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Late last year, security researchers made a startling discovery: Kremlin-backed disinformation campaigns were bypassing moderation on social media platforms by leveraging the same malicious advertising technology that powers a sprawling ecosystem of online hucksters and website hackers. A new report on the fallout from that investigation finds this dark ad tech industry is far more resilient and incestuous than previously known.
Image: Infoblox.
In November 2024, researchers at the security firm Qurium published an investigation into “Doppelganger,” a disinformation network that promotes pro-Russian narratives and infiltrates Europe’s media landscape by pushing fake news through a network of cloned websites.
Doppelganger campaigns use specialized links that bounce the visitor’s browser through a long series of domains before the fake news content is served. Qurium found Doppelganger relies on a sophisticated “domain cloaking” service, a technology that allows websites to present different content to search engines compared to what regular visitors see. The use of cloaking services helps the disinformation sites remain online longer than they otherwise would, while ensuring that only the targeted audience gets to view the intended content.
Qurium discovered that Doppelganger’s cloaking service also promoted online dating sites, and shared much of the same infrastructure with VexTrio, which is thought to be the oldest malicious traffic distribution system (TDS) in existence. While TDSs are commonly used by legitimate advertising networks to manage traffic from disparate sources and to track who or what is behind each click, VexTrio’s TDS largely manages web traffic from victims of phishing, malware, and social engineering scams.
Digging deeper, Qurium noticed Doppelganger’s cloaking service used an Internet provider in Switzerland as the first entry point in a chain of domain redirections. They also noticed the same infrastructure hosted a pair of co-branded affiliate marketing services that were driving traffic to sketchy adult dating sites: LosPollos[.]com and TacoLoco[.]co.
The LosPollos ad network incorporates many elements and references from the hit series “Breaking Bad,” mirroring the fictional “Los Pollos Hermanos” restaurant chain that served as a money laundering operation for a violent methamphetamine cartel.
The LosPollos advertising network invokes characters and themes from the hit show Breaking Bad. The logo for LosPollos (upper left) is the image of Gustavo Fring, the fictional chicken restaurant chain owner in the show.
Affiliates who sign up with LosPollos are given JavaScript-heavy “smartlinks” that drive traffic into the VexTrio TDS, which in turn distributes the traffic among a variety of advertising partners, including dating services, sweepstakes offers, bait-and-switch mobile apps, financial scams and malware download sites.
LosPollos affiliates typically stitch these smart links into WordPress websites that have been hacked via known vulnerabilities, and those affiliates will earn a small commission each time an Internet user referred by any of their hacked sites falls for one of these lures.
The Los Pollos advertising network promoting itself on LinkedIn.
According to Qurium, TacoLoco is a traffic monetization network that uses deceptive tactics to trick Internet users into enabling “push notifications,” a cross-platform browser standard that allows websites to show pop-up messages which appear outside of the browser. For example, on Microsoft Windows systems these notifications typically show up in the bottom right corner of the screen — just above the system clock.
In the case of VexTrio and TacoLoco, the notification approval requests themselves are deceptive — disguised as “CAPTCHA” challenges designed to distinguish automated bot traffic from real visitors. For years, VexTrio and its partners have successfully tricked countless users into enabling these site notifications, which are then used to continuously pepper the victim’s device with a variety of phony virus alerts and misleading pop-up messages.
Examples of VexTrio landing pages that lead users to accept push notifications on their device.
According to a December 2024 annual report from GoDaddy, nearly 40 percent of compromised websites in 2024 redirected visitors to VexTrio via LosPollos smartlinks.
On November 14, 2024, Qurium published research to support its findings that LosPollos and TacoLoco were services operated by Adspro Group, a company registered in the Czech Republic and Russia, and that Adspro runs its infrastructure at the Swiss hosting providers C41 and Teknology SA.
Qurium noted the LosPollos and TacoLoco sites state that their content is copyrighted by ByteCore AG and SkyForge Digital AG, both Swiss firms that are run by the owner of Teknology SA, Giulio Vitorrio Leonardo Cerutti. Further investigation revealed LosPollos and TacoLoco were apps developed by a company called Holacode, which lists Cerutti as its CEO.
The apps marketed by Holacode include numerous VPN services, as well as one called Spamshield that claims to stop unwanted push notifications. But in January, Infoblox said they tested the app on their own mobile devices, and found it hides the user’s notifications, and then after 24 hours stops hiding them and demands payment. Spamshield subsequently changed its developer name from Holacode to ApLabz, although Infoblox noted that the Terms of Service for several of the rebranded ApLabz apps still referenced Holacode in their terms of service.
Incredibly, Cerutti threatened to sue me for defamation before I’d even uttered his name or sent him a request for comment (Cerutti sent the unsolicited legal threat back in January after his company and my name were merely tagged in an Infoblox post on LinkedIn about VexTrio).
Asked to comment on the findings by Qurium and Infoblox, Cerutti vehemently denied being associated with VexTrio. Cerutti asserted that his companies all strictly adhere to the regulations of the countries in which they operate, and that they have been completely transparent about all of their operations.
“We are a group operating in the advertising and marketing space, with an affiliate network program,” Cerutti responded. “I am not [going] to say we are perfect, but I strongly declare we have no connection with VexTrio at all.”
“Unfortunately, as a big player in this space we also get to deal with plenty of publisher fraud, sketchy traffic, fake clicks, bots, hacked, listed and resold publisher accounts, etc, etc.,” Cerutti continued. “We bleed lots of money to such malpractices and conduct regular internal screenings and audits in a constant battle to remove bad traffic sources. It is also a highly competitive space, where some upstarts will often play dirty against more established mainstream players like us.”
Working with Qurium, researchers at the security firm Infoblox released details about VexTrio’s infrastructure to their industry partners. Just four days after Qurium published its findings, LosPollos announced it was suspending its push monetization service. Less than a month later, Adspro had rebranded to Aimed Global.
A mind map illustrating some of the key findings and connections in the Infoblox and Qurium investigations. Click to enlarge.
In March 2025, researchers at GoDaddy chronicled how DollyWay — a malware strain that has consistently redirected victims to VexTrio throughout its eight years of activity — suddenly stopped doing that on November 20, 2024. Virtually overnight, DollyWay and several other malware families that had previously used VexTrio began pushing their traffic through another TDS called Help TDS.
Digging further into historical DNS records and the unique code scripts used by the Help TDS, Infoblox determined it has long enjoyed an exclusive relationship with VexTrio (at least until LosPollos ended its push monetization service in November).
In a report released today, Infoblox said an exhaustive analysis of the JavaScript code, website lures, smartlinks and DNS patterns used by VexTrio and Help TDS linked them with at least four other TDS operators (not counting TacoLoco). Those four entities — Partners House, BroPush, RichAds and RexPush — are all Russia-based push monetization programs that pay affiliates to drive signups for a variety of schemes, but mostly online dating services.
“As Los Pollos push monetization ended, we’ve seen an increase in fake CAPTCHAs that drive user acceptance of push notifications, particularly from Partners House,” the Infoblox report reads. “The relationship of these commercial entities remains a mystery; while they are certainly long-time partners redirecting traffic to one another, and they all have a Russian nexus, there is no overt common ownership.”
Renee Burton, vice president of threat intelligence at Infoblox, said the security industry generally treats the deceptive methods used by VexTrio and other malicious TDSs as a kind of legally grey area that is mostly associated with less dangerous security threats, such as adware and scareware.
But Burton argues that this view is myopic, and helps perpetuate a dark adtech industry that also pushes plenty of straight-up malware, noting that hundreds of thousands of compromised websites around the world every year redirect victims to the tangled web of VexTrio and VexTrio-affiliate TDSs.
“These TDSs are a nefarious threat, because they’re the ones you can connect to the delivery of things like information stealers and scams that cost consumers billions of dollars a year,” Burton said. “From a larger strategic perspective, my takeaway is that Russian organized crime has control of malicious adtech, and these are just some of the many groups involved.”
As KrebsOnSecurity warned way back in 2020, it’s a good idea to be very sparing in approving notifications when browsing the Web. In many cases these notifications are benign, but as we’ve seen there are numerous dodgy firms that are paying site owners to install their notification scripts, and then reselling that communications pathway to scammers and online hucksters.
If you’d like to prevent sites from ever presenting notification requests, all of the major browser makers let you do this — either across the board or on a per-website basis. While it is true that blocking notifications entirely can break the functionality of some websites, doing this for any devices you manage on behalf of your less tech-savvy friends or family members might end up saving everyone a lot of headache down the road.
To modify site notification settings in Mozilla Firefox, navigate to Settings, Privacy & Security, Permissions, and click the “Settings” tab next to “Notifications.” That page will display any notifications already permitted and allow you to edit or delete any entries. Tick the box next to “Block new requests asking to allow notifications” to stop them altogether.
In Google Chrome, click the icon with the three dots to the right of the address bar, scroll all the way down to Settings, Privacy and Security, Site Settings, and Notifications. Select the “Don’t allow sites to send notifications” button if you want to banish notification requests forever.
In Apple’s Safari browser, go to Settings, Websites, and click on Notifications in the sidebar. Uncheck the option to “allow websites to ask for permission to send notifications” if you wish to turn off notification requests entirely.
Microsoft today released security updates to fix at least 67 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and software. Redmond warns that one of the flaws is already under active attack, and that software blueprints showing how to exploit a pervasive Windows bug patched this month are now public.
The sole zero-day flaw this month is CVE-2025-33053, a remote code execution flaw in the Windows implementation of WebDAV — an HTTP extension that lets users remotely manage files and directories on a server. While WebDAV isn’t enabled by default in Windows, its presence in legacy or specialized systems still makes it a relevant target, said Seth Hoyt, senior security engineer at Automox.
Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7, said Microsoft’s advisory for CVE-2025-33053 does not mention that the Windows implementation of WebDAV is listed as deprecated since November 2023, which in practical terms means that the WebClient service no longer starts by default.
“The advisory also has attack complexity as low, which means that exploitation does not require preparation of the target environment in any way that is beyond the attacker’s control,” Barnett said. “Exploitation relies on the user clicking a malicious link. It’s not clear how an asset would be immediately vulnerable if the service isn’t running, but all versions of Windows receive a patch, including those released since the deprecation of WebClient, like Server 2025 and Windows 11 24H2.”
Microsoft warns that an “elevation of privilege” vulnerability in the Windows Server Message Block (SMB) client (CVE-2025-33073) is likely to be exploited, given that proof-of-concept code for this bug is now public. CVE-2025-33073 has a CVSS risk score of 8.8 (out of 10), and exploitation of the flaw leads to the attacker gaining “SYSTEM” level control over a vulnerable PC.
“What makes this especially dangerous is that no further user interaction is required after the initial connection—something attackers can often trigger without the user realizing it,” said Alex Vovk, co-founder and CEO of Action1. “Given the high privilege level and ease of exploitation, this flaw poses a significant risk to Windows environments. The scope of affected systems is extensive, as SMB is a core Windows protocol used for file and printer sharing and inter-process communication.”
Beyond these highlights, 10 of the vulnerabilities fixed this month were rated “critical” by Microsoft, including eight remote code execution flaws.
Notably absent from this month’s patch batch is a fix for a newly discovered weakness in Windows Server 2025 that allows attackers to act with the privileges of any user in Active Directory. The bug, dubbed “BadSuccessor,” was publicly disclosed by researchers at Akamai on May 21, and several public proof-of-concepts are now available. Tenable’s Satnam Narang said organizations that have at least one Windows Server 2025 domain controller should review permissions for principals and limit those permissions as much as possible.
Adobe has released updates for Acrobat Reader and six other products addressing at least 259 vulnerabilities, most of them in an update for Experience Manager. Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome both recently released security updates that require a restart of the browser to take effect. The latest Chrome update fixes two zero-day exploits in the browser (CVE-2025-5419 and CVE-2025-4664).
For a detailed breakdown on the individual security updates released by Microsoft today, check out the Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. Action 1 has a breakdown of patches from Microsoft and a raft of other software vendors releasing fixes this month. As always, please back up your system and/or data before patching, and feel free to drop a note in the comments if you run into any problems applying these updates.
Image: Mark Rademaker, via Shutterstock.
Ukraine has seen nearly one-fifth of its Internet space come under Russian control or sold to Internet address brokers since February 2022, a new study finds. The analysis indicates large chunks of Ukrainian Internet address space are now in the hands of shadowy proxy and anonymity services that are nested at some of America’s largest Internet service providers (ISPs).
The findings come in a report examining how the Russian invasion has affected Ukraine’s domestic supply of Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) addresses. Researchers at Kentik, a company that measures the performance of Internet networks, found that while a majority of ISPs in Ukraine haven’t changed their infrastructure much since the war began in 2022, others have resorted to selling swathes of their valuable IPv4 address space just to keep the lights on.
For example, Ukraine’s incumbent ISP Ukrtelecom is now routing just 29 percent of the IPv4 address ranges that the company controlled at the start of the war, Kentik found. Although much of that former IP space remains dormant, Ukrtelecom told Kentik’s Doug Madory they were forced to sell many of their address blocks “to secure financial stability and continue delivering essential services.”
“Leasing out a portion of our IPv4 resources allowed us to mitigate some of the extraordinary challenges we have been facing since the full-scale invasion began,” Ukrtelecom told Madory.
Madory found much of the IPv4 space previously allocated to Ukrtelecom is now scattered to more than 100 providers globally, particularly at three large American ISPs — Amazon (AS16509), AT&T (AS7018), and Cogent (AS174).
Another Ukrainian Internet provider — LVS (AS43310) — in 2022 was routing approximately 6,000 IPv4 addresses across the nation. Kentik learned that by November 2022, much of that address space had been parceled out to over a dozen different locations, with the bulk of it being announced at AT&T.
IP addresses routed over time by Ukrainian provider LVS (AS43310) shows a large chunk of it being routed by AT&T (AS7018). Image: Kentik.
Ditto for the Ukrainian ISP TVCOM, which currently routes nearly 15,000 fewer IPv4 addresses than it did at the start of the war. Madory said most of those addresses have been scattered to 37 other networks outside of Eastern Europe, including Amazon, AT&T, and Microsoft.
The Ukrainian ISP Trinity (AS43554) went offline in early March 2022 during the bloody siege of Mariupol, but its address space eventually began showing up in more than 50 different networks worldwide. Madory found more than 1,000 of Trinity’s IPv4 addresses suddenly appeared on AT&T’s network.
Why are all these former Ukrainian IP addresses being routed by U.S.-based networks like AT&T? According to spur.us, a company that tracks VPN and proxy services, nearly all of the address ranges identified by Kentik now map to commercial proxy services that allow customers to anonymously route their Internet traffic through someone else’s computer.
From a website’s perspective, the traffic from a proxy network user appears to originate from the rented IP address, not from the proxy service customer. These services can be used for several business purposes, such as price comparisons, sales intelligence, web crawlers and content-scraping bots. However, proxy services also are massively abused for hiding cybercrime activity because they can make it difficult to trace malicious traffic to its original source.
IPv4 address ranges are always in high demand, which means they are also quite valuable. There are now multiple companies that will pay ISPs to lease out their unwanted or unused IPv4 address space. Madory said these IPv4 brokers will pay between $100-$500 per month to lease a block of 256 IPv4 addresses, and very often the entities most willing to pay those rental rates are proxy and VPN providers.
A cursory review of all Internet address blocks currently routed through AT&T — as seen in public records maintained by the Internet backbone provider Hurricane Electric — shows a preponderance of country flags other than the United States, including networks originating in Hungary, Lithuania, Moldova, Mauritius, Palestine, Seychelles, Slovenia, and Ukraine.
AT&T’s IPv4 address space seems to be routing a great deal of proxy traffic, including a large number of IP address ranges that were until recently routed by ISPs in Ukraine.
Asked about the apparent high incidence of proxy services routing foreign address blocks through AT&T, the telecommunications giant said it recently changed its policy about originating routes for network blocks that are not owned and managed by AT&T. That new policy, spelled out in a February 2025 update to AT&T’s terms of service, gives those customers until Sept. 1, 2025 to originate their own IP space from their own autonomous system number (ASN), a unique number assigned to each ISP (AT&T’s is AS7018).
“To ensure our customers receive the best quality of service, we changed our terms for dedicated internet in February 2025,” an AT&T spokesperson said in an emailed reply. “We no longer permit static routes with IP addresses that we have not provided. We have been in the process of identifying and notifying affected customers that they have 90 days to transition to Border Gateway Protocol routing using their own autonomous system number.”
Ironically, the co-mingling of Ukrainian IP address space with proxy providers has resulted in many of these addresses being used in cyberattacks against Ukraine and other enemies of Russia. Earlier this month, the European Union sanctioned Stark Industries Solutions Inc., an ISP that surfaced two weeks before the Russian invasion and quickly became the source of large-scale DDoS attacks and spear-phishing attempts by Russian state-sponsored hacking groups. A deep dive into Stark’s considerable address space showed some of it was sourced from Ukrainian ISPs, and most of it was connected to Russia-based proxy and anonymity services.
According to Spur, the proxy service IPRoyal is the current beneficiary of IP address blocks from several Ukrainian ISPs profiled in Kentik’s report. Customers can chose proxies by specifying the city and country they would to proxy their traffic through. Image: Trend Micro.
Spur’s Chief Technology Officer Riley Kilmer said AT&T’s policy change will likely force many proxy services to migrate to other U.S. providers that have less stringent policies.
“AT&T is the first one of the big ISPs that seems to be actually doing something about this,” Kilmer said. “We track several services that explicitly sell AT&T IP addresses, and it will be very interesting to see what happens to those services come September.”
Still, Kilmer said, there are several other large U.S. ISPs that continue to make it easy for proxy services to bring their own IP addresses and host them in ranges that give the appearance of residential customers. For example, Kentik’s report identified former Ukrainian IP ranges showing up as proxy services routed by Cogent Communications (AS174), a tier-one Internet backbone provider based in Washington, D.C.
Kilmer said Cogent has become an attractive home base for proxy services because it is relatively easy to get Cogent to route an address block.
“In fairness, they transit a lot of traffic,” Kilmer said of Cogent. “But there’s a reason a lot of this proxy stuff shows up as Cogent: Because it’s super easy to get something routed there.”
Cogent declined a request to comment on Kentik’s findings.
Authorities in Pakistan have arrested 21 individuals accused of operating “Heartsender,” a once popular spam and malware dissemination service that operated for more than a decade. The main clientele for HeartSender were organized crime groups that tried to trick victim companies into making payments to a third party, and its alleged proprietors were publicly identified by KrebsOnSecurity in 2021 after they inadvertently infected their computers with malware.
Some of the core developers and sellers of Heartsender posing at a work outing in 2021. WeCodeSolutions boss Rameez Shahzad (in sunglasses) is in the center of this group photo, which was posted by employee Burhan Ul Haq, pictured just to the right of Shahzad.
A report from the Pakistani media outlet Dawn states that authorities there arrested 21 people alleged to have operated Heartsender, a spam delivery service whose homepage openly advertised phishing kits targeting users of various Internet companies, including Microsoft 365, Yahoo, AOL, Intuit, iCloud and ID.me. Pakistan’s National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) reportedly conducted raids in Lahore’s Bahria Town and Multan on May 15 and 16.
The NCCIA told reporters the group’s tools were connected to more than $50m in losses in the United States alone, with European authorities investigating 63 additional cases.
“This wasn’t just a scam operation – it was essentially a cybercrime university that empowered fraudsters globally,” NCCIA Director Abdul Ghaffar said at a press briefing.
In January 2025, the FBI and the Dutch Police seized the technical infrastructure for the cybercrime service, which was marketed under the brands Heartsender, Fudpage and Fudtools (and many other “fud” variations). The “fud” bit stands for “Fully Un-Detectable,” and it refers to cybercrime resources that will evade detection by security tools like antivirus software or anti-spam appliances.
The FBI says transnational organized crime groups that purchased these services primarily used them to run business email compromise (BEC) schemes, wherein the cybercrime actors tricked victim companies into making payments to a third party.
Dawn reported that those arrested included Rameez Shahzad, the alleged ringleader of the Heartsender cybercrime business, which most recently operated under the Pakistani front company WeCodeSolutions. Mr. Shahzad was named and pictured in a 2021 KrebsOnSecurity story about a series of remarkable operational security mistakes that exposed their identities and Facebook pages showing employees posing for group photos and socializing at work-related outings.
Prior to folding their operations behind WeCodeSolutions, Shahzad and others arrested this month operated as a web hosting group calling itself The Manipulaters. KrebsOnSecurity first wrote about The Manipulaters in May 2015, mainly because their ads at the time were blanketing a number of popular cybercrime forums, and because they were fairly open and brazen about what they were doing — even who they were in real life.
Sometime in 2019, The Manipulaters failed to renew their core domain name — manipulaters[.]com — the same one tied to so many of the company’s business operations. That domain was quickly scooped up by Scylla Intel, a cyber intelligence firm that specializes in connecting cybercriminals to their real-life identities. Soon after, Scylla started receiving large amounts of email correspondence intended for the group’s owners.
In 2024, DomainTools.com found the web-hosted version of Heartsender leaked an extraordinary amount of user information to unauthenticated users, including customer credentials and email records from Heartsender employees. DomainTools says the malware infections on Manipulaters PCs exposed “vast swaths of account-related data along with an outline of the group’s membership, operations, and position in the broader underground economy.”
Shahzad allegedly used the alias “Saim Raza,” an identity which has contacted KrebsOnSecurity multiple times over the past decade with demands to remove stories published about the group. The Saim Raza identity most recently contacted this author in November 2024, asserting they had quit the cybercrime industry and turned over a new leaf after a brush with the Pakistani police.
The arrested suspects include Rameez Shahzad, Muhammad Aslam (Rameez’s father), Atif Hussain, Muhammad Umar Irshad, Yasir Ali, Syed Saim Ali Shah, Muhammad Nowsherwan, Burhanul Haq, Adnan Munawar, Abdul Moiz, Hussnain Haider, Bilal Ahmad, Dilbar Hussain, Muhammad Adeel Akram, Awais Rasool, Usama Farooq, Usama Mehmood and Hamad Nawaz.
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The U.S. government today unsealed criminal charges against 16 individuals accused of operating and selling DanaBot, a prolific strain of information-stealing malware that has been sold on Russian cybercrime forums since 2018. The FBI says a newer version of DanaBot was used for espionage, and that many of the defendants exposed their real-life identities after accidentally infecting their own systems with the malware.
DanaBot’s features, as promoted on its support site. Image: welivesecurity.com.
Initially spotted in May 2018 by researchers at the email security firm Proofpoint, DanaBot is a malware-as-a-service platform that specializes in credential theft and banking fraud.
Today, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed a criminal complaint and indictment from 2022, which said the FBI identified at least 40 affiliates who were paying between $3,000 and $4,000 a month for access to the information stealer platform.
The government says the malware infected more than 300,000 systems globally, causing estimated losses of more than $50 million. The ringleaders of the DanaBot conspiracy are named as Aleksandr Stepanov, 39, a.k.a. “JimmBee,” and Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin, 34, a.k.a. “Onix”, both of Novosibirsk, Russia. Kalinkin is an IT engineer for the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. His Facebook profile name is “Maffiozi.”
According to the FBI, there were at least two major versions of DanaBot; the first was sold between 2018 and June 2020, when the malware stopped being offered on Russian cybercrime forums. The government alleges that the second version of DanaBot — emerging in January 2021 — was provided to co-conspirators for use in targeting military, diplomatic and non-governmental organization computers in several countries, including the United States, Belarus, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Russia.
“Unindicted co-conspirators would use the Espionage Variant to compromise computers around the world and steal sensitive diplomatic communications, credentials, and other data from these targeted victims,” reads a grand jury indictment dated Sept. 20, 2022. “This stolen data included financial transactions by diplomatic staff, correspondence concerning day-to-day diplomatic activity, as well as summaries of a particular country’s interactions with the United States.”
The indictment says the FBI in 2022 seized servers used by the DanaBot authors to control their malware, as well as the servers that stored stolen victim data. The government said the server data also show numerous instances in which the DanaBot defendants infected their own PCs, resulting in their credential data being uploaded to stolen data repositories that were seized by the feds.
