Two men pleaded guilty in the United Kingdom this week to criminal charges stemming from an August 2024 cyberattack that crippled Transport for London, the entity responsible for the public transport network in the Greater London area. The duo were key members of a prolific cybercrime group known as Scattered Spider, and their guilty pleas came on the first day of what was expected to be a six-week trial.

Thalha Jubair, 20, of East London and 18-year-old Owen Flowers of Walsall admitted conspiring to commit unauthorized acts against Transport for London computer systems and causing risk of serious damage to human welfare. According to a report from the BBC, Flowers alone admitted to being part of a conspiracy to hack into U.S. based healthcare providers SSM Health Care Corporation and Sutter Health in September 2024.

Jubair is also wanted by U.S. law enforcement agencies. In September 2025, prosecutors in New Jersey unsealed an indictment alleging Jubair and other Scattered Spider members committed computer fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering in relation to 120 computer network intrusions involving 47 U.S. entities between May 2022 and September 2025, and that the group’s victims paid at least $115 million in ransom payments.

In July 2025, KrebsOnSecurity reported that Flowers and Jubair were arrested in the United Kingdom in connection with Scattered Spider ransom attacks against the retailers Marks & Spencer and Harrods, and the British food retailer Co-op Group. Multiple sources familiar with those investigations said Flowers was the Scattered Spider member who anonymously gave interviews to the media in the days after the group’s September 2023 ransomware attacks disrupted operations at Las Vegas casinos operated by MGM Resorts and Caesars Entertainment.

According to prosecutors, Jubair co-ran a bustling Telegram channel called Star Chat, the home of a SIM-swapping group that used voice- and SMS-based phishing attacks to steal credentials from employees at the major wireless providers in the U.S. and U.K. The group would then use that access to sell a service that could redirect a target’s phone number to a device the attackers controlled and intercept the victim’s calls and text messages (including one-time codes for multi-factor authentication).

New Jersey prosecutors also allege Jubair also was involved in a mass SMS phishing campaign during the summer of 2022 that stole single sign-on credentials from employees at hundreds of companies. That weeks-long SMS phishing campaign led to intrusions and data thefts at more than 130 organizations, including LastPass, DoorDash, Mailchimp, Plex and Signal.

KrebsOnSecurity reported last year that one of Jubair’s alter egos at age 15 was “Everlynn,” a hacker who sold fraudulent “emergency data requests” that used compromised police and government email addresses to demand subscriber data (e.g. username, IP/email address) from major tech companies, claiming the requests concerned urgent matters of life and death and could not wait for a court order.

In April 2026, 24-year-old British national and Scattered Spider member Tyler “Tylerb” Buchanan pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy and aggravated identity theft for participating in the group’s SMS phishing spree in the summer of 2022. The government said Buchanan, Jubair and others used the credentials harvested in that phishing campaign to steal at least $8 million in cryptocurrency from victims throughout the United States. Buchanan is currently scheduled to be sentenced on October 2.

In August 2025, 20-year-old Scattered Spider member from Florida named Noah Michael Urban was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison and ordered to pay $13 million in restitution, after pleading guilty to charges of wire fraud and conspiracy.

The U.S. Department of Justice says three alleged Scattered Spider defendants indicted along with Buchanan still face charges, including Ahmed Hossam Eldin Elbadawy, 24, a.k.a. “AD,” of College Station, Texas; Evans Onyeaka Osiebo, 21, of Dallas, Texas; and Joel Martin Evans, 26, a.k.a. “joeleoli,” of Jacksonville, North Carolina.

Flowers and Jubair are slated to be sentenced in a London court on July 15, 2026.

For the past four years, a sprawling Android-based botnet called Popa has forced millions of consumer TV boxes to relay Internet traffic linked to advertising fraud, account takeovers, and mass data-scraping efforts. This week, researchers from multiple security firms concluded that the Popa botnet is linked to NetNut, a “residential proxy” provider operated by the publicly-traded Israeli firm Alarum Technologies Ltd [NASDAQ: ALAR].

Popa is a massive botnet, but by all accounts it is unlike traditional botnets that enlist compromised systems in destructive activities, such as coordinating huge distributed denial-of-service attacks. Rather, Popa appears designed with a singular purpose: Implementing a persistent communications layer capable of registering a device, maintaining long-lived encrypted connections, and opening communication tunnels on demand.

Experts say Popa is a plugin component associated with the Vo1d botnet, a large-scale malware campaign targeting unofficial Android-based TV boxes. These devices, which are marketed under thousands of brand names and model numbers and broadly available for purchase at top e-commerce destinations, all advertise the ability to stream hundreds of subscription video services for an up front one-time fee.

But as the FBI and security industry experts have warned repeatedly, these streaming boxes typically bundle or come pre-installed with software that turns the user’s TV into a “residential proxy” — allowing anyone to route their Internet traffic through that device for as long as it remains plugged into a wall socket and connected to a local network. More concerning, some of these proxy networks do little to stop malicious customers from communicating with and even compromising systems on the local network of the unsuspecting device owner.

The first clues about Popa’s origins came in a 2025 report from the Chinese security company XLAB, which flagged at least nine domain names that were used to register and direct the activities of compromised devices. In a report released today, the security firm Qurium described how it stumbled on some of those same domains while investigating a series of disruptive and expensive data scraping events targeting the company’s hosted organizations in May 2026, in which the scraping activity was scattered evenly across more than 1.4 million Internet addresses.

Qurium said it found several dozen domains used to control Popa that were all hosted in lockstep across multiple Internet addresses over time, including gmslb[.]net, safernetwork[.]io, tera-home[.]com, and ninjatech[.]io. Digging deeper, Qurium discovered gmslb[.]net was referenced in dozens of pirated or modded video content streaming apps, such as CRICFy, DooFlix, Sprozfy, RTS Tv, Flixoid, CyberFlix, Rapid Streamz, TvMob and HD/OceanStreams.

Qurium’s report notes that most of the domains long used to control the Popa botnet were seized or dismantled in July 2025, after Google, HUMAN Security and Trend Micro teamed up to disrupt Badbox 2.0, a botnet that is closely associated with Vo1d. Qurium said that immediately after that disruption, several dozen new domains were registered to serve as controllers for the Popa botnet, but that one of those control domains was not new: ninjatech[.]io.

Ninjatech is a company founded by Moishi Kramer, whose LinkedIn profile says he is vice president of research and development at NetNut. That resume credits Kramer for helping NetNut to build from the “ground up,” “designing the architecture,” and “scaling the NetNut” before the company was acquired by Alarum Technologies. A self-created listing at the job board F6S references Kramer as the sole owner of the Ninjatech domain (a screen capture of it is pictured below).

Responding via email, Mr. Kramer said Ninjatech ceased operations approximately five years ago, when the company sold a software development kit (SDK) called Popa that was designed to use a small portion of a device’s bandwidth and to run only after the host application obtained user consent.

“That code was sold and licensed to third parties including resellers years ago,” Kramer said. “Once software is distributed that way, the original developer has no control over how others later modify, rebrand, or deploy it.”

Kramer said neither he nor NetNut builds, operates or maintains the infrastructure being described as Popa, nor does he control the Ninjatech domain.

“I didn’t register the June 2025 domains you mention, and I don’t know who did,” he continued. “I have no control over, or visibility into, that infrastructure. I can only tell you it isn’t operated by me or by NetNut.”

But in a separate Popa research report released today, the proxy-tracking company Synthient said a recent analysis of the Popa SDK revealed outbound traffic clearly associated with NetNut.

“The research team assesses with high confidence that devices running Popa forward traffic from Netnut clients,” Synthient wrote. “This proves without a shadow of a doubt that Popa actively continues to be used by NetNut as part of their proxy pool.”

Alarum Technologies, NetNut’s Tel Aviv-based parent company, said the reports by Synthient and Qurium contained “demonstrably inaccurate assertions and flawed deductions rather than verified facts.” Alarum shared a statement saying they reject the basic characterization of the SDKs and technologies discussed in the reports as a “botnet.”

“The SDKs at issue are designed to facilitate bandwidth-sharing functionality and do not transform user devices into malware-controlled systems or otherwise compromise the devices on which they operate,” the statement reads. “Netnut operates a commercial proxy network and maintains policies, procedures, and technological measures designed to promote lawful and responsible use of its services.”

Alarum said NetNut places “significant emphasis on appropriate notice and consent mechanisms, conducts customer due diligence, monitors for potential misuse, and takes steps intended to detect and mitigate suspicious or unauthorized activity.”

“This method of operation is supported both by internal procedures and policies, including performing KYC checks and additional due diligence of NetNut’s customers, as well as employing various technological measures, designed to assist in identifying and addressing suspected misuse of the network,” their statement continued.

However, in a report released on June 8, the proxy tracking service Spur asserted that NetNut does not require corporate verification or meaningful “know your customer” procedures before allowing customers to purchase proxy access.

“An individual can sign up, pay, and route traffic through partner address space, including space belonging to institutions whose users never opted in,” Spur wrote. “The ‘verified corporations only’ claim is simply marketing for bandwidth sellers, not an access control on who actually uses the proxies.”

“Nor is NetNut the only front door,” Spur continued. “A number of downstream white labelers and resellers repackage the same ISP proxy pool under their own brands. These outlets typically perform no KYC at all, less scrutiny than NetNut itself, who at the very least might assign an account manager to potential users. Anyone who knows where to look can buy access through a reseller with nothing more than a burner email address and $5 in crypto.”

Synthient found that although the most recent builds of Popa (as of three months ago) have added the ability to ask the user for consent before installing proxy components, not all variants or previous versions of Popa contain this functionality.

“Of the over 20 genuine Popa publishers analyzed, none of them were observed asking for user consent,” Sythient wrote.

THE PREVALENCE OF POPA

Chris Formosa is senior lead information security engineer for Black Lotus Labs, a division of the Internet backbone carrier Lumen Technologies.

“What especially makes Popa dangerous is just how widely used NetNut is for reselling and sharing,” Formosa said, explaining that many other proxy services simply resell NetNut proxies rather than building out their own far-flung proxy networks. “So these Popa IPs appear in tons of different services all over the ecosystem, which makes it one of the most problematic and dangerous proxy botnets on the market currently.”

Formosa said the Popa botnet averages between 1.5 million to 2.5 million distinct IP addresses each day, relying on between 250 and 300 Internet addresses that are used to direct its activities.

“That’s why Popa is so dangerous,” Formosa said. “It may not be the largest botnet we have seen, but it is spread all over the industry, making its power very amplified.”

Formosa said while that makes Popa one of the larger botnets out there today, its numbers pale in comparison to those previously boasted by IPIDEA, a China-based proxy provider that until recently operated a daily pool of nearly 10 million devices that they resold as proxies to anyone. In January 2026, Synthient published research showing that multiple new large DDoS botnets had grown rapidly by tunneling through IPIDEA proxies into the local networks of unsuspecting TV box owners and infecting other Android-based devices behind the user’s firewall.

IPIDEA is based largely on SDKs used to view pirated streaming content on a vast number of TV box devices, but the service’s numbers have dwindled since January, when Google and industry partners took legal action to seize domain names that IPIDEA used to control devices and proxy traffic through them.

Jérôme Meyer, a security researcher at Nokia Deepfield, said the total population of devices participating in the Popa botnet may be far higher than Lumen’s estimates. Meyer told KrebsOnSecurity that Nokia is monitoring 26 of at least 359 known relay nodes for the botnet, and estimates that each relay node handles between 35,000 and 60,000 clients simultaneously.

“On the relay node subset I am looking at (26 of them), 750,000 unique sources in 24 hours,” Meyer wrote in response to questions.

Nokia Deepfield released its own report today on RoboVPN, a VPN app tied to the Vo1d botnet’s Popa plugin that Qurium attributes to NetNut/Alarum Technologies.

THE SYMBIOSIS OF PROXIES AND DATA SCRAPING

Experts say many of the world’s largest proxy providers have updated their public-facing branding to highlight their utility for training AI platforms, implying it is a primary use case for their residential proxies. That’s because AI services tend to rely on constantly mass-scraping the Internet for new text, images and video content that can be used to train large language models (LLMs).

