Oregon Man Charged in ‘Rapper Bot’ DDoS Service

August 19, 2025
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A 22-year-old Oregon man has been arrested on suspicion of operating “Rapper Bot,” a massive botnet used to power a service for launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against targets — including a March 2025 DDoS that knocked Twitter/X offline. The Justice Department asserts the suspect and an unidentified co-conspirator rented out the botnet to online extortionists, and tried to stay off the radar of law enforcement by ensuring that their botnet was never pointed at KrebsOnSecurity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Shutterstock, WhataWin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE OUTSIDER

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

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

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

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

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday, August 2025 Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KrebsOnSecurity in New ‘Most Wanted’ HBO Max Series

August 8, 2025
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A new documentary series about cybercrime airing next month on HBO Max features interviews with Yours Truly. The four-part series follows the exploits of Julius Kivimäki, a prolific Finnish hacker recently convicted of leaking tens of thousands of patient records from an online psychotherapy practice while attempting to extort the clinic and its patients.

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

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

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

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

Julius “Zeekill” Kivimaki, in December 2014.

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

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

August 6, 2025
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On July 22, 2025, the European police agency Europol said a long-running investigation led by the French Police resulted in the arrest of a 38-year-old administrator of XSS, a Russian-language cybercrime forum with more than 50,000 members. The action has triggered an ongoing frenzy of speculation and panic among XSS denizens about the identity of the unnamed suspect, but the consensus is that he is a pivotal figure in the crime forum scene who goes by the hacker handle “Toha.” Here’s a deep dive on what’s knowable about Toha, and a short stab at who got nabbed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CROSS-SITE GRIFTING

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

DomainTools.com finds Toha’s email address — toschka2003@yandex.ru — was used to register at least a dozen domain names — most of them from the mid- to late 2000s. Apart from exploit[.]in and a domain called ixyq[.]com, the other domains registered to that email address end in .ua, the top-level domain for Ukraine (e.g. deleted.org[.]ua, lj.com[.]ua, and blogspot.org[.]ua).

A 2008 snapshot of a domain registered to toschka2003@yandex.ru and to Anton Medvedovsky in Kiev. Note the message at the bottom left, “Protected by Exploit,in.” Image: archive.org.

Nearly all of the domains registered to toschka2003@yandex.ru contain the name Anton Medvedovskiy in the registration records, except for the aforementioned ixyq[.]com, which is registered to the name Yuriy Avdeev in Moscow.

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

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

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

Scammers Unleash Flood of Slick Online Gaming Sites

July 30, 2025
34 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phishers Target Aviation Execs to Scam Customers

July 24, 2025
10 Comments

KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from a reader whose boss’s email account got phished and was used to trick one of the company’s customers into sending a large payment to scammers. An investigation into the attacker’s infrastructure points to a long-running Nigerian cybercrime ring that is actively targeting established companies in the transportation and aviation industries.

Image: Shutterstock, Mr. Teerapon Tiuekhom.

A reader who works in the transportation industry sent a tip about a recent successful phishing campaign that tricked an executive at the company into entering their credentials at a fake Microsoft 365 login page. From there, the attackers quickly mined the executive’s inbox for past communications about invoices, copying and modifying some of those messages with new invoice demands that were sent to some of the company’s customers and partners.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the reader said the resulting phishing emails to customers came from a newly registered domain name that was remarkably similar to their employer’s domain, and that at least one of their customers fell for the ruse and paid a phony invoice. They said the attackers had spun up a look-alike domain just a few hours after the executive’s inbox credentials were phished, and that the scam resulted in a customer suffering a six-figure financial loss.

The reader also shared that the email addresses in the registration records for the imposter domain — roomservice801@gmail.com — is tied to many such phishing domains. Indeed, a search on this email address at DomainTools.com finds it is associated with at least 240 domains registered in 2024 or 2025. Virtually all of them mimic legitimate domains for companies in the aerospace and transportation industries worldwide.

An Internet search for this email address reveals a humorous blog post from 2020 on the Russian forum hackware[.]ru, which found roomservice801@gmail.com was tied to a phishing attack that used the lure of phony invoices to trick the recipient into logging in at a fake Microsoft login page. We’ll come back to this research in a moment.

JUSTY JOHN

DomainTools shows that some of the early domains registered to roomservice801@gmail.com in 2016 include other useful information. For example, the WHOIS records for alhhomaidhicentre[.]biz reference the technical contact of “Justy John” and the email address justyjohn50@yahoo.com.