“In some cases, such self-infections appeared to be deliberately done in order to test, analyze, or improve the malware,” the criminal complaint reads. “In other cases, the infections seemed to be inadvertent – one of the hazards of committing cybercrime is that criminals will sometimes infect themselves with their own malware by mistake.”
Image: welivesecurity.com
A statement from the DOJ says that as part of today’s operation, agents with the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) seized the DanaBot control servers, including dozens of virtual servers hosted in the United States. The government says it is now working with industry partners to notify DanaBot victims and help remediate infections. The statement credits a number of security firms with providing assistance to the government, including ESET, Flashpoint, Google, Intel 471, Lumen, PayPal, Proofpoint, Team CYMRU, and ZScaler.
It’s not unheard of for financially-oriented malicious software to be repurposed for espionage. A variant of the ZeuS Trojan, which was used in countless online banking attacks against companies in the United States and Europe between 2007 and at least 2015, was for a time diverted to espionage tasks by its author.
As detailed in this 2015 story, the author of the ZeuS trojan created a custom version of the malware to serve purely as a spying machine, which scoured infected systems in Ukraine for specific keywords in emails and documents that would likely only be found in classified documents.
The public charging of the 16 DanaBot defendants comes a day after Microsoft joined a slew of tech companies in disrupting the IT infrastructure for another malware-as-a-service offering — Lumma Stealer, which is likewise offered to affiliates under tiered subscription prices ranging from $250 to $1,000 per month. Separately, Microsoft filed a civil lawsuit to seize control over 2,300 domain names used by Lumma Stealer and its affiliates.
Further reading:
Danabot: Analyzing a Fallen Empire
ZScaler blog: DanaBot Launches DDoS Attack Against the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense
Flashpoint: Operation Endgame DanaBot Malware
Team CYMRU: Inside DanaBot’s Infrastructure: In Support of Operation Endgame II
March 2022 criminal complaint v. Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin
September 2022 grand jury indictment naming the 16 defendants
KrebsOnSecurity last week was hit by a near record distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that clocked in at more than 6.3 terabits of data per second (a terabit is one trillion bits of data). The brief attack appears to have been a test run for a massive new Internet of Things (IoT) botnet capable of launching crippling digital assaults that few web destinations can withstand. Read on for more about the botnet, the attack, and the apparent creator of this global menace.
For reference, the 6.3 Tbps attack last week was ten times the size of the assault launched against this site in 2016 by the Mirai IoT botnet, which held KrebsOnSecurity offline for nearly four days. The 2016 assault was so large that Akamai – which was providing pro-bono DDoS protection for KrebsOnSecurity at the time — asked me to leave their service because the attack was causing problems for their paying customers.
Since the Mirai attack, KrebsOnSecurity.com has been behind the protection of Project Shield, a free DDoS defense service that Google provides to websites offering news, human rights, and election-related content. Google Security Engineer Damian Menscher told KrebsOnSecurity the May 12 attack was the largest Google has ever handled. In terms of sheer size, it is second only to a very similar attack that Cloudflare mitigated and wrote about in April.
After comparing notes with Cloudflare, Menscher said the botnet that launched both attacks bears the fingerprints of Aisuru, a digital siege machine that first surfaced less than a year ago. Menscher said the attack on KrebsOnSecurity lasted less than a minute, hurling large UDP data packets at random ports at a rate of approximately 585 million data packets per second.
“It was the type of attack normally designed to overwhelm network links,” Menscher said, referring to the throughput connections between and among various Internet service providers (ISPs). “For most companies, this size of attack would kill them.”
A graph depicting the 6.5 Tbps attack mitigated by Cloudflare in April 2025. Image: Cloudflare.
The Aisuru botnet comprises a globally-dispersed collection of hacked IoT devices, including routers, digital video recorders and other systems that are commandeered via default passwords or software vulnerabilities. As documented by researchers at QiAnXin XLab, the botnet was first identified in an August 2024 attack on a large gaming platform.
Aisuru reportedly went quiet after that exposure, only to reappear in November with even more firepower and software exploits. In a January 2025 report, XLab found the new and improved Aisuru (a.k.a. “Airashi“) had incorporated a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability in Cambium Networks cnPilot routers.
The people behind the Aisuru botnet have been peddling access to their DDoS machine in public Telegram chat channels that are closely monitored by multiple security firms. In August 2024, the botnet was rented out in subscription tiers ranging from $150 per day to $600 per week, offering attacks of up to two terabits per second.
“You may not attack any measurement walls, healthcare facilities, schools or government sites,” read a notice posted on Telegram by the Aisuru botnet owners in August 2024.
Interested parties were told to contact the Telegram handle “@yfork” to purchase a subscription. The account @yfork previously used the nickname “Forky,” an identity that has been posting to public DDoS-focused Telegram channels since 2021.
According to the FBI, Forky’s DDoS-for-hire domains have been seized in multiple law enforcement operations over the years. Last year, Forky said on Telegram he was selling the domain stresser[.]best, which saw its servers seized by the FBI in 2022 as part of an ongoing international law enforcement effort aimed at diminishing the supply of and demand for DDoS-for-hire services.
“The operator of this service, who calls himself ‘Forky,’ operates a Telegram channel to advertise features and communicate with current and prospective DDoS customers,” reads an FBI seizure warrant (PDF) issued for stresser[.]best. The FBI warrant stated that on the same day the seizures were announced, Forky posted a link to a story on this blog that detailed the domain seizure operation, adding the comment, “We are buying our new domains right now.”
A screenshot from the FBI’s seizure warrant for Forky’s DDoS-for-hire domains shows Forky announcing the resurrection of their service at new domains.
Approximately ten hours later, Forky posted again, including a screenshot of the stresser[.]best user dashboard, instructing customers to use their saved passwords for the old website on the new one.
A review of Forky’s posts to public Telegram channels — as indexed by the cyber intelligence firms Unit 221B and Flashpoint — reveals a 21-year-old individual who claims to reside in Brazil [full disclosure: Flashpoint is currently an advertiser on this blog].
Since late 2022, Forky’s posts have frequently promoted a DDoS mitigation company and ISP that he operates called botshield[.]io. The Botshield website is connected to a business entity registered in the United Kingdom called Botshield LTD, which lists a 21-year-old woman from Sao Paulo, Brazil as the director. Internet routing records indicate Botshield (AS213613) currently controls several hundred Internet addresses that were allocated to the company earlier this year.
Domaintools.com reports that botshield[.]io was registered in July 2022 to a Kaike Southier Leite in Sao Paulo. A LinkedIn profile by the same name says this individual is a network specialist from Brazil who works in “the planning and implementation of robust network infrastructures, with a focus on security, DDoS mitigation, colocation and cloud server services.”
Image: Jaclyn Vernace / Shutterstock.com.
In his posts to public Telegram chat channels, Forky has hardly attempted to conceal his whereabouts or identity. In countless chat conversations indexed by Unit 221B, Forky could be seen talking about everyday life in Brazil, often remarking on the extremely low or high prices in Brazil for a range of goods, from computer and networking gear to narcotics and food.
Reached via Telegram, Forky claimed he was “not involved in this type of illegal actions for years now,” and that the project had been taken over by other unspecified developers. Forky initially told KrebsOnSecurity he had been out of the botnet scene for years, only to concede this wasn’t true when presented with public posts on Telegram from late last year that clearly showed otherwise.
Forky denied being involved in the attack on KrebsOnSecurity, but acknowledged that he helped to develop and market the Aisuru botnet. Forky claims he is now merely a staff member for the Aisuru botnet team, and that he stopped running the botnet roughly two months ago after starting a family. Forky also said the woman named as director of Botshield is related to him.
Forky offered equivocal, evasive responses to a number of questions about the Aisuru botnet and his business endeavors. But on one point he was crystal clear:
“I have zero fear about you, the FBI, or Interpol,” Forky said, asserting that he is now almost entirely focused on their hosting business — Botshield.
Forky declined to discuss the makeup of his ISP’s clientele, or to clarify whether Botshield was more of a hosting provider or a DDoS mitigation firm. However, Forky has posted on Telegram about Botshield successfully mitigating large DDoS attacks launched against other DDoS-for-hire services.
DomainTools finds the same Sao Paulo street address in the registration records for botshield[.]io was used to register several other domains, including cant-mitigate[.]us. The email address in the WHOIS records for that domain is forkcontato@gmail.com, which DomainTools says was used to register the domain for the now-defunct DDoS-for-hire service stresser[.]us, one of the domains seized in the FBI’s 2023 crackdown.
On May 8, 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the seizure of stresser[.]us, along with a dozen other domains offering DDoS services. The DOJ said ten of the 13 domains were reincarnations of services that were seized during a prior sweep in December, which targeted 48 top stresser services (also known as “booters”).
Forky claimed he could find out who attacked my site with Aisuru. But when pressed a day later on the question, Forky said he’d come up empty-handed.
“I tried to ask around, all the big guys are not retarded enough to attack you,” Forky explained in an interview on Telegram. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. But you are welcome to write the story and try to put the blame on me.”
The 6.3 Tbps attack last week caused no visible disruption to this site, in part because it was so brief — lasting approximately 45 seconds. DDoS attacks of such magnitude and brevity typically are produced when botnet operators wish to test or demonstrate their firepower for the benefit of potential buyers. Indeed, Google’s Menscher said it is likely that both the May 12 attack and the slightly larger 6.5 Tbps attack against Cloudflare last month were simply tests of the same botnet’s capabilities.
In many ways, the threat posed by the Aisuru/Airashi botnet is reminiscent of Mirai, an innovative IoT malware strain that emerged in the summer of 2016 and successfully out-competed virtually all other IoT malware strains in existence at the time.
As first revealed by KrebsOnSecurity in January 2017, the Mirai authors were two U.S. men who co-ran a DDoS mitigation service — even as they were selling far more lucrative DDoS-for-hire services using the most powerful botnet on the planet.
Less than a week after the Mirai botnet was used in a days-long DDoS against KrebsOnSecurity, the Mirai authors published the source code to their botnet so that they would not be the only ones in possession of it in the event of their arrest by federal investigators.
Ironically, the leaking of the Mirai source is precisely what led to the eventual unmasking and arrest of the Mirai authors, who went on to serve probation sentences that required them to consult with FBI investigators on DDoS investigations. But that leak also rapidly led to the creation of dozens of Mirai botnet clones, many of which were harnessed to fuel their own powerful DDoS-for-hire services.
Menscher told KrebsOnSecurity that as counterintuitive as it may sound, the Internet as a whole would probably be better off if the source code for Aisuru became public knowledge. After all, he said, the people behind Aisuru are in constant competition with other IoT botnet operators who are all striving to commandeer a finite number of vulnerable IoT devices globally.
Such a development would almost certainly cause a proliferation of Aisuru botnet clones, he said, but at least then the overall firepower from each individual botnet would be greatly diminished — or at least within range of the mitigation capabilities of most DDoS protection providers.
Barring a source code leak, Menscher said, it would be nice if someone published the full list of software exploits being used by the Aisuru operators to grow their botnet so quickly.
“Part of the reason Mirai was so dangerous was that it effectively took out competing botnets,” he said. “This attack somehow managed to compromise all these boxes that nobody else knows about. Ideally, we’d want to see that fragmented out, so that no [individual botnet operator] controls too much.”
In what experts are calling a novel legal outcome, the 22-year-old former administrator of the cybercrime community Breachforums will forfeit nearly $700,000 to settle a civil lawsuit from a health insurance company whose customer data was posted for sale on the forum in 2023. Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, a.k.a. “Pompompurin,” is slated for resentencing next month after pleading guilty to access device fraud and possession of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
A redacted screenshot of the Breachforums sales thread. Image: Ke-la.com.
On January 18, 2023, denizens of Breachforums posted for sale tens of thousands of records — including Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, and phone numbers — stolen from Nonstop Health, an insurance provider based in Concord, Calif.
Class-action attorneys sued Nonstop Health, which added Fitzpatrick as a third-party defendant to the civil litigation in November 2023, several months after he was arrested by the FBI and criminally charged with access device fraud and CSAM possession. In January 2025, Nonstop agreed to pay $1.5 million to settle the class action.
Jill Fertel is a former prosecutor who runs the cyber litigation practice at Cipriani & Werner, the law firm that represented Nonstop Health. Fertel told KrebsOnSecurity this is the first and only case where a cybercriminal or anyone related to the security incident was actually named in civil litigation.
“Civil plaintiffs are not at all likely to see money seized from threat actors involved in the incident to be made available to people impacted by the breach,” Fertel said. “The best we could do was make this money available to the class, but it’s still incumbent on the members of the class who are impacted to make that claim.”
Mark Rasch is a former federal prosecutor who now represents Unit 221B, a cybersecurity firm based in New York City. Rasch said he doesn’t doubt that the civil settlement involving Fitzpatrick’s criminal activity is a novel legal development.
“It is rare in these civil cases that you know the threat actor involved in the breach, and it’s also rare that you catch them with sufficient resources to be able to pay a claim,” Rasch said.
Despite admitting to possessing more than 600 CSAM images and personally operating Breachforums, Fitzpatrick was sentenced in January 2024 to time served and 20 years of supervised release. Federal prosecutors objected, arguing that his punishment failed to adequately reflect the seriousness of his crimes or serve as a deterrent.
An excerpt from a pre-sentencing report for Fitzpatrick indicates he had more than 600 CSAM images on his devices.
Indeed, the same month he was sentenced Fitzpatrick was rearrested (PDF) for violating the terms of his release, which forbade him from using a computer that didn’t have court-required monitoring software installed.
Federal prosecutors said Fitzpatrick went on Discord following his guilty plea and professed innocence to the very crimes to which he’d pleaded guilty, stating that his plea deal was “so BS” and that he had “wanted to fight it.” The feds said Fitzpatrick also joked with his friends about selling data to foreign governments, exhorting one user to “become a foreign asset to china or russia,” and to “sell government secrets.”
In January 2025, a federal appeals court agreed with the government’s assessment, vacating Fitzpatrick’s sentence and ordering him to be resentenced on June 3, 2025.
Fitzpatrick launched BreachForums in March 2022 to replace RaidForums, a similarly popular crime forum that was infiltrated and shut down by the FBI the previous month. As administrator, his alter ego Pompompurin served as the middleman, personally reviewing all databases for sale on the forum and offering an escrow service to those interested in buying stolen data.
A yearbook photo of Fitzpatrick unearthed by the Yonkers Times.
The new site quickly attracted more than 300,000 users, and facilitated the sale of databases stolen from hundreds of hacking victims, including some of the largest consumer data breaches in recent history. In May 2024, a reincarnation of Breachforums was seized by the FBI and international partners. Still more relaunches of the forum occurred after that, with the most recent disruption last month.
As KrebsOnSecurity reported last year in The Dark Nexus Between Harm Groups and The Com, it is increasingly common for federal investigators to find CSAM material when searching devices seized from cybercriminal suspects. While the mere possession of CSAM is a serious federal crime, not all of those caught with CSAM are necessarily creators or distributors of it. Fertel said some cybercriminal communities have been known to require new entrants to share CSAM material as a way of proving that they are not a federal investigator.
“If you’re going to the darkest corners of Internet, that’s how you prove you’re not law enforcement,” Fertel said. “Law enforcement would never share that material. It would be criminal for me as a prosecutor, if I obtained and possessed those types of images.”
Further reading: The settlement between Fitzpatrick and Nonstop (PDF).
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P E N T E S T A R S E N A L
A comprehensive web application security testing toolkit that combines 10 powerful penetration testing features into one tool.
Identifies potential security Misconfigurations" title="Misconfigurations">misconfigurations
JWT Token Inspector
Detects common JWT vulnerabilities
Parameter Pollution Finder
Detects server-side parameter handling issues
CORS Misconfiguration Scanner
Detects credential exposure risks
Upload Bypass Tester
Identifies dangerous file type handling
Exposed .git Directory Finder
Tests for sensitive information disclosure
SSRF (Server Side Request Forgery) Detector
Includes cloud metadata endpoint tests
Blind SQL Injection Time Delay Detector
Identifies injectable parameters
Local File Inclusion (LFI) Mapper
Supports various encoding bypasses
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Fingerprinter
git clone https://github.com/sobri3195/pegasus-pentest-arsenal.git
cd pegasus-pentest-arsenal
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate # On Windows: venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python pegasus_pentest.py
This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.
This tool is provided for educational and authorized testing purposes only. Users are responsible for obtaining proper authorization before testing any target. The authors are not responsible for any misuse or damage caused by this tool.
A Texas firm recently charged with conspiring to distribute synthetic opioids in the United States is at the center of a vast network of companies in the U.S. and Pakistan whose employees are accused of using online ads to scam westerners seeking help with trademarks, book writing, mobile app development and logo designs, a new investigation reveals.
In an indictment (PDF) unsealed last month, the U.S. Department of Justice said Dallas-based eWorldTrade “operated an online business-to-business marketplace that facilitated the distribution of synthetic opioids such as isotonitazene and carfentanyl, both significantly more potent than fentanyl.”
Launched in 2017, eWorldTrade[.]com now features a seizure notice from the DOJ. eWorldTrade operated as a wholesale seller of consumer goods, including clothes, machinery, chemicals, automobiles and appliances. The DOJ’s indictment includes no additional details about eWorldTrade’s business, origins or other activity, and at first glance the website might appear to be a legitimate e-commerce platform that also just happened to sell some restricted chemicals.
A screenshot of the eWorldTrade homepage on March 25, 2025. Image: archive.org.
However, an investigation into the company’s founders reveals they are connected to a sprawling network of websites that have a history of extortionate scams involving trademark registration, book publishing, exam preparation, and the design of logos, mobile applications and websites.
Records from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) show the eWorldTrade mark is owned by an Azneem Bilwani in Karachi (this name also is in the registration records for the now-seized eWorldTrade domain). Mr. Bilwani is perhaps better known as the director of the Pakistan-based IT provider Abtach Ltd., which has been singled out by the USPTO and Google for operating trademark registration scams (the main offices for eWorldtrade and Abtach share the same address in Pakistan).
In November 2021, the USPTO accused Abtach of perpetrating “an egregious scheme to deceive and defraud applicants for federal trademark registrations by improperly altering official USPTO correspondence, overcharging application filing fees, misappropriating the USPTO’s trademarks, and impersonating the USPTO.”
Abtach offered trademark registration at suspiciously low prices compared to legitimate costs of over USD $1,500, and claimed they could register a trademark in 24 hours. Abtach reportedly rebranded to Intersys Limited after the USPTO banned Abtach from filing any more trademark applications.
In a note published to its LinkedIn profile, Intersys Ltd. asserted last year that certain scam firms in Karachi were impersonating the company.
Many of Abtach’s employees are former associates of a similar company in Pakistan called Axact that was targeted by Pakistani authorities in a 2015 fraud investigation. Axact came under law enforcement scrutiny after The New York Times ran a front-page story about the company’s most lucrative scam business: Hundreds of sites peddling fake college degrees and diplomas.
People who purchased fake certifications were subsequently blackmailed by Axact employees posing as government officials, who would demand additional payments under threats of prosecution or imprisonment for having bought fraudulent “unauthorized” academic degrees. This practice created a continuous cycle of extortion, internally referred to as “upselling.”
“Axact took money from at least 215,000 people in 197 countries — one-third of them from the United States,” The Times reported. “Sales agents wielded threats and false promises and impersonated government officials, earning the company at least $89 million in its final year of operation.”
Dozens of top Axact employees were arrested, jailed, held for months, tried and sentenced to seven years for various fraud violations. But a 2019 research brief on Axact’s diploma mills found none of those convicted had started their prison sentence, and that several had fled Pakistan and never returned.
“In October 2016, a Pakistan district judge acquitted 24 Axact officials at trial due to ‘not enough evidence’ and then later admitted he had accepted a bribe (of $35,209) from Axact,” reads a history (PDF) published by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
In 2021, Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) charged Bilwani and nearly four dozen others — many of them Abtach employees — with running an elaborate trademark scam. The authorities called it “the biggest money laundering case in the history of Pakistan,” and named a number of businesses based in Texas that allegedly helped move the proceeds of cybercrime.
A page from the March 2021 FIA report alleging that Digitonics Labs and Abtach employees conspired to extort and defraud consumers.
The FIA said the defendants operated a large number of websites offering low-cost trademark services to customers, before then “ignoring them after getting the funds and later demanding more funds from clients/victims in the name of up-sale (extortion).” The Pakistani law enforcement agency said that about 75 percent of customers received fake or fabricated trademarks as a result of the scams.
The FIA found Abtach operates in conjunction with a Karachi firm called Digitonics Labs, which earned a monthly revenue of around $2.5 million through the “extortion of international clients in the name of up-selling, the sale of fake/fabricated USPTO certificates, and the maintaining of phishing websites.”
According the Pakistani authorities, the accused also ran countless scams involving ebook publication and logo creation, wherein customers are subjected to advance-fee fraud and extortion — with the scammers demanding more money for supposed “copyright release” and threatening to release the trademark.
Also charged by the FIA was Junaid Mansoor, the owner of Digitonics Labs in Karachi. Mansoor’s U.K.-registered company Maple Solutions Direct Limited has run at least 700 ads for logo design websites since 2015, the Google Ads Transparency page reports. The company has approximately 88 ads running on Google as of today.
Junaid Mansoor. Source: youtube/@Olevels․com School.
Mr. Mansoor is actively involved with and promoting a Quran study business called quranmasteronline[.]com, which was founded by Junaid’s brother Qasim Mansoor (Qasim is also named in the FIA criminal investigation). The Google ads promoting quranmasteronline[.]com were paid for by the same account advertising a number of scam websites selling logo and web design services.
Junaid Mansoor did not respond to requests for comment. An address in Teaneck, New Jersey where Mr. Mansoor previously lived is listed as an official address of exporthub[.]com, a Pakistan-based e-commerce website that appears remarkably similar to eWorldTrade (Exporthub says its offices are in Texas). Interestingly, a search in Google for this domain shows ExportHub currently features multiple listings for fentanyl citrate from suppliers in China and elsewhere.
The CEO of Digitonics Labs is Muhammad Burhan Mirza, a former Axact official who was arrested by the FIA as part of its money laundering and trademark fraud investigation in 2021. In 2023, prosecutors in Pakistan charged Mirza, Mansoor and 14 other Digitonics employees with fraud, impersonating government officials, phishing, cheating and extortion. Mirza’s LinkedIn profile says he currently runs an educational technology/life coach enterprise called TheCoach360, which purports to help young kids “achieve financial independence.”
Reached via LinkedIn, Mr. Mirza denied having anything to do with eWorldTrade or any of its sister companies in Texas.
“Moreover, I have no knowledge as to the companies you have mentioned,” said Mr. Mirza, who did not respond to follow-up questions.
The current disposition of the FIA’s fraud case against the defendants is unclear. The investigation was marred early on by allegations of corruption and bribery. In 2021, Pakistani authorities alleged Bilwani paid a six-figure bribe to FIA investigators. Meanwhile, attorneys for Mr. Bilwani have argued that although their client did pay a bribe, the payment was solicited by government officials. Mr. Bilwani did not respond to requests for comment.
KrebsOnSecurity has learned that the people and entities at the center of the FIA investigations have built a significant presence in the United States, with a strong concentration in Texas. The Texas businesses promote websites that sell logo and web design, ghostwriting, and academic cheating services. Many of these entities have recently been sued for fraud and breach of contract by angry former customers, who claimed the companies relentlessly upsold them while failing to produce the work as promised.
For example, the FIA complaints named Retrocube LLC and 360 Digital Marketing LLC, two entities that share a street address with eWorldTrade: 1910 Pacific Avenue, Suite 8025, Dallas, Texas. Also incorporated at that Pacific Avenue address is abtach[.]ae, a web design and marketing firm based in Dubai; and intersyslimited[.]com, the new name of Abtach after they were banned by the USPTO. Other businesses registered at this address market services for logo design, mobile app development, and ghostwriting.
A list published in 2021 by Pakistan’s FIA of different front companies allegedly involved in scamming people who are looking for help with trademarks, ghostwriting, logos and web design.