“AI companies depend on web-scraped content: for pre-training, for retrieval, for agent grounding, for search,” reads a report this month from Include Security that examines the prevalence of proxy SDKs in smart TV apps. “But the modern web isn’t scrapeable from a datacenter. Cloudflare, DataDome, HUMAN, among others throttle or block requests from known cloud IPs. The workaround is residential proxies. A scraping job routed through a Comcast or T-Mobile subscriber’s connection arrives at the target site from an IP that belongs to a paying residential customer.”

This non-stop content scraping has spawned more than 70 copyright infringement lawsuits against major tech companies that have acknowledged large-scale data scraping as a major source of the “brains” behind their commercial AI offerings. Ironically, much of that scraping is being aided by proxy services that are intimately tied to unofficial Android TV boxes and associated SDKs whose stated purpose is streaming pirated content.

The scraping activity has become so aggressive that it often overwhelms the targeted websites, preventing them from being reachable by legitimate visitors. In many reported cases, nonprofit organizations, libraries and universities have complained of constantly battling to keep their services online in the face of relentless data-scraping firms hiding behind residential proxy services.

A survey conducted last year by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) found while some content scraping bots are rather innocuous, “others are sufficiently aggressive that they are increasingly causing service disruptions in repositories and other scholarly communications infrastructures.” More than 90 percent of survey respondents indicated their repository is encountering aggressive bots, usually more than once a week, and often leading to slow downs and service outages.

“Automated web scraping is nothing new, and has been the key technology underlying search engines such as Google for over 30 years,” wrote Brendan O’Connell, platform manager at the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), a free, community-curated index of peer-reviewed academic journals. “However, the current investor-fueled AI startup craze means there are now thousands of well-funded companies developing and deploying their own scraping tools to train AI models, alongside existing major players like OpenAI and Google.”

DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL!

Across the United States, local communities are pushing back against the proliferation of new data centers aimed primarily at improving the capabilities of AI. But security experts say the general public remains largely unaware that using one of these unsanctioned Android TV boxes means their “smart TV” is almost certainly using a significant amount of bandwidth each month to help train modern AI models.

Even households without these sketchy TV boxes can still have their smart TVs turned into residential proxy nodes, just by downloading one of thousands of apps made available on Samsung and LG smart TVs. Spur said it recently scraped the LG and Samsung app stores and found that each had approximately 3,000 apps available for download. Many of these apps are simple games or utilities that state in the fine print that the user’s Internet connection will be used to download data and that they can opt out at any time.

Spur said it found that more than 42 percent of apps available for download via the webOS operating system on LG smart TVs include SDKs that turn one’s television into an always-on residential proxy node. More than a quarter of the apps made for Samsung’s Tizen operating system had similar residential proxy components, Spur found.

Experts say it’s questionable whether TV apps with proxy SDKs can obtain meaningful consent from users for installing an always-on proxy connection, particularly when anyone in a household — including children — can effectively opt the family TV into a residential proxy network just by installing a simple game or app.

“Privacy-policy disclosure is the wrong control surface for a TV,” Include Security wrote. “It is hard to scroll through a legal document navigated by arrow keys on a remote, and the in-app consent dialog doesn’t convey that a paying customer is about to route their scraping traffic through the user’s home internet.”

Spur’s head of research Sean Simmons told KrebsOnSecurity that most people do not have a working mental model for what it means to sell access to their residential IP address, no matter what device they are using.

“And on a TV, the gap is even wider,” Simmons said. “A one-time prompt navigated with a remote can disappear into the setup flow, while the app keeps monetizing the connection long after anyone remembers what they accepted.”

Simmons said LG and Samsung should follow the lead of other TV platforms that have already drawn a line against residential proxy providers, pointing to policies by Amazon that prohibit apps facilitating proxy services for third parties. Likewise the TV streaming device maker Roku reportedly now bars developers from using proxy SDKs and has removed apps that bundled them.

Apps that turn one’s device into a residential proxy node are not limited to smart TVs and no-name streaming boxes, of course. As noted by the security firm Infoblox, mobile app developers can embed SDKs provided by the residential proxy networks into their products to monetize their software, allowing them to receive a small amount of money on each installation.

The result, Infoblox said, is that devices are frequently enrolled without the owner’s knowledge, typically through free applications such as VPNs, streaming apps, screensavers and “productivity” apps such as PDF viewers and break reminders.

All too often, these proxy services are beaconing out from employee devices brought into the workplace, Infoblox found. In a blog post earlier this month, Infoblox said it discovered that fully 65% of its customer base was querying one or more residential proxy related domains.

“We saw steady growth in these queries in 2025, with a 25% increase over the year to over 500 billion per month,” Infoblox wrote. “Over 90% of our pharmaceutical and food & beverage customers have queried residential proxy indicators. Perhaps even more concerning is that over 60% of government and banking customers have as well.”

Infoblox researchers Nick Sundvall and David Brunsdon warned that with residential proxies in the corporate environment, external access is granted to an organization’s IP space.

“If threat actors were to abuse the residential proxy to attack a third party, the third party’s incident response would, correctly, identify your residential proxy as the source,” they wrote. “Untangling that, by proving that you were the conduit and not the threat actor, costs time, creates legal exposure, and can damage your reputation. The stunning prevalence of these services within customer environments warrants attention from both network defenders and policy makers who should consider how the risks posed by residential proxies could be impacting their security posture.”

A cybercrime group known as The Gentlemen has emerged as the second most active ransomware gang by victim count, rapidly attracting a talented pool of hackers through an aggressive recruitment strategy that promises affiliates 90 percent of any ransom paid by victims. This post examines clues pointing to a real life identity for the administrator of The Gentlemen ransomware group.

Experts at the security firm Check Point Software have been closely covering exploits of The Gentlemen, a so-called “ransomware-as-a-service” (RaaS) offering that pays affiliates handsomely to help spread the group’s malware.

“A 90/10 affiliate revenue split — compared to the industry standard 80/20 — is accelerating the group’s growth by attracting experienced operators from competing programs,” the researchers wrote in April.

Check Point found The Gentlemen are the second most active ransomware group by victim count so far this year, claiming at least 332 published victims since the group’s inception in mid-2025 and more than 240 in 2026 alone.

According to Check Point, the group targets Internet-facing devices (VPNs, firewalls) as their entry point, and once inside moves quickly to encrypt entire networks within hours.

Check Point says the administrator and primary operator of the ransomware group uses the nickname Zeta88 on the Russian-language cybercrime forums, and that this individual was previously known under the moniker Hastalamuerte. Check Point noted that a breach of the group’s backend infrastructure made it clear that Hastalamuerte/Zeta88 is the person who assembles the locker and RaaS panel, manages payments, and is essentially the administrator of the entire program who receives 10 percent of all ransoms.

WHO IS HASTALAMUERTE?

The cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 shows that the user Hastalamuerte is a Russian and English speaking person who registered on almost a dozen cybercrime forums between 2019 and the present day, including Exploit, Breachforums, Ramp_V2, BHF, Raidforums, and Nulled.

Intel 471 reveals that Hastalamuerte registered on Breachforums in January 2025 from an Internet address in Izhevsk, the capital city of Russia’s Udmurt Republic. Likewise, the user Zeta88 signed up at the English-language cybercrime forum Breached in August 2022 from a different Internet address in Izhevsk.

Intel 471 finds Hastalamuerte registered on Raidforums in 2020 using the email address hastalamuerte1488@protonmail.com (1488 is a common combination of two numeric symbols associated with white supremacy). A lookup on this address at the open source intelligence service Epieos shows it is connected to an account at Apple and to a phone number ending in 04.

Epieos says that Protonmail address is also linked to a GitHub account under the username SantaMuerte. That account is marked private, but a history of this user’s activity shows they are watching and developing a number of malware tools and exploits.

In April 2020, Hastalamuerte said on the crime forum Nulled that they could be contacted at the Telegram instant messenger name @hastalamuerte18, and the threat intelligence company Flashpoint finds this username is assigned the unique Telegram ID number 30907522 [full disclosure: Flashpoint is an advertiser on this blog].

The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence reports that Hastalamuerte’s Telegram ID is connected to another username — “bu4vs” — and to the Russian phone number 79127650004. Pivoting on this phone number in Constella fetches multiple records from hacked Russian government databases showing it is assigned to one Alexander Andreevich Yapaev, a 36-year-old from Izhevsk.

Constella reveals that phone number was used to create an account at the Russian social media platform Pikabu under the name “4apai18,” and shows Mr. Yapaev has signed up at a number of websites using the common surname Ivanov, or else “Chapaev” (the numeral 4 is often used as shorthand for a “ch” sound in Russian).

A search in Intel 471 for cybercrime forum members with the nickname SantaMuerte unearths an account by the same name created in 2020 on the Russian hacking forum Codeby. Intel 471 shows this user originally registered on Codeby with the not-so-subtle nickname Alexandr 4apaev.

Constella finds Mr. Yapaev regularly used the email address bu4vs@mail.ru. Meanwhile, Epieos shows this address is connected to a LinkedIn account for Alexander Yapaev, who lists himself as the head of B2B marketing at the company Uralenergo Udmurtia, one of Russia’s largest suppliers of electrotechnical and lighting products.

Mr. Yapaev did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Nearly every time we publish one of these Breadcrumbs stories, readers are curious to know why it seems like so many cybercriminals from Russia apparently do little to hide their real life identities. The truth is that — Russian or not — most didn’t exactly set out to be arch criminals, but instead got drawn into the scene gradually over several years as their skills broadened and sharpened.

Another important dynamic is that the Russian government generally either co-opts or ignores cybercriminal activity within its borders so long as the hackers do not steal from or attack Russian businesses and citizens. As a result, successful cybercriminals in Russia are usually insulated from prosecution and arrest by foreign law enforcement agencies provided they occasionally pay off the right people and do not travel abroad. And cybercriminals who intend to strictly adhere to those unwritten rules may (at least initially) be less concerned about covering their tracks online.

But the simplest explanation is that cybercriminals of all nationalities tend to make a number of basic operational security mistakes early in their careers, when they are less savvy and have far less to lose by their carelessness. A review of Hastalamuerte’s early posts on the crime forums (circa 2019-2020) shows a relatively unsophisticated and low-skilled hacker still trying to learn the ropes and earn a positive reputation on these communities.

For example, in June 2020 Hastalamuerte’s Telegram account joined a multi-month training program (@pntst) to learn how to use popular penetration testing tools, and their candid posts to this hacker training camp show Hastalamuerte struggling to use these tools effectively. A Google-translated record of Hastalmuerte’s posts to @pntst is here.

Update, June 11, 10:23 a.m. ET:  The threat research group PRODAFT has released a detailed writeup on the history and current operations of The Gentlemen. PRODAFT said its findings match the same persona with “high confidence,” and found the administrator (Zeta88/Hastalamuerte) supplies affiliates with initial access directly, primarily Fortinet SSL-VPN credentials obtained through brute-force attacks or sourced from the group’s own leak database. They also discovered the administrator is using AI to develop and maintain the ransomware and associated tooling, as well as to assist with post-exploitation activity.

Microsoft today released software updates to plug nearly 200 security holes across its Windows operating systems and supported software, a record number of fixes for the company’s monthly Patch Tuesday cycle. Nearly three dozen of those bugs earned Microsoft’s most dire “critical” rating, and exploit code for at least three of the weaknesses is now publicly available.

The software giant said in a blog post last month that both its engineers and the security community are increasing using artificial intelligence tools to find bugs, meaning this month’s heavy Patch Tuesday may start to become the norm, said Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable.

“Some surveys put AI usage among security professionals generally at 90%, so it’s unsurprising that this volume of patches may be the norm,” Narang said. “Pandora’s proverbial box has been opened, and as more advanced AI models become available, we expect the norm to continue upward across the board, not just for Patch Tuesday.”

June’s zero-day bugs include CVE-2026-49160, a denial of service vulnerability affecting a range of web servers, including Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS). Microsoft says the flaw was reported by OpenAI’s Codex.

Two of the zero-days addressed this month appear to stem from recent vulnerability disclosures by Nightmare Eclipse, the nickname chosen by a security researcher who has been dropping exploits for various Windows flaws. One of those, dubbed “GreenPlasma,” leverages an elevation of privilege weakness in the Windows Collaborative Translation Framework, the same framework patched today in CVE-2026-45586.

