administrator of XSS, a Russian-language cybercrime forum with more than 50,000 members. The action has triggered an ongoing frenzy of speculation and panic among XSS denizens about the identity of the unnamed suspect, but the consensus is that he is a pivotal figure in the crime forum scene who goes by the hacker handle “Toha.” Here’s a deep dive on what’s knowable about Toha, and a short stab at who got nabbed.

An unnamed 38-year-old man was arrested in Kiev last month on suspicion of administering the cybercrime forum XSS. Image: ssu.gov.ua.

Europol did not name the accused, but published partially obscured photos of him from the raid on his residence in Kiev. The police agency said the suspect acted as a trusted third party — arbitrating disputes between criminals — and guaranteeing the security of transactions on XSS. A statement from Ukraine’s SBU security service said XSS counted among its members many cybercriminals from various ransomware groups, including REvil, LockBit, Conti, and Qiliin.

Since the Europol announcement, the XSS forum resurfaced at a new address on the deep web (reachable only via the anonymity network Tor). But from reviewing the recent posts, there appears to be little consensus among longtime members about the identity of the now-detained XSS administrator.

The most frequent comment regarding the arrest was a message of solidarity and support for Toha, the handle chosen by the longtime administrator of XSS and several other major Russian forums. Toha’s accounts on other forums have been silent since the raid.

Europol said the suspect has enjoyed a nearly 20-year career in cybercrime, which roughly lines up with Toha’s history. In 2005, Toha was a founding member of the Russian-speaking forum Hack-All. That is, until it got massively hacked a few months after its debut. In 2006, Toha rebranded the forum to exploit[.]in, which would go on to draw tens of thousands of members, including an eventual Who’s-Who of wanted cybercriminals.

Toha announced in 2018 that he was selling the Exploit forum, prompting rampant speculation on the forums that the buyer was secretly a Russian or Ukrainian government entity or front person. However, those suspicions were unsupported by evidence, and Toha vehemently denied the forum had been given over to authorities.

One of the oldest Russian-language cybercrime forums was DaMaGeLaB, which operated from 2004 to 2017, when its administrator “Ar3s” was arrested. In 2018, a partial backup of the DaMaGeLaB forum was reincarnated as xss[.]is, with Toha as its stated administrator.

CROSS-SITE GRIFTING

Clues about Toha’s early presence on the Internet — from ~2004 to 2010 — are available in the archives of Intel 471, a cyber intelligence firm that tracks forum activity. Intel 471 shows Toha used the same email address across multiple forum accounts, including at Exploit, Antichat, Carder[.]su and inattack[.]ru.

DomainTools.com finds Toha’s email address — [email protected] — was used to register at least a dozen domain names — most of them from the mid- to late 2000s. Apart from exploit[.]in and a domain called ixyq[.]com, the other domains registered to that email address end in .ua, the top-level domain for Ukraine (e.g. deleted.org[.]ua, lj.com[.]ua, and blogspot.org[.]ua).

A 2008 snapshot of a domain registered to [email protected] and to Anton Medvedovsky in Kiev. Note the message at the bottom left, “Protected by Exploit,in.” Image: archive.org.

Nearly all of the domains registered to [email protected] contain the name Anton Medvedovskiy in the registration records, except for the aforementioned ixyq[.]com, which is registered to the name Yuriy Avdeev in Moscow.

This Avdeev surname came up in a lengthy conversation with Lockbitsupp, the leader of the rapacious and destructive ransomware affiliate group Lockbit. The conversation took place in February 2024, when Lockbitsupp asked for help identifying Toha’s real-life identity.

In early 2024, the leader of the Lockbit ransomware group — Lockbitsupp — asked for help investigating the identity of the XSS administrator Toha, which he claimed was a Russian man named Anton Avdeev.