360 Digital Marketing’s website 360digimarketing[.]com is owned by an Abtach front company called Abtech LTD. Meanwhile, business records show 360 Digi Marketing LTD is a U.K. company whose officers include former Abtach director Bilwani; Muhammad Saad Iqbal, formerly Abtach, now CEO of Intersys Ltd; Niaz Ahmed, a former Abtach associate; and Muhammad Salman Yousuf, formerly a vice president at Axact, Abtach, and Digitonics Labs.
Google’s Ads Transparency Center finds 360 Digital Marketing LLC ran at least 500 ads promoting various websites selling ghostwriting services . Another entity tied to Junaid Mansoor — a company called Octa Group Technologies AU — has run approximately 300 Google ads for book publishing services, promoting confusingly named websites like amazonlistinghub[.]com and barnesnoblepublishing[.]co.
360 Digital Marketing LLC ran approximately 500 ads for scam ghostwriting sites.
Rameez Moiz is a Texas resident and former Abtach product manager who has represented 360 Digital Marketing LLC and RetroCube. Moiz told KrebsOnSecurity he stopped working for 360 Digital Marketing in the summer of 2023. Mr. Moiz did not respond to follow-up questions, but an Upwork profile for him states that as of April 2025 he is employed by Dallas-based Vertical Minds LLC.
In April 2025, California resident Melinda Will sued the Texas firm Majestic Ghostwriting — which is doing business as ghostwritingsquad[.]com — alleging they scammed her out of $100,000 after she hired them to help write her book. Google’s ad transparency page shows Moiz’s employer Vertical Minds LLC paid to run approximately 55 ads for ghostwritingsquad[.]com and related sites.
Google’s ad transparency listing for ghostwriting ads paid for by Vertical Minds LLC.
Ms. Will’s lawsuit is just one of more than two dozen complaints over the past four years wherein plaintiffs sued one of this group’s web design, wiki editing or ghostwriting services. In 2021, a New Jersey man sued Octagroup Technologies, alleging they ripped him off when he paid a total of more than $26,000 for the design and marketing of a web-based mapping service.
The plaintiff in that case did not respond to requests for comment, but his complaint alleges Octagroup and a myriad other companies it contracted with produced minimal work product despite subjecting him to relentless upselling. That case was decided in favor of the plaintiff because the defendants never contested the matter in court.
In 2023, 360 Digital Marketing LLC and Retrocube LLC were sued by a woman who said they scammed her out of $40,000 over a book she wanted help writing. That lawsuit helpfully showed an image of the office front door at 1910 Pacific Ave Suite 8025, which featured the logos of 360 Digital Marketing, Retrocube, and eWorldTrade.
The front door at 1910 Pacific Avenue, Suite 8025, Dallas, Texas.
The lawsuit was filed pro se by Leigh Riley, a 64-year-old career IT professional who paid 360 Digital Marketing to have a company called Talented Ghostwriter co-author and promote a series of books she’d outlined on spirituality and healing.
“The main reason I hired them was because I didn’t understand what I call the formula for writing a book, and I know there’s a lot of marketing that goes into publishing,” Riley explained in an interview. “I know nothing about that stuff, and these guys were convincing that they could handle all aspects of it. Until I discovered they couldn’t write a damn sentence in English properly.”
Riley’s well-documented lawsuit (not linked here because it features a great deal of personal information) includes screenshots of conversations with the ghostwriting team, which was constantly assigning her to new writers and editors, and ghosting her on scheduled conference calls about progress on the project. Riley said she ended up writing most of the book herself because the work they produced was unusable.
“Finally after months of promising the books were printed and on their way, they show up at my doorstep with the wrong title on the book,” Riley said. When she demanded her money back, she said the people helping her with the website to promote the book locked her out of the site.
A conversation snippet from Leigh Riley’s lawsuit against Talented Ghostwriter, aka 360 Digital Marketing LLC. “Other companies once they have you money they don’t even respond or do anything,” the ghostwriting team manager explained.
Riley decided to sue, naming 360 Digital Marketing LLC and Retrocube LLC, among others. The companies offered to settle the matter for $20,000, which she accepted. “I didn’t have money to hire a lawyer, and I figured it was time to cut my losses,” she said.
Riley said she could have saved herself a great deal of headache by doing some basic research on Talented Ghostwriter, whose website claims the company is based in Los Angeles. According to the California Secretary of State, however, there is no registered entity by that name. Rather, the address claimed by talentedghostwriter[.]com is a vacant office building with a “space available” sign in the window.
California resident Walter Horsting discovered something similar when he sued 360 Digital Marketing in small claims court last year, after hiring a company called Vox Ghostwriting to help write, edit and promote a spy novel he’d been working on. Horsting said he paid Vox $3,300 to ghostwrite a 280-page book, and was upsold an Amazon marketing and publishing package for $7,500.
In an interview, Horsting said the prose that Vox Ghostwriting produced was “juvenile at best,” forcing him to rewrite and edit the work himself, and to partner with a graphical artist to produce illustrations. Horsting said that when it came time to begin marketing the novel, Vox Ghostwriting tried to further upsell him on marketing packages, while dodging scheduled meetings with no follow-up.
“They have a money back guarantee, and when they wouldn’t refund my money I said I’m taking you to court,” Horsting recounted. “I tried to serve them in Los Angeles but found no such office exists. I talked to a salon next door and they said someone else had recently shown up desperately looking for where the ghostwriting company went, and it appears there are a trail of corpses on this. I finally tracked down where they are in Texas.”
It was the same office that Ms. Riley served her lawsuit against. Horsting said he has a court hearing scheduled later this month, but he’s under no illusions that winning the case means he’ll be able to collect.
“At this point, I’m doing it out of pride more than actually expecting anything to come to good fortune for me,” he said.
The following mind map was helpful in piecing together key events, individuals and connections mentioned above. It’s important to note that this graphic only scratches the surface of the operations tied to this group. For example, in Case 2 we can see mention of academic cheating services, wherein people can be hired to take online proctored exams on one’s behalf. Those who hire these services soon find themselves subject to impersonation and blackmail attempts for larger and larger sums of money, with the threat of publicly exposing their unethical academic cheating activity.
A “mind map” illustrating the connections between and among entities referenced in this story. Click to enlarge.
KrebsOnSecurity reviewed the Google Ad Transparency links for nearly 500 different websites tied to this network of ghostwriting, logo, app and web development businesses. Those website names were then fed into spyfu.com, a competitive intelligence company that tracks the reach and performance of advertising keywords. Spyfu estimates that between April 2023 and April 2025, those websites spent more than $10 million on Google ads.
Reached for comment, Google said in a written statement that it is constantly policing its ad network for bad actors, pointing to an ads safety report (PDF) showing Google blocked or removed 5.1 billion bad ads last year — including more than 500 million ads related to trademarks.
“Our policy against Enabling Dishonest Behavior prohibits products or services that help users mislead others, including ads for paper-writing or exam-taking services,” the statement reads. “When we identify ads or advertisers that violate our policies, we take action, including by suspending advertiser accounts, disapproving ads, and restricting ads to specific domains when appropriate.”
Google did not respond to specific questions about the advertising entities mentioned in this story, saying only that “we are actively investigating this matter and addressing any policy violations, including suspending advertiser accounts when appropriate.”
From reviewing the ad accounts that have been promoting these scam websites, it appears Google has very recently acted to remove a large number of the offending ads. Prior to my notifying Google about the extent of this ad network on April 28, the Google Ad Transparency network listed over 500 ads for 360 Digital Marketing; as of this publication, that number had dwindled to 10.
On April 30, Google announced that starting this month its ads transparency page will display the payment profile name as the payer name for verified advertisers, if that name differs from their verified advertiser name. Searchengineland.com writes the changes are aimed at increasing accountability in digital advertising.
This spreadsheet lists the domain names, advertiser names, and Google Ad Transparency links for more than 350 entities offering ghostwriting, publishing, web design and academic cheating services.
KrebsOnSecurity would like to thank the anonymous security researcher NatInfoSec for their assistance in this investigation.
For further reading on Abtach and its myriad companies in all of the above-mentioned verticals (ghostwriting, logo design, etc.), see this Wikiwand entry.
Article tags
A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server implementation that integrates with Firecrawl for web scraping capabilities.
Big thanks to @vrknetha, @cawstudios for the initial implementation!
You can also play around with our MCP Server on MCP.so's playground. Thanks to MCP.so for hosting and @gstarwd for integrating our server.
env FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=fc-YOUR_API_KEY npx -y firecrawl-mcp
npm install -g firecrawl-mcp
Configuring Cursor 🖥️ Note: Requires Cursor version 0.45.6+ For the most up-to-date configuration instructions, please refer to the official Cursor documentation on configuring MCP servers: Cursor MCP Server Configuration Guide
To configure Firecrawl MCP in Cursor v0.45.6
env FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=your-api-key npx -y firecrawl-mcp
To configure Firecrawl MCP in Cursor v0.48.6
json { "mcpServers": { "firecrawl-mcp": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "firecrawl-mcp"], "env": { "FIRECRAWL_API_KEY": "YOUR-API-KEY" } } } }
If you are using Windows and are running into issues, try
cmd /c "set FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=your-api-key && npx -y firecrawl-mcp"
Replace your-api-key with your Firecrawl API key. If you don't have one yet, you can create an account and get it from https://www.firecrawl.dev/app/api-keys
After adding, refresh the MCP server list to see the new tools. The Composer Agent will automatically use Firecrawl MCP when appropriate, but you can explicitly request it by describing your web scraping needs. Access the Composer via Command+L (Mac), select "Agent" next to the submit button, and enter your query.
Add this to your ./codeium/windsurf/model_config.json:
{
"mcpServers": {
"mcp-server-firecrawl": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "firecrawl-mcp"],
"env": {
"FIRECRAWL_API_KEY": "YOUR_API_KEY"
}
}
}
}
To install Firecrawl for Claude Desktop automatically via Smithery:
npx -y @smithery/cli install @mendableai/mcp-server-firecrawl --client claude
FIRECRAWL_API_KEY: Your Firecrawl API keyFIRECRAWL_API_URL
FIRECRAWL_API_URL (Optional): Custom API endpoint for self-hosted instanceshttps://firecrawl.your-domain.com
FIRECRAWL_RETRY_MAX_ATTEMPTS: Maximum number of retry attempts (default: 3)FIRECRAWL_RETRY_INITIAL_DELAY: Initial delay in milliseconds before first retry (default: 1000)FIRECRAWL_RETRY_MAX_DELAY: Maximum delay in milliseconds between retries (default: 10000)FIRECRAWL_RETRY_BACKOFF_FACTOR: Exponential backoff multiplier (default: 2)FIRECRAWL_CREDIT_WARNING_THRESHOLD: Credit usage warning threshold (default: 1000)FIRECRAWL_CREDIT_CRITICAL_THRESHOLD: Credit usage critical threshold (default: 100)For cloud API usage with custom retry and credit monitoring:
# Required for cloud API
export FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=your-api-key
# Optional retry configuration
export FIRECRAWL_RETRY_MAX_ATTEMPTS=5 # Increase max retry attempts
export FIRECRAWL_RETRY_INITIAL_DELAY=2000 # Start with 2s delay
export FIRECRAWL_RETRY_MAX_DELAY=30000 # Maximum 30s delay
export FIRECRAWL_RETRY_BACKOFF_FACTOR=3 # More aggressive backoff
# Optional credit monitoring
export FIRECRAWL_CREDIT_WARNING_THRESHOLD=2000 # Warning at 2000 credits
export FIRECRAWL_CREDIT_CRITICAL_THRESHOLD=500 # Critical at 500 credits
For self-hosted instance:
# Required for self-hosted
export FIRECRAWL_API_URL=https://firecrawl.your-domain.com
# Optional authentication for self-hosted
export FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=your-api-key # If your instance requires auth
# Custom retry configuration
export FIRECRAWL_RETRY_MAX_ATTEMPTS=10
export FIRECRAWL_RETRY_INITIAL_DELAY=500 # Start with faster retries
Add this to your claude_desktop_config.json:
{
"mcpServers": {
"mcp-server-firecrawl": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "firecrawl-mcp"],
"env": {
"FIRECRAWL_API_KEY": "YOUR_API_KEY_HERE",
"FIRECRAWL_RETRY_MAX_ATTEMPTS": "5",
"FIRECRAWL_RETRY_INITIAL_DELAY": "2000",
"FIRECRAWL_RETRY_MAX_DELAY": "30000",
"FIRECRAWL_RETRY_BACKOFF_FACTOR": "3",
"FIRECRAWL_CREDIT_WARNING_THRESHOLD": "2000",
"FIRECRAWL_CREDIT_CRITICAL_THRESHOLD": "500"
}
}
}
}
The server includes several configurable parameters that can be set via environment variables. Here are the default values if not configured:
const CONFIG = {
retry: {
maxAttempts: 3, // Number of retry attempts for rate-limited requests
initialDelay: 1000, // Initial delay before first retry (in milliseconds)
maxDelay: 10000, // Maximum delay between retries (in milliseconds)
backoffFactor: 2, // Multiplier for exponential backoff
},
credit: {
warningThreshold: 1000, // Warn when credit usage reaches this level
criticalThreshold: 100, // Critical alert when credit usage reaches this level
},
};
These configurations control:
Retry Behavior
Automatically retries failed requests due to rate limits
Example: With default settings, retries will be attempted at:
Credit Usage Monitoring
The server utilizes Firecrawl's built-in rate limiting and batch processing capabilities:
firecrawl_scrape)Scrape content from a single URL with advanced options.
{
"name": "firecrawl_scrape",
"arguments": {
"url": "https://example.com",
"formats": ["markdown"],
"onlyMainContent": true,
"waitFor": 1000,
"timeout": 30000,
"mobile": false,
"includeTags": ["article", "main"],
"excludeTags": ["nav", "footer"],
"skipTlsVerification": false
}
}
firecrawl_batch_scrape)Scrape multiple URLs efficiently with built-in rate limiting and parallel processing.
{
"name": "firecrawl_batch_scrape",
"arguments": {
"urls": ["https://example1.com", "https://example2.com"],
"options": {
"formats": ["markdown"],
"onlyMainContent": true
}
}
}
Response includes operation ID for status checking:
{
"content": [
{
"type": "text",
"text": "Batch operation queued with ID: batch_1. Use firecrawl_check_batch_status to check progress."
}
],
"isError": false
}
firecrawl_check_batch_status)Check the status of a batch operation.
{
"name": "firecrawl_check_batch_status",
"arguments": {
"id": "batch_1"
}
}
firecrawl_search)Search the web and optionally extract content from search results.
{
"name": "firecrawl_search",
"arguments": {
"query": "your search query",
"limit": 5,
"lang": "en",
"country": "us",
"scrapeOptions": {
"formats": ["markdown"],
"onlyMainContent": true
}
}
}
firecrawl_crawl)Start an asynchronous crawl with advanced options.
{
"name": "firecrawl_crawl",
"arguments": {
"url": "https://example.com",
"maxDepth": 2,
"limit": 100,
"allowExternalLinks": false,
"deduplicateSimilarURLs": true
}
}
firecrawl_extract)Extract structured information from web pages using LLM capabilities. Supports both cloud AI and self-hosted LLM extraction.
{
"name": "firecrawl_extract",
"arguments": {
"urls": ["https://example.com/page1", "https://example.com/page2"],
"prompt": "Extract product information including name, price, and description",
"systemPrompt": "You are a helpful assistant that extracts product information",
"schema": {
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"name": { "type": "string" },
"price": { "type": "number" },
"description": { "type": "string" }
},
"required": ["name", "price"]
},
"allowExternalLinks": false,
"enableWebSearch": false,
"includeSubdomains": false
}
}
Example response:
{
"content": [
{
"type": "text",
"text": {
"name": "Example Product",
"price": 99.99,
"description": "This is an example product description"
}
}
],
"isError": false
}
urls: Array of URLs to extract information fromprompt: Custom prompt for the LLM extractionsystemPrompt: System prompt to guide the LLMschema: JSON schema for structured data extractionallowExternalLinks: Allow extraction from external linksenableWebSearch: Enable web search for additional contextincludeSubdomains: Include subdomains in extractionWhen using a self-hosted instance, the extraction will use your configured LLM. For cloud API, it uses Firecrawl's managed LLM service.
Conduct deep web research on a query using intelligent crawling, search, and LLM analysis.
{
"name": "firecrawl_deep_research",
"arguments": {
"query": "how does carbon capture technology work?",
"maxDepth": 3,
"timeLimit": 120,
"maxUrls": 50
}
}
Arguments:
Returns:
Generate a standardized llms.txt (and optionally llms-full.txt) file for a given domain. This file defines how large language models should interact with the site.
{
"name": "firecrawl_generate_llmstxt",
"arguments": {
"url": "https://example.com",
"maxUrls": 20,
"showFullText": true
}
}
Arguments:
Returns:
The server includes comprehensive logging:
Example log messages:
[INFO] Firecrawl MCP Server initialized successfully
[INFO] Starting scrape for URL: https://example.com
[INFO] Batch operation queued with ID: batch_1
[WARNING] Credit usage has reached warning threshold
[ERROR] Rate limit exceeded, retrying in 2s...
The server provides robust error handling:
Example error response:
{
"content": [
{
"type": "text",
"text": "Error: Rate limit exceeded. Retrying in 2 seconds..."
}
],
"isError": true
}
# Install dependencies
npm install
# Build
npm run build
# Run tests
npm test
npm test
MIT License - see LICENSE file for details
Real-time face swap and video deepfake with a single click and only a single image.
This deepfake software is designed to be a productive tool for the AI-generated media industry. It can assist artists in animating custom characters, creating engaging content, and even using models for clothing design.
We are aware of the potential for unethical applications and are committed to preventative measures. A built-in check prevents the program from processing inappropriate media (nudity, graphic content, sensitive material like war footage, etc.). We will continue to develop this project responsibly, adhering to the law and ethics. We may shut down the project or add watermarks if legally required.
Ethical Use: Users are expected to use this software responsibly and legally. If using a real person's face, obtain their consent and clearly label any output as a deepfake when sharing online.
Content Restrictions: The software includes built-in checks to prevent processing inappropriate media, such as nudity, graphic content, or sensitive material.
Legal Compliance: We adhere to all relevant laws and ethical guidelines. If legally required, we may shut down the project or add watermarks to the output.
User Responsibility: We are not responsible for end-user actions. Users must ensure their use of the software aligns with ethical standards and legal requirements.
By using this software, you agree to these terms and commit to using it in a manner that respects the rights and dignity of others.
Users are expected to use this software responsibly and legally. If using a real person's face, obtain their consent and clearly label any output as a deepfake when sharing online. We are not responsible for end-user actions.
1. Select a face 2. Select which camera to use 3. Press live!
Retain your original mouth for accurate movement using Mouth Mask
Use different faces on multiple subjects simultaneously
Watch movies with any face in real-time
Run Live shows and performances
Create Your Most Viral Meme Yet
Created using Many Faces feature in Deep-Live-Cam
Surprise people on Omegle
Please be aware that the installation requires technical skills and is not for beginners. Consider downloading the prebuilt version.
git clone https://github.com/hacksider/Deep-Live-Cam.git
cd Deep-Live-Cam
python -m venv venv
venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
# Install Python 3.10 (specific version is important)
brew install python@3.10
# Install tkinter package (required for the GUI)
brew install python-tk@3.10
# Create and activate virtual environment with Python 3.10
python3.10 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
# Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt
# Deactivate the virtual environment
rm -rf venv
# Reinstall the virtual environment
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
# install the dependencies again
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip uninstall onnxruntime onnxruntime-gpu
pip install onnxruntime-gpu==1.16.3
python run.py --execution-provider cuda
pip uninstall onnxruntime onnxruntime-silicon
pip install onnxruntime-silicon==1.13.1
python3.10 run.py --execution-provider coreml
pip uninstall onnxruntime onnxruntime-coreml
pip install onnxruntime-coreml==1.13.1
python run.py --execution-provider coreml
pip uninstall onnxruntime onnxruntime-directml
pip install onnxruntime-directml==1.15.1
python run.py --execution-provider directml
pip uninstall onnxruntime onnxruntime-openvino
pip install onnxruntime-openvino==1.15.0
python run.py --execution-provider openvino
1. Image/Video Mode
python run.py.2. Webcam Mode
python run.py.Check out these helpful guides to get the most out of Deep-Live-Cam:
Visit our official blog for more tips and tutorials.
options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-s SOURCE_PATH, --source SOURCE_PATH select a source image
-t TARGET_PATH, --target TARGET_PATH select a target image or video
-o OUTPUT_PATH, --output OUTPUT_PATH select output file or directory
--frame-processor FRAME_PROCESSOR [FRAME_PROCESSOR ...] frame processors (choices: face_swapper, face_enhancer, ...)
--keep-fps keep original fps
--keep-audio keep original audio
--keep-frames keep temporary frames
--many-faces process every face
--map-faces map source target faces
--mouth-mask mask the mouth region
--video-encoder {libx264,libx265,libvpx-vp9} adjust output video encoder
--video-quality [0-51] adjust output video quality
--live-mirror the live camera display as you see it in the front-facing camera frame
--live-resizable the live camera frame is resizable
--max-memory MAX_MEMORY maximum amount of RAM in GB
--execution-provider {cpu} [{cpu} ...] available execution provider (choices: cpu, ...)
--execution-threads EXECUTION_THREADS number of execution threads
-v, --version show program's version number and exit
Looking for a CLI mode? Using the -s/--source argument will make the run program in cli mode.
We are always open to criticism and are ready to improve, that's why we didn't cherry-pick anything.
🐫 CAMEL is an open-source community dedicated to finding the scaling laws of agents. We believe that studying these agents on a large scale offers valuable insights into their behaviors, capabilities, and potential risks. To facilitate research in this field, we implement and support various types of agents, tasks, prompts, models, and simulated environments.
The framework is designed to support systems with millions of agents, ensuring efficient coordination, communication, and resource management at scale.
Agents maintain stateful memory, enabling them to perform multi-step interactions with environments and efficiently tackle sophisticated tasks.
Every line of code and comment serves as a prompt for agents. Code should be written clearly and readably, ensuring both humans and agents can interpret it effectively.
We are a community-driven research collective comprising over 100 researchers dedicated to advancing frontier research in Multi-Agent Systems. Researchers worldwide choose CAMEL for their studies based on the following reasons.
| ✅ | Large-Scale Agent System | Simulate up to 1M agents to study emergent behaviors and scaling laws in complex, multi-agent environments. |
| ✅ | Dynamic Communication | Enable real-time interactions among agents, fostering seamless collaboration for tackling intricate tasks. |
| ✅ | Stateful Memory | Equip agents with the ability to retain and leverage historical context, improving decision-making over extended interactions. |
| ✅ | Support for Multiple Benchmarks | Utilize standardized benchmarks to rigorously evaluate agent performance, ensuring reproducibility and reliable comparisons. |
| ✅ | Support for Different Agent Types | Work with a variety of agent roles, tasks, models, and environments, supporting interdisciplinary experiments and diverse research applications. |
| ✅ | Data Generation and Tool Integration | Automate the creation of large-scale, structured datasets while seamlessly integrating with multiple tools, streamlining synthetic data generation and research workflows. |
Installing CAMEL is a breeze thanks to its availability on PyPI. Simply open your terminal and run:
pip install camel-ai
This example demonstrates how to create a ChatAgent using the CAMEL framework and perform a search query using DuckDuckGo.
bash pip install 'camel-ai[web_tools]'
bash export OPENAI_API_KEY='your_openai_api_key'
```python from camel.models import ModelFactory from camel.types import ModelPlatformType, ModelType from camel.agents import ChatAgent from camel.toolkits import SearchToolkit
model = ModelFactory.create( model_platform=ModelPlatformType.OPENAI, model_type=ModelType.GPT_4O, model_config_dict={"temperature": 0.0}, )
search_tool = SearchToolkit().search_duckduckgo
agent = ChatAgent(model=model, tools=[search_tool])
response_1 = agent.step("What is CAMEL-AI?") print(response_1.msgs[0].content) # CAMEL-AI is the first LLM (Large Language Model) multi-agent framework # and an open-source community focused on finding the scaling laws of agents. # ...
response_2 = agent.step("What is the Github link to CAMEL framework?") print(response_2.msgs[0].content) # The GitHub link to the CAMEL framework is # https://github.com/camel-ai/camel. ```
For more detailed instructions and additional configuration options, check out the installation section.