Nightmare Eclipse also last month released “YellowKey,” an exploit for a Windows BitLocker vulnerability that allows an attacker with physical access to view encrypted data, and CVE-2026-50507 is a patch for an elevation of privilege bug in BitLocker.

Microsoft received heavy blowback on social media last month after it said in a blog post that it was considering taking legal action against the security researcher. The company later clarified on Twitter/X that while it has no intention of pursuing legal actions against researchers, it would report them to authorities if they break the law. The advisories for CVE-2026-49160 and CVE-2026-50507 do not credit any researchers in the acknowledgement section, saying only that “Microsoft recognizes the efforts of those in the security community who help us protect customers through coordinated vulnerability disclosure.”

Nightmare Eclipse claims to be a former employee of Microsoft, although Microsoft has not responded to questions about this claim. Rapid7 notes that a recent blog post by Nightmare Eclipse included an image of Albert Wesker, a character from the Resident Evil video game series who formerly worked as a researcher for a technology company before going rogue.

Nightmare Eclipse has pledged to release even more zero-day exploits for Windows in what they called a “bone shattering” drop planned for July 14 (the same day as next month’s Patch Tuesday). Immediately following the release of Microsoft patches today, the researcher published an exploit for what they claimed was a zero-day bug in Windows Defender.

While 200 vulnerabilities may be a record for Patch Tuesday, the actual number of security flaws Microsoft addressed this month is far higher, said Rapid7’s Adam Barnett.

“So far this month, Microsoft has provided patches to address 360 browser vulnerabilities, which is an order of magnitude more than has been typical in any given month over the past few years,” Barnett wrote. “As usual, browser [flaws] are not included in the Patch Tuesday count above. Indeed, the vast, and presumably sustained, uptick in the number of browser vulnerabilities has led to Microsoft no longer enumerating Chromium CVEs in the Security Update Guide.”

Microsoft also patched a zero-day vulnerability in Visual Studio Code that allows attackers to steal GitHub tokens with a single click. The company was forced to push a stopgap fix for the flaw on June 3, after a researcher published instructions showing how to exploit it. The researcher said they opted not to work with Microsoft because of a recent experience wherein Redmond silently patched a flaw they reported without offering credit or recognition.

Microsoft battled its own internal zero-day emergencies last week, after at least 72 of the company’s public code repositories were infected with a variant of the Shai-Hulud worm. Researchers found that all of the affected packages were connected to Microsoft official Azure Durable Task SDK, which got hit by the same Shai-Hulud worm in May.

Other major software makers are also shipping outsized update bundles this month. Adobe has released updates to fix a massive number of critical vulnerabilities across a range of products, including Adobe Experience Manager, Acrobat Reader and Cold Fusion. On June 3, Google resolved a whopping 429 vulnerabilities in its latest Chrome browser update (Chrome automatically downloads updates but installing them usually requires a complete restart of the browser).

As ever, please consider backing up your data before applying operating system updates, and drop a note in the comments if you run into any problems with this month’s patches.

Further reading:

Microsoft’s Security Update Guide

Action1’s Patch Tuesday breakdown

SANS Internet Storm Center notes on Patch Tuesday

The Instagram accounts for the Obama White House and the Chief Master Sergeant of the U.S. Space Force were briefly defaced with pro-Iranian images and messages over the weekend, after instructions began circulating on Telegram showing how to trick Meta’s “AI support assistant” bot into resetting account passwords.

On May 31, word began to spread on several Telegram instant message channels that Meta’s AI bot would happily add an email address to an existing account as part of the bot’s standard password reset flow.

A video released on Telegram by pro-Iran hackers claimed to document a remarkably simple exploit that appears to have involved using a VPN connection with an IP address that is in or near the target’s usual hometown, requesting a password reset for the account, and then choosing to chat with Meta’s AI support assistant. From there, the video shows the attacker told the bot to link the account in question to a new email address, after which the bot dutifully sent that address a one-time code that allowed a password reset.

The Telegram account that posted the video also linked to screenshots of pro-Iran images, videos and messages that defaced the hacked Instagram accounts, saying hackers had used the exploit to hijack a number of valuable (read: short) Instagram account names that allegedly have a resale value of more than a half million dollars.

Meta has not responded to requests for comment on the video’s claims, but Meta’s Andy Stone said on Twitter/X that the issue had been resolved and that they were securing impacted accounts. The security blog thecybersecguru.com reports that Meta pushed an emergency patch over the weekend, and clarified that no back end database was breached.

“Instagram has notoriously poor human support infrastructure,” Cybersecguru wrote. “Recovering a locked account – especially a high-value one can take weeks of back-and-forth with an automated ticketing system. Meta’s solution was to deploy a conversational AI layer to handle common recovery workflows: relinking a lost email address, triggering a password reset, verifying account ownership. The assistant, presumably, was supposed to reduce friction for legitimate users stuck in account-access hell.”

Ian Goldin, a threat researcher at Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs, said we’re entering unchartered security territory as more large online platforms start allowing AI chatbots to handle sensitive account recovery requests. Just like human customer support employees can be social engineered into providing unauthorized access to someone’s account, AI bots are equally eager to help and vulnerable to persuasion and trickery, he said.

“AI chatbots create interesting new attack surface, and we’re likely going to see a lot more of these kinds of attacks,” Goldin said.

Securing your various online accounts means taking full advantage of the most secure form of multi-factor authentication (MFA) offered (such as a passkey or security key). In this case, even using the least robust form of MFA that Instagram offers — a one-time code sent via SMS — likely would have blocked the exploit: The hackers who released the video on Telegram said their exploit failed to work against any accounts that had MFA enabled.

Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested the co-owners of two related Internet hosting companies for operating IT infrastructure used by Russia to carry out cyberattacks, influence operations and disinformation campaigns inside the European Union. The two men were the focus of a 2025 KrebsOnSecurity story about how their hosting companies had assumed control over the technical infrastructure of Stark Industries Solutions, an Internet service provider sanctioned last year by the EU as a frequent staging ground for cyber mischief from Russia’s intelligence agencies.

The Dutch daily news outlet de Volkskrant reports that the Dutch financial crime agency FIOD on May 18 arrested a 57-year-old from Amsterdam and a 39-year-old from The Hague, charging them with violating sanctions law by directly or indirectly making economic resources available to EU-sanctioned entities.

The Dutch investigation focuses on Stark Industries, a sprawling hosting provider that materialized just two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine. As detailed in this May 2024 deep-dive, Stark quickly became the source of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against European targets, and emerged as a top supplier of proxy and anonymity services that showed up time and again in cyberattacks linked to Russia-backed hacking groups.

That report identified two Moldovan brothers — Ivan and Yuri Neculiti and their company PQHosting — who were providing one of Stark’s two main conduits to the larger Internet. In May 2025, the EU sanctioned PQHosting and the Neculiti brothers for aiding Russia’s hybrid warfare efforts. But as KrebsOnSecurity observed in September 2025, those sanctions failed to target Stark’s remaining connection to the Internet — an Internet service provider based in the Netherlands called MIRhosting.

MIRhosting is operated by Andrey Nesterenko, a 39-year-old Russian native who runs the business out of the Netherlands.  News that PQHosting and the Neculiti brothers were about to be sanctioned by the EU leaked in the media nearly two weeks before the sanctions were announced last year. During that time, the Stark network assets were transferred from PQHosting to a new entity called the[.]hosting, under the control of the Dutch entity WorkTitans BV.

And as our September 2025 report showed, WorkTitans was controlled by Nesterenko and a 57-year-old from Amsterdam named Youssef Zinad. On top of that, WorkTitans was getting connectivity to the larger Internet solely through MIRhosting, where Zinad had worked previously.

On May 18, Dutch financial crime investigators arrested Nesterenko and Zinad, and searched three businesses in Enschede and Almere and two data centers in Dronten and Schiphol-Rijk. A statement from the Dutch authorities said they also seized laptops, telephones and more than 800 servers.

De Volkskrant said it reviewed data showing WorkTitans and MIRhosting were the most-used networks in pro-Russian attacks on Danish government bodies between November 13 and 19, 2025, the week of Denmark’s municipal elections.

The publication wrote that prior to Nesterenko’s arrest, the MIRhosting founder denied that he knew his servers had been misused by pro-Russian cybercriminals. “He said he had ended all services with the Neculiti brothers when the EU sanctions came into force in May 2025,” and the he “reserved all rights to take action against ‘harmful and incorrect publications,” de Volkskrant wrote.

MIRhosting released a statement saying it has initiated an internal investigation into the alleged facts concerning the elections in Denmark, and that it has temporarily paused services to WorkTitans as a precautionary measure while the matter is being reviewed further.

“Based on our preliminary findings, there are no indications that the services over which we exercise control were actually used to influence the Danish elections,” the statement reads. “No anomalies or spikes were observed in our network traffic during the period mentioned in the publication; had large-scale DDoS attacks occurred, such activity would have been evident. Furthermore, prior to the media publication, we had not received any complaints, abuse reports, or official requests regarding suspicious activities or misuse of our network. Meanwhile, our regular operational activities continue, and our service to our other clients remains fully intact.”

Born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, Mr. Nesterenko grew up as a piano prodigy who performed publicly at a young age. In 2004, Nesterenko founded MIRhosting’s parent Innovation IT Solutions Corp., which has the notable distinction of being the company responsible for hosting stopgeorgia[.]ru, a hacktivist website for organizing cyberattacks against Georgia that appeared at the same time Russian forces invaded the former Soviet nation in 2008. That conflict was thought to be the first war ever fought in which a notable cyberattack and an actual military engagement happened simultaneously.

Responding to questions shared via email, Nesterenko said MIRhosting does not support cybercrime, sanctions evasion, or illegal activity, and that the allegations and arrest by Dutch authorities have been extremely harmful to him and his company.

“The transition to the.hosting was not intended to evade sanctions,” Nesterenko wrote. “The hardware and customer portfolio had already been transferred to WorkTitans before the sanctions appeared. Closing or damaging a legitimate Dutch infrastructure company will not stop cybercrime, but it will harm many people who have done nothing wrong.”

Far less is public about the 57-year-old Zinad, who reportedly has been keeping a low profile since our story last year. De Volkskrant reported that Zinad blocked access to his LinkedIn account, had gone months without responding to emails, WhatsApp messages and phone calls, and told a colleague that illness was forcing him to lead a somewhat more reclusive life.

Mr. Nesterenko claims Zinad was never an employee of MIRhosting.

“He helped me and MIRhosting with certain business tasks under a normal business-to-business arrangement between companies,” Nesterenko explained.

However, in previous emails to KrebsOnSecurity, Nesterenko carbon copied Mr. Zinad (who had a @mirhosting.com email), explaining that he was part of the company’s legal team. Also, the Dutch website stagemarkt[.]nl lists Youssef Zinad as an official contact for MIRhosting’s offices in Almere.

Mr. Zinad has never responded to requests for comment. Nor did de Volkskrant have any luck tracking him down. The publication said it repeatedly asked Mr. Zinad (referred to here as simply “Z”), but he reportedly avoided every form of contact.

“‘I am unavailable but will respond to your message as soon as possible,’ reads an automated reply on WhatsApp on 2 October 2025,” de Volkskrant reported. “It is the only response de Volkskrant would receive in months. He did not pick up his phone and did not call back. When an acquaintance asked him via LinkedIn to contact the reporter, he blocked access to his LinkedIn page. At an address in Almere where Z.’s personal limited company is registered, no one was present in April. The corner house’s blinds were drawn, and a pile of rubbish bags lay outside next to a container, as if someone had recently left. A neighbour said he knew the man but did not know where he was staying. Z. was later arrested at a residence in Amsterdam.”

Lawmakers in both houses of Congress are demanding answers from the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) after KrebsOnSecurity reported this week that a CISA contractor intentionally published AWS GovCloud keys and a vast trove of other agency secrets on a public GitHub account. The inquiry comes as CISA is still struggling to contain the breach and invalidate the leaked credentials.

On May 18, KrebsOnSecurity reported that a CISA contractor with administrative access to the agency’s code development platform had created a public GitHub profile called “Private-CISA” that included plaintext credentials to dozens of internal CISA systems. Experts who reviewed the exposed secrets said the commit logs for the code repository showed the CISA contractor disabled GitHub’s built-in protection against publishing sensitive credentials in public repos.