Lockbitsupp didn’t share why he wanted Toha’s details, but he maintained that Toha’s real name was Anton Avdeev. I declined to help Lockbitsupp in whatever revenge he was planning on Toha, but his question made me curious to look deeper. Continue reading →

Scammers Unleash Flood of Slick Online Gaming Sites

July 30, 2025
34 Comments

Fraudsters are flooding Discord and other social media platforms with ads for hundreds of polished online gaming and wagering websites that lure people with free credits and eventually abscond with any cryptocurrency funds deposited by players. Here’s a closer look at the social engineering tactics and remarkable traits of this sprawling network of more than 1,200 scam sites.

The scam begins with deceptive ads posted on social media that claim the wagering sites are working in partnership with popular social media personalities, such as Mr. Beast, who recently launched a gaming business called Beast Games. The ads invariably state that by using a supplied “promo code,” interested players can claim a $2,500 credit on the advertised gaming website.

An ad posted to a Discord channel for a scam gambling website that the proprietors falsely claim was operating in collaboration with the Internet personality Mr. Beast. Image: Reddit.com.

The gaming sites all require users to create a free account to claim their $2,500 credit, which they can use to play any number of extremely polished video games that ask users to bet on each action. At the scam website gamblerbeast[.]com, for example, visitors can pick from dozens of games like B-Ball Blitz, in which you play a basketball pro who is taking shots from the free throw line against a single opponent, and you bet on your ability to sink each shot.

The financial part of this scam begins when users try to cash out any “winnings.” At that point, the gaming site will reject the request and prompt the user to make a “verification deposit” of cryptocurrency — typically around $100 — before any money can be distributed. Those who deposit cryptocurrency funds are soon asked for additional payments.

However, any “winnings” displayed by these gaming sites are a complete fantasy, and players who deposit cryptocurrency funds will never see that money again. Compounding the problem, victims likely will soon be peppered with come-ons from “recovery experts” who peddle dubious claims on social media networks about being able to retrieve funds lost to such scams.

KrebsOnSecurity first learned about this network of phony betting sites from a Discord user who asked to be identified only by their screen name: “Thereallo” is a 17-year-old developer who operates multiple Discord servers and said they began digging deeper after users started complaining of being inundated with misleading spam messages promoting the sites.

“We were being spammed relentlessly by these scam posts from compromised or purchased [Discord] accounts,” Thereallo said. “I got frustrated with just banning and deleting, so I started to investigate the infrastructure behind the scam messages. This is not a one-off site, it’s a scalable criminal enterprise with a clear playbook, technical fingerprints, and financial infrastructure.”

After comparing the code on the gaming sites promoted via spam messages, Thereallo found they all invoked the same API key for an online chatbot that appears to be in limited use or else is custom-made. Indeed, a scan for that API key at the threat hunting platform Silent Push reveals at least 1,270 recently-registered and active domains whose names all invoke some type of gaming or wagering theme.

The “verification deposit” stage of the scam requires the user to deposit cryptocurrency in order to withdraw their “winnings.”

Thereallo said the operators of this scam empire appear to generate a unique Bitcoin wallet for each gaming domain they deploy.

“This is a decoy wallet,” Thereallo explained. “Once the victim deposits funds, they are never able to withdraw any money. Any attempts to contact the ‘Live Support’ are handled by a combination of AI and human operators who eventually block the user. The chat system is self-hosted, making it difficult to report to third-party service providers.”

Thereallo discovered another feature common to all of these scam gambling sites [hereafter referred to simply as “scambling” sites]: If you register at one of them and then very quickly try to register at a sister property of theirs from the same Internet address and device, the registration request is denied at the second site.

“I registered on one site, then hopped to another to register again,” Thereallo said. Instead, the second site returned an error stating that a new account couldn’t be created for another 10 minutes.

The scam gaming site spinora dot cc shares the same chatbot API as more than 1,200 similar fake gaming sites.

“They’re tracking my VPN IP across their entire network,” Thereallo explained. “My password manager also proved it. It tried to use my dummy email on a site I had never visited, and the site told me the account already existed. So it’s definitely one entity running a single platform with 1,200+ different domain names as front-ends. This explains how their support works, a central pool of agents handling all the sites. It also explains why they’re so strict about not giving out wallet addresses; it’s a network-wide policy.” Continue reading →