A search at DomainTools found justyjohn50@yahoo.com has been registering one-off phishing domains since at least 2012. At this point, I was convinced that some security company surely had already published an analysis of this particular threat group, but I didn’t yet have enough information to draw any solid conclusions.

DomainTools says the Justy John email address is tied to more than two dozen domains registered since 2012, but we can find hundreds more phishing domains and related email addresses simply by pivoting on details in the registration records for these Justy John domains. For example, the street address used by the Justy John domain axisupdate[.]net — 7902 Pelleaux Road in Knoxville, TN — also appears in the registration records for accountauthenticate[.]com, acctlogin[.]biz, and loginaccount[.]biz, all of which at one point included the email address rsmith60646@gmail.com.

That Rsmith Gmail address is connected to the 2012 phishing domain alibala[.]biz (one character off of the Chinese e-commerce giant alibaba.com, with a different top-level domain of .biz). A search in DomainTools on the phone number in those domain records — 1.7736491613 — reveals even more phishing domains as well as the Nigerian phone number “2348062918302” and the email address michsmith59@gmail.com.

DomainTools shows michsmith59@gmail.com appears in the registration records for the domain seltrock[.]com, which was used in the phishing attack documented in the 2020 Russian blog post mentioned earlier. At this point, we are just two steps away from identifying the threat actor group.

The same Nigerian phone number shows up in dozens of domain registrations that reference the email address sebastinekelly69@gmail.com, including 26i3[.]net, costamere[.]com, danagruop[.]us, and dividrilling[.]com. A Web search on any of those domains finds they were indexed in an “indicator of compromise” list on GitHub maintained by Palo Alto Networks‘ Unit 42 research team. Continue reading →

Microsoft Fix Targets Attacks on SharePoint Zero-Day

July 21, 2025
7 Comments

On Sunday, July 20, Microsoft Corp. issued an emergency security update for a vulnerability in SharePoint Server that is actively being exploited to compromise vulnerable organizations. The patch comes amid reports that malicious hackers have used the SharePoint flaw to breach U.S. federal and state agencies, universities, and energy companies.

Image: Shutterstock, by Ascannio.

In an advisory about the SharePoint security hole, a.k.a. CVE-2025-53770, Microsoft said it is aware of active attacks targeting on-premises SharePoint Server customers and exploiting vulnerabilities that were only partially addressed by the July 8, 2025 security update.

The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) concurred, saying CVE-2025-53770 is a variant on a flaw Microsoft patched earlier this month (CVE-2025-49706). Microsoft notes the weakness applies only to SharePoint Servers that organizations use in-house, and that SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 are not affected.

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that the U.S. government and partners in Canada and Australia are investigating the hack of SharePoint servers, which provide a platform for sharing and managing documents. The Post reports at least two U.S. federal agencies have seen their servers breached via the SharePoint vulnerability.

According to CISA, attackers exploiting the newly-discovered flaw are retrofitting compromised servers with a backdoor dubbed “ToolShell” that provides unauthenticated, remote access to systems. CISA said ToolShell enables attackers to fully access SharePoint content — including file systems and internal configurations — and execute code over the network.

Researchers at Eye Security said they first spotted large-scale exploitation of the SharePoint flaw on July 18, 2025, and soon found dozens of separate servers compromised by the bug and infected with ToolShell. In a blog post, the researchers said the attacks sought to steal SharePoint server ASP.NET machine keys.

“These keys can be used to facilitate further attacks, even at a later date,” Eye Security warned. “It is critical that affected servers rotate SharePoint server ASP.NET machine keys and restart IIS on all SharePoint servers. Patching alone is not enough. We strongly advise defenders not to wait for a vendor fix before taking action. This threat is already operational and spreading rapidly.” Continue reading →

Poor Passwords Tattle on AI Hiring Bot Maker Paradox.ai

July 17, 2025
23 Comments

Security researchers recently revealed that the personal information of millions of people who applied for jobs at McDonald’s was exposed after they guessed the password (“123456”) for the fast food chain’s account at Paradox.ai, a company that makes artificial intelligence based hiring chatbots used by many Fortune 500 firms. Paradox.ai said the security oversight was an isolated incident that did not affect its other customers, but recent security breaches involving its employees in Vietnam tell a more nuanced story.

A screenshot of the paradox.ai homepage showing its AI hiring chatbot “Olivia” interacting with potential hires.

Earlier this month, security researchers Ian Carroll and Sam Curry wrote about simple methods they found to access the backend of the AI chatbot platform on McHire.com, the McDonald’s website that many of its franchisees use to screen job applicants. As first reported by Wired, the researchers discovered that the weak password used by Paradox exposed 64 million records, including applicants’ names, email addresses and phone numbers.