After running, you can explore our CAMEL Tech Stack and Cookbooks at docs.camel-ai.org to build powerful multi-agent systems.
We provide a demo showcasing a conversation between two ChatGPT agents playing roles as a python programmer and a stock trader collaborating on developing a trading bot for stock market.
Explore different types of agents, their roles, and their applications.
Please reach out to us on CAMEL discord if you encounter any issue set up CAMEL.
Core components and utilities to build, operate, and enhance CAMEL-AI agents and societies.
| Module | Description |
|---|---|
| Agents | Core agent architectures and behaviors for autonomous operation. |
| Agent Societies | Components for building and managing multi-agent systems and collaboration. |
| Data Generation | Tools and methods for synthetic data creation and augmentation. |
| Models | Model architectures and customization options for agent intelligence. |
| Tools | Tools integration for specialized agent tasks. |
| Memory | Memory storage and retrieval mechanisms for agent state management. |
| Storage | Persistent storage solutions for agent data and states. |
| Benchmarks | Performance evaluation and testing frameworks. |
| Interpreters | Code and command interpretation capabilities. |
| Data Loaders | Data ingestion and preprocessing tools. |
| Retrievers | Knowledge retrieval and RAG components. |
| Runtime | Execution environment and process management. |
| Human-in-the-Loop | Interactive components for human oversight and intervention. |
| --- |
We believe that studying these agents on a large scale offers valuable insights into their behaviors, capabilities, and potential risks.
Explore our research projects:
Research with US
We warmly invite you to use CAMEL for your impactful research.
Rigorous research takes time and resources. We are a community-driven research collective with 100+ researchers exploring the frontier research of Multi-agent Systems. Join our ongoing projects or test new ideas with us, reach out via email for more information.
For more details, please see our Models Documentation.
Data (Hosted on Hugging Face)
| Dataset | Chat format | Instruction format | Chat format (translated) |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI Society | Chat format | Instruction format | Chat format (translated) |
| Code | Chat format | Instruction format | x |
| Math | Chat format | x | x |
| Physics | Chat format | x | x |
| Chemistry | Chat format | x | x |
| Biology | Chat format | x | x |
| Dataset | Instructions | Tasks |
|---|---|---|
| AI Society | Instructions | Tasks |
| Code | Instructions | Tasks |
| Misalignment | Instructions | Tasks |
Practical guides and tutorials for implementing specific functionalities in CAMEL-AI agents and societies.
| Cookbook | Description |
|---|---|
| Creating Your First Agent | A step-by-step guide to building your first agent. |
| Creating Your First Agent Society | Learn to build a collaborative society of agents. |
| Message Cookbook | Best practices for message handling in agents. |
| Cookbook | Description |
|---|---|
| Tools Cookbook | Integrating tools for enhanced functionality. |
| Memory Cookbook | Implementing memory systems in agents. |
| RAG Cookbook | Recipes for Retrieval-Augmented Generation. |
| Graph RAG Cookbook | Leveraging knowledge graphs with RAG. |
| Track CAMEL Agents with AgentOps | Tools for tracking and managing agents in operations. |
| Cookbook | Description |
|---|---|
| Data Generation with CAMEL and Finetuning with Unsloth | Learn how to generate data with CAMEL and fine-tune models effectively with Unsloth. |
| Data Gen with Real Function Calls and Hermes Format | Explore how to generate data with real function calls and the Hermes format. |
| CoT Data Generation and Upload Data to Huggingface | Uncover how to generate CoT data with CAMEL and seamlessly upload it to Huggingface. |
| CoT Data Generation and SFT Qwen with Unsolth | Discover how to generate CoT data using CAMEL and SFT Qwen with Unsolth, and seamlessly upload your data and model to Huggingface. |
| Cookbook | Description |
|---|---|
| Role-Playing Scraper for Report & Knowledge Graph Generation | Create role-playing agents for data scraping and reporting. |
| Create A Hackathon Judge Committee with Workforce | Building a team of agents for collaborative judging. |
| Dynamic Knowledge Graph Role-Playing: Multi-Agent System with dynamic, temporally-aware knowledge graphs | Builds dynamic, temporally-aware knowledge graphs for financial applications using a multi-agent system. It processes financial reports, news articles, and research papers to help traders analyze data, identify relationships, and uncover market insights. The system also utilizes diverse and optional element node deduplication techniques to ensure data integrity and optimize graph structure for financial decision-making. |
| Customer Service Discord Bot with Agentic RAG | Learn how to build a robust customer service bot for Discord using Agentic RAG. |
| Customer Service Discord Bot with Local Model | Learn how to build a robust customer service bot for Discord using Agentic RAG which supports local deployment. |
| Cookbook | Description |
|---|---|
| Video Analysis | Techniques for agents in video data analysis. |
| 3 Ways to Ingest Data from Websites with Firecrawl | Explore three methods for extracting and processing data from websites using Firecrawl. |
| Create AI Agents that work with your PDFs | Learn how to create AI agents that work with your PDFs using Chunkr and Mistral AI. |
For those who'd like to contribute code, we appreciate your interest in contributing to our open-source initiative. Please take a moment to review our contributing guidelines to get started on a smooth collaboration journey.🚀
We also welcome you to help CAMEL grow by sharing it on social media, at events, or during conferences. Your support makes a big difference!
For more information please contact camel-ai@eigent.ai
GitHub Issues: Report bugs, request features, and track development. Submit an issue
Discord: Get real-time support, chat with the community, and stay updated. Join us
X (Twitter): Follow for updates, AI insights, and key announcements. Follow us
Ambassador Project: Advocate for CAMEL-AI, host events, and contribute content. Learn more
@inproceedings{li2023camel,
title={CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society},
author={Li, Guohao and Hammoud, Hasan Abed Al Kader and Itani, Hani and Khizbullin, Dmitrii and Ghanem, Bernard},
booktitle={Thirty-seventh Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
year={2023}
}
Special thanks to Nomic AI for giving us extended access to their data set exploration tool (Atlas).
We would also like to thank Haya Hammoud for designing the initial logo of our project.
We implemented amazing research ideas from other works for you to build, compare and customize your agents. If you use any of these modules, please kindly cite the original works: - TaskCreationAgent, TaskPrioritizationAgent and BabyAGI from Nakajima et al.: Task-Driven Autonomous Agent. [Example]
PersonaHub from Tao Ge et al.: Scaling Synthetic Data Creation with 1,000,000,000 Personas. [Example]
Self-Instruct from Yizhong Wang et al.: SELF-INSTRUCT: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions. [Example]
The source code is licensed under Apache 2.0.
SubGPT looks at subdomains you have already discovered for a domain and uses BingGPT to find more. Best part? It's free!
The following subdomains were found by this tool with these 30 subdomains as input.
call-prompts-staging.example.com
dclb02-dca1.prod.example.com
activedirectory-sjc1.example.com
iadm-staging.example.com
elevatenetwork-c.example.com
If you like my work, you can support me with as little as $1, here :)
pip install subgpt
git clone https://github.com/s0md3v/SubGPT && cd SubGPT && python setup.py install
cookies.json
Note: Any issues regarding BingGPT itself should be reported EdgeGPT, not here.
It is supposed to be used after you have discovered some subdomains using all other methods. The standard way to run SubGPT is as follows:
subgpt -i input.txt -o output.txt -c /path/to/cookies.json
If you don't specify an output file, the output will be shown in your terminal (stdout) instead.
To generate subdomains and not resolve them, use the --dont-resolve option. It's a great way to see all subdomains generated by SubGPT and/or use your own resolver on them.
An employee at Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI leaked a private key on GitHub that for the past two months could have allowed anyone to query private xAI large language models (LLMs) which appear to have been custom made for working with internal data from Musk’s companies, including SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter/X, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.
Image: Shutterstock, @sdx15.
Philippe Caturegli, “chief hacking officer” at the security consultancy Seralys, was the first to publicize the leak of credentials for an x.ai application programming interface (API) exposed in the GitHub code repository of a technical staff member at xAI.
Caturegli’s post on LinkedIn caught the attention of researchers at 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.
GitGuardian’s Eric Fourrier told KrebsOnSecurity the exposed API key had access to several unreleased models of Grok, the AI chatbot developed by xAI. In total, GitGuardian found the key had access to at least 60 fine-tuned and private LLMs.
“The credentials can be used to access the X.ai API with the identity of the user,” GitGuardian wrote in an email explaining their findings to xAI. “The associated account not only has access to public Grok models (grok-2-1212, etc) but also to what appears to be unreleased (grok-2.5V), development (research-grok-2p5v-1018), and private models (tweet-rejector, grok-spacex-2024-11-04).”
Fourrier found GitGuardian had alerted the xAI employee about the exposed API key nearly two months ago — on March 2. But as of April 30, when GitGuardian directly alerted xAI’s security team to the exposure, the key was still valid and usable. xAI told GitGuardian to report the matter through its bug bounty program at HackerOne, but just a few hours later the repository containing the API key was removed from GitHub.
“It looks like some of these internal LLMs were fine-tuned on SpaceX data, and some were fine-tuned with Tesla data,” Fourrier said. “I definitely don’t think a Grok model that’s fine-tuned on SpaceX data is intended to be exposed publicly.”
xAI did not respond to a request for comment. Nor did the 28-year-old xAI technical staff member whose key was exposed.
Carole Winqwist, chief marketing officer at GitGuardian, said giving potentially hostile users free access to private LLMs is a recipe for disaster.
“If you’re an attacker and you have direct access to the model and the back end interface for things like Grok, it’s definitely something you can use for further attacking,” she said. “An attacker could it use for prompt injection, to tweak the (LLM) model to serve their purposes, or try to implant code into the supply chain.”
The inadvertent exposure of internal LLMs for xAI comes as Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been feeding sensitive government records into artificial intelligence tools. In February, The Washington Post reported DOGE officials were feeding data from across the Education Department into AI tools to probe the agency’s programs and spending.
The Post said DOGE plans to replicate this process across many departments and agencies, accessing the back-end software at different parts of the government and then using AI technology to extract and sift through information about spending on employees and programs.
“Feeding sensitive data into AI software puts it into the possession of a system’s operator, increasing the chances it will be leaked or swept up in cyberattacks,” Post reporters wrote.
Wired reported in March that DOGE has deployed a proprietary chatbot called GSAi to 1,500 federal workers at the General Services Administration, part of an effort to automate tasks previously done by humans as DOGE continues its purge of the federal workforce.
A Reuters report last month said Trump administration officials told some U.S. government employees that DOGE is using AI to surveil at least one federal agency’s communications for hostility to President Trump and his agenda. Reuters wrote that the DOGE team has heavily deployed Musk’s Grok AI chatbot as part of their work slashing the federal government, although Reuters said it could not establish exactly how Grok was being used.
Caturegli said while there is no indication that federal government or user data could be accessed through the exposed x.ai API key, these private models are likely trained on proprietary data and may unintentionally expose details related to internal development efforts at xAI, Twitter, or SpaceX.
“The fact that this key was publicly exposed for two months and granted access to internal models is concerning,” Caturegli said. “This kind of long-lived credential exposure highlights weak key management and insufficient internal monitoring, raising questions about safeguards around developer access and broader operational security.”
A 23-year-old Scottish man thought to be a member of the prolific Scattered Spider cybercrime group was extradited last week from Spain to the United States, where he is facing charges of wire fraud, conspiracy and identity theft. U.S. prosecutors allege Tyler Robert Buchanan and co-conspirators hacked into dozens of companies in the United States and abroad, and that he personally controlled more than $26 million stolen from victims.
Scattered Spider is a loosely affiliated criminal hacking group whose members have broken into and stolen data from some of the world’s largest technology companies. Buchanan was arrested in Spain last year on a warrant from the FBI, which wanted him in connection with a series of SMS-based phishing attacks in the summer of 2022 that led to intrusions at Twilio, LastPass, DoorDash, Mailchimp, and many other tech firms.
Tyler Buchanan, being escorted by Spanish police at the airport in Palma de Mallorca in June 2024.
As first reported by KrebsOnSecurity, Buchanan (a.k.a. “tylerb”) 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. Buchanan was arrested in June 2024 at the airport in Palma de Mallorca while trying to board a flight to Italy. His extradition to the United States was first reported last week by Bloomberg.
Members of Scattered Spider have been tied to the 2023 ransomware attacks against MGM and Caesars casinos in Las Vegas, but it remains unclear whether Buchanan was implicated in that incident. The Justice Department’s complaint against Buchanan makes no mention of the 2023 ransomware attack.
Rather, the investigation into Buchanan appears to center on the SMS phishing campaigns from 2022, and on SIM-swapping attacks that siphoned funds from individual cryptocurrency investors. In a SIM-swapping attack, 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 — including one-time passcodes for authentication and password reset links sent via SMS.
In August 2022, KrebsOnSecurity reviewed data harvested in a months-long cybercrime campaign by Scattered Spider involving countless SMS-based phishing attacks against employees at major corporations. The security firm Group-IB called them by a different name — 0ktapus, because the group typically spoofed the identity provider Okta in their phishing messages to employees at targeted firms.
A Scattered Spider/0Ktapus SMS phishing lure sent to Twilio employees in 2022.
The complaint against Buchanan (PDF) says the FBI tied him to the 2022 SMS phishing attacks after discovering the same username and email address was used to register numerous Okta-themed 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 from January 26, 2022 to November 7, 2022.
Authorities seized at least 20 digital devices when they raided Buchanan’s residence, and on one of those devices they found usernames and passwords for employees of three different companies targeted in the phishing campaign.
“The FBI’s investigation to date has gathered evidence showing that Buchanan and his co-conspirators targeted at least 45 companies in the United States and abroad, including Canada, India, and the United Kingdom,” the FBI complaint reads. “One of Buchanan’s devices contained a screenshot of Telegram messages between an account known to be used by Buchanan and other unidentified co-conspirators discussing dividing up the proceeds of SIM swapping.”
U.S. prosecutors allege that records obtained from Discord showed the same U.K. Internet address was used to operate a Discord account that specified a cryptocurrency wallet when asking another user to send funds. The complaint says the publicly available transaction history for that payment address shows approximately 391 bitcoin was transferred in and out of this address between October 2022 and
February 2023; 391 bitcoin is presently worth more than $26 million.
In November 2024, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles unsealed criminal charges against Buchanan and four other alleged Scattered Spider members, including Ahmed Elbadawy, 23, of College Station, Texas; Joel Evans, 25, of Jacksonville, North Carolina; Evans Osiebo, 20, of Dallas; and Noah Urban, 20, of Palm Coast, Florida. KrebsOnSecurity reported last year that another suspected Scattered Spider member — a 17-year-old from the United Kingdom — was arrested as part of a joint investigation with the FBI into the MGM hack.
Mr. Buchanan’s court-appointed attorney did not respond to a request for comment. The accused faces charges of wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to obtain information by computer for private financial gain, and aggravated identity theft. Convictions on the latter charge carry a minimum sentence of two years in prison.
Documents from the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California indicate Buchanan is being held without bail pending trial. A preliminary hearing in the case is slated for May 6.
Dealing with failing web scrapers due to anti-bot protections or website changes? Meet Scrapling.
Scrapling is a high-performance, intelligent web scraping library for Python that automatically adapts to website changes while significantly outperforming popular alternatives. For both beginners and experts, Scrapling provides powerful features while maintaining simplicity.
>> from scrapling.defaults import Fetcher, AsyncFetcher, StealthyFetcher, PlayWrightFetcher
# Fetch websites' source under the radar!
>> page = StealthyFetcher.fetch('https://example.com', headless=True, network_idle=True)
>> print(page.status)
200
>> products = page.css('.product', auto_save=True) # Scrape data that survives website design changes!
>> # Later, if the website structure changes, pass `auto_match=True`
>> products = page.css('.product', auto_match=True) # and Scrapling still finds them!
Fetcher class.PlayWrightFetcher class through your real browser, Scrapling's stealth mode, Playwright's Chrome browser, or NSTbrowser's browserless!StealthyFetcher and PlayWrightFetcher classes.from scrapling.fetchers import Fetcher
fetcher = Fetcher(auto_match=False)
# Do http GET request to a web page and create an Adaptor instance
page = fetcher.get('https://quotes.toscrape.com/', stealthy_headers=True)
# Get all text content from all HTML tags in the page except `script` and `style` tags
page.get_all_text(ignore_tags=('script', 'style'))
# Get all quotes elements, any of these methods will return a list of strings directly (TextHandlers)
quotes = page.css('.quote .text::text') # CSS selector
quotes = page.xpath('//span[@class="text"]/text()') # XPath
quotes = page.css('.quote').css('.text::text') # Chained selectors
quotes = [element.text for element in page.css('.quote .text')] # Slower than bulk query above
# Get the first quote element
quote = page.css_first('.quote') # same as page.css('.quote').first or page.css('.quote')[0]
# Tired of selectors? Use find_all/find
# Get all 'div' HTML tags that one of its 'class' values is 'quote'
quotes = page.find_all('div', {'class': 'quote'})
# Same as
quotes = page.find_all('div', class_='quote')
quotes = page.find_all(['div'], class_='quote')
quotes = page.find_all(class_='quote') # and so on...
# Working with elements
quote.html_content # Get Inner HTML of this element
quote.prettify() # Prettified version of Inner HTML above
quote.attrib # Get that element's attributes
quote.path # DOM path to element (List of all ancestors from <html> tag till the element itself)
To keep it simple, all methods can be chained on top of each other!
Scrapling isn't just powerful - it's also blazing fast. Scrapling implements many best practices, design patterns, and numerous optimizations to save fractions of seconds. All of that while focusing exclusively on parsing HTML documents. Here are benchmarks comparing Scrapling to popular Python libraries in two tests.
| # | Library | Time (ms) | vs Scrapling |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Scrapling | 5.44 | 1.0x |
| 2 | Parsel/Scrapy | 5.53 | 1.017x |
| 3 | Raw Lxml | 6.76 | 1.243x |
| 4 | PyQuery | 21.96 | 4.037x |
| 5 | Selectolax | 67.12 | 12.338x |
| 6 | BS4 with Lxml | 1307.03 | 240.263x |
| 7 | MechanicalSoup | 1322.64 | 243.132x |
| 8 | BS4 with html5lib | 3373.75 | 620.175x |
As you see, Scrapling is on par with Scrapy and slightly faster than Lxml which both libraries are built on top of. These are the closest results to Scrapling. PyQuery is also built on top of Lxml but still, Scrapling is 4 times faster.
| Library | Time (ms) | vs Scrapling |
|---|---|---|
| Scrapling | 2.51 | 1.0x |
| AutoScraper | 11.41 | 4.546x |
Scrapling can find elements with more methods and it returns full element Adaptor objects not only the text like AutoScraper. So, to make this test fair, both libraries will extract an element with text, find similar elements, and then extract the text content for all of them. As you see, Scrapling is still 4.5 times faster at the same task.
All benchmarks' results are an average of 100 runs. See our benchmarks.py for methodology and to run your comparisons.
Scrapling is a breeze to get started with; Starting from version 0.2.9, we require at least Python 3.9 to work.
pip3 install scrapling
Then run this command to install browsers' dependencies needed to use Fetcher classes
scrapling install
If you have any installation issues, please open an issue.
Fetchers are interfaces built on top of other libraries with added features that do requests or fetch pages for you in a single request fashion and then return an Adaptor object. This feature was introduced because the only option we had before was to fetch the page as you wanted it, then pass it manually to the Adaptor class to create an Adaptor instance and start playing around with the page.
You might be slightly confused by now so let me clear things up. All fetcher-type classes are imported in the same way
from scrapling.fetchers import Fetcher, StealthyFetcher, PlayWrightFetcher
All of them can take these initialization arguments: auto_match, huge_tree, keep_comments, keep_cdata, storage, and storage_args, which are the same ones you give to the Adaptor class.
If you don't want to pass arguments to the generated Adaptor object and want to use the default values, you can use this import instead for cleaner code:
from scrapling.defaults import Fetcher, AsyncFetcher, StealthyFetcher, PlayWrightFetcher
then use it right away without initializing like:
page = StealthyFetcher.fetch('https://example.com')
Also, the Response object returned from all fetchers is the same as the Adaptor object except it has these added attributes: status, reason, cookies, headers, history, and request_headers. All cookies, headers, and request_headers are always of type dictionary.
[!NOTE] The
auto_matchargument is enabled by default which is the one you should care about the most as you will see later.
This class is built on top of httpx with additional configuration options, here you can do GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE requests.
For all methods, you have stealthy_headers which makes Fetcher create and use real browser's headers then create a referer header as if this request came from Google's search of this URL's domain. It's enabled by default. You can also set the number of retries with the argument retries for all methods and this will make httpx retry requests if it failed for any reason. The default number of retries for all Fetcher methods is 3.
Hence: All headers generated by
stealthy_headersargument can be overwritten by you through theheadersargument
You can route all traffic (HTTP and HTTPS) to a proxy for any of these methods in this format http://username:password@localhost:8030
>> page = Fetcher().get('https://httpbin.org/get', stealthy_headers=True, follow_redirects=True)
>> page = Fetcher().post('https://httpbin.org/post', data={'key': 'value'}, proxy='http://username:password@localhost:8030')
>> page = Fetcher().put('https://httpbin.org/put', data={'key': 'value'})
>> page = Fetcher().delete('https://httpbin.org/delete')
For Async requests, you will just replace the import like below:
>> from scrapling.fetchers import AsyncFetcher
>> page = await AsyncFetcher().get('https://httpbin.org/get', stealthy_headers=True, follow_redirects=True)
>> page = await AsyncFetcher().post('https://httpbin.org/post', data={'key': 'value'}, proxy='http://username:password@localhost:8030')
>> page = await AsyncFetcher().put('https://httpbin.org/put', data={'key': 'value'})
>> page = await AsyncFetcher().delete('https://httpbin.org/delete')
This class is built on top of Camoufox, bypassing most anti-bot protections by default. Scrapling adds extra layers of flavors and configurations to increase performance and undetectability even further.
>> page = StealthyFetcher().fetch('https://www.browserscan.net/bot-detection') # Running headless by default
>> page.status == 200
True
>> page = await StealthyFetcher().async_fetch('https://www.browserscan.net/bot-detection') # the async version of fetch
>> page.status == 200
True
Note: all requests done by this fetcher are waiting by default for all JS to be fully loaded and executed so you don't have to :)
This list isn't final so expect a lot more additions and flexibility to be added in the next versions!
This class is built on top of Playwright which currently provides 4 main run options but they can be mixed as you want.
>> page = PlayWrightFetcher().fetch('https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Scrapling%22', disable_resources=True) # Vanilla Playwright option
>> page.css_first("#search a::attr(href)")
'https://github.com/D4Vinci/Scrapling'
>> page = await PlayWrightFetcher().async_fetch('https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Scrapling%22', disable_resources=True) # the async version of fetch
>> page.css_first("#search a::attr(href)")
'https://github.com/D4Vinci/Scrapling'
Note: all requests done by this fetcher are waiting by default for all JS to be fully loaded and executed so you don't have to :)
Using this Fetcher class, you can make requests with: 1) Vanilla Playwright without any modifications other than the ones you chose. 2) Stealthy Playwright with the stealth mode I wrote for it. It's still a WIP but it bypasses many online tests like Sannysoft's. Some of the things this fetcher's stealth mode does include: * Patching the CDP runtime fingerprint. * Mimics some of the real browsers' properties by injecting several JS files and using custom options. * Using custom flags on launch to hide Playwright even more and make it faster. * Generates real browser's headers of the same type and same user OS then append it to the request's headers. 3) Real browsers by passing the real_chrome argument or the CDP URL of your browser to be controlled by the Fetcher and most of the options can be enabled on it. 4) NSTBrowser's docker browserless option by passing the CDP URL and enabling nstbrowser_mode option.
Hence using the
real_chromeargument requires that you have Chrome browser installed on your device
Add that to a lot of controlling/hiding options as you will see in the arguments list below.
This list isn't final so expect a lot more additions and flexibility to be added in the next versions!