CISA acknowledged the leak but has not responded to questions about the duration of the data exposure. However, experts who reviewed the now-defunct Private-CISA archive said it was originally created in November 2025, and that it exhibits a pattern consistent with an individual operator using the repository as a working scratchpad or synchronization mechanism rather than a curated project repository.

In a written statement, CISA said “there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of the incident.” But in a May 19 a letter (PDF) to CISA’s Acting Director Nick Andersen, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) said the credential leak raises serious questions about how such a security lapse could occur at the very agency charged with helping to prevent cyber breaches.

“This reporting raises serious concerns regarding CISA’s internal policies and procedures at a time of significant cybersecurity threats against U.S. critical infrastructure,” Sen. Hassan wrote.

Sen. Hassan noted that the incident occurred against the backdrop of major disruptions internally at CISA, which lost more than a third of it workforce and almost all of its senior leaders after the Trump administration forced a series of early retirements, buyouts, and resignations across the agency’s various divisions.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee, echoed the senator’s concerns.

“We are concerned that this incident reflects a diminished security culture and/or an inability for CISA to adequately manage its contract support,” Thompson wrote in a May 19 letter to the acting CISA chief that was co-signed by Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill), the ranking member of the panel’s Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection. “It’s no secret that our adversaries — like China, Russia, and Iran — seek to gain access to and persistence on federal networks. The files contained in the ‘Private-CISA’ repository provided the information, access, and roadmap to do just that.”

KrebsOnSecurity has learned that more a week after CISA was first notified of the data leak by the security firm GitGuardian, the agency is still working to invalidate and replace many of the exposed keys and secrets.

On May 20, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Dylan Ayrey, the creator of TruffleHog, an open-source tool for discovering private keys and other secrets buried in code hosted at GitHub and other public platforms. Ayrey said CISA still hadn’t invalidated an RSA private key exposed in the Private-CISA repo that granted access to a GitHub app which is owned by the CISA enterprise account and installed on the CISA-IT GitHub organization with full access to all code repositories.

“An attacker with this key can read source code from every repository in the CISA-IT organization, including private repos, register rogue self-hosted runners to hijack CI/CD pipelines and access repository secrets, and modify repository admin settings including branch protection rules, webhooks, and deploy keys,” Ayrey told KrebsOnSecurity. CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, and it refers to a set of practices used to automate the building, testing and deployment of software.

KrebsOnSecurity notified CISA about Ayrey’s findings on May 20. Ayrey said CISA appears to have invalidated the exposed RSA private key sometime after that notification. But he noted that CISA still hasn’t rotated leaked credentials tied to other critical security technologies that are deployed across the agency’s technology portfolio (KrebsOnSecurity is not naming those technologies publicly for the time being).

CISA responded with a brief written statement in response to questions about Ayrey’s findings, saying “CISA is actively responding and coordinating with the appropriate parties and vendors to ensure any identified leaked credentials are rotated and rendered invalid and will continue to take appropriate steps to protect the security of our systems.”

Ayrey said his company Truffle Security monitors GitHub and a number of other code platforms for exposed keys, and attempts to alert affected accounts to the sensitive data exposure(s). They can do this easily on GitHub because the platform publishes a live feed which includes a record of all commits and changes to public code repositories. But he said cybercriminal actors also monitor these public feeds, and are often quick to pounce on API or SSH keys that get inadvertently published in code commits.

In practical terms, it is likely that cybercrime groups or foreign adversaries also noticed the publication of these CISA secrets, the most egregious of which appears to have happened in late April 2026, Ayrey said.

“We monitor that firehose of data for keys, and we have tools to try to figure out whose they are,” he said. “We have evidence attackers monitor that firehose as well. Anyone monitoring GitHub events could be sitting on this information.”

James Wilson, the enterprise technology editor for the Risky Business security podcast, said organizations using GitHub to manage code projects can set top-down policies that prevent employees from disabling GitHub’s protections against publishing secret keys and credentials. But Wilson’s co-host Adam Boileau said it’s not clear that any technology could stop employees from opening their own personal GitHub account and using it to store sensitive and proprietary information.

“Ultimately, this is a thing you can’t solve with a technical control,” Boileau said on this week’s podcast. “This is a human problem where you’ve hired a contractor to do this work and they have decided of their own volition to use GitHub to synchronize content from a work machine to a home machine. I don’t know what technical controls you could put in place given that this is being done presumably outside of anything CISA managed or even had visibility on.”

Update, 3:05 p.m. ET: Added statement from CISA. Corrected a date in the story (Truffle Security said it found the repo gained some of its most sensitive secrets in late April 2026, not 2025).

Canadian authorities on Wednesday arrested a 23-year-old Ottawa man on suspicion of building and operating Kimwolf, a fast spreading Internet-of-Things botnet that enslaved millions of devices for use in a series of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks over the past six months. KrebsOnSecurity publicly named the suspect in February 2026 after the accused launched a volley of DDoS, doxing and swatting campaigns against this author and a security researcher. He now faces criminal hacking charges in both Canada and the United States.

A criminal complaint unsealed today in an Alaska district court charges Jacob Butler, a.k.a. “Dort,” of Ottawa, Canada with operating the Kimwolf DDoS botnet. A statement from the Department of Justice says the complaint against Butler was unsealed following the defendant’s arrest in Canada by the Ontario Provincial Police pursuant to a U.S. extradition warrant. Butler is currently in Canadian custody awaiting an initial court hearing scheduled for early next week.

The government said Kimwolf targeted infected devices which were traditionally “firewalled” from the rest of the internet, such as digital photo frames and web cameras. The infected systems were then rented to other cybercriminals, or forced to participate in record-smashing DDoS attacks, as well as assaults that affected Internet address ranges for the Department of Defense. Consequently, the DoD’s Defense Criminal Investigative Service is investigating the case, with assistance from the FBI field office in Anchorage.

“KimWolf was tied to DDoS attacks which were measured at nearly 30 Terabits per second, a record in recorded DDoS attack volume,” the Justice Department statement reads. “These attacks resulted in financial losses which, for some victims, exceeded one million dollars. The KimWolf botnet is alleged to have issued over 25,000 attack commands.”

On March 19, U.S. authorities joined international law enforcement partners in seizing the technical infrastructure for Kimwolf and three other large DDoS botnets — named Aisuru, JackSkid and Mossad — that were all competing for the same pool of vulnerable devices.

On February 28, KrebsOnSecurity identified Butler as the Kimwolf botmaster after digging through his various email addresses, registrations on the cybercrime forums, and posts to public Telegram and Discord servers. However, Dort continued to threaten and harass researchers who helped track down his real-life identity and dramatically slow the spread of his botnet.

Dort claimed responsibility for at least two swatting attacks targeting the founder of Synthient, a security startup that helped to secure a widespread critical security weakness that Kimwolf was using to spread faster and more effectively than any other IoT botnet out there. Synthient was among many technology companies thanked by the Justice Department today, and Synthient’s founder Ben Brundage told KrebsOnSecurity he’s relieved Butler is in custody.

“Hopefully this will end the harassment,” Brundage said.

The government says investigators connected Butler to the administration of the KimWolf botnet through IP address, online account information, transaction records, and online messaging application records obtained through the issuance of legal process. The criminal complaint against Butler (PDF) shows he did little to separate his real-life and cybercriminal identities (something we demonstrated in our February unmasking of Dort).

In April, the Justice Department joined authorities across Europe in seizing domain names tied to nearly four-dozen DDoS-for-hire services, although because of a bureaucratic mix-up the list of seized domains has remain sealed until today. The DOJ said at least one of those services collaborated with Butler’s Kimwolf botnet.

A statement from the Ontario Provincial Police said a search warrant was executed on March 19 at Butler’s address in Ottawa, where they seized multiple devices. As a result of that investigation, Butler was arrested and charged this week with unauthorized user of computer; possession of device to obtain unauthorized use of computer system or to commit mischief; and mischief in relation to computer data. He is scheduled to remain in custody until a hearing on May 26.

In the United States, Butler is facing one count of aiding and abetting computer intrusion. If extradited, tried and convicted in a U.S. court, Butler could face up to 10 years in prison, although that maximum sentence would likely be heavily tempered by considerations in the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, which make allowances for mitigating factors such as youth, lack of criminal history and level of cooperation with investigators.

Until this past weekend, a contractor for the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) maintained a public GitHub repository that exposed credentials to several highly privileged AWS GovCloud accounts and a large number of internal CISA systems. Security experts said the public archive included files detailing how CISA builds, tests and deploys software internally, and that it represents one of the most egregious government data leaks in recent history.

On May 15, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Guillaume Valadon, a researcher with the security firm GitGuardian. Valadon’s company constantly scans public code repositories at GitHub and elsewhere for exposed secrets, automatically alerting the offending accounts of any apparent sensitive data exposures. Valadon said he reached out because the owner in this case wasn’t responding and the information exposed was highly sensitive.

The GitHub repository that Valadon flagged was named “Private-CISA,” and it harbored a vast number of internal CISA/DHS credentials and files, including cloud keys, tokens, plaintext passwords, logs and other sensitive CISA assets.

Valadon said the exposed CISA credentials represent a textbook example of poor security hygiene, noting that the commit logs in the offending GitHub account show that the CISA administrator disabled the default setting in GitHub that blocks users from publishing SSH keys or other secrets in public code repositories.

“Passwords stored in plain text in a csv, backups in git, explicit commands to disable GitHub secrets detection feature,” Valadon wrote in an email. “I honestly believed that it was all fake before analyzing the content deeper. This is indeed the worst leak that I’ve witnessed in my career. It is obviously an individual’s mistake, but I believe that it might reveal internal practices.”

One of the exposed files, titled “importantAWStokens,” included the administrative credentials to three Amazon AWS GovCloud servers. Another file exposed in their public GitHub repository — “AWS-Workspace-Firefox-Passwords.csv” — listed plaintext usernames and passwords for dozens of internal CISA systems. According to Caturegli, those systems included one called “LZ-DSO,” which appears short for “Landing Zone DevSecOps,” the agency’s secure code development environment.

Philippe Caturegli, founder of the security consultancy Seralys, said he tested the AWS keys only to see whether they were still valid and to determine which internal systems the exposed accounts could access. Caturegli said the GitHub account that exposed the CISA secrets exhibits a pattern consistent with an individual operator using the repository as a working scratchpad or synchronization mechanism rather than a curated project repository.

“The use of both a CISA-associated email address and a personal email address suggests the repository may have been used across differently configured environments,” Caturegli observed. “The available Git metadata alone does not prove which endpoint or device was used.”

Caturegli said he validated that the exposed credentials could authenticate to three AWS GovCloud accounts at a high privilege level. He said the archive also includes plain text credentials to CISA’s internal “artifactory” — essentially a repository of all the code packages they are using to build software — and that this would represent a juicy target for malicious attackers looking for ways to maintain a persistent foothold in CISA systems.

“That would be a prime place to move laterally,” he said. “Backdoor in some software packages, and every time they build something new they deploy your backdoor left and right.”

In response to questions, a spokesperson for CISA said the agency is aware of the reported exposure and is continuing to investigate the situation.

“Currently, there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of this incident,” the CISA spokesperson wrote. “While we hold our team members to the highest standards of integrity and operational awareness, we are working to ensure additional safeguards are implemented to prevent future occurrences.”

A review of the GitHub account and its exposed passwords show the “Private CISA” repository was maintained by an employee of Nightwing, a government contractor based in Dulles, Va. Nightwing declined to comment, directing inquiries to CISA.

CISA has not responded to questions about the potential duration of the data exposure, but Caturegli said the Private CISA repository was created on November 13, 2025. The contractor’s GitHub account was created back in September 2018.

The GitHub account that included the Private CISA repo was taken offline shortly after both KrebsOnSecurity and Seralys notified CISA about the exposure. But Caturegli said the exposed AWS keys inexplicably continued to remain valid for another 48 hours.

CISA is currently operating with only a fraction of its normal budget and staffing levels. The agency has lost nearly a third of its workforce since the beginning of the second Trump administration, which forced a series of early retirements, buyouts, and resignations across the agency’s various divisions.

The now-defunct Private CISA repo showed the contractor also used easily-guessed passwords for a number of internal resources; for example, many of the credentials used a password consisting of each platform’s name followed by the current year. Caturegli said such practices would constitute a serious security threat for any organization even if those credentials were never exposed externally, noting that threat actors often use key credentials exposed on the internal network to expand their reach after establishing initial access to a targeted system.