Paradox.ai acknowledged the researchers’ findings but said the company’s other client instances were not affected, and that no sensitive information — such as Social Security numbers — was exposed.

“We are confident, based on our records, this test account was not accessed by any third party other than the security researchers,” the company wrote in a July 9 blog post. “It had not been logged into since 2019 and frankly, should have been decommissioned. We want to be very clear that while the researchers may have briefly had access to the system containing all chat interactions (NOT job applications), they only viewed and downloaded five chats in total that had candidate information within. Again, at no point was any data leaked online or made public.”

However, a review of stolen password data gathered by multiple breach-tracking services shows that at the end of June 2025, a Paradox.ai administrator in Vietnam suffered a malware compromise on their device that stole usernames and passwords for a variety of internal and third-party online services. The results were not pretty.

The password data from the Paradox.ai developer was stolen by a malware strain known as “Nexus Stealer,” a form grabber and password stealer that is sold on cybercrime forums. The information snarfed by stealers like Nexus is often recovered and indexed by data leak aggregator services like Intelligence X, which reports that the malware on the Paradox.ai developer’s device exposed hundreds of mostly poor and recycled passwords (using the same base password but slightly different characters at the end).

Those purloined credentials show the developer in question at one point used the same seven-digit password to log in to Paradox.ai accounts for a number of Fortune 500 firms listed as customers on the company’s website, including Aramark, Lockheed Martin, Lowes, and Pepsi.

Seven-character passwords, particularly those consisting entirely of numerals, are highly vulnerable to “brute-force” attacks that can try a large number of possible password combinations in quick succession. According to a much-referenced password strength guide maintained by Hive Systems, modern password-cracking systems can work out a seven number password more or less instantly.

Image: hivesystems.com.

In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, Paradox.ai confirmed that the password data was recently stolen by a malware infection on the personal device of a longtime Paradox developer based in Vietnam, and said the company was made aware of the compromise shortly after it happened. Paradox maintains that few of the exposed passwords were still valid, and that a majority of them were present on the employee’s personal device only because he had migrated the contents of a password manager from an old computer.

Paradox also pointed out that it has been requiring single sign-on (SSO) authentication since 2020 that enforces multi-factor authentication for its partners. Still, a review of the exposed passwords shows they included the Vietnamese administrator’s credentials to the company’s SSO platform — paradoxai.okta.com. The password for that account ended in 202506 — possibly a reference to the month of June 2025 — and the digital cookie left behind after a successful Okta login with those credentials says it was valid until December 2025. Continue reading →

DOGE Denizen Marko Elez Leaked API Key for xAI

July 14, 2025
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Marko Elez, a 25-year-old employee at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been granted access to sensitive databases at the U.S. Social Security Administration, the Treasury and Justice departments, and the Department of Homeland Security. So it should fill all Americans with a deep sense of confidence to learn that Mr. Elez over the weekend inadvertently published a private key that allowed anyone to interact directly with more than four dozen large language models (LLMs) developed by Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI.

Image: Shutterstock, @sdx15.

On July 13, Mr. Elez committed a code script to GitHub called “agent.py” that included a private application programming interface (API) key for xAI. The inclusion of the private key was first flagged by GitGuardian, a company that specializes in detecting and remediating exposed secrets in public and proprietary environments. GitGuardian’s systems constantly scan GitHub and other code repositories for exposed API keys, and fire off automated alerts to affected users.

Philippe Caturegli, “chief hacking officer” at the security consultancy Seralys, said the exposed API key allowed access to at least 52 different LLMs used by xAI. The most recent LLM in the list was called “grok-4-0709” and was created on July 9, 2025.

Grok, the generative AI chatbot developed by xAI and integrated into Twitter/X, relies on these and other LLMs (a query to Grok before publication shows Grok currently uses Grok-3, which was launched in Feburary 2025). Earlier today, xAI announced that the Department of Defense will begin using Grok as part of a contract worth up to $200 million. The contract award came less than a week after Grok began spewing antisemitic rants and invoking Adolf Hitler.

Mr. Elez did not respond to a request for comment. The code repository containing the private xAI key was removed shortly after Caturegli notified Elez via email. However, Caturegli said the exposed API key still works and has not yet been revoked.

“If a developer can’t keep an API key private, it raises questions about how they’re handling far more sensitive government information behind closed doors,” Caturegli told KrebsOnSecurity. Continue reading →