>>> quote.tag
'div'
>>> quote.parent
<data='<div class="col-md-8"> <div class="quote...' parent='<div class="row"> <div class="col-md-8">...'>
>>> quote.parent.tag
'div'
>>> quote.children
[<data='<span class="text" itemprop="text">"The...' parent='<div class="quote" itemscope itemtype="h...'>,
<data='<span>by <small class="author" itemprop=...' parent='<div class="quote" itemscope itemtype="h...'>,
<data='<div class="tags"> Tags: <meta class="ke...' parent='<div class="quote" itemscope itemtype="h...'>]
>>> quote.siblings
[<data='<div class="quote" itemscope itemtype="h...' parent='<div class="col-md-8"> <div class="quote...'>,
<data='<div class="quote" itemscope itemtype="h...' parent='<div class="col-md-8"> <div class="quote...'>,
...]
>>> quote.next # gets the next element, the same logic applies to `quote.previous`
<data='<div class="quote" itemscope itemtype="h...' parent='<div class="col-md-8"> <div class="quote...'>
>>> quote.children.css_first(".author::text")
'Albert Einstein'
>>> quote.has_class('quote')
True
# Generate new selectors for any element
>>> quote.generate_css_selector
'body > div > div:nth-of-type(2) > div > div'
# Test these selectors on your favorite browser or reuse them again in the library's methods!
>>> quote.generate_xpath_selector
'//body/div/div[2]/div/div'
If your case needs more than the element's parent, you can iterate over the whole ancestors' tree of any element like below
for ancestor in quote.iterancestors():
# do something with it...
You can search for a specific ancestor of an element that satisfies a function, all you need to do is to pass a function that takes an Adaptor object as an argument and return True if the condition satisfies or False otherwise like below:
>>> quote.find_ancestor(lambda ancestor: ancestor.has_class('row'))
<data='<div class="row"> <div class="col-md-8">...' parent='<div class="container"> <div class="row...'>
You can select elements by their text content in multiple ways, here's a full example on another website:
>>> page = Fetcher().get('https://books.toscrape.com/index.html')
>>> page.find_by_text('Tipping the Velvet') # Find the first element whose text fully matches this text
<data='<a href="catalogue/tipping-the-velvet_99...' parent='<h3><a href="catalogue/tipping-the-velve...'>
>>> page.urljoin(page.find_by_text('Tipping the Velvet').attrib['href']) # We use `page.urljoin` to return the full URL from the relative `href`
'https://books.toscrape.com/catalogue/tipping-the-velvet_999/index.html'
>>> page.find_by_text('Tipping the Velvet', first_match=False) # Get all matches if there are more
[<data='<a href="catalogue/tipping-the-velvet_99...' parent='<h3><a href="catalogue/tipping-the-velve...'>]
>>> page.find_by_regex(r'£[\d\.]+') # Get the first element that its text content matches my price regex
<data='<p class="price_color">£51.77</p>' parent='<div class="product_price"> <p class="pr...'>
>>> page.find_by_regex(r'£[\d\.]+', first_match=False) # Get all elements that matches my price regex
[<data='<p class="price_color">£51.77</p>' parent='<div class="product_price"> <p class="pr...'>,
<data='<p class="price_color">£53.74</p>' parent='<div class="product_price"> <p class="pr...'>,
<data='<p class="price_color">£50.10</p>' parent='<div class="product_price"> <p class="pr...'>,
<data='<p class="price_color">£47.82</p>' parent='<div class="product_price"> <p class="pr...'>,
...]
Find all elements that are similar to the current element in location and attributes
# For this case, ignore the 'title' attribute while matching
>>> page.find_by_text('Tipping the Velvet').find_similar(ignore_attributes=['title'])
[<data='<a href="catalogue/a-light-in-the-attic_...' parent='<h3><a href="catalogue/a-light-in-the-at...'>,
<data='<a href="catalogue/soumission_998/index....' parent='<h3><a href="catalogue/soumission_998/in...'>,
<data='<a href="catalogue/sharp-objects_997/ind...' parent='<h3><a href="catalogue/sharp-objects_997...'>,
...]
# You will notice that the number of elements is 19 not 20 because the current element is not included.
>>> len(page.find_by_text('Tipping the Velvet').find_similar(ignore_attributes=['title']))
19
# Get the `href` attribute from all similar elements
>>> [element.attrib['href'] for element in page.find_by_text('Tipping the Velvet').find_similar(ignore_attributes=['title'])]
['catalogue/a-light-in-the-attic_1000/index.html',
'catalogue/soumission_998/index.html',
'catalogue/sharp-objects_997/index.html',
...]
To increase the complexity a little bit, let's say we want to get all books' data using that element as a starting point for some reason
>>> for product in page.find_by_text('Tipping the Velvet').parent.parent.find_similar():
print({
"name": product.css_first('h3 a::text'),
"price": product.css_first('.price_color').re_first(r'[\d\.]+'),
"stock": product.css('.availability::text')[-1].clean()
})
{'name': 'A Light in the ...', 'price': '51.77', 'stock': 'In stock'}
{'name': 'Soumission', 'price': '50.10', 'stock': 'In stock'}
{'name': 'Sharp Objects', 'price': '47.82', 'stock': 'In stock'}
...
The documentation will provide more advanced examples.
Let's say you are scraping a page with a structure like this:
<div class="container">
<section class="products">
<article class="product" id="p1">
<h3>Product 1</h3>
<p class="description">Description 1</p>
</article>
<article class="product" id="p2">
<h3>Product 2</h3>
<p class="description">Description 2</p>
</article>
</section>
</div>
And you want to scrape the first product, the one with the p1 ID. You will probably write a selector like this
page.css('#p1')
When website owners implement structural changes like
<div class="new-container">
<div class="product-wrapper">
<section class="products">
<article class="product new-class" data-id="p1">
<div class="product-info">
<h3>Product 1</h3>
<p class="new-description">Description 1</p>
</div>
</article>
<article class="product new-class" data-id="p2">
<div class="product-info">
<h3>Product 2</h3>
<p class="new-description">Description 2</p>
</div>
</article>
</section>
</div>
</div>
The selector will no longer function and your code needs maintenance. That's where Scrapling's auto-matching feature comes into play.
from scrapling.parser import Adaptor
# Before the change
page = Adaptor(page_source, url='example.com')
element = page.css('#p1' auto_save=True)
if not element: # One day website changes?
element = page.css('#p1', auto_match=True) # Scrapling still finds it!
# the rest of the code...
How does the auto-matching work? Check the FAQs section for that and other possible issues while auto-matching.
Let's use a real website as an example and use one of the fetchers to fetch its source. To do this we need to find a website that will change its design/structure soon, take a copy of its source then wait for the website to make the change. Of course, that's nearly impossible to know unless I know the website's owner but that will make it a staged test haha.
To solve this issue, I will use The Web Archive's Wayback Machine. Here is a copy of StackOverFlow's website in 2010, pretty old huh?Let's test if the automatch feature can extract the same button in the old design from 2010 and the current design using the same selector :)
If I want to extract the Questions button from the old design I can use a selector like this #hmenus > div:nth-child(1) > ul > li:nth-child(1) > a This selector is too specific because it was generated by Google Chrome. Now let's test the same selector in both versions
>> from scrapling.fetchers import Fetcher
>> selector = '#hmenus > div:nth-child(1) > ul > li:nth-child(1) > a'
>> old_url = "https://web.archive.org/web/20100102003420/http://stackoverflow.com/"
>> new_url = "https://stackoverflow.com/"
>>
>> page = Fetcher(automatch_domain='stackoverflow.com').get(old_url, timeout=30)
>> element1 = page.css_first(selector, auto_save=True)
>>
>> # Same selector but used in the updated website
>> page = Fetcher(automatch_domain="stackoverflow.com").get(new_url)
>> element2 = page.css_first(selector, auto_match=True)
>>
>> if element1.text == element2.text:
... print('Scrapling found the same element in the old design and the new design!')
'Scrapling found the same element in the old design and the new design!'
Note that I used a new argument called automatch_domain, this is because for Scrapling these are two different URLs, not the website so it isolates their data. To tell Scrapling they are the same website, we then pass the domain we want to use for saving auto-match data for them both so Scrapling doesn't isolate them.
In a real-world scenario, the code will be the same except it will use the same URL for both requests so you won't need to use the automatch_domain argument. This is the closest example I can give to real-world cases so I hope it didn't confuse you :)
Notes: 1. For the two examples above I used one time the Adaptor class and the second time the Fetcher class just to show you that you can create the Adaptor object by yourself if you have the source or fetch the source using any Fetcher class then it will create the Adaptor object for you. 2. Passing the auto_save argument with the auto_match argument set to False while initializing the Adaptor/Fetcher object will only result in ignoring the auto_save argument value and the following warning message text Argument `auto_save` will be ignored because `auto_match` wasn't enabled on initialization. Check docs for more info. This behavior is purely for performance reasons so the database gets created/connected only when you are planning to use the auto-matching features. Same case with the auto_match argument.
auto_match parameter works only for Adaptor instances not Adaptors so if you do something like this you will get an error python page.css('body').css('#p1', auto_match=True) because you can't auto-match a whole list, you have to be specific and do something like python page.css_first('body').css('#p1', auto_match=True)
Inspired by BeautifulSoup's find_all function you can find elements by using find_all/find methods. Both methods can take multiple types of filters and return all elements in the pages that all these filters apply to.
So the way it works is after collecting all passed arguments and keywords, each filter passes its results to the following filter in a waterfall-like filtering system.
It filters all elements in the current page/element in the following order:
Note: The filtering process always starts from the first filter it finds in the filtering order above so if no tag name(s) are passed but attributes are passed, the process starts from that layer and so on. But the order in which you pass the arguments doesn't matter.
Examples to clear any confusion :)
>> from scrapling.fetchers import Fetcher
>> page = Fetcher().get('https://quotes.toscrape.com/')
# Find all elements with tag name `div`.
>> page.find_all('div')
[<data='<div class="container"> <div class="row...' parent='<body> <div class="container"> <div clas...'>,
<data='<div class="row header-box"> <div class=...' parent='<div class="container"> <div class="row...'>,
...]
# Find all div elements with a class that equals `quote`.
>> page.find_all('div', class_='quote')
[<data='<div class="quote" itemscope itemtype="h...' parent='<div class="col-md-8"> <div class="quote...'>,
<data='<div class="quote" itemscope itemtype="h...' parent='<div class="col-md-8"> <div class="quote...'>,
...]
# Same as above.
>> page.find_all('div', {'class': 'quote'})
[<data='<div class="quote" itemscope itemtype="h...' parent='<div class="col-md-8"> <div class="quote...'>,
<data='<div class="quote" itemscope itemtype="h...' parent='<div class="col-md-8"> <div class="quote...'>,
...]
# Find all elements with a class that equals `quote`.
>> page.find_all({'class': 'quote'})
[<data='<div class="quote" itemscope itemtype="h...' parent='<div class="col-md-8"> <div class="quote...'>,
<data='<div class="quote" itemscope itemtype="h...' parent='<div class="col-md-8"> <div class="quote...'>,
...]
# Find all div elements with a class that equals `quote`, and contains the element `.text` which contains the word 'world' in its content.
>> page.find_all('div', {'class': 'quote'}, lambda e: "world" in e.css_first('.text::text'))
[<data='<div class="quote" itemscope itemtype="h...' parent='<div class="col-md-8"> <div class="quote...'>]
# Find all elements that don't have children.
>> page.find_all(lambda element: len(element.children) > 0)
[<data='<html lang="en"><head><meta charset="UTF...'>,
<data='<head><meta charset="UTF-8"><title>Quote...' parent='<html lang="en"><head><meta charset="UTF...'>,
<data='<body> <div class="container"> <div clas...' parent='<html lang="en"><head><meta charset="UTF...'>,
...]
# Find all elements that contain the word 'world' in its content.
>> page.find_all(lambda element: "world" in element.text)
[<data='<span class="text" itemprop="text">"The...' parent='<div class="quote" itemscope itemtype="h...'>,
<data='<a class="tag" href="/tag/world/page/1/"...' parent='<div class="tags"> Tags: <meta class="ke...'>]
# Find all span elements that match the given regex
>> page.find_all('span', re.compile(r'world'))
[<data='<span class="text" itemprop="text">"The...' parent='<div class="quote" itemscope itemtype="h...'>]
# Find all div and span elements with class 'quote' (No span elements like that so only div returned)
>> page.find_all(['div', 'span'], {'class': 'quote'})
[<data='<div class="quote" itemscope itemtype="h...' parent='<div class="col-md-8"> <div class="quote...'>,
<data='<div class="quote" itemscope itemtype="h...' parent='<div class="col-md-8"> <div class="quote...'>,
...]
# Mix things up
>> page.find_all({'itemtype':"http://schema.org/CreativeWork"}, 'div').css('.author::text')
['Albert Einstein',
'J.K. Rowling',
...]
Here's what else you can do with Scrapling:
lxml.etree object itself of any element directly python >>> quote._root <Element div at 0x107f98870>
Saving and retrieving elements manually to auto-match them outside the css and the xpath methods but you have to set the identifier by yourself.
To save an element to the database: python >>> element = page.find_by_text('Tipping the Velvet', first_match=True) >>> page.save(element, 'my_special_element')
python >>> element_dict = page.retrieve('my_special_element') >>> page.relocate(element_dict, adaptor_type=True) [<data='<a href="catalogue/tipping-the-velvet_99...' parent='<h3><a href="catalogue/tipping-the-velve...'>] >>> page.relocate(element_dict, adaptor_type=True).css('::text') ['Tipping the Velvet']
if you want to keep it as lxml.etree object, leave the adaptor_type argument python >>> page.relocate(element_dict) [<Element a at 0x105a2a7b0>]
Filtering results based on a function
# Find all products over $50
expensive_products = page.css('.product_pod').filter(
lambda p: float(p.css('.price_color').re_first(r'[\d\.]+')) > 50
)
# Find all the products with price '53.23'
page.css('.product_pod').search(
lambda p: float(p.css('.price_color').re_first(r'[\d\.]+')) == 54.23
)
Doing operations on element content is the same as scrapy python quote.re(r'regex_pattern') # Get all strings (TextHandlers) that match the regex pattern quote.re_first(r'regex_pattern') # Get the first string (TextHandler) only quote.json() # If the content text is jsonable, then convert it to json using `orjson` which is 10x faster than the standard json library and provides more options except that you can do more with them like python quote.re( r'regex_pattern', replace_entities=True, # Character entity references are replaced by their corresponding character clean_match=True, # This will ignore all whitespaces and consecutive spaces while matching case_sensitive= False, # Set the regex to ignore letters case while compiling it ) Hence all of these methods are methods from the TextHandler within that contains the text content so the same can be done directly if you call the .text property or equivalent selector function.
Doing operations on the text content itself includes
python quote.clean()
TextHandler objects too? so in cases where you have for example a JS object assigned to a JS variable inside JS code and want to extract it with regex and then convert it to json object, in other libraries, these would be more than 1 line of code but here you can do it in 1 line like this python page.xpath('//script/text()').re_first(r'var dataLayer = (.+);').json()
Sort all characters in the string as if it were a list and return the new string python quote.sort(reverse=False)
To be clear,
TextHandleris a sub-class of Python'sstrso all normal operations/methods that work with Python strings will work with it.
Any element's attributes are not exactly a dictionary but a sub-class of mapping called AttributesHandler that's read-only so it's faster and string values returned are actually TextHandler objects so all operations above can be done on them, standard dictionary operations that don't modify the data, and more :)
python >>> for item in element.attrib.search_values('catalogue', partial=True): print(item) {'href': 'catalogue/tipping-the-velvet_999/index.html'}
python >>> element.attrib.json_string b'{"href":"catalogue/tipping-the-velvet_999/index.html","title":"Tipping the Velvet"}'
python >>> dict(element.attrib) {'href': 'catalogue/tipping-the-velvet_999/index.html', 'title': 'Tipping the Velvet'}
Scrapling is under active development so expect many more features coming soon :)
There are a lot of deep details skipped here to make this as short as possible so to take a deep dive, head to the docs section. I will try to keep it updated as possible and add complex examples. There I will explain points like how to write your storage system, write spiders that don't depend on selectors at all, and more...
Note that implementing your storage system can be complex as there are some strict rules such as inheriting from the same abstract class, following the singleton design pattern used in other classes, and more. So make sure to read the docs first.
[!IMPORTANT] A website is needed to provide detailed library documentation.
I'm trying to rush creating the website, researching new ideas, and adding more features/tests/benchmarks but time is tight with too many spinning plates between work, personal life, and working on Scrapling. I have been working on Scrapling for months for free after all.
If you likeScraplingand want it to keep improving then this is a friendly reminder that you can help by supporting me through the sponsor button.
This section addresses common questions about Scrapling, please read this section before opening an issue.
css or xpath with the auto_save parameter set to True before structural changes happen.Now because everything about the element can be changed or removed, nothing from the element can be used as a unique identifier for the database. To solve this issue, I made the storage system rely on two things:
identifier parameter you passed to the method while selecting. If you didn't pass one, then the selector string itself will be used as an identifier but remember you will have to use it as an identifier value later when the structure changes and you want to pass the new selector.Together both are used to retrieve the element's unique properties from the database later. 4. Now later when you enable the auto_match parameter for both the Adaptor instance and the method call. The element properties are retrieved and Scrapling loops over all elements in the page and compares each one's unique properties to the unique properties we already have for this element and a score is calculated for each one. 5. Comparing elements is not exact but more about finding how similar these values are, so everything is taken into consideration, even the values' order, like the order in which the element class names were written before and the order in which the same element class names are written now. 6. The score for each element is stored in the table, and the element(s) with the highest combined similarity scores are returned.
Not a big problem as it depends on your usage. The word default will be used in place of the URL field while saving the element's unique properties. So this will only be an issue if you used the same identifier later for a different website that you didn't pass the URL parameter while initializing it as well. The save process will overwrite the previous data and auto-matching uses the latest saved properties only.
For each element, Scrapling will extract: - Element tag name, text, attributes (names and values), siblings (tag names only), and path (tag names only). - Element's parent tag name, attributes (names and values), and text.
auto_save/auto_match parameter while selecting and it got completely ignored with a warning messageThat's because passing the auto_save/auto_match argument without setting auto_match to True while initializing the Adaptor object will only result in ignoring the auto_save/auto_match argument value. This behavior is purely for performance reasons so the database gets created only when you are planning to use the auto-matching features.
It could be one of these reasons: 1. No data were saved/stored for this element before. 2. The selector passed is not the one used while storing element data. The solution is simple - Pass the old selector again as an identifier to the method called. - Retrieve the element with the retrieve method using the old selector as identifier then save it again with the save method and the new selector as identifier. - Start using the identifier argument more often if you are planning to use every new selector from now on. 3. The website had some extreme structural changes like a new full design. If this happens a lot with this website, the solution would be to make your code as selector-free as possible using Scrapling features.
Pretty much yeah, almost all features you get from BeautifulSoup can be found or achieved in Scrapling one way or another. In fact, if you see there's a feature in bs4 that is missing in Scrapling, please make a feature request from the issues tab to let me know.
Of course, you can find elements by text/regex, find similar elements in a more reliable way than AutoScraper, and finally save/retrieve elements manually to use later as the model feature in AutoScraper. I have pulled all top articles about AutoScraper from Google and tested Scrapling against examples in them. In all examples, Scrapling got the same results as AutoScraper in much less time.
Yes, Scrapling instances are thread-safe. Each Adaptor instance maintains its state.
Everybody is invited and welcome to contribute to Scrapling. There is a lot to do!
Please read the contributing file before doing anything.
[!CAUTION] This library is provided for educational and research purposes only. By using this library, you agree to comply with local and international laws regarding data scraping and privacy. The authors and contributors are not responsible for any misuse of this software. This library should not be used to violate the rights of others, for unethical purposes, or to use data in an unauthorized or illegal manner. Do not use it on any website unless you have permission from the website owner or within their allowed rules like the
robots.txtfile, for example.
This work is licensed under BSD-3
This project includes code adapted from: - Parsel (BSD License) - Used for translator submodule
Frogy 2.0 is an automated external reconnaissance and Attack Surface Management (ASM) toolkit designed to map out an organization's entire internet presence. It identifies assets, IP addresses, web applications, and other metadata across the public internet and then smartly prioritizes them with highest (most attractive) to lowest (least attractive) from an attacker's playground perspective.
Comprehensive recon:
Aggregate subdomains and assets using multiple tools (CHAOS, Subfinder, Assetfinder, crt.sh) to map an organization's entire digital footprint.
Live asset verification:
Validate assets with live DNS resolution and port scanning (using DNSX and Naabu) to confirm what is publicly reachable.
In-depth web recon:
Collect detailed HTTP response data (via HTTPX) including metadata, technology stack, status codes, content lengths, and more.
Smart prioritization:
Use a composite scoring system that considers homepage status, login identification, technology stack, and DNS data and much more to generate risk score for each assets helping bug bounty hunters and pentesters focus on the most promising targets to start attacks with.
Professional reporting:
Generate a dynamic, colour-coded HTML report with a modern design and dark/light theme toggle.
In this tool, risk scoring is based on the notion of asset attractiveness—the idea that certain attributes or characteristics make an asset more interesting to attackers. If we see more of these attributes, the overall score goes up, indicating a broader "attack surface" that adversaries could leverage. Below is an overview of how each factor contributes to the final risk score.
200 OK, it often means the page is legitimately reachable and responding with content. A 200 OK is more interesting to attackers than a 404 or a redirect—so a 200 status modestly increases the risk.Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS)X-Frame-OptionsContent-Security-PolicyX-XSS-ProtectionReferrer-PolicyPermissions-PolicyMissing or disabled headers mean an endpoint is more prone to common web exploits. Each absent header increments the score.
Each factor above contributes one or more points to the final risk score. For example:
Once all factors are tallied, we get a numeric risk score. Higher means more interesting and potentially gives more room for pentesters to test around to an attacker.
Why This Matters
This approach helps you quickly prioritize which assets warrant deeper testing. Subdomains with high counts of open ports, advanced internal usage, missing headers, or login panels are more complex, more privileged, or more likely to be misconfigured—therefore, your security team can focus on those first.
Clone the repository and run the installer script to set up all dependencies and tools:
chmod +x install.sh
./install.sh
chmod +x frogy.sh
./frogy.sh domains.txt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHlU4CYNj1M
OWASP Maryam is a modular open-source framework based on OSINT and data gathering. It is designed to provide a robust environment to harvest data from open sources and search engines quickly and thoroughly.
$ pip install maryam
Alternatively, you can install the latest version with the following command (Recommended):
pip install git+https://github.com/saeeddhqan/maryam.git
# Using dns_search. --max means all of resources. --api shows the results as json.
# .. -t means use multi-threading.
maryam -e dns_search -d ibm.com -t 5 --max --api --form
# Using youtube. -q means query
maryam -e youtube -q "<QUERY>"
maryam -e google -q "<QUERY>"
maryam -e dnsbrute -d domain.tld
# Show framework modules
maryam -e show modules
# Set framework options.
maryam -e set proxy ..
maryam -e set agent ..
maryam -e set timeout ..
# Run web API
maryam -e web api 127.0.0.1 1313
Here is a start guide: Development Guide You can add a new search engine to the util classes or use the current search engines to write a new module. The best help to write a new module is checking the current modules.
To report bugs, requests, or any other issues please create an issue.
A critical resource that cybersecurity professionals worldwide rely on to identify, mitigate and fix security vulnerabilities in software and hardware is in danger of breaking down. The federally funded, non-profit research and development organization MITRE warned today that its contract to maintain the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program — which is traditionally funded each year by the Department of Homeland Security — expires on April 16.
A letter from MITRE vice president Yosry Barsoum, warning that the funding for the CVE program will expire on April 16, 2025.
Tens of thousands of security flaws in software are found and reported every year, and these vulnerabilities are eventually assigned their own unique CVE tracking number (e.g. CVE-2024-43573, which is a Microsoft Windows bug that Redmond patched last year).
There are hundreds of organizations — known as CVE Numbering Authorities (CNAs) — that are authorized by MITRE to bestow these CVE numbers on newly reported flaws. Many of these CNAs are country and government-specific, or tied to individual software vendors or vulnerability disclosure platforms (a.k.a. bug bounty programs).