“What I suspect happened is [the CISA contractor] was using this GitHub to synchronize files between a work laptop and a home computer, because he has regularly committed to this repo since November 2025,” Caturegli said. “This would be an embarrassing leak for any company, but it’s even more so in this case because it’s CISA.”

Artificial intelligence platforms may be just as susceptible to social engineering as human beings, but they are proving remarkably good at finding security vulnerabilities in human-made computer code. That reality is on full display this month with some of the more widely-used software makers — including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Oracle — fixing near record volumes of security bugs, and/or quickening the tempo of their patch releases.

As it does on the second Tuesday of every month, Microsoft today released software updates to address at least 118 security vulnerabilities in its various Windows operating systems and other products. Remarkably, this is the first Patch Tuesday in nearly two years that Microsoft is not shipping any fixes to deal with emergency zero-day flaws that are already being exploited. Nor have any of the flaws fixed today been previously disclosed (potentially giving attackers a heads up in how to exploit the weakness).

Sixteen of the vulnerabilities earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” label, meaning malware or miscreants could abuse these bugs to seize remote control over a vulnerable Windows device with little or no help from the user. Rapid7 has done much of the heavy lifting in identifying some of the more concerning critical weaknesses this month, including:

• CVE-2026-41089: A critical stack-based buffer overflow in Windows Netlogon that offers an attacker SYSTEM privileges on the domain controller. No privileges or user interaction are required, and attack complexity is low. Patches are available for all versions of Windows Server from 2012 onwards.
• CVE-2026-41096: A critical RCE in the Windows DNS client implementation worthy of attention despite Microsoft assessing exploitation as less likely.
• CVE-2026-41103: A critical elevation of privilege vulnerability that allows an unauthorized attacker to impersonate an existing user by presenting forged credentials, thus bypassing Entra ID. Microsoft expects that exploitation is more likely.

May’s Patch Tuesday is a welcome respite from April, which saw Microsoft fix a near-record 167 security flaws. Microsoft was among a few dozen tech giants given access to a “Project Glasswing,” a much-hyped AI capability developed by Anthropic that appears quite effective at unearthing security vulnerabilities in code.

Apple, another early participant in Project Glasswing, typically fixes an average of 20 vulnerabilities each time it ships a security update for iOS devices, said Chris Goettl, vice president of product management at Ivanti. On May 11, Apple shipped updates to address at least 52 vulnerabilities and backported the changes all the way to iPhone 6s and iOS 15.

Last month, Mozilla released Firefox 150, which resolved a whopping 271 vulnerabilities that were reportedly discovered during the Glasswing evaluation.

“Since Firefox 150.0.0 released, they have been on a more aggressive weekly cadence for security updates including the release of Firefox 150.0.3 on May Patch Tuesday resolving between three to five CVEs in each release,” Goettl said.

The software giant Oracle likewise recently increased its patch pace in response to their work with Glasswing. In its most recent quarterly patch update, Oracle addressed at least 450 flaws, including more than 300 fixes for remotely exploitable, unauthenticated flaws. But at the end of April, Oracle announced it was switching to a monthly update cycle for critical security issues.

On May 8, Google started rolling out updates to its Chrome browser that fixed an astonishing 127 security flaws (up from just 30 the previous month). Chrome automagically downloads available security updates, but installing them requires fully restarting the browser.

If you encounter any weirdness applying the updates from Microsoft or any other vendor mentioned here, feel free to sound off in the comments below. Meantime, if you haven’t backed up your data and/or drive lately, doing that before updating is generally sound advice. For a more granular look at the Microsoft updates released today, checkout this inventory by the SANS Internet Storm Center.

An ongoing data extortion attack targeting the widely-used education technology platform Canvas disrupted classes and coursework at school districts and universities across the United States today, after a cybercrime group defaced the service’s login page with a ransom demand that threatened to leak data from 275 million students and faculty across nearly 9,000 educational institutions.

Canvas parent firm Instructure responded to today’s defacement attacks by disabling the platform, which is used by thousands of schools, universities and businesses to manage coursework and assignments, and to communicate with students.

Instructure acknowledged a data breach earlier this week, after the cybercrime group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility and said they would leak data on tens of millions of students and faculty unless paid a ransom. The stated deadline for payment was initially set at May 6, but it was later pushed back to May 12.

In a statement on May 6, Instructure said the investigation so far shows the stolen information includes “certain identifying information of users at affected institutions, such as names, email addresses, and student ID numbers, as well as as messages among users.” The company said it found no evidence the breached data included more sensitive information, such as passwords, dates of birth, government identifiers or financial information.

The May 6 update stated that Canvas was fully operational, and that Instructure was not seeing any ongoing unauthorized activity on their platform. “At this stage, we believe the incident has been contained,” Instructure wrote.

However, by mid-day on Thursday, May 7, students and faculty at dozens of schools and universities were flooding social media sites with comments saying that a ransom demand from ShinyHunters had replaced the usual Canvas login page. Instructure responded by pulling Canvas offline and replacing the portal with the message, “Canvas is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. Check back soon.”

“We anticipate being up soon, and will provide updates as soon as possible,” reads the current message on Instructure’s status page.

While the data stolen by ShinyHunters may or may not contain particularly sensitive information (ShinyHunters claims it includes several billion private messages among students and teachers, as well as names, phone numbers and email addresses), this attack could hardly have come at a worse time for Instructure: Many of the affected schools and universities are in the middle of final exams, and a prolonged outage could be highly damaging for the company.

The extortion message that greeted countless Canvas users today advised the affected schools to negotiate their own ransom payments to prevent the publication of their data — regardless of whether Instructure decides to pay.

“ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again),” the extortion message read. “Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some ‘security patches.'”

A source close to the investigation who was not authorized to speak to the press told KrebsOnSecurity that a number of universities have already approached the cybercrime group about paying. The same source also pointed out that the ShinyHunters data leak blog no longer lists Instructure among its current extortion victims, and that the samples of data stolen from Canvas customers were removed as well. Data extortion groups like ShinyHunters will typically only remove victims from their leak sites after receiving an extortion payment or after a victim agrees to negotiate.

Dipan Mann, founder and CEO of the security firm Cloudskope, slammed Instructure for referring to today’s outage as a “scheduled maintenance” event on its status page. Mann said Shiny Hunters first demonstrated they’d breached Instructure on May 1, prompting Instructure’s Chief Information Security Officer Steve Proud to declare the following day that the incident had been contained. But Mann said today’s attack is at least the third time in the past eight months that Instructure has been breached by ShinyHunters.

In a blog post today, Mann noted that in September 2025, ShinyHunters released thousands of internal University of Pennsylvania files — donor records, internal memos, and other confidential materials — through what the Daily Pennsylvanian and other outlets later determined was, in part, a Canvas/Instructure-mediated access path.

“Penn was the named victim,” Mann wrote. “Instructure was the mechanism. The incident was treated as a Penn-specific story by most of the national press and quietly handled by Instructure as a customer-specific matter. That framing was wrong then. It is dramatically more wrong in light of the May 2026 events, which now look like the planned escalation of an attack pattern that ShinyHunters had been working against Instructure’s environment for at least eight months prior. The September 2025 Penn breach was the proof of concept. The May 1, 2026 incident was the production run. The May 7, 2026 recompromise was ShinyHunters demonstrating publicly that the May 2 ‘containment’ did not happen.”

In February, a ShinyHunters spokesperson told The Daily Pennsylvanian that Penn failed to pay a $1 million ransom demand. On March 5, ShinyHunters published 461 megabytes worth of data stolen from Penn, including thousands of files such as donor records and internal memos.

ShinyHunters is a prolific and fluid cybercriminal group that specializes in data theft and extortion. They typically gain access to companies through voice phishing and social engineering attacks that often involve impersonating IT personnel or other trusted members of a targeted organization.

Last month, ShinyHunters relieved the home security giant ADT of personal information on 5.5 million customers. The extortion group told BleepingComputer they breached the company by compromising an employee’s Okta single sign-on account in a voice phishing attack that enabled access to ADT’s Salesforce instance. BleepingComputer says ShinyHunters recently has taken credit for a number of extortion attacks against high-profile organizations, including Medtronic, Rockstar Games, McGraw Hill, 7-Eleven and the cruise line operator Carnival.

The attack on Canvas customers is just one of several major cybercrime campaigns being launched by ShinyHunters at the moment, said Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at the Google-owned Mandiant Consulting. Carmakal declined to comment specifically on the Canvas breach, but said “there are multiple concurrent and discrete ShinyHunters intrusion and extortion campaigns happening right now.”

Cloudskope’s Mann said what happens next depends largely on whether Instructure’s customers — the universities, K-12 districts, and education ministries paying for Canvas — choose to apply pressure or absorb the breach quietly.

“The history of education-vendor incidents suggests the path of least resistance is the second one,” he concluded.

Update, May 8, 11:05 a.m. ET: Instructure has published an incident update page that includes more information about the breach. Instructure said its Canvas portal is functioning normally again, and that the hackers exploited an issue related to Free-for-Teacher accounts.

“This is the same issue that led to the unauthorized access the prior week,” Instructure wrote. “As a result, we have made the difficult decision to temporarily shut down Free-for-Teacher accounts. These accounts have been a core part of our platform, and we’re committed to resolving the issues with these accounts.”

Instructure said affected organizations were notified on May 6.

“If your organization is affected, Instructure will contact your organization’s primary contacts directly,” the update states. “Please don’t rely on third-party lists or social media posts naming potentially affected organizations as those lists aren’t verified. Instructure will confirm validated information through direct outreach to all affected organizations.”

Update, May 11, 10:16 p.m. ET: Instructure posted an update saying they paid their extortionists in exchange for a promise to destroy the stolen data. “The data was returned to us,” the update reads. “We received digital confirmation of data destruction (shred logs). We have been informed that no Instructure customers will be extorted as a result of this incident, publicly or otherwise.”

A Brazilian tech firm that specializes in protecting networks from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks has been enabling a botnet responsible for an extended campaign of massive DDoS attacks against other network operators in Brazil, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The firm’s chief executive says the malicious activity resulted from a security breach and was likely the work of a competitor trying to tarnish his company’s public image.

For the past several years, security experts have tracked a series of massive DDoS attacks originating from Brazil and solely targeting Brazilian ISPs. Until recently, it was less than clear who or what was behind these digital sieges. That changed earlier this month when a trusted source who asked to remain anonymous shared a curious file archive that was exposed in an open directory online.

The exposed archive contained several Portuguese-language malicious programs written in Python. It also included the private SSH authentication keys belonging to the CEO of Huge Networks, a Brazilian ISP that primarily offers DDoS protection to other Brazilian network operators.

Founded in Miami, Fla. in 2014, Huge Networks’s operations are centered in Brazil. The company originated from protecting game servers against DDoS attacks and evolved into an ISP-focused DDoS mitigation provider. It does not appear in any public abuse complaints and is not associated with any known DDoS-for-hire services.

Nevertheless, the exposed archive shows that a Brazil-based threat actor maintained root access to Huge Networks infrastructure and built a powerful DDoS botnet by routinely mass-scanning the Internet for insecure Internet routers and unmanaged domain name system (DNS) servers on the Web that could be enlisted in attacks.

DNS is what allows Internet users to reach websites by typing familiar domain names instead of the associated IP addresses. Ideally, DNS servers only provide answers to machines within a trusted domain. But so-called “DNS reflection” attacks rely on DNS servers that are (mis)configured to accept queries from anywhere on the Web. Attackers can send spoofed DNS queries to these servers so that the request appears to come from the target’s network. That way, when the DNS servers respond, they reply to the spoofed (targeted) address.

By taking advantage of an extension to the DNS protocol that enables large DNS messages, botmasters can dramatically boost the size and impact of a reflection attack — crafting DNS queries so that the responses are much bigger than the requests. For example, an attacker could compose a DNS request of less than 100 bytes, prompting a response that is 60-70 times as large. This amplification effect is especially pronounced when the perpetrators can query many DNS servers with these spoofed requests from tens of thousands of compromised devices simultaneously.