Put simply, MITRE is a critical, widely-used resource for centralizing and standardizing information on software vulnerabilities. That means the pipeline of information it supplies is plugged into an array of cybersecurity tools and services that help organizations identify and patch security holes — ideally before malware or malcontents can wriggle through them.
“What the CVE lists really provide is a standardized way to describe the severity of that defect, and a centralized repository listing which versions of which products are defective and need to be updated,” said Matt Tait, chief operating officer of Corellium, a cybersecurity firm that sells phone-virtualization software for finding security flaws.
In a letter sent today to the CVE board, MITRE Vice President Yosry Barsoum warned that on April 16, 2025, “the current contracting pathway for MITRE to develop, operate and modernize CVE and several other related programs will expire.”
“If a break in service were to occur, we anticipate multiple impacts to CVE, including deterioration of national vulnerability databases and advisories, tool vendors, incident response operations, and all manner of critical infrastructure,” Barsoum wrote.
MITRE told KrebsOnSecurity the CVE website listing vulnerabilities will remain up after the funding expires, but that new CVEs won’t be added after April 16.
A representation of how a vulnerability becomes a CVE, and how that information is consumed. Image: James Berthoty, Latio Tech, via LinkedIn.
DHS officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The program is funded through DHS’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is currently facing deep budget and staffing cuts by the Trump administration. The CVE contract available at USAspending.gov says the project was awarded approximately $40 million last year.
Former CISA Director Jen Easterly said the CVE program is a bit like the Dewey Decimal System, but for cybersecurity.
“It’s the global catalog that helps everyone—security teams, software vendors, researchers, governments—organize and talk about vulnerabilities using the same reference system,” Easterly said in a post on LinkedIn. “Without it, everyone is using a different catalog or no catalog at all, no one knows if they’re talking about the same problem, defenders waste precious time figuring out what’s wrong, and worst of all, threat actors take advantage of the confusion.”
John Hammond, principal security researcher at the managed security firm Huntress, told Reuters he swore out loud when he heard the news that CVE’s funding was in jeopardy, and that losing the CVE program would be like losing “the language and lingo we used to address problems in cybersecurity.”
“I really can’t help but think this is just going to hurt,” said Hammond, who posted a Youtube video to vent about the situation and alert others.
Several people close to the matter told KrebsOnSecurity this is not the first time the CVE program’s budget has been left in funding limbo until the last minute. Barsoum’s letter, which was apparently leaked, sounded a hopeful note, saying the government is making “considerable efforts to continue MITRE’s role in support of the program.”
Tait said that without the CVE program, risk managers inside companies would need to continuously monitor many other places for information about new vulnerabilities that may jeopardize the security of their IT networks. Meaning, it may become more common that software updates get mis-prioritized, with companies having hackable software deployed for longer than they otherwise would, he said.
“Hopefully they will resolve this, but otherwise the list will rapidly fall out of date and stop being useful,” he said.
Update, April 16, 11:00 a.m. ET: The CVE board today announced the creation of non-profit entity called The CVE Foundation that will continue the program’s work under a new, unspecified funding mechanism and organizational structure.
“Since its inception, the CVE Program has operated as a U.S. government-funded initiative, with oversight and management provided under contract,” the press release reads. “While this structure has supported the program’s growth, it has also raised longstanding concerns among members of the CVE Board about the sustainability and neutrality of a globally relied-upon resource being tied to a single government sponsor.”
The organization’s website, thecvefoundation.org, is less than a day old and currently hosts no content other than the press release heralding its creation. The announcement said the foundation would release more information about its structure and transition planning in the coming days.
Update, April 16, 4:26 p.m. ET: MITRE issued a statement today saying it “identified incremental funding to keep the programs operational. We appreciate the overwhelming support for these programs that have been expressed by the global cyber community, industry and government over the last 24 hours. The government continues to make considerable efforts to support MITRE’s role in the program and MITRE remains committed to CVE and CWE as global resources.”
Lobo Guará is a platform aimed at cybersecurity professionals, with various features focused on Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI). It offers tools that make it easier to identify threats, monitor data leaks, analyze suspicious domains and URLs, and much more.
Allows identifying domains and subdomains that may pose a threat to organizations. SSL certificates issued by trusted authorities are indexed in real-time, and users can search using keywords of 4 or more characters.
Note: The current database contains certificates issued from September 5, 2024.
Allows the insertion of keywords for monitoring. When a certificate is issued and the common name contains the keyword (minimum of 5 characters), it will be displayed to the user.
Generates a link to capture device information from attackers. Useful when the security professional can contact the attacker in some way.
Performs a scan on a domain, displaying whois information and subdomains associated with that domain.
Allows performing a scan on a URL to identify URIs (web paths) related to that URL.
Performs a scan on a URL, generating a screenshot and a mirror of the page. The result can be made public to assist in taking down malicious websites.
Monitors a URL with no active application until it returns an HTTP 200 code. At that moment, it automatically initiates a URL scan, providing evidence for actions against malicious sites.
Centralizes intelligence news from various channels, keeping users updated on the latest threats.
The application installation has been approved on Ubuntu 24.04 Server and Red Hat 9.4 distributions, the links for which are below:
Lobo Guará Implementation on Ubuntu 24.04
Lobo Guará Implementation on Red Hat 9.4
There is a Dockerfile and a docker-compose version of Lobo Guará too. Just clone the repo and do:
docker compose up
Then, go to your web browser at localhost:7405.
Before proceeding with the installation, ensure the following dependencies are installed:
git clone https://github.com/olivsec/loboguara.git
cd loboguara/
nano server/app/config.py
Fill in the required parameters in the config.py file:
class Config:
SECRET_KEY = 'YOUR_SECRET_KEY_HERE'
SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI = 'postgresql://guarauser:YOUR_PASSWORD_HERE@localhost/guaradb?sslmode=disable'
SQLALCHEMY_TRACK_MODIFICATIONS = False
MAIL_SERVER = 'smtp.example.com'
MAIL_PORT = 587
MAIL_USE_TLS = True
MAIL_USERNAME = 'no-reply@example.com'
MAIL_PASSWORD = 'YOUR_SMTP_PASSWORD_HERE'
MAIL_DEFAULT_SENDER = 'no-reply@example.com'
ALLOWED_DOMAINS = ['yourdomain1.my.id', 'yourdomain2.com', 'yourdomain3.net']
API_ACCESS_TOKEN = 'YOUR_LOBOGUARA_API_TOKEN_HERE'
API_URL = 'https://loboguara.olivsec.com.br/api'
CHROME_DRIVER_PATH = '/opt/loboguara/bin/chromedriver'
GOOGLE_CHROME_PATH = '/opt/loboguara/bin/google-chrome'
FFUF_PATH = '/opt/loboguara/bin/ffuf'
SUBFINDER_PATH = '/opt/loboguara/bin/subfinder'
LOG_LEVEL = 'ERROR'
LOG_FILE = '/opt/loboguara/logs/loboguara.log'
sudo chmod +x ./install.sh
sudo ./install.sh
sudo -u loboguara /opt/loboguara/start.sh
Access the URL below to register the Lobo Guará Super Admin
http://your_address:7405/admin
Access the Lobo Guará platform online: https://loboguara.olivsec.com.br/
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” -U.S. Constitution, First Amendment.
Image: Shutterstock, zimmytws.
In an address to Congress this month, President Trump claimed he had “brought free speech back to America.” But barely two months into his second term, the president has waged an unprecedented attack on the First Amendment rights of journalists, students, universities, government workers, lawyers and judges.
This story explores a slew of recent actions by the Trump administration that threaten to undermine all five pillars of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees freedoms concerning speech, religion, the media, the right to assembly, and the right to petition the government and seek redress for wrongs.
The right to petition allows citizens to communicate with the government, whether to complain, request action, or share viewpoints — without fear of reprisal. But that right is being assaulted by this administration on multiple levels. For starters, many GOP lawmakers are now heeding their leadership’s advice to stay away from local town hall meetings and avoid the wrath of constituents affected by the administration’s many federal budget and workforce cuts.
Another example: President Trump recently fired most of the people involved in processing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for government agencies. FOIA is an indispensable tool used by journalists and the public to request government records, and to hold leaders accountable.
The biggest story by far this week was the bombshell from The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who recounted how he was inadvertently added to a Signal group chat with National Security Advisor Michael Waltz and 16 other Trump administration officials discussing plans for an upcoming attack on Yemen.
One overlooked aspect of Goldberg’s incredible account is that by planning and coordinating the attack on Signal — which features messages that can auto-delete after a short time — administration officials were evidently seeking a way to avoid creating a lasting (and potentially FOIA-able) record of their deliberations.
“Intentional or not, use of Signal in this context was an act of erasure—because without Jeffrey Goldberg being accidentally added to the list, the general public would never have any record of these communications or any way to know they even occurred,” Tony Bradley wrote this week at Forbes.
Petitioning the government, particularly when it ignores your requests, often requires challenging federal agencies in court. But that becomes far more difficult if the most competent law firms start to shy away from cases that may involve crossing the president and his administration.
On March 22, the president issued a memorandum that directs heads of the Justice and Homeland Security Departments to “seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable and vexatious litigation against the United States,” or in matters that come before federal agencies.
The POTUS recently issued several executive orders railing against specific law firms with attorneys who worked legal cases against him. On Friday, the president announced that the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meager & Flom had agreed to provide $100 million in pro bono work on issues that he supports.
Trump issued another order naming the firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, which ultimately agreed to pledge $40 million in pro bono legal services to the president’s causes.
Other Trump executive orders targeted law firms Jenner & Block and WilmerHale, both of which have attorneys that worked with special counsel Robert Mueller on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. But this week, two federal judges in separate rulings froze parts of those orders.
“There is no doubt this retaliatory action chills speech and legal advocacy, and that is qualified as a constitutional harm,” wrote Judge Richard Leon, who ruled against the executive order targeting WilmerHale.
President Trump recently took the extraordinary step of calling for the impeachment of federal judges who rule against the administration. Trump called U.S. District Judge James Boasberg a “Radical Left Lunatic” and urged he be removed from office for blocking deportation of Venezuelan alleged gang members under a rarely invoked wartime legal authority.
In a rare public rebuke to a sitting president, U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts issued a statement on March 18 pointing out that “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”
The U.S. Constitution provides that judges can be removed from office only through impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction by the Senate. The Constitution also states that judges’ salaries cannot be reduced while they are in office.
Undeterred, House Speaker Mike Johnson this week suggested the administration could still use the power of its purse to keep courts in line, and even floated the idea of wholesale eliminating federal courts.
“We do have authority over the federal courts as you know,” Johnson said. “We can eliminate an entire district court. We have power of funding over the courts, and all these other things. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and Congress is going to act, so stay tuned for that.”
President Trump has taken a number of actions to discourage lawful demonstrations at universities and colleges across the country, threatening to cut federal funding for any college that supports protests he deems “illegal.”
A Trump executive order in January outlined a broad federal crackdown on what he called “the explosion of antisemitism” on U.S. college campuses. This administration has asserted that foreign students who are lawfully in the United States on visas do not enjoy the same free speech or due process rights as citizens.
Reuters reports that the acting civil rights director at the Department of Education on March 10 sent letters to 60 educational institutions warning they could lose federal funding if they don’t do more to combat anti-semitism. On March 20, Trump issued an order calling for the closure of the Education Department.
Meanwhile, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have been detaining and trying to deport pro-Palestinian students who are legally in the United States. The administration is targeting students and academics who spoke out against Israel’s attacks on Gaza, or who were active in campus protests against U.S. support for the attacks. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Thursday that at least 300 foreign students have seen their visas revoked under President Trump, a far higher number than was previously known.
In his first term, Trump threatened to use the national guard or the U.S. military to deal with protesters, and in campaigning for re-election he promised to revisit the idea.
“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump told Fox News in October 2024. “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
This term, Trump acted swiftly to remove the top judicial advocates in the armed forces who would almost certainly push back on any request by the president to use U.S. soldiers in an effort to quell public protests, or to arrest and detain immigrants. In late February, the president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the top legal officers for the military services — those responsible for ensuring the Uniform Code of Military Justice is followed by commanders.
Military.com warns that the purge “sets an alarming precedent for a crucial job in the military, as President Donald Trump has mused about using the military in unorthodox and potentially illegal ways.” Hegseth told reporters the removals were necessary because he didn’t want them to pose any “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.”
President Trump has sued a number of U.S. news outlets, including 60 Minutes, CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other smaller media organizations for unflattering coverage.
In a $10 billion lawsuit against 60 Minutes and its parent Paramount, Trump claims they selectively edited an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris prior to the 2024 election. The TV news show last month published transcripts of the interview at the heart of the dispute, but Paramount is reportedly considering a settlement to avoid potentially damaging its chances of winning the administration’s approval for a pending multibillion-dollar merger.
The president sued The Des Moines Register and its parent company, Gannett, for publishing a poll showing Trump trailing Harris in the 2024 presidential election in Iowa (a state that went for Trump). The POTUS also is suing the Pulitzer Prize board over 2018 awards given to The New York Times and The Washington Post for their coverage of purported Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Whether or not any of the president’s lawsuits against news organizations have merit or succeed is almost beside the point. The strategy behind suing the media is to make reporters and newsrooms think twice about criticizing or challenging the president and his administration. The president also knows some media outlets will find it more expedient to settle.
Trump also sued ABC News and George Stephanopoulos for stating that the president had been found liable for “rape” in a civil case [Trump was found liable of sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll]. ABC parent Disney settled that claim by agreeing to donate $15 million to the Trump Presidential Library.
Following the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Facebook blocked President Trump’s account. Trump sued Meta, and after the president’s victory in 2024 Meta settled and agreed to pay Trump $25 million: $22 million would go to his presidential library, and the rest to legal fees. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also announced Facebook and Instagram would get rid of fact-checkers and rely instead on reader-submitted “community notes” to debunk disinformation on the social media platform.
Brendan Carr, the president’s pick to run the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has pledged to “dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.” But on January 22, 2025, the FCC reopened complaints against ABC, CBS and NBC over their coverage of the 2024 election. The previous FCC chair had dismissed the complaints as attacks on the First Amendment and an attempt to weaponize the agency for political purposes.
According to Reuters, the complaints call for an investigation into how ABC News moderated the pre-election TV debate between Trump and Biden, and appearances of then-Vice President Harris on 60 Minutes and on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”
Since then, the FCC has opened investigations into NPR and PBS, alleging that they are breaking sponsorship rules. The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), a think tank based in Washington, D.C., noted that the FCC is also investigating KCBS in San Francisco for reporting on the location of federal immigration authorities.
“Even if these investigations are ultimately closed without action, the mere fact of opening them – and the implicit threat to the news stations’ license to operate – can have the effect of deterring the press from news coverage that the Administration dislikes,” the CDT’s Kate Ruane observed.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to “open up” libel laws, with the goal of making it easier to sue media organizations for unfavorable coverage. But this week, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge brought by Trump donor and Las Vegas casino magnate Steve Wynn to overturn the landmark 1964 decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, which insulates the press from libel suits over good-faith criticism of public figures.
The president also has insisted on picking which reporters and news outlets should be allowed to cover White House events and participate in the press pool that trails the president. He barred the Associated Press from the White House and Air Force One over their refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico by another name.
And the Defense Department has ordered a number of top media outlets to vacate their spots at the Pentagon, including CNN, The Hill, The Washington Post, The New York Times, NBC News, Politico and National Public Radio.
“Incoming media outlets include the New York Post, Breitbart, the Washington Examiner, the Free Press, the Daily Caller, Newsmax, the Huffington Post and One America News Network, most of whom are seen as conservative or favoring Republican President Donald Trump,” Reuters reported.
Shortly after Trump took office again in January 2025, the administration began circulating lists of hundreds of words that government staff and agencies shall not use in their reports and communications.
The Brookings Institution notes that in moving to comply with this anti-speech directive, federal agencies have purged countless taxpayer-funded data sets from a swathe of government websites, including data on crime, sexual orientation, gender, education, climate, and global development.
The New York Times reports that in the past two months, hundreds of terabytes of digital resources analyzing data have been taken off government websites.
“While in many cases the underlying data still exists, the tools that make it possible for the public and researchers to use that data have been removed,” The Times wrote.
On Jan. 27, Trump issued a memo (PDF) that paused all federally funded programs pending a review of those programs for alignment with the administration’s priorities. Among those was ensuring that no funding goes toward advancing “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.”
According to the CDT, this order is a blatant attempt to force government grantees to cease engaging in speech that the current administration dislikes, including speech about the benefits of diversity, climate change, and LGBTQ issues.
“The First Amendment does not permit the government to discriminate against grantees because it does not like some of the viewpoints they espouse,” the CDT’s Ruane wrote. “Indeed, those groups that are challenging the constitutionality of the order argued as much in their complaint, and have won an injunction blocking its implementation.”
On January 20, the same day Trump issued an executive order on free speech, the president also issued an executive order titled “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid,” which froze funding for programs run by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Among those were programs designed to empower civil society and human rights groups, journalists and others responding to digital repression and Internet shutdowns.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), this includes many freedom technologies that use cryptography, fight censorship, protect freedom of speech, privacy and anonymity for millions of people around the world.
“While the State Department has issued some limited waivers, so far those waivers do not seem to cover the open source internet freedom technologies,” the EFF wrote about the USAID disruptions. “As a result, many of these projects have to stop or severely curtail their work, lay off talented workers, and stop or slow further development.”
On March 14, the president signed another executive order that effectively gutted the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which oversees or funds media outlets including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America (VOA). The USAGM also oversees Radio Free Asia, which supporters say has been one of the most reliable tools used by the government to combat Chinese propaganda.
But this week, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, temporarily blocked USAGM’s closure by the administration.
“RFE/RL has, for decades, operated as one of the organizations that Congress has statutorily designated to carry out this policy,” Lamberth wrote in a 10-page opinion. “The leadership of USAGM cannot, with one sentence of reasoning offering virtually no explanation, force RFE/RL to shut down — even if the President has told them to do so.”
The Trump administration rescinded a decades-old policy that instructed officers not to take immigration enforcement actions in or near “sensitive” or “protected” places, such as churches, schools, and hospitals.
That directive was immediately challenged in a case brought by a group of Quakers, Baptists and Sikhs, who argued the policy reversal was keeping people from attending services for fear of being arrested on civil immigration violations. On Feb. 24, a federal judge agreed and blocked ICE agents from entering churches or targeting migrants nearby.
The president’s executive order allegedly addressing antisemitism came with a fact sheet that described college campuses as “infested” with “terrorists” and “jihadists.” Multiple faith groups expressed alarm over the order, saying it attempts to weaponize antisemitism and promote “dehumanizing anti-immigrant policies.”
The president also announced the creation of a “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias,” to be led by Attorney General Pam Bondi. Never mind that Christianity is easily the largest faith in America and that Christians are well-represented in Congress.
The Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, a Baptist minister and head of the progressive Interfaith Alliance, issued a statement accusing Trump of hypocrisy in claiming to champion religion by creating the task force.
“From allowing immigration raids in churches, to targeting faith-based charities, to suppressing religious diversity, the Trump Administration’s aggressive government overreach is infringing on religious freedom in a way we haven’t seen for generations,” Raushenbush said.
A statement from Americans United for Separation of Church and State said the task force could lead to religious persecution of those with other faiths.
“Rather than protecting religious beliefs, this task force will misuse religious freedom to justify bigotry, discrimination, and the subversion of our civil rights laws,” said Rachel Laser, the group’s president and CEO.
Where is President Trump going with all these blatant attacks on the First Amendment? The president has made no secret of his affection for autocratic leaders and “strongmen” around the world, and he is particularly enamored with Hungary’s far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort twice in the past year.
A March 15 essay in The Atlantic by Hungarian investigative journalist András Pethő recounts how Orbán rose to power by consolidating control over the courts, and by building his own media universe while simultaneously placing a stranglehold on the independent press.
“As I watch from afar what’s happening to the free press in the United States during the first weeks of Trump’s second presidency — the verbal bullying, the legal harassment, the buckling by media owners in the face of threats — it all looks very familiar,” Pethő wrote. “The MAGA authorities have learned Orbán’s lessons well.”
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Many successful phishing attacks result in a financial loss or malware infection. But falling for some phishing scams, like those currently targeting Russians searching online for organizations that are fighting the Kremlin war machine, can cost you your freedom or your life.
The real website of the Ukrainian paramilitary group “Freedom of Russia” legion. The text has been machine-translated from Russian.
Researchers at the security firm Silent Push mapped a network of several dozen phishing domains that spoof the recruitment websites of Ukrainian paramilitary groups, as well as Ukrainian government intelligence sites.
The website legiohliberty[.]army features a carbon copy of the homepage for the Freedom of Russia Legion (a.k.a. “Free Russia Legion”), a three-year-old Ukraine-based paramilitary unit made up of Russian citizens who oppose Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine.
The phony version of that website copies the legitimate site — legionliberty[.]army — providing an interactive Google Form where interested applicants can share their contact and personal details. The form asks visitors to provide their name, gender, age, email address and/or Telegram handle, country, citizenship, experience in the armed forces; political views; motivations for joining; and any bad habits.
“Participation in such anti-war actions is considered illegal in the Russian Federation, and participating citizens are regularly charged and arrested,” Silent Push wrote in a report released today. “All observed campaigns had similar traits and shared a common objective: collecting personal information from site-visiting victims. Our team believes it is likely that this campaign is the work of either Russian Intelligence Services or a threat actor with similarly aligned motives.”
Silent Push’s Zach Edwards said the fake Legion Liberty site shared multiple connections with rusvolcorps[.]net. That domain mimics the recruitment page for a Ukrainian far-right paramilitary group called the Russian Volunteer Corps (rusvolcorps[.]com), and uses a similar Google Forms page to collect information from would-be members.
Other domains Silent Push connected to the phishing scheme include: ciagov[.]icu, which mirrors the content on the official website of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency; and hochuzhitlife[.]com, which spoofs the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine & General Directorate of Intelligence (whose actual domain is hochuzhit[.]com).
According to Edwards, there are no signs that these phishing sites are being advertised via email. Rather, it appears those responsible are promoting them by manipulating the search engine results shown when someone searches for one of these anti-Putin organizations.
In August 2024, security researcher Artem Tamoian posted on Twitter/X about how he received startlingly different results when he searched for “Freedom of Russia legion” in Russia’s largest domestic search engine Yandex versus Google.com. The top result returned by Google was the legion’s actual website, while the first result on Yandex was a phishing page targeting the group.
“I think at least some of them are surely promoted via search,” Tamoian said of the phishing domains. “My first thread on that accuses Yandex, but apart from Yandex those websites are consistently ranked above legitimate in DuckDuckGo and Bing. Initially, I didn’t realize the scale of it. They keep appearing to this day.”
Tamoian, a native Russian who left the country in 2019, is the founder of the cyber investigation platform malfors.com. He recently discovered two other sites impersonating the Ukrainian paramilitary groups — legionliberty[.]world and rusvolcorps[.]ru — and reported both to Cloudflare. When Cloudflare responded by blocking the sites with a phishing warning, the real Internet address of these sites was exposed as belonging to a known “bulletproof hosting” network called Stark Industries Solutions Ltd.
Stark Industries Solutions appeared two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, materializing out of nowhere with hundreds of thousands of Internet addresses in its stable — many of them originally assigned to Russian government organizations. In May 2024, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive on Stark, which has repeatedly been used to host infrastructure for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, phishing, malware and disinformation campaigns from Russian intelligence agencies and pro-Kremlin hacker groups.
In March 2023, Russia’s Supreme Court designated the Freedom of Russia legion as a terrorist organization, meaning that Russians caught communicating with the group could face between 10 and 20 years in prison.
Tamoian said those searching online for information about these paramilitary groups have become easy prey for Russian security services.
“I started looking into those phishing websites, because I kept stumbling upon news that someone gets arrested for trying to join [the] Ukrainian Army or for trying to help them,” Tamoian told KrebsOnSecurity. “I have also seen reports [of] FSB contacting people impersonating Ukrainian officers, as well as using fake Telegram bots, so I thought fake websites might be an option as well.”
Search results showing news articles about people in Russia being sentenced to lengthy prison terms for attempting to aid Ukrainian paramilitary groups.
Tamoian said reports surface regularly in Russia about people being arrested for trying carry out an action requested by a “Ukrainian recruiter,” with the courts unfailingly imposing harsh sentences regardless of the defendant’s age.
“This keeps happening regularly, but usually there are no details about how exactly the person gets caught,” he said. “All cases related to state treason [and] terrorism are classified, so there are barely any details.”
Tamoian said while he has no direct evidence linking any of the reported arrests and convictions to these phishing sites, he is certain the sites are part of a larger campaign by the Russian government.
“Considering that they keep them alive and keep spawning more, I assume it might be an efficient thing,” he said. “They are on top of DuckDuckGo and Yandex, so it unfortunately works.”
Further reading: Silent Push report, Russian Intelligence Targeting its Citizens and Informants.
One month into his second term, President Trump’s actions to shrink the government through mass layoffs, firings and withholding funds allocated by Congress have thrown federal cybersecurity and consumer protection programs into disarray. At the same time, agencies are battling an ongoing effort by the world’s richest man to wrest control over their networks and data.
Image: Shutterstock. Greg Meland.
The Trump administration has fired at least 130 employees at the federal government’s foremost cybersecurity body — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Those dismissals reportedly included CISA staff dedicated to securing U.S. elections, and fighting misinformation and foreign influence operations.
Earlier this week, technologists with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) arrived at CISA and gained access to the agency’s email and networked files. Those DOGE staffers include Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a 19-year-old former denizen of the “Com,” an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network.
The investigative journalist Jacob Silverman writes that Coristine is the grandson of Valery Martynov, a KGB double agent who spied for the United States. Silverman recounted how Martynov’s wife Natalya Martynova moved to the United States with her two children after her husband’s death.
“Her son became a Virginia police officer who sometimes posts comments on blogs about his historically famous father,” Silverman wrote. “Her daughter became a financial professional who married Charles Coristine, the proprietor of LesserEvil, a snack company. Among their children is a 19-year-old young man named Edward Coristine, who currently wields an unknown amount of power and authority over the inner-workings of our federal government.”
Another member of DOGE is Christopher Stanley, formerly senior director for security engineering at X and principal security engineer at Musk’s SpaceX. Stanley, 33, had a brush with celebrity on Twitter in 2015 when he leaked the user database for the DDoS-for-hire service LizardStresser, and soon faced threats of physical violence against his family.
My 2015 story on that leak did not name Stanley, but he exposed himself as the source by posting a video about it on his Youtube channel. A review of domain names registered by Stanley shows he went by the nickname “enKrypt,” and was the former owner of a pirated software and hacking forum called error33[.]net, as well as theC0re, a video game cheating community.
DOGE has been steadily gaining sensitive network access to federal agencies that hold a staggering amount of personal and financial information on Americans, including the Social Security Administration (SSA), the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the Treasury Department.
Most recently, DOGE has sought broad access to systems at the Internal Revenue Service that contain the personal tax information on millions of Americans, including how much individuals earn and owe, property information, and even details related to child custody agreements. The New York Times reported Friday that the IRS had reached an agreement whereby a single DOGE employee — 25-year-old Gavin Kliger — will be allowed to see only anonymized taxpayer information.
The rapidity with which DOGE has rifled through one federal database after another in the name of unearthing “massive fraud” by government agencies has alarmed many security experts, who warned that DOGE’s actions bypassed essential safeguards and security measures.
“The most alarming aspect isn’t just the access being granted,” wrote Bruce Schneier and Davi Ottenheimer, referring to DOGE as a national cyberattack. “It’s the systematic dismantling of security measures that would detect and prevent misuse—including standard incident response protocols, auditing, and change-tracking mechanisms—by removing the career officials in charge of those security measures and replacing them with inexperienced operators.”
Jacob Williams is a former hacker with the U.S. National Security Agency who now works as managing director of the cybersecurity firm Hunter Labs. Williams kicked a virtual hornet’s nest last week when he posted on LinkedIn that the network incursions by DOGE were “a bigger threat to U.S. federal government information systems than China.”
Williams said while he doesn’t believe anyone at DOGE would intentionally harm the integrity and availability of these systems, it’s widely reported (and not denied) that DOGE introduced code changes into multiple federal IT systems. These code changes, he maintained, are not following the normal process for vetting and review given to federal government IT systems.
“For those thinking ‘I’m glad they aren’t following the normal federal government IT processes, those are too burdensome’ I get where you’re coming from,” Williams wrote. “But another name for ‘red tape’ are ‘controls.’ If you’re comfortable bypassing controls for the advancement of your agenda, I have questions – mostly about whether you do this in your day job too. Please tag your employer letting them know your position when you comment that controls aren’t important (doubly so if you work in cybersecurity). All satire aside, if you’re comfortable abandoning controls for expediency, I implore you to decide where the line is that you won’t cross in that regard.”
The DOGE website’s “wall of receipts” boasts that Musk and his team have saved the federal government more than $55 billion through staff reductions, lease cancellations and terminated contracts. But a team of reporters at The New York Times found the math that could back up those checks is marred with accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, outdated data and other mistakes.
For example, DOGE claimed it saved $8 billion in one contract, when the total amount was actually $8 million, The Times found.
“Some contracts the group claims credit for were double- or triple-counted,” reads a Times story with six bylines. “Another initially contained an error that inflated the totals by billions of dollars. While the DOGE team has surely cut some number of billions of dollars, its slapdash accounting adds to a pattern of recklessness by the group, which has recently gained access to sensitive government payment systems.”
So far, the DOGE website does not inspire confidence: We learned last week that the doge.gov administrators somehow left their database wide open, allowing someone to publish messages that ridiculed the site’s insecurity.
A screenshot of the DOGE website after it was defaced with the message: “These ‘experts’ left their database open – roro”
Trump’s efforts to grab federal agencies by their data has seen him replace career civil servants who refused to allow DOGE access to agency networks. CNN reports that Michelle King, acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration for more than 30 years, was shown the door after she denied DOGE access to sensitive information.
King was replaced by Leland Dudek, formerly a senior advisor in the SSA’s Office of Program Integrity. This week, Dudek posted a now-deleted message on LinkedIn acknowledging he had been placed on administrative leave for cooperating with DOGE.
“I confess,” Dudek wrote. “I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done. I confess. I asked where the fat was and is in our contracts so we can make the right tough choices.”
Dudek’s message on LinkedIn.
According to Wired, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was also bracing this week for roughly 500 staffers to be fired, which could have serious impacts on NIST’s cybersecurity standards and software vulnerability tracking work.
“And cuts last week at the US Digital Service included the cybersecurity lead for the central Veterans Affairs portal, VA.gov, potentially leaving VA systems and data more vulnerable without someone in his role,” Wired’s Andy Greenberg and Lily Hay Newman wrote.
NextGov reports that Trump named the Department of Defense’s new chief information security officer: Katie Arrington, a former South Carolina state lawmaker who helped steer Pentagon cybersecurity contracting policy before being put on leave amid accusations that she disclosed classified data from a military intelligence agency.
NextGov notes that the National Security Agency suspended her clearance in 2021, although the exact reasons that led to the suspension and her subsequent leave were classified. Arrington argued that the suspension was a politically motivated effort to silence her.
Trump also appointed the former chief operating officer of the Republican National Committee as the new head of the Office of National Cyber Director. Sean Cairncross, who has no formal experience in technology or security, will be responsible for coordinating national cybersecurity policy, advising the president on cyber threats, and ensuring a unified federal response to emerging cyber-risks, Politico writes.
DarkReading reports that Cairncross would share responsibility for advising the president on cyber matters, along with the director of cyber at the White House National Security Council (NSC) — a group that advises the president on all matters security related, and not just cyber.
The president also ordered staffers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to stop most work. Created by Congress in 2011 to be a clearinghouse of consumer complaints, the CFPB has sued some of the nation’s largest financial institutions for violating consumer protection laws.
The CFPB says its actions have put nearly $18 billion back in Americans’ pockets in the form of monetary compensation or canceled debts, and imposed $4 billion in civil money penalties against violators. The CFPB’s homepage has featured a “404: Page not found” error for weeks now.
Trump has appointed Russell Vought, the architect of the conservative policy playbook Project 2025, to be the CFPB’s acting director. Vought has publicly favored abolishing the agency, as has Elon Musk, whose efforts to remake X into a payments platform would otherwise be regulated by the CFPB.
The New York Times recently published a useful graphic showing all of the government staffing changes, including the firing of several top officials, affecting agencies with federal investigations into or regulatory battles with Musk’s companies. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee also have released a comprehensive account (PDF) of Musk’s various conflicts of interest.
Image: nytimes.com
As the Times notes, Musk and his companies have repeatedly failed to comply with federal reporting protocols aimed at protecting state secrets, and these failures have prompted at least three federal reviews. Those include an inquiry launched last year by the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General. Four days after taking office, Trump fired the DoD inspector general along with 17 other inspectors general.
The Trump administration also shifted the enforcement priorities of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) away from prosecuting misconduct in the cryptocurrency sector, reassigning lawyers and renaming the unit to focus more on “cyber and emerging technologies.”
Reuters reports that the former SEC chair Gary Gensler made fighting misconduct in a sector he termed the “wild west” a priority for the agency, targeting not only cryptocurrency fraudsters but also the large firms that facilitate trading such as Coinbase.
On Friday, Coinbase said the SEC planned to withdraw its lawsuit against the crypto exchange. Also on Friday, the cryptocurrency exchange Bybit announced on X that a cybersecurity breach led to the theft of more than $1.4 billion worth of cryptocurrencies — making it the largest crypto heist ever.
On Feb. 10, Trump ordered executive branch agencies to stop enforcing the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which froze foreign bribery investigations, and even allows for “remedial actions” of past enforcement actions deemed “inappropriate.”
Trump’s action also disbanded the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative and KleptoCapture Task Force — units which proved their value in corruption cases and in seizing the assets of sanctioned Russian oligarchs — and diverted resources away from investigating white-collar crime.
That’s according to the independent Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an investigative journalism outlet that until very recently was funded in part by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
The OCCRP lost nearly a third of its funding and was forced to lay off 43 reporters and staff after Trump moved to shutter USAID and freeze its spending. NBC News reports the Trump administration plans to gut the agency and leave fewer than 300 staffers on the job out of the current 8,000 direct hires and contractors.
The Global Investigative Journalism Network wrote this week that the sudden hold on USAID foreign assistance funding has frozen an estimated $268 million in agreed grants for independent media and the free flow of information in more than 30 countries — including several under repressive regimes.
Elon Musk has called USAID “a criminal organization” without evidence, and promoted fringe theories on his social media platform X that the agency operated without oversight and was rife with fraud. Just months before the election, USAID’s Office of Inspector General announced an investigation into USAID’s oversight of Starlink satellite terminals provided to the government of Ukraine.
KrebsOnSecurity this week heard from a trusted source that all outgoing email from USAID now carries a notation of “sensitive but unclassified,” a designation that experts say could make it more difficult for journalists and others to obtain USAID email records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). On Feb. 20, Fedscoop reported also hearing the same thing from multiple sources, noting that the added message cannot be seen by senders until after the email is sent.
On Feb. 18, Trump issued an executive order declaring that only the U.S. attorney general and the president can provide authoritative interpretations of the law for the executive branch, and that this authority extends to independent agencies operating under the executive branch.
Trump is arguing that Article II, Clause 1 of the Constitution vests this power with the president. However, jurist.org writes that Article II does not expressly state the president or any other person in the executive branch has the power to interpret laws.
“The article states that the president is required to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed,'” Juris noted. “Jurisdiction to interpret laws and determine constitutionality belongs to the judicial branch under Article III. The framers of the Constitution designed the separation of duties to prevent any single branch of government from becoming too powerful.”
The executive order requires all agencies to submit to “performance standards and management objectives” to be established by the White House Office of Management and Budget, and to report periodically to the president.
Those performance metrics are already being requested: Employees at multiple federal agencies on Saturday reported receiving an email from the Office of Personnel Management ordering them to reply with a set of bullet points justifying their work for the past week.
“Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager,” the notice read. “Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments. Deadline is this Monday at 11:59 p.m. EST.”
An email sent by the OPM to more than two million federal employees late in the afternoon EST on Saturday, Feb. 22.
In a social media post Saturday, Musk said the directive came at the behest of President Trump, and that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. Meanwhile, Bloomberg writes the Department of Justice has been urging employees to hold off replying out of concern doing so could trigger ethics violations. The National Treasury Employees Union also is advising its employees not to respond.
A legal battle over Trump’s latest executive order is bound to join more than 70 other lawsuits currently underway to halt the administration’s efforts to massively reduce the size of the federal workforce through layoffs, firings and attrition.
On Feb. 15, the president posted on social media, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” citing a quote often attributed to the French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte. Four days later, Trump referred to himself as “the king” on social media, while the White House nonchalantly posted an illustration of him wearing a crown.
Trump has been publicly musing about running for an unconstitutional third-term in office, a statement that some of his supporters dismiss as Trump just trying to rile his liberal critics. However, just days after Trump began his second term, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) introduced a bill to amend the Constitution so that Trump — and any other future president — can be elected to serve a third term.
This week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Rep. Ogles reportedly led a group of Trump supporters calling itself the “Third Term Project,” which is trying to gain support for the bill from GOP lawmakers. The event featured images of Trump depicted as Caesar.
A banner at the CPAC conference this week in support of The Third Term Project, a group of conservatives trying to gain support for a bill to amend the Constitution and allow Trump to run for a third term.
Russia continues to be among the world’s top exporters of cybercrime, narcotics, money laundering, human trafficking, disinformation, war and death, and yet the Trump administration has suddenly broken with the Western world in normalizing relations with Moscow.
This week President Trump stunned U.S. allies by repeating Kremlin talking points that Ukraine is somehow responsible for Russia’s invasion, and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a “dictator.” The president repeated these lies even as his administration is demanding that Zelensky give the United States half of his country’s mineral wealth in exchange for a promise that Russia will cease its territorial aggression there.
President Trump’s servility toward an actual dictator — Russian President Vladimir Putin — does not bode well for efforts to improve the cybersecurity of U.S. federal IT networks, or the private sector systems on which the government is largely reliant. In addition, this administration’s baffling moves to alienate, antagonize and sideline our closest allies could make it more difficult for the United States to secure their ongoing cooperation in cybercrime investigations.
It’s also startling how closely DOGE’s approach so far hews to tactics typically employed by ransomware gangs: A group of 20-somethings with names like “Big Balls” shows up on a weekend and gains access to your servers, deletes data, locks out key staff, takes your website down, and prevents you from serving customers.
When the federal executive starts imitating ransomware playbooks against its own agencies while Congress largely gazes on in either bewilderment or amusement, we’re in four-alarm fire territory. At least in theory, one can negotiate with ransomware purveyors.
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Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so. As today’s story explores, the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant collaboration.
Since President Trump’s second inauguration, Musk’s DOGE team has gained access to a truly staggering amount of personal and sensitive data on American citizens, moving quickly to seize control over databases at the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Resources, among others.
Wired first reported on Feb. 2 that one of the technologists on Musk’s crew is a 19-year-old high school graduate named Edward Coristine, who reportedly goes by the nickname “Big Balls” online. One of the companies Coristine founded, Tesla.Sexy LLC, was set up in 2021, when he would have been around 16 years old.
“Tesla.Sexy LLC controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains,” Wired reported. “One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market. While the operation of a Russian website would not violate US sanctions preventing Americans doing business with Russian companies, it could potentially be a factor in a security clearance review.”
Mr. Coristine has not responded to requests for comment. In a follow-up story this week, Wired found that someone using a Telegram handle tied to Coristine solicited a DDoS-for-hire service in 2022, and that he worked for a short time at a company that specializes in protecting customers from DDoS attacks.
A profile photo from Coristine’s WhatsApp account.
Internet routing records show that Coristine runs an Internet service provider called Packetware (AS400495). Also known as “DiamondCDN,” Packetware currently hosts tesla[.]sexy and diamondcdn[.]com, among other domains.
DiamondCDN was advertised and claimed by someone who used the nickname “Rivage” on several Com-based Discord channels over the years. A review of chat logs from some of those channels show other members frequently referred to Rivage as “Edward.”
From late 2020 to late 2024, Rivage’s conversations would show up in multiple Com chat servers that are closely monitored by security companies. In November 2022, Rivage could be seen requesting recommendations for a reliable and powerful DDoS-for-hire service.
Rivage made that request in the cybercrime channel “Dstat,” a core Com hub where users could buy and sell attack services. Dstat’s website dstat[.]cc was seized in 2024 as part of “Operation PowerOFF,” an international law enforcement action against DDoS services.
Coristine’s LinkedIn profile said that in 2022 he worked at an anti-DDoS company called Path Networks, which Wired generously described as a “network monitoring firm known for hiring reformed blackhat hackers.” Wired wrote:
“At Path Network, Coristine worked as a systems engineer from April to June of 2022, according to his now-deleted LinkedIn résumé. Path has at times listed as employees Eric Taylor, also known as Cosmo the God, a well-known former cybercriminal and member of the hacker group UGNazis, as well as Matthew Flannery, an Australian convicted hacker whom police allege was a member of the hacker group LulzSec. It’s unclear whether Coristine worked at Path concurrently with those hackers, and WIRED found no evidence that either Coristine or other Path employees engaged in illegal activity while at the company.”
The founder of Path is a young man named Marshal Webb. I wrote about Webb back in 2016, in a story about a DDoS defense company he co-founded called BackConnect Security LLC. On September 20, 2016, KrebsOnSecurity published data showing that the company had a history of hijacking Internet address space that belonged to others.
Less than 24 hours after that story ran, KrebsOnSecurity.com was hit with the biggest DDoS attack the Internet had ever seen at the time. That sustained attack kept this site offline for nearly 4 days.
The other founder of BackConnect Security LLC was Tucker Preston, a Georgia man who pleaded guilty in 2020 to paying a DDoS-for-hire service to launch attacks against others.
The aforementioned Path employee Eric Taylor pleaded guilty in 2017 to charges including an attack on our home in 2013. Taylor was among several men involved in making a false report to my local police department about a supposed hostage situation at our residence in Virginia. In response, a heavily-armed police force surrounded my home and put me in handcuffs at gunpoint before the police realized it was all a dangerous hoax known as “swatting.”
CosmoTheGod rocketed to Internet infamy in 2013 when he and a number of other hackers set up the Web site exposed[dot]su, which “doxed” dozens of public officials and celebrities by publishing the address, Social Security numbers and other personal information on the former First Lady Michelle Obama, the then-director of the FBI and the U.S. attorney general, among others. The group also swatted many of the people they doxed.
Wired noted that Coristine only worked at Path for a few months in 2022, but the story didn’t mention why his tenure was so short. A screenshot shared on the website pathtruths.com includes a snippet of conversations in June 2022 between Path employees discussing Coristine’s firing.
According to that record, Path founder Marshal Webb dismissed Coristine for leaking internal documents to a competitor. Not long after Coristine’s termination, someone leaked an abundance of internal Path documents and conversations. Among other things, those chats revealed that one of Path’s technicians was a Canadian man named Curtis Gervais who was convicted in 2017 of perpetrating dozens of swatting attacks and fake bomb threats — including at least two attempts against our home in 2014.
A snippet of text from an internal Path chat room, wherein members discuss the reason for Coristine’s termination: Allegedly, leaking internal company information. Source: Pathtruths.com.
On May 11, 2024, Rivage posted on a Discord channel for a DDoS protection service that is chiefly marketed to members of The Com. Rivage expressed frustration with his time spent on Com-based communities, suggesting that its profitability had been oversold.
“I don’t think there’s a lot of money to be made in the com,” Rivage lamented. “I’m not buying Heztner [servers] to set up some com VPN.”
Rivage largely stopped posting messages on Com channels after that. Wired reports that Coristine subsequently spent three months last summer working at Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant startup.
The trouble with all this is that even if someone sincerely intends to exit The Com after years of consorting with cybercriminals, they are often still subject to personal attacks, harassment and hacking long after they have left the scene.
That’s because a huge part of Com culture involves harassing, swatting and hacking other members of the community. These internecine attacks are often for financial gain, but just as frequently they are perpetrated by cybercrime groups to exact retribution from or assert dominance over rival gangs.
Experts say it is extremely difficult for former members of violent street gangs to gain a security clearance needed to view sensitive or classified information held by the U.S. government. That’s because ex-gang members are highly susceptible to extortion and coercion from current members of the same gang, and that alone presents an unacceptable security risk for intelligence agencies.
And make no mistake: The Com is the English-language cybercriminal hacking equivalent of a violent street gang. KrebsOnSecurity has published numerous stories detailing how feuds within the community periodically spill over into real-world violence.
When Coristine’s name surfaced in Wired‘s report this week, members of The Com immediately took notice. In the following segment from a February 5, 2025 chat in a Com-affiliated hosting provider, members criticized Rivage’s skills, and discussed harassing his family and notifying authorities about incriminating accusations that may or may not be true.
2025-02-05 16:29:44 UTC vperked#0 they got this nigga on indiatimes man
2025-02-05 16:29:46 UTC alexaloo#0 Their cropping is worse than AI could have done
2025-02-05 16:29:48 UTC hebeatsme#0 bro who is that
2025-02-05 16:29:53 UTC hebeatsme#0 yalla re talking about
2025-02-05 16:29:56 UTC xewdy#0 edward
2025-02-05 16:29:56 UTC .yarrb#0 rivagew
2025-02-05 16:29:57 UTC vperked#0 Rivarge
2025-02-05 16:29:57 UTC xewdy#0 diamondcdm
2025-02-05 16:29:59 UTC vperked#0 i cant spell it
2025-02-05 16:30:00 UTC hebeatsme#0 rivage
2025-02-05 16:30:08 UTC .yarrb#0 yes
2025-02-05 16:30:14 UTC hebeatsme#0 i have him added
2025-02-05 16:30:20 UTC hebeatsme#0 hes on discord still
2025-02-05 16:30:47 UTC .yarrb#0 hes focused on stroking zaddy elon
2025-02-05 16:30:47 UTC vperked#0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Coristine
2025-02-05 16:30:50 UTC vperked#0 no fucking way
2025-02-05 16:30:53 UTC vperked#0 they even made a wiki for him
2025-02-05 16:30:55 UTC vperked#0 LOOOL
2025-02-05 16:31:05 UTC hebeatsme#0 no way
2025-02-05 16:31:08 UTC hebeatsme#0 hes not a good dev either
2025-02-05 16:31:14 UTC hebeatsme#0 like????
2025-02-05 16:31:22 UTC hebeatsme#0 has to be fake
2025-02-05 16:31:24 UTC xewdy#0 and theyre saying ts
2025-02-05 16:31:29 UTC xewdy#0 like ok bro
2025-02-05 16:31:51 UTC .yarrb#0 now i wanna know what all the other devs are like…
2025-02-05 16:32:00 UTC vperked#0 “`Coristine used the moniker “bigballs” on LinkedIn and @Edwardbigballer on Twitter, according to The Daily Dot.[“`
2025-02-05 16:32:05 UTC vperked#0 LOL
2025-02-05 16:32:06 UTC hebeatsme#0 lmfaooo
2025-02-05 16:32:07 UTC vperked#0 bro
2025-02-05 16:32:10 UTC hebeatsme#0 bro
2025-02-05 16:32:17 UTC hebeatsme#0 has to be fake right
2025-02-05 16:32:22 UTC .yarrb#0 does it mention Rivage?
2025-02-05 16:32:23 UTC xewdy#0 He previously worked for NeuraLink, a brain computer interface company led by Elon Musk
2025-02-05 16:32:26 UTC xewdy#0 bro what
2025-02-05 16:32:27 UTC alexaloo#0 I think your current occupation gives you a good insight of what probably goes on
2025-02-05 16:32:29 UTC hebeatsme#0 bullshit man
2025-02-05 16:32:33 UTC xewdy#0 this nigga got hella secrets
2025-02-05 16:32:37 UTC hebeatsme#0 rivage couldnt print hello world
2025-02-05 16:32:42 UTC hebeatsme#0 if his life was on the line
2025-02-05 16:32:50 UTC xewdy#0 nigga worked for neuralink
2025-02-05 16:32:54 UTC hebeatsme#0 bullshit
2025-02-05 16:33:06 UTC Nashville Dispatch ##0000 ||@PD Ping||
2025-02-05 16:33:07 UTC hebeatsme#0 must have killed all those test pigs with some bugs
2025-02-05 16:33:24 UTC hebeatsme#0 ur telling me the rivage who failed to start a company
2025-02-05 16:33:28 UTC hebeatsme#0 https://cdn.camp
2025-02-05 16:33:32 UTC hebeatsme#0 who didnt pay for servers
2025-02-05 16:33:34 UTC hebeatsme#0 ?