The exposed file archive includes a command-line history showing exactly how this attacker built and maintained a powerful botnet by scouring the Internet for TP-Link Archer AX21 routers. Specifically, the botnet seeks out TP-Link devices that remain vulnerable to CVE-2023-1389, an unauthenticated command injection vulnerability that was patched back in April 2023.

Malicious domains in the exposed Python attack scripts included DNS lookups for hikylover[.]st, and c.loyaltyservices[.]lol, both domains that have been flagged in the past year as control servers for an Internet of Things (IoT) botnet powered by a Mirai malware variant.

The leaked archive shows the botmaster coordinated their scanning from a Digital Ocean server that has been flagged for abusive activity hundreds of times in the past year. The Python scripts invoke multiple Internet addresses assigned to Huge Networks that were used to identify targets and execute DDoS campaigns. The attacks were strictly limited to Brazilian IP address ranges, and the scripts show that each selected IP address prefix was attacked for 10-60 seconds with four parallel processes per host before the botnet moved on to the next target.

The archive also shows these malicious Python scripts relied on private SSH keys belonging to Huge Networks’s CEO, Erick Nascimento. Reached for comment about the files, Mr. Nascimento said he did not write the attack programs and that he didn’t realize the extent of the DDoS campaigns until contacted by KrebsOnSecurity.

“We received and notified many Tier 1 upstreams regarding very very large DDoS attacks against small ISPs,” Nascimento said. “We didn’t dig deep enough at the time, and what you sent makes that clear.”

Nascimento said the unauthorized activity is likely related to a digital intrusion first detected in January 2026 that compromised two of the company’s development servers, as well as his personal SSH keys. But he said there’s no evidence those keys were used after January.

“We notified the team in writing the same day, wiped the boxes, and rotated keys,” Nascimento said, sharing a screenshot of a January 11 notification from Digital Ocean. “All documented internally.”

Mr. Nascimento said Huge Networks has since engaged a third-party network forensics firm to investigate further.

“Our working assessment so far is that this all started with a single internal compromise — one pivot point that gave the attacker downstream access to some resources, including a legacy personal droplet of mine,” he wrote.

“The compromise happened through a bastion/jump server that several people had access to,” Nascimento continued. “Digital Ocean flagged the droplet on January 11 — compromised due to a leaked SSH key, in their wording — I was traveling at the time and addressed it on return. That droplet was deprecated and destroyed, and it was never part of Huge Networks infrastructure.”

The malicious software that powers the botnet of TP-Link devices used in the DDoS attacks on Brazilian ISPs is based on Mirai, a malware strain that made its public debut in September 2016 by launching a then record-smashing DDoS attack that kept this website offline for four days. In January 2017, KrebsOnSecurity identified the Mirai authors as the co-owners of a DDoS mitigation firm that was using the botnet to attack gaming servers and scare up new clients.

In May 2025, KrebsOnSecurity was hit by another Mirai-based DDoS that Google called the largest attack it had ever mitigated. That report implicated a 20-something Brazilian man who was running a DDoS mitigation company as well as several DDoS-for-hire services that have since been seized by the FBI.

Nascimento flatly denied being involved in DDoS attacks against Brazilian operators to generate business for his company’s services.

“We don’t run DDoS attacks against Brazilian operators to sell protection,” Nascimento wrote in response to questions. “Our sales model is mostly inbound and through channel integrator, distributors, partners — not active prospecting based on market incidents. The targets in the scripts you received are small regional providers, the vast majority of which are neither in our customer base nor in our commercial pipeline — a fact verifiable through public sources like QRator.”

Nascimento maintains he has “strong evidence stored on the blockchain” that this was all done by a competitor. As for who that competitor might be, the CEO wouldn’t say.

“I would love to share this with you, but it could not be published as it would lose the surprise factor against my dishonest competitor,” he explained. “Coincidentally or not, your contact happened a week before an important event – ​​one that this competitor has NEVER participated in (and it’s a traditional event in the sector). And this year, they will be participating. Strange, isn’t it?”

Strange indeed.

A 24-year-old British national and senior member of the cybercrime group “Scattered Spider” has pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy and aggravated identity theft. Tyler Robert Buchanan admitted his role in a series of text-message phishing attacks in the summer of 2022 that allowed the group to hack into at least a dozen major technology companies and steal tens of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency from investors.

Buchanan’s hacker handle “Tylerb” once graced a leaderboard in the English-language criminal hacking scene that tracked the most accomplished cyber thieves. Now in U.S. custody and awaiting sentencing, the Dundee, Scotland native is facing the possibility of more than 20 years in prison.

Scattered Spider is the name given to a prolific English-speaking cybercrime group known for using social engineering tactics to break into companies and steal data for ransom, often impersonating employees or contractors to deceive IT help desks into granting access.

As part of his guilty plea, Buchanan admitted conspiring with other Scattered Spider members to launch tens of thousands of SMS-based phishing attacks in 2022 that led to intrusions at a number of technology companies, including Twilio, LastPass, DoorDash, and Mailchimp.

The group then used data stolen in those breaches to carry out SIM-swapping attacks that siphoned funds from individual cryptocurrency investors. In an unauthorized SIM-swap, crooks transfer the target’s phone number to a device they control and intercept any text messages or phone calls to the victim’s device — such as one-time passcodes for authentication and password reset links sent via SMS. The U.S. Justice Department said Buchanan admitted to stealing at least $8 million in virtual currency from individual victims throughout the United States.

FBI investigators tied Buchanan to the 2022 SMS phishing attacks after discovering the same username and email address was used to register numerous phishing domains seen in the campaign. The domain registrar NameCheap found that less than a month before the phishing spree, the account that registered those domains logged in from an Internet address in the U.K. FBI investigators said the Scottish police told them the address was leased to Buchanan throughout 2022.

As first reported by KrebsOnSecurity, Buchanan fled the United Kingdom in February 2023, after a rival cybercrime gang hired thugs to invade his home, assault his mother, and threaten to burn him with a blowtorch unless he gave up the keys to his cryptocurrency wallet. That same year, U.K. investigators found a device at Buchanan’s Scotland residence that included data stolen from SMS phishing victims and seed phrases from cryptocurrency theft victims.

Buchanan was arrested by Spanish authorities in June 2024 while trying to board a flight to Italy. He was extradited to the United States and has remained in U.S. federal custody since April 2025.

Buchanan is the second known Scattered Spider member to plead guilty. Noah Michael Urban, 21, of Palm Coast, Fla., was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison last year and ordered to pay $13 million in restitution. Three other alleged co-conspirators — Ahmed Hossam Eldin Elbadawy, 24, a.k.a. “AD,” of College Station, Texas; Evans Onyeaka Osiebo, 21, of Dallas, Texas; and Joel Martin Evans, 26, a.k.a. “joeleoli,” of Jacksonville, North Carolina – still face criminal charges.

Two other alleged Scattered Spider members will soon be tried in the United Kingdom. Owen Flowers, 18, and Thalha Jubair, 20, are facing charges related to the hacking and extortion of several large U.K. retailers, the London transit system, and healthcare providers in the United States. Both have pleaded not guilty, and their trial is slated to begin in June.

Investigators say the Scattered Spider suspects are part of a sprawling cybercriminal community online known as “The Com,” wherein hackers from different cliques boast publicly on Telegram and Discord about high-profile cyber thefts that almost invariably begin with social engineering — tricking people over the phone, email or SMS into giving away credentials that allow remote access to corporate internal networks.

One of the more popular SIM-swapping channels on Telegram has long maintained a leaderboard of the most rapacious SIM-swappers, indexed by their supposed conquests in stealing cryptocurrency. That leaderboard previously listed Buchanan’s hacker alias Tylerb at #65 (out of 100 hackers), with Urban’s moniker “Sosa” coming in at #24.

Buchanan’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for August 21, 2026. According to the Justice Department, he faces a statutory maximum sentence of 22 years in federal prison. However, any sentence the judge hands down in this case may be significantly tempered by a number of mitigating factors in the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, including the defendant’s age, criminal history, time already served in U.S. custody, and the degree to which they cooperated with federal authorities.

Microsoft today pushed software updates to fix a staggering 167 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and related software, including a SharePoint Server zero-day and a publicly disclosed weakness in Windows Defender dubbed “BlueHammer.” Separately, Google Chrome fixed its fourth zero-day of 2026, and an emergency update for Adobe Reader nixes an actively exploited flaw that can lead to remote code execution.

Redmond warns that attackers are already targeting CVE-2026-32201, a vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint Server that allows attackers to spoof trusted content or interfaces over a network.

Mike Walters, president and co-founder of Action1, said CVE-2026-32201 can be used to deceive employees, partners, or customers by presenting falsified information within trusted SharePoint environments.

“This CVE can enable phishing attacks, unauthorized data manipulation, or social engineering campaigns that lead to further compromise,” Walters said. “The presence of active exploitation significantly increases organizational risk.”

Microsoft also addressed BlueHammer (CVE-2026-33825), a privilege escalation bug in Windows Defender. According to BleepingComputer, the researcher who discovered the flaw published exploit code for it after notifying Microsoft and growing exasperated with their response. Will Dormann, senior principal vulnerability analyst at Tharros, says he confirmed that the public BlueHammer exploit code no longer works after installing today’s patches.

Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said April marks the second-biggest Patch Tuesday ever for Microsoft. Narang also said there are indications that a zero-day flaw Adobe patched in an emergency update on April 11 — CVE-2026-34621 — has seen active exploitation since at least November 2025.

Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7, called the patch total from Microsoft today “a new record in that category” because it includes nearly 60 browser vulnerabilities. Barnett said it might be tempting to imagine that this sudden spike was tied to the buzz around the announcement a week ago today of Project Glasswing — a much-hyped but still unreleased new AI capability from Anthropic that is reportedly quite good at finding bugs in a vast array of software.

But he notes that Microsoft Edge is based on the Chromium engine, and the Chromium maintainers acknowledge a wide range of researchers for the vulnerabilities which Microsoft republished last Friday.

“A safe conclusion is that this increase in volume is driven by ever-expanding AI capabilities,” Barnett said. “We should expect to see further increases in vulnerability reporting volume as the impact of AI models extend further, both in terms of capability and availability.”

Finally, no matter what browser you use to surf the web, it’s important to completely close out and restart the browser periodically. This is really easy to put off (especially if you have a bajillion tabs open at any time) but it’s the only way to ensure that any available updates get installed. For example, a Google Chrome update released earlier this month fixed 21 security holes, including the high-severity zero-day flaw CVE-2026-5281.

For a clickable, per-patch breakdown, check out the SANS Internet Storm Center Patch Tuesday roundup. Running into problems applying any of these updates? Leave a note about it in the comments below and there’s a decent chance someone here will pipe in with a solution.

Hackers linked to Russia’s military intelligence units are using known flaws in older Internet routers to mass harvest authentication tokens from Microsoft Office users, security experts warned today. The spying campaign allowed state-backed Russian hackers to quietly siphon authentication tokens from users on more than 18,000 networks without deploying any malicious software or code.

Microsoft said in a blog post today it identified more than 200 organizations and 5,000 consumer devices that were caught up in a stealthy but remarkably simple spying network built by a Russia-backed threat actor known as “Forest Blizzard.”

Also known as APT28 and Fancy Bear, Forest Blizzard is attributed to the military intelligence units within Russia’s General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU). APT 28 famously compromised the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2016 in an attempt to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.

Researchers at Black Lotus Labs, a security division of the Internet backbone provider Lumen, found that at the peak of its activity in December 2025, Forest Blizzard’s surveillance dragnet ensnared more than 18,000 Internet routers that were mostly unsupported, end-of-life routers, or else far behind on security updates. A new report from Lumen says the hackers primarily targeted government agencies—including ministries of foreign affairs, law enforcement, and third-party email providers.

Black Lotus Security Engineer Ryan English said the GRU hackers did not need to install malware on the targeted routers, which were mainly older Mikrotik and TP-Link devices marketed to the Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) market. Instead, they used known vulnerabilities to modify the Domain Name System (DNS) settings of the routers to include DNS servers controlled by the hackers.

As the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) notes in a new advisory detailing how Russian cyber actors have been compromising routers, DNS is what allows individuals to reach websites by typing familiar addresses, instead of associated IP addresses. In a DNS hijacking attack, bad actors interfere with this process to covertly send users to malicious websites designed to steal login details or other sensitive information.

English said the routers attacked by Forest Blizzard were reconfigured to use DNS servers that pointed to a handful of virtual private servers controlled by the attackers. Importantly, the attackers could then propagate their malicious DNS settings to all users on the local network, and from that point forward intercept any OAuth authentication tokens transmitted by those users.

Because those tokens are typically transmitted only after the user has successfully logged in and gone through multi-factor authentication, the attackers could gain direct access to victim accounts without ever having to phish each user’s credentials and/or one-time codes.

“Everyone is looking for some sophisticated malware to drop something on your mobile devices or something,” English said. “These guys didn’t use malware. They did this in an old-school, graybeard way that isn’t really sexy but it gets the job done.”

Microsoft refers to the Forest Blizzard activity as using DNS hijacking “to support post-compromise adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) attacks on Transport Layer Security (TLS) connections against Microsoft Outlook on the web domains.” The software giant said while targeting SOHO devices isn’t a new tactic, this is the first time Microsoft has seen Forest Blizzard using “DNS hijacking at scale to support AiTM of TLS connections after exploiting edge devices.”

Black Lotus Labs engineer Danny Adamitis said it will be interesting to see how Forest Blizzard reacts to today’s flurry of attention to their espionage operation, noting that the group immediately switched up its tactics in response to a similar NCSC report (PDF) in August 2025. At the time, Forest Blizzard was using malware to control a far more targeted and smaller group of compromised routers. But Adamitis said the day after the NCSC report, the group quickly ditched the malware approach in favor of mass-altering the DNS settings on thousands of vulnerable routers.

“Before the last NCSC report came out they used this capability in very limited instances,” Adamitis told KrebsOnSecurity. “After the report was released they implemented the capability in a more systemic fashion and used it to target everything that was vulnerable.”

TP-Link was among the router makers facing a complete ban in the United States. But on March 23, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took a much broader approach, announcing it would no longer certify consumer-grade Internet routers that are produced outside of the United States.

The FCC warned that foreign-made routers had become an untenable national security threat, and that poorly-secured routers present “a severe cybersecurity risk that could be leveraged to immediately and severely disrupt U.S. critical infrastructure and directly harm U.S. persons.”

Experts have countered that few new consumer-grade routers would be available for purchase under this new FCC policy (besides maybe Musk’s Starlink satellite Internet routers, which are produced in Texas). The FCC says router makers can apply for a special “conditional approval” from the Department of War or Department of Homeland Security, and that the new policy does not affect any previously-purchased consumer-grade routers.

An elusive hacker who went by the handle “UNKN” and ran the early Russian ransomware groups GandCrab and REvil now has a name and a face. Authorities in Germany say 31-year-old Russian Daniil Maksimovich Shchukin headed both cybercrime gangs and helped carry out at least 130 acts of computer sabotage and extortion against victims across the country between 2019 and 2021.

Shchukin was named as UNKN (a.k.a. UNKNOWN) in an advisory published by the German Federal Criminal Police (the “Bundeskriminalamt” or BKA for short). The BKA said Shchukin and another Russian — 43-year-old Anatoly Sergeevitsch Kravchuk — extorted nearly $2 million euros across two dozen cyberattacks that caused more than 35 million euros in total economic damage.

Germany’s BKA said Shchukin acted as the head of one of the largest worldwide operating ransomware groups GandCrab and REvil, which pioneered the practice of double extortion — charging victims once for a key needed to unlock hacked systems, and a separate payment in exchange for a promise not to publish stolen data.

Shchukin’s name appeared in a Feb. 2023 filing (PDF) from the U.S. Justice Department seeking the seizure of various cryptocurrency accounts associated with proceeds from the REvil ransomware gang’s activities. The government said the digital wallet tied to Shchukin contained more than $317,000 in ill-gotten cryptocurrency.

The GandCrab ransomware affiliate program first surfaced in January 2018, and paid enterprising hackers huge shares of the profits just for hacking into user accounts at major corporations. The GandCrab team would then try to expand that access, often siphoning vast amounts of sensitive and internal documents in the process. The malware’s curators shipped five major revisions to the GandCrab code, each corresponding with sneaky new features and bug fixes aimed at thwarting the efforts of computer security firms to stymie the spread of the malware.

On May 31, 2019, the GandCrab team announced the group was shutting down after extorting more than $2 billion from victims. “We are a living proof that you can do evil and get off scot-free,” GandCrab’s farewell address famously quipped. “We have proved that one can make a lifetime of money in one year. We have proved that you can become number one by general admission, not in your own conceit.”

The REvil ransomware affiliate program materialized around the same as GandCrab’s demise, fronted by a user named UNKNOWN who announced on a Russian cybercrime forum that he’d deposited $1 million in the forum’s escrow to show he meant business. By this time, many cybersecurity experts had concluded REvil was little more than a reorganization of GandCrab.

UNKNOWN also gave an interview to Dmitry Smilyanets, a former malicious hacker hired by Recorded Future, wherein UNKNOWN described a rags-to-riches tale unencumbered by ethics and morals.

“As a child, I scrounged through the trash heaps and smoked cigarette butts,” UNKNOWN told Recorded Future. “I walked 10 km one way to the school. I wore the same clothes for six months. In my youth, in a communal apartment, I didn’t eat for two or even three days. Now I am a millionaire.”

As described in The Ransomware Hunting Team by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden, UNKNOWN and REvil reinvested significant earnings into improving their success and mirroring practices of legitimate businesses. The authors wrote:

“Just as a real-world manufacturer might hire other companies to handle logistics or web design, ransomware developers increasingly outsourced tasks beyond their purview, focusing instead on improving the quality of their ransomware. The higher quality ransomware—which, in many cases, the Hunting Team could not break—resulted in more and higher pay-outs from victims. The monumental payments enabled gangs to reinvest in their enterprises. They hired more specialists, and their success accelerated.”

“Criminals raced to join the booming ransomware economy. Underworld ancillary service providers sprouted or pivoted from other criminal work to meet developers’ demand for customized support. Partnering with gangs like GandCrab, ‘cryptor’ providers ensured ransomware could not be detected by standard anti-malware scanners. ‘Initial access brokerages’ specialized in stealing credentials and finding vulnerabilities in target networks, selling that access to ransomware operators and affiliates. Bitcoin “tumblers” offered discounts to gangs that used them as a preferred vendor for laundering ransom payments. Some contractors were open to working with any gang, while others entered exclusive partnerships.”

REvil would evolve into a feared “big-game-hunting” machine capable of extracting hefty extortion payments from victims, largely going after organizations with more than $100 million in annual revenues and fat new cyber insurance policies that were known to pay out.

Over the July 4, 2021 weekend in the United States, REvil hacked into and extorted Kaseya, a company that handled IT operations for more than 1,500 businesses, nonprofits and government agencies. The FBI would later announce they’d infiltrated the ransomware group’s servers prior to the Kaseya hack but couldn’t tip their hand at the time. REvil never recovered from that core compromise, or from the FBI’s release of a free decryption key for REvil victims who couldn’t or didn’t pay.

Shchukin is from Krasnodar, Russia and is thought to reside there, the BKA said.

“Based on the investigations so far, it is assumed that the wanted person is abroad, presumably in Russia,” the BKA advised. “Travel behaviour cannot be ruled out.”

There is little that connects Shchukin to UNKNOWN’s various accounts on the Russian crime forums. But a review of the Russian crime forums indexed by the cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 shows there is plenty connecting Shchukin to a hacker identity called “Ger0in” who operated large botnets and sold “installs” — allowing other cybercriminals to rapidly deploy malware of their choice to thousands of PCs in one go. However, Ger0in was only active between 2010 and 2011, well before UNKNOWN’s appearance as the REvil front man.

A review of the mugshots released by the BKA at the image comparison site Pimeyes found a match on this birthday celebration from 2023, which features a young man named Daniel wearing the same fancy watch as in the BKA photos.

Update, April 6, 12:06 p.m. ET: A reader forwarded this English-dubbed audio recording from a ccc.de (37C3) conference talk in Germany from 2023 that previously outed Shchukin as the REvil leader (Shchuckin is mentioned at around 24:25).

A financially motivated data theft and extortion group is attempting to inject itself into the Iran war, unleashing a worm that spreads through poorly secured cloud services and wipes data on infected systems that use Iran’s time zone or have Farsi set as the default language.

Experts say the wiper campaign against Iran materialized this past weekend and came from a relatively new cybercrime group known as TeamPCP. In December 2025, the group began compromising corporate cloud environments using a self-propagating worm that went after exposed Docker APIs, Kubernetes clusters, Redis servers, and the React2Shell vulnerability. TeamPCP then attempted to move laterally through victim networks, siphoning authentication credentials and extorting victims over Telegram.

In a profile of TeamPCP published in January, the security firm Flare said the group weaponizes exposed control planes rather than exploiting endpoints, predominantly targeting cloud infrastructure over end-user devices, with Azure (61%) and AWS (36%) accounting for 97% of compromised servers.

“TeamPCP’s strength does not come from novel exploits or original malware, but from the large-scale automation and integration of well-known attack techniques,” Flare’s Assaf Morag wrote. “The group industrializes existing vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and recycled tooling into a cloud-native exploitation platform that turns exposed infrastructure into a self-propagating criminal ecosystem.”

On March 19, TeamPCP executed a supply chain attack against the vulnerability scanner Trivy from Aqua Security, injecting credential-stealing malware into official releases on GitHub actions. Aqua Security said it has since removed the harmful files, but the security firm Wiz notes the attackers were able to publish malicious versions that snarfed SSH keys, cloud credentials, Kubernetes tokens and cryptocurrency wallets from users.

Over the weekend, the same technical infrastructure TeamPCP used in the Trivy attack was leveraged to deploy a new malicious payload which executes a wiper attack if the user’s timezone and locale are determined to correspond to Iran, said Charlie Eriksen, a security researcher at Aikido. In a blog post published on Sunday, Eriksen said if the wiper component detects that the victim is in Iran and has access to a Kubernetes cluster, it will destroy data on every node in that cluster.

“If it doesn’t it will just wipe the local machine,” Eriksen told KrebsOnSecurity.

Aikido refers to TeamPCP’s infrastructure as “CanisterWorm” because the group orchestrates their campaigns using an Internet Computer Protocol (ICP) canister — a system of tamperproof, blockchain-based “smart contracts” that combine both code and data. ICP canisters can serve Web content directly to visitors, and their distributed architecture makes them resistant to takedown attempts. These canisters will remain reachable so long as their operators continue to pay virtual currency fees to keep them online.

Eriksen said the people behind TeamPCP are bragging about their exploits in a group on Telegram and claim to have used the worm to steal vast amounts of sensitive data from major companies, including a large multinational pharmaceutical firm.

“When they compromised Aqua a second time, they took a lot of GitHub accounts and started spamming these with junk messages,” Eriksen said. “It was almost like they were just showing off how much access they had. Clearly, they have an entire stash of these credentials, and what we’ve seen so far is probably a small sample of what they have.”

Security experts say the spammed GitHub messages could be a way for TeamPCP to ensure that any code packages tainted with their malware will remain prominent in GitHub searches. In a newsletter published today titled GitHub is Starting to Have a Real Malware Problem, Risky Business reporter Catalin Cimpanu writes that attackers often are seen pushing meaningless commits to their repos or using online services that sell GitHub stars and “likes” to keep malicious packages at the top of the GitHub search page.

This weekend’s outbreak is the second major supply chain attack involving Trivy in as many months. At the end of February, Trivy was hit as part of an automated threat called HackerBot-Claw, which mass exploited misconfigured workflows in GitHub Actions to steal authentication tokens.

Eriksen said it appears TeamPCP used access gained in the first attack on Aqua Security to perpetrate this weekend’s mischief. But he said there is no reliable way to tell whether TeamPCP’s wiper actually succeeded in trashing any data from victim systems, and that the malicious payload was only active for a short time over the weekend.

“They’ve been taking [the malicious code] up and down, rapidly changing it adding new features,” Eriksen said, noting that when the malicious canister wasn’t serving up malware downloads it was pointing visitors to a Rick Roll video on YouTube.

“It’s a little all over the place, and there’s a chance this whole Iran thing is just their way of getting attention,” Eriksen said. “I feel like these people are really playing this Chaotic Evil role here.”