2025-02-05 16:33:42 UTC hebeatsme#0 was too cheap
2025-02-05 16:33:44 UTC vperked#0 yes
2025-02-05 16:33:50 UTC hebeatsme#0 like??
2025-02-05 16:33:53 UTC hebeatsme#0 it aint adding up
2025-02-05 16:33:56 UTC alexaloo#0 He just needed to find his calling idiot.
2025-02-05 16:33:58 UTC alexaloo#0 He found it.
2025-02-05 16:33:59 UTC hebeatsme#0 bro
2025-02-05 16:34:01 UTC alexaloo#0 Cope in a river dude
2025-02-05 16:34:04 UTC hebeatsme#0 he cant make good money right
2025-02-05 16:34:08 UTC hebeatsme#0 doge is about efficiency
2025-02-05 16:34:11 UTC hebeatsme#0 he should make $1/he
2025-02-05 16:34:15 UTC hebeatsme#0 $1/hr
2025-02-05 16:34:25 UTC hebeatsme#0 and be whipped for better code
2025-02-05 16:34:26 UTC vperked#0 prolly makes more than us
2025-02-05 16:34:35 UTC vperked#0 with his dad too
2025-02-05 16:34:52 UTC hebeatsme#0 time to report him for fraud
2025-02-05 16:34:54 UTC hebeatsme#0 to donald trump
2025-02-05 16:35:04 UTC hebeatsme#0 rivage participated in sim swap hacks in 2018
2025-02-05 16:35:08 UTC hebeatsme#0 put that on his wiki
2025-02-05 16:35:10 UTC hebeatsme#0 thanks
2025-02-05 16:35:15 UTC hebeatsme#0 and in 2021
2025-02-05 16:35:17 UTC hebeatsme#0 thanks
2025-02-05 16:35:19 UTC chainofcommand#0 i dont think they’ll care tbh
Given the speed with which Musk’s DOGE team was allowed access to such critical government databases, it strains credulity that Coristine could have been properly cleared beforehand. After all, he’d recently been dismissed from a job for allegedly leaking internal company information to outsiders.
According to the national security adjudication guidelines (PDF) released by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), eligibility determinations take into account a person’s stability, trustworthiness, reliability, discretion, character, honesty, judgment, and ability to protect classified information.
The DNI policy further states that “eligibility for covered individuals shall be granted only when facts and circumstances indicate that eligibility is clearly consistent with the national security interests of the United States, and any doubt shall be resolved in favor of national security.”
On Thursday, 25-year-old DOGE staff member Marko Elez resigned after being linked to a deleted social media account that advocated racism and eugenics. Elez resigned after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to the account.
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” the account posted in July. “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” the account wrote on X in September. “Normalize Indian hate,” the account wrote the same month, in reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley.
Elez’s resignation came a day after the Department of Justice agreed to limit the number of DOGE employees who have access to federal payment systems. The DOJ said access would be limited to two people, Elez and Tom Krause, the CEO of a company called Cloud Software Group.
Earlier today, Musk said he planned to rehire Elez after President Trump and Vice President JD Vance reportedly endorsed the idea. Speaking at The White House today, Trump said he wasn’t concerned about the security of personal information and other data accessed by DOGE, adding that he was “very proud of the job that this group of young people” are doing.
A White House official told Reuters on Wednesday that Musk and his engineers have appropriate security clearances and are operating in “full compliance with federal law, appropriate security clearances, and as employees of the relevant agencies, not as outside advisors or entities.”
NPR reports Trump added that his administration’s cost-cutting efforts would soon turn to the Education Department and the Pentagon, “where he suggested without evidence that there could be ‘trillions’ of dollars in wasted spending within the $6.75 trillion the federal government spent in fiscal year 2024.”
GOP leaders in the Republican-controlled House and Senate have largely shrugged about Musk’s ongoing efforts to seize control over federal databases, dismantle agencies mandated by Congress, freeze federal spending on a range of already-appropriated government programs, and threaten workers with layoffs.
Meanwhile, multiple parties have sued to stop DOGE’s activities. ABC News says a federal judge was to rule today on whether DOGE should be blocked from accessing Department of Labor records, following a lawsuit alleging Musk’s team sought to illegally access highly sensitive data, including medical information, from the federal government.
At least 13 state attorneys general say they plan to file a lawsuit to stop DOGE from accessing federal payment systems containing Americans’ sensitive personal information, reports The Associated Press.
Reuters reported Thursday that the U.S. Treasury Department had agreed not to give Musk’s team access to its payment systems while a judge is hearing arguments in a lawsuit by employee unions and retirees alleging Musk illegally searched those records.
Ars Technica writes that The Department of Education (DoE) was sued Friday by a California student association demanding an “immediate stop” to DOGE’s “unlawfully” digging through student loan data to potentially dismantle the DoE.
New mobile apps from the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek have remained among the top three “free” downloads for Apple and Google devices since their debut on Jan. 25, 2025. But experts caution that many of DeepSeek’s design choices — such as using hard-coded encryption keys, and sending unencrypted user and device data to Chinese companies — introduce a number of glaring security and privacy risks.
Public interest in the DeepSeek AI chat apps swelled following widespread media reports that the upstart Chinese AI firm had managed to match the abilities of cutting-edge chatbots while using a fraction of the specialized computer chips that leading AI companies rely on. As of this writing, DeepSeek is the third most-downloaded “free” app on the Apple store, and #1 on Google Play.
DeepSeek’s rapid rise caught the attention of the mobile security firm NowSecure, a Chicago-based company that helps clients screen mobile apps for security and privacy threats. In a teardown of the DeepSeek app published today, NowSecure urged organizations to remove the DeepSeek iOS mobile app from their environments, citing security concerns.
NowSecure founder Andrew Hoog said they haven’t yet concluded an in-depth analysis of the DeepSeek app for Android devices, but that there is little reason to believe its basic design would be functionally much different.
Hoog told KrebsOnSecurity there were a number of qualities about the DeepSeek iOS app that suggest the presence of deep-seated security and privacy risks. For starters, he said, the app collects an awful lot of data about the user’s device.
“They are doing some very interesting things that are on the edge of advanced device fingerprinting,” Hoog said, noting that one property of the app tracks the device’s name — which for many iOS devices defaults to the customer’s name followed by the type of iOS device.
The device information shared, combined with the user’s Internet address and data gathered from mobile advertising companies, could be used to deanonymize users of the DeepSeek iOS app, NowSecure warned. The report notes that DeepSeek communicates with Volcengine, a cloud platform developed by ByteDance (the makers of TikTok), although NowSecure said it wasn’t clear if the data is just leveraging ByteDance’s digital transformation cloud service or if the declared information share extends further between the two companies.
Image: NowSecure.
Perhaps more concerning, NowSecure said the iOS app transmits device information “in the clear,” without any encryption to encapsulate the data. This means the data being handled by the app could be intercepted, read, and even modified by anyone who has access to any of the networks that carry the app’s traffic.
“The DeepSeek iOS app globally disables App Transport Security (ATS) which is an iOS platform level protection that prevents sensitive data from being sent over unencrypted channels,” the report observed. “Since this protection is disabled, the app can (and does) send unencrypted data over the internet.”
Hoog said the app does selectively encrypt portions of the responses coming from DeepSeek servers. But they also found it uses an insecure and now deprecated encryption algorithm called 3DES (aka Triple DES), and that the developers had hard-coded the encryption key. That means the cryptographic key needed to decipher those data fields can be extracted from the app itself.
There were other, less alarming security and privacy issues highlighted in the report, but Hoog said he’s confident there are additional, unseen security concerns lurking within the app’s code.
“When we see people exhibit really simplistic coding errors, as you dig deeper there are usually a lot more issues,” Hoog said. “There is virtually no priority around security or privacy. Whether cultural, or mandated by China, or a witting choice, taken together they point to significant lapse in security and privacy controls, and that puts companies at risk.”
Apparently, plenty of others share this view. Axios reported on January 30 that U.S. congressional offices are being warned not to use the app.
“[T]hreat actors are already exploiting DeepSeek to deliver malicious software and infect devices,” read the notice from the chief administrative officer for the House of Representatives. “To mitigate these risks, the House has taken security measures to restrict DeepSeek’s functionality on all House-issued devices.”
TechCrunch reports that Italy and Taiwan have already moved to ban DeepSeek over security concerns. Bloomberg writes that The Pentagon has blocked access to DeepSeek. CNBC says NASA also banned employees from using the service, as did the U.S. Navy.
Beyond security concerns tied to the DeepSeek iOS app, there are indications the Chinese AI company may be playing fast and loose with the data that it collects from and about users. On January 29, researchers at Wiz said they discovered a publicly accessible database linked to DeepSeek that exposed “a significant volume of chat history, backend data and sensitive information, including log streams, API secrets, and operational details.”
“More critically, the exposure allowed for full database control and potential privilege escalation within the DeepSeek environment, without any authentication or defense mechanism to the outside world,” Wiz wrote. [Full disclosure: Wiz is currently an advertiser on this website.]
KrebsOnSecurity sought comment on the report from DeepSeek and from Apple. This story will be updated with any substantive replies.
The FBI joined authorities across Europe last week in seizing domain names for Cracked and Nulled, English-language cybercrime forums with millions of users that trafficked in stolen data, hacking tools and malware. An investigation into the history of these communities shows their apparent co-founders quite openly operate an Internet service provider and a pair of e-commerce platforms catering to buyers and sellers on both forums.
In this 2019 post from Cracked, a forum moderator told the author of the post (Buddie) that the owner of the RDP service was the founder of Nulled, a.k.a. “Finndev.” Image: Ke-la.com.
On Jan. 30, the U.S. Department of Justice said it seized eight domain names that were used to operate Cracked, a cybercrime forum that sprang up in 2018 and attracted more than four million users. The DOJ said the law enforcement action, dubbed Operation Talent, also seized domains tied to Sellix, Cracked’s payment processor.
In addition, the government seized the domain names for two popular anonymity services that were heavily advertised on Cracked and Nulled and allowed customers to rent virtual servers: StarkRDP[.]io, and rdp[.]sh.
Those archived webpages show both RDP services were owned by an entity called 1337 Services Gmbh. According to corporate records compiled by Northdata.com, 1337 Services GmbH is also known as AS210558 and is incorporated in Hamburg, Germany.
The Cracked forum administrator went by the nicknames “FlorainN” and “StarkRDP” on multiple cybercrime forums. Meanwhile, a LinkedIn profile for a Florian M. from Germany refers to this person as the co-founder of Sellix and founder of 1337 Services GmbH.
Northdata’s business profile for 1337 Services GmbH shows the company is controlled by two individuals: 32-year-old Florian Marzahl and Finn Alexander Grimpe, 28.
An organization chart showing the owners of 1337 Services GmbH as Florian Marzahl and Finn Grimpe. Image: Northdata.com.
Neither Marzahl nor Grimpe responded to requests for comment. But Grimpe’s first name is interesting because it corresponds to the nickname chosen by the founder of Nulled, who goes by the monikers “Finn” and “Finndev.” NorthData reveals that Grimpe was the founder of a German entity called DreamDrive GmbH, which rented out high-end sports cars and motorcycles.
According to the cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, a user named Finndev registered on multiple cybercrime forums, including Raidforums [seized by the FBI in 2022], Void[.]to, and vDOS, a DDoS-for-hire service that was shut down in 2016 after its founders were arrested.
The email address used for those accounts was f.grimpe@gmail.com. DomainTools.com reports f.grimpe@gmail.com was used to register at least nine domain names, including nulled[.]lol and nulled[.]it. Neither of these domains were among those seized in Operation Talent.
Intel471 finds the user FlorainN registered across multiple cybercrime forums using the email address olivia.messla@outlook.de. The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence says this email address used the same password (and slight variations of it) across many accounts online — including at hacker forums — and that the same password was used in connection with dozens of other email addresses, such as florianmarzahl@hotmail.de, and fmarzahl137@gmail.com.
The Justice Department said the Nulled marketplace had more than five million members, and has been selling stolen login credentials, stolen identification documents and hacking services, as well as tools for carrying out cybercrime and fraud, since 2016.
Perhaps fittingly, both Cracked and Nulled have been hacked over the years, exposing countless private messages between forum users. A review of those messages archived by Intel 471 showed that dozens of early forum members referred privately to Finndev as the owner of shoppy[.]gg, an e-commerce platform that caters to the same clientele as Sellix.
Shoppy was not targeted as part of Operation Talent, and its website remains online. Northdata reports that Shoppy’s business name — Shoppy Ecommerce Ltd. — is registered at an address in Gan-Ner, Israel, but there is no ownership information about this entity. Shoppy did not respond to requests for comment.
Constella found that a user named Shoppy registered on Cracked in 2019 using the email address finn@shoppy[.]gg. Constella says that email address is tied to a Twitter/X account for Shoppy Ecommerce in Israel.
The DOJ said one of the alleged administrators of Nulled, a 29-year-old Argentinian national named Lucas Sohn, was arrested in Spain. The government has not announced any other arrests or charges associated with Operation Talent.
Indeed, both StarkRDP and FloraiN have posted to their accounts on Telegram that there were no charges levied against the proprietors of 1337 Services GmbH. FlorainN told former customers they were in the process of moving to a new name and domain for StarkRDP, where existing accounts and balances would be transferred.
“StarkRDP has always been operating by the law and is not involved in any of these alleged crimes and the legal process will confirm this,” the StarkRDP Telegram account wrote on January 30. “All of your servers are safe and they have not been collected in this operation. The only things that were seized is the website server and our domain. Unfortunately, no one can tell who took it and with whom we can talk about it. Therefore, we will restart operation soon, under a different name, to close the chapter [of] ‘StarkRDP.'”
The FBI and authorities in The Netherlands this week seized dozens of servers and domains for a hugely popular spam and malware dissemination service operating out of Pakistan. The proprietors of the service, who use the collective nickname “The Manipulaters,” have been the subject of three stories published here since 2015. The FBI said the main clientele are organized crime groups that try to trick victim companies into making payments to a third party.
One of several current Fudtools sites run by the principals of The Manipulators.
On January 29, the FBI and the Dutch national police seized the technical infrastructure for a cybercrime service marketed under the brands Heartsender, Fudpage and Fudtools (and many other “fud” variations). The “fud” bit stands for “Fully Un-Detectable,” and it refers to cybercrime resources that will evade detection by security tools like antivirus software or anti-spam appliances.
The Dutch authorities said 39 servers and domains abroad were seized, and that the servers contained millions of records from victims worldwide — including at least 100,000 records pertaining to Dutch citizens.
A statement from the U.S. Department of Justice refers to the cybercrime group as Saim Raza, after a pseudonym The Manipulaters communally used to promote their spam, malware and phishing services on social media.
“The Saim Raza-run websites operated as marketplaces that advertised and facilitated the sale of tools such as phishing kits, scam pages and email extractors often used to build and maintain fraud operations,” the DOJ explained.
The core Manipulaters product is Heartsender, a spam delivery service whose homepage openly advertised phishing kits targeting users of various Internet companies, including Microsoft 365, Yahoo, AOL, Intuit, iCloud and ID.me, to name a few.
The government says transnational organized crime groups that purchased these services primarily used them to run business email compromise (BEC) schemes, wherein the cybercrime actors tricked victim companies into making payments to a third party.
“Those payments would instead be redirected to a financial account the perpetrators controlled, resulting in significant losses to victims,” the DOJ wrote. “These tools were also used to acquire victim user credentials and utilize those credentials to further these fraudulent schemes. The seizure of these domains is intended to disrupt the ongoing activity of these groups and stop the proliferation of these tools within the cybercriminal community.”
Manipulaters advertisement for “Office 365 Private Page with Antibot” phishing kit sold via Heartsender. “Antibot” refers to functionality that attempts to evade automated detection techniques, keeping a phish deployed and accessible as long as possible. Image: DomainTools.
KrebsOnSecurity first wrote about The Manipulaters in May 2015, mainly because their ads at the time were blanketing a number of popular cybercrime forums, and because they were fairly open and brazen about what they were doing — even who they were in real life.
We caught up with The Manipulaters again in 2021, with a story that found the core employees had started a web coding company in Lahore called WeCodeSolutions — presumably as a way to account for their considerable Heartsender income. That piece examined how WeCodeSolutions employees had all doxed themselves on Facebook by posting pictures from company parties each year featuring a large cake with the words FudCo written in icing.
A follow-up story last year about The Manipulaters prompted messages from various WeCodeSolutions employees who pleaded with this publication to remove stories about them. The Saim Raza identity told KrebsOnSecurity they were recently released from jail after being arrested and charged by local police, although they declined to elaborate on the charges.
The Manipulaters never seemed to care much about protecting their own identities, so it’s not surprising that they were unable or unwilling to protect their own customers. In an analysis released last year, DomainTools.com found the web-hosted version of Heartsender leaked an extraordinary amount of user information to unauthenticated users, including customer credentials and email records from Heartsender employees.
Almost every year since their founding, The Manipulaters have posted a picture of a FudCo cake from a company party celebrating its anniversary.
DomainTools also uncovered evidence that the computers used by The Manipulaters were all infected with the same password-stealing malware, and that vast numbers of credentials were stolen from the group and sold online.
“Ironically, the Manipulaters may create more short-term risk to their own customers than law enforcement,” DomainTools wrote. “The data table ‘User Feedbacks’ (sic) exposes what appear to be customer authentication tokens, user identifiers, and even a customer support request that exposes root-level SMTP credentials–all visible by an unauthenticated user on a Manipulaters-controlled domain.”
Police in The Netherlands said the investigation into the owners and customers of the service is ongoing.
“The Cybercrime Team is on the trail of a number of buyers of the tools,” the Dutch national police said. “Presumably, these buyers also include Dutch nationals. The investigation into the makers and buyers of this phishing software has not yet been completed with the seizure of the servers and domains.”
U.S. authorities this week also joined law enforcement in Australia, France, Greece, Italy, Romania and Spain in seizing a number of domains for several long-running cybercrime forums and services, including Cracked and Nulled. According to a statement from the European police agency Europol, the two communities attracted more than 10 million users in total.
Other domains seized as part of “Operation Talent” included Sellix, an e-commerce platform that was frequently used by cybercrime forum members to buy and sell illicit goods and services.
The payment card giant MasterCard just fixed a glaring error in its domain name server settings that could have allowed anyone to intercept or divert Internet traffic for the company by registering an unused domain name. The misconfiguration persisted for nearly five years until a security researcher spent $300 to register the domain and prevent it from being grabbed by cybercriminals.
A DNS lookup on the domain az.mastercard.com on Jan. 14, 2025 shows the mistyped domain name a22-65.akam.ne.
From June 30, 2020 until January 14, 2025, one of the core Internet servers that MasterCard uses to direct traffic for portions of the mastercard.com network was misnamed. MasterCard.com relies on five shared Domain Name System (DNS) servers at the Internet infrastructure provider Akamai [DNS acts as a kind of Internet phone book, by translating website names to numeric Internet addresses that are easier for computers to manage].
All of the Akamai DNS server names that MasterCard uses are supposed to end in “akam.net” but one of them was misconfigured to rely on the domain “akam.ne.”
This tiny but potentially critical typo was discovered recently by Philippe Caturegli, founder of the security consultancy Seralys. Caturegli said he guessed that nobody had yet registered the domain akam.ne, which is under the purview of the top-level domain authority for the West Africa nation of Niger.
Caturegli said it took $300 and nearly three months of waiting to secure the domain with the registry in Niger. After enabling a DNS server on akam.ne, he noticed hundreds of thousands of DNS requests hitting his server each day from locations around the globe. Apparently, MasterCard wasn’t the only organization that had fat-fingered a DNS entry to include “akam.ne,” but they were by far the largest.
Had he enabled an email server on his new domain akam.ne, Caturegli likely would have received wayward emails directed toward mastercard.com or other affected domains. If he’d abused his access, he probably could have obtained website encryption certificates (SSL/TLS certs) that were authorized to accept and relay web traffic for affected websites. He may even have been able to passively receive Microsoft Windows authentication credentials from employee computers at affected companies.
But the researcher said he didn’t attempt to do any of that. Instead, he alerted MasterCard that the domain was theirs if they wanted it, copying this author on his notifications. A few hours later, MasterCard acknowledged the mistake, but said there was never any real threat to the security of its operations.
“We have looked into the matter and there was not a risk to our systems,” a MasterCard spokesperson wrote. “This typo has now been corrected.”
Meanwhile, Caturegli received a request submitted through Bugcrowd, a program that offers financial rewards and recognition to security researchers who find flaws and work privately with the affected vendor to fix them. The message suggested his public disclosure of the MasterCard DNS error via a post on LinkedIn (after he’d secured the akam.ne domain) was not aligned with ethical security practices, and passed on a request from MasterCard to have the post removed.
MasterCard’s request to Caturegli, a.k.a. “Titon” on infosec.exchange.
Caturegli said while he does have an account on Bugcrowd, he has never submitted anything through the Bugcrowd program, and that he reported this issue directly to MasterCard.
“I did not disclose this issue through Bugcrowd,” Caturegli wrote in reply. “Before making any public disclosure, I ensured that the affected domain was registered to prevent exploitation, mitigating any risk to MasterCard or its customers. This action, which we took at our own expense, demonstrates our commitment to ethical security practices and responsible disclosure.”
Most organizations have at least two authoritative domain name servers, but some handle so many DNS requests that they need to spread the load over additional DNS server domains. In MasterCard’s case, that number is five, so it stands to reason that if an attacker managed to seize control over just one of those domains they would only be able to see about one-fifth of the overall DNS requests coming in.
But Caturegli said the reality is that many Internet users are relying at least to some degree on public traffic forwarders or DNS resolvers like Cloudflare and Google.
“So all we need is for one of these resolvers to query our name server and cache the result,” Caturegli said. By setting their DNS server records with a long TTL or “Time To Live” — a setting that can adjust the lifespan of data packets on a network — an attacker’s poisoned instructions for the target domain can be propagated by large cloud providers.
“With a long TTL, we may reroute a LOT more than just 1/5 of the traffic,” he said.
The researcher said he’d hoped that the credit card giant might thank him, or at least offer to cover the cost of buying the domain.
“We obviously disagree with this assessment,” Caturegli wrote in a follow-up post on LinkedIn regarding MasterCard’s public statement. “But we’ll let you judge— here are some of the DNS lookups we recorded before reporting the issue.”
Caturegli posted this screenshot of MasterCard domains that were potentially at risk from the misconfigured domain.
As the screenshot above shows, the misconfigured DNS server Caturegli found involved the MasterCard subdomain az.mastercard.com. It is not clear exactly how this subdomain is used by MasterCard, however their naming conventions suggest the domains correspond to production servers at Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. Caturegli said the domains all resolve to Internet addresses at Microsoft.
“Don’t be like Mastercard,” Caturegli concluded in his LinkedIn post. “Don’t dismiss risk, and don’t let your marketing team handle security disclosures.”
One final note: The domain akam.ne has been registered previously — in December 2016 by someone using the email address um-i-delo@yandex.ru. The Russian search giant Yandex reports this user account belongs to an “Ivan I.” from Moscow. Passive DNS records from DomainTools.com show that between 2016 and 2018 the domain was connected to an Internet server in Germany, and that the domain was left to expire in 2018.
This is interesting given a comment on Caturegli’s LinkedIn post from an ex-Cloudflare employee who linked to a report he co-authored on a similar typo domain apparently registered in 2017 for organizations that may have mistyped their AWS DNS server as “awsdns-06.ne” instead of “awsdns-06.net.” DomainTools reports that this typo domain also was registered to a Yandex user (playlotto@yandex.ru), and was hosted at the same German ISP — Team Internet (AS61969).