Cimpanu observed that supply chain attacks have increased in frequency of late as threat actors begin to grasp just how efficient they can be, and his post documents an alarming number of these incidents since 2024.

“While security firms appear to be doing a good job spotting this, we’re also gonna need GitHub’s security team to step up,” Cimpanu wrote. “Unfortunately, on a platform designed to copy (fork) a project and create new versions of it (clones), spotting malicious additions to clones of legitimate repos might be quite the engineering problem to fix.”

Update, 2:40 p.m. ET: Wiz is reporting that TeamPCP also pushed credential stealing malware to the KICS vulnerability scanner from Checkmarx, and that the scanner’s GitHub Action was compromised between 12:58 and 16:50 UTC today (March 23rd).

The U.S. Justice Department joined authorities in Canada and Germany in dismantling the online infrastructure behind four highly disruptive botnets that compromised more than three million Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as routers and web cameras. The feds say the four botnets — named Aisuru, Kimwolf, JackSkid and Mossad — are responsible for a series of recent record-smashing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks capable of knocking nearly any target offline.

The Justice Department said the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General’s (DoDIG) Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) executed seizure warrants targeting multiple U.S.-registered domains, virtual servers, and other infrastructure involved in DDoS attacks against Internet addresses owned by the DoD.

The government alleges the unnamed people in control of the four botnets used their crime machines to launch hundreds of thousands of DDoS attacks, often demanding extortion payments from victims. Some victims reported tens of thousands of dollars in losses and remediation expenses.

The oldest of the botnets — Aisuru — issued more than 200,000 attacks commands, while JackSkid hurled at least 90,000 attacks. Kimwolf issued more than 25,000 attack commands, the government said, while Mossad was blamed for roughy 1,000 digital sieges.

The DOJ said the law enforcement action was designed to prevent further infection to victim devices and to limit or eliminate the ability of the botnets to launch future attacks. The case is being investigated by the DCIS with help from the FBI’s field office in Anchorage, Alaska, and the DOJ’s statement credits nearly two dozen technology companies with assisting in the operation.

“By working closely with DCIS and our international law enforcement partners, we collectively identified and disrupted criminal infrastructure used to carry out large-scale DDoS attacks,” said Special Agent in Charge Rebecca Day of the FBI Anchorage Field Office.

Aisuru emerged in late 2024, and by mid-2025 it was launching record-breaking DDoS attacks as it rapidly infected new IoT devices. In October 2025, Aisuru was used to seed Kimwolf, an Aisuru variant which introduced a novel spreading mechanism that allowed the botnet to infect devices hidden behind the protection of the user’s internal network.

On January 2, 2026, the security firm Synthient publicly disclosed the vulnerability Kimwolf was using to propagate so quickly. That disclosure helped curtail Kimwolf’s spread somewhat, but since then several other IoT botnets have emerged that effectively copy Kimwolf’s spreading methods while competing for the same pool of vulnerable devices. According to the DOJ, the JackSkid botnet also sought out systems on internal networks just like Kimwolf.

The DOJ said its disruption of the four botnets coincided with “law enforcement actions” conducted in Canada and Germany targeting individuals who allegedly operated those botnets, although no further details were available on the suspected operators.

In late February, KrebsOnSecurity identified a 22-year-old Canadian man as a core operator of the Kimwolf botnet. Multiple sources familiar with the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity the other prime suspect is a 15-year-old living in Germany.

A hacktivist group with links to Iran’s intelligence agencies is claiming responsibility for a data-wiping attack against Stryker, a global medical technology company based in Michigan. News reports out of Ireland, Stryker’s largest hub outside of the United States, said the company sent home more than 5,000 workers there today. Meanwhile, a voicemail message at Stryker’s main U.S. headquarters says the company is currently experiencing a building emergency.

Based in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Stryker [NYSE:SYK] is a medical and surgical equipment maker that reported $25 billion in global sales last year. In a lengthy statement posted to Telegram, a hacktivist group known as Handala (a.k.a. Handala Hack Team) claimed that Stryker’s offices in 79 countries have been forced to shut down after the group erased data from more than 200,000 systems, servers and mobile devices.

“All the acquired data is now in the hands of the free people of the world, ready to be used for the true advancement of humanity and the exposure of injustice and corruption,” a portion of the Handala statement reads.

The group said the wiper attack was in retaliation for a Feb. 28 missile strike that hit an Iranian school and killed at least 175 people, most of them children. The New York Times reports today that an ongoing military investigation has determined the United States is responsible for the deadly Tomahawk missile strike.

Handala was one of several hacker groups recently profiled by Palo Alto Networks, which links it to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). Palo Alto says Handala surfaced in late 2023 and is assessed as one of several online personas maintained by Void Manticore, a MOIS-affiliated actor.

Stryker’s website says the company has 56,000 employees in 61 countries. A phone call placed Wednesday morning to the media line at Stryker’s Michigan headquarters sent this author to a voicemail message that stated, “We are currently experiencing a building emergency. Please try your call again later.”

A report Wednesday morning from the Irish Examiner said Stryker staff are now communicating via WhatsApp for any updates on when they can return to work. The story quoted an unnamed employee saying anything connected to the network is down, and that “anyone with Microsoft Outlook on their personal phones had their devices wiped.”

“Multiple sources have said that systems in the Cork headquarters have been ‘shut down’ and that Stryker devices held by employees have been wiped out,” the Examiner reported. “The login pages coming up on these devices have been defaced with the Handala logo.”

Wiper attacks usually involve malicious software designed to overwrite any existing data on infected devices. But a trusted source with knowledge of the attack who spoke on condition of anonymity told KrebsOnSecurity the perpetrators in this case appear to have used a Microsoft service called Microsoft Intune to issue a ‘remote wipe’ command against all connected devices.

Intune is a cloud-based solution built for IT teams to enforce security and data compliance policies, and it provides a single, web-based administrative console to monitor and control devices regardless of location. The Intune connection is supported by this Reddit discussion on the Stryker outage, where several users who claimed to be Stryker employees said they were told to uninstall Intune urgently.

Palo Alto says Handala’s hack-and-leak activity is primarily focused on Israel, with occasional targeting outside that scope when it serves a specific agenda. The security firm said Handala also has taken credit for recent attacks against fuel systems in Jordan and an Israeli energy exploration company.

“Recent observed activities are opportunistic and ‘quick and dirty,’ with a noticeable focus on supply-chain footholds (e.g., IT/service providers) to reach downstream victims, followed by ‘proof’ posts to amplify credibility and intimidate targets,” Palo Alto researchers wrote.

The Handala manifesto posted to Telegram referred to Stryker as a “Zionist-rooted corporation,” which may be a reference to the company’s 2019 acquisition of the Israeli company OrthoSpace.

Stryker is a major supplier of medical devices, and the ongoing attack is already affecting healthcare providers. One healthcare professional at a major university medical system in the United States told KrebsOnSecurity they are currently unable to order surgical supplies that they normally source through Stryker.

“This is a real-world supply chain attack,” the expert said, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the press. “Pretty much every hospital in the U.S. that performs surgeries uses their supplies.”

John Riggi, national advisor for the American Hospital Association (AHA), said the AHA is not aware of any supply-chain disruptions as of yet.

“We are aware of reports of the cyber attack against Stryker and are actively exchanging information with the hospital field and the federal government to understand the nature of the threat and assess any impact to hospital operations,” Riggi said in an email. “As of this time, we are not aware of any direct impacts or disruptions to U.S. hospitals as a result of this attack. That may change as hospitals evaluate services, technology and supply chain related to Stryker and if the duration of the attack extends.”

According to a March 11 memo from the state of Maryland’s Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems, Stryker indicated that some of their computer systems have been impacted by a “global network disruption.” The memo indicates that in response to the attack, a number of hospitals have opted to disconnect from Stryker’s various online services, including LifeNet, which allows paramedics to transmit EKGs to emergency physicians so that heart attack patients can expedite their treatment when they arrive at the hospital.

“As a precaution, some hospitals have temporarily suspended their connection to Stryker systems, including LIFENET, while others have maintained the connection,” wrote Timothy Chizmar, the state’s EMS medical director. “The Maryland Medical Protocols for EMS requires ECG transmission for patients with acute coronary syndrome (or STEMI). However, if you are unable to transmit a 12 Lead ECG to a receiving hospital, you should initiate radio consultation and describe the findings on the ECG.”

This is a developing story. Updates will be noted with a timestamp.

Update, 2:54 p.m. ET: Added comment from Riggi and perspectives on this attack’s potential to turn into a supply-chain problem for the healthcare system.

Update, Mar. 12, 7:59 a.m. ET: Added information about the outage affecting Stryker’s online services.

Microsoft Corp. today pushed security updates to fix at least 77 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. There are no pressing “zero-day” flaws this month (compared to February’s five zero-day treat), but as usual some patches may deserve more rapid attention from organizations using Windows. Here are a few highlights from this month’s Patch Tuesday.

Two of the bugs Microsoft patched today were publicly disclosed previously. CVE-2026-21262 is a weakness that allows an attacker to elevate their privileges on SQL Server 2016 and later editions.

“This isn’t just any elevation of privilege vulnerability, either; the advisory notes that an authorized attacker can elevate privileges to sysadmin over a network,” Rapid7’s Adam Barnett said. “The CVSS v3 base score of 8.8 is just below the threshold for critical severity, since low-level privileges are required. It would be a courageous defender who shrugged and deferred the patches for this one.”

The other publicly disclosed flaw is CVE-2026-26127, a vulnerability in applications running on .NET. Barnett said the immediate impact of exploitation is likely limited to denial of service by triggering a crash, with the potential for other types of attacks during a service reboot.

It would hardly be a proper Patch Tuesday without at least one critical Microsoft Office exploit, and this month doesn’t disappoint. CVE-2026-26113 and CVE-2026-26110 are both remote code execution flaws that can be triggered just by viewing a booby-trapped message in the Preview Pane.

Satnam Narang at Tenable notes that just over half (55%) of all Patch Tuesday CVEs this month are privilege escalation bugs, and of those, a half dozen were rated “exploitation more likely” — across Windows Graphics Component, Windows Accessibility Infrastructure, Windows Kernel, Windows SMB Server and Winlogon. These include:

–CVE-2026-24291: Incorrect permission assignments within the Windows Accessibility Infrastructure to reach SYSTEM (CVSS 7.8)
–CVE-2026-24294: Improper authentication in the core SMB component (CVSS 7.8)
–CVE-2026-24289: High-severity memory corruption and race condition flaw (CVSS 7.8)
–CVE-2026-25187: Winlogon process weakness discovered by Google Project Zero (CVSS 7.8).

Ben McCarthy, lead cyber security engineer at Immersive, called attention to CVE-2026-21536, a critical remote code execution bug in a component called the Microsoft Devices Pricing Program. Microsoft has already resolved the issue on their end, and fixing it requires no action on the part of Windows users. But McCarthy says it’s notable as one of the first vulnerabilities identified by an AI agent and officially recognized with a CVE attributed to the Windows operating system. It was discovered by XBOW, a fully autonomous AI penetration testing agent.

XBOW has consistently ranked at or near the top of the Hacker One bug bounty leaderboard for the past year. McCarthy said CVE-2026-21536 demonstrates how AI agents can identify critical 9.8-rated vulnerabilities without access to source code.

“Although Microsoft has already patched and mitigated the vulnerability, it highlights a shift toward AI-driven discovery of complex vulnerabilities at increasing speed,” McCarthy said. “This development suggests AI-assisted vulnerability research will play a growing role in the security landscape.”

Microsoft earlier provided patches to address nine browser vulnerabilities, which are not included in the Patch Tuesday count above. In addition, Microsoft issued a crucial out-of-band (emergency) update on March 2 for Windows Server 2022 to address a certificate renewal issue with passwordless authentication technology Windows Hello for Business.

Separately, Adobe shipped updates to fix 80 vulnerabilities — some of them critical in severity — in a variety of products, including Acrobat and Adobe Commerce. Mozilla Firefox v. 148.0.2 resolves three high severity CVEs.

For a complete breakdown of all the patches Microsoft released today, check out the SANS Internet Storm Center’s Patch Tuesday post. Windows enterprise admins who wish to stay abreast of any news about problematic updates, AskWoody.com is always worth a visit. Please feel free to drop a comment below if you experience any issues apply this month’s patches.