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If you’re in the market for insurance right now, keep an eye out for scammers in the mix. They’re out in full force once again this open enrollment season.
As people across the U.S. sign up for, renew, or change their health insurance plans, scammers want to cash in as people rush to get their coverage set. And scammers have several factors working in their favor.
For starters, many people find the insurance marketplace confusing, frustrating, and even intimidating, all feelings that scammers can take advantage of. Moreover, concerns about getting the right level of coverage at an affordable price also play into the hands of scammers.
Amidst all this uncertainty and time pressure, health insurance scams crop up online. Whether under the guise of helping people navigate the complex landscape or by offering seemingly low-cost quotes, scammers prey on insurance seekers by stealing their personal information, Social Security numbers, and money.
According to the FBI, health insurance scams cost families millions each year. In some cases, the costs are up front. People pay for fraudulent insurance and have their personal info stolen. And for many, the follow-on costs are far worse, where victims go in for emergency care and find that their treatment isn’t covered—leaving them with a hefty bill.
Like so many of the scams we cover here in our blogs, you can spot health insurance scams relatively quickly once you get to know their ins and outs.
Here’s how some of those scams can play out.
Some are “one and done scams” where the scammer promises a policy or service and then disappears after stealing money and personal info—much like an online shopping scam. It’s a quick and dirty hit where scammers quickly get what they want by reaching victims the usual ways, such as through texts, emails, paid search results, and social media. In the end, victims end up on a phishing site where they think they’re locking in a good deal but handing over their info to scammers instead.
Other scams play a long con game, milking victims for thousands and thousands of dollars over time. The following complaint lodged by one victim in Washington state provides a typical example:
A man purchased a plan to cover himself, his wife, and his two children, only to learn there was no coverage. He was sold a second policy, with the same result, and offered a refund if he purchased a third policy. When he filed a complaint, his family still had no coverage, and he was seeking a refund for more than $20,000 and reimbursement for $55,000 in treatments and prescriptions he’d paid out of pocket.
Scams like these are known as ghost broker scams where scammers pose as insurance brokers who take insurance premiums and pocket the money, leaving victims thinking they have coverage when they don’t. In some cases, scammers initially apply for a genuine policy with a legitimate carrier, only to cancel it later, while still taking premiums from the victim as their “broker.” Many victims only find out that they got scammed when they attempt to file a claim.
Another type of scam comes in the form of policy cancellation scams. These work like any number of other account-based scams, where a scammer pretends to be a customer service rep at a bank, utility, or credit card company. In the insurance version of it, scammers email, text, or call with some bad news—the person’s policy is about to get cancelled. Yet not to worry, the victim can keep the policy active they hand over some personal and financial info. It’s just one more way that scammers use urgency and fear to steal to commit identity theft and fraud.
As said, health insurance scams become relatively easy to spot once you know the tricks that scammers use. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) offers up its list of the ones they typically use the most:
1)Someone says they’re from the government and need money or your personal info.Government agencies don’t call people out of the blue to ask them for money or personal info. No one from the government will ask you to verify your Social Security, bank account, or credit card number, and they won’t ask you to wire money or pay by gift card or cryptocurrency.
If you have a question about Health Insurance Marketplace®, contact the government directly at: HealthCare.gov or 1-800-318-2596
2) Someone tries to sell you a medical discount plan. Legitimate medical discount plans differ from health insurance. They supplement it. In that way, they don’t pay for any of your medical expenses. Rather, they’re membership programs where you pay a recurring fee for access to a network of providers who offer their services at pre-negotiated, reduced rates. The FTC strongly advises thorough research before participating in one, as some take people’s money and offer very little in return. Call your caregiver and see if they really participate in the program and in what way. And always review the details of any medical discount plan in writing before you sign up.
3) Someone wants your sensitive personal info in exchange for a price quote. The Affordable Care Act’s (ACA’s) official government site is HealthCare.gov. It lets you compare prices on health insurance plans, check your eligibility for healthcare subsidies, and begin enrollment. But HealthCare.gov will only ask for your monthly income and your age to give you a price quote. Never enter personal financial info like your Social Security number, bank account, or credit card number to get a quote for health insurance.
4) Someone wants money to help you navigate the Health Insurance Marketplace. The people who offer legitimate help with the Health Insurance Marketplace (sometimes called Navigators or Assisters) are not allowed to charge you and won’t ask you for personal or financial info. If they ask for money, it’s a scam. Go to HealthCare.govand click “Find Local Help” to learn more.
1)For health insurance, visit a trusted source like HealthCare.gov or your state marketplace. Doing so helps guarantee that you’ll get the kind of fully compliant coverage you want.
2) Make sure the insurance covers you in your state. Not every insurer is licensed to operate in your state. Double-check that the one you’re dealing with is. A good place to start is to visit the site for your state’s insurance commission. It should have resources that let you look up the insurance companies, agents, and brokers in your state.
3) For any insurance, research the company offering it. Run a search with the company name and add “scam” or “fraud” to it. See if any relevant news or complaints show up. And if the plan you’re being offered sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
4) Watch out for high-pressure sales. Don’t pay anything up front and be cautious if a company is forcing you to make quick decisions.
5) Guard your personal info. Never share your personal info, account details, or Social Security number over text or email. Make sure you’re really working with a legitimate company and that you submit any info through a secure submissions process.
6) Block bad links to phishing sites. Many insurance scams rely on phishing sites to steal personal info. A combination of our Web Protection and Scam Detector can steer you clear of them. They’ll alert you if a link might take you to one. It’ll also block those sites if you accidentally tap or click on a bad link.
7) Monitor your identity and credit. In some health insurance scams, your personal info winds up in wrong hands, which can lead to identity fraud and theft. And the problem is that you only find out once the damage is done. Actively monitoring your identity and credit can spot a problem before it becomes an even bigger one. You can take care of both easily with our identity monitoring and credit monitoring.
Additionally, our identity theft coverage can help if the unexpected happens with up to $2 million in identity theft coverage and identity restoration support if determined you’re a victim of identity theft.
You’ll find these protections and more in McAfee+.
The post How To Spot Health Insurance Scams This Open Enrollment Season appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Imagine a day where you didn’t have to juggle passwords.
No more sticky notes. No more notebooks with dozens of passwords scribbled in, crossed out, and scribbled in again. No more forgetting and resetting. No more typing them in all the time.
And even better, imagine secure accounts, likely even more secure than you could keep them on your own.
That’s the power of a password manager in your life.
A password manager does the work of creating strong, unique passwords for each and every one of your accounts. And considering the hundred or so accounts you have, that’s something that would take plenty of time if you did all that work on your own.
In all, a password manager can turn the pain of juggling passwords into a real comfort.
Before we get into how a password manager can make your life easier while making your accounts more secure, let’s look at what makes up a bad password. Here are a few examples:
Obvious passwords: Password-cracking programs start by entering a list of common (and arguably lazy) passwords. These may include the simple “password” or “1234567”. Others include common keyboard paths like “qwerty.” Even longer keyboard paths like “qwertyuiop” are well known to hackers and their tools as well.
Dictionary words: Hacking tools also look for common dictionary words strung together, which helps them crack longer passwords in chunks. The same goes for passwords that contain the name of the app or service in them. These are “no brainer” words found in passwords that make passwords even easier to crack.
Repeated passwords: You may think you have such an unbreakable password that you want to use it for all your accounts. However, this means that if hackers compromise one of your accounts, all your other accounts are vulnerable. This is a favorite tactic of hackers. They’ll target less secure accounts and services and then attempt to re-use those credentials on more secure services like online bank and credit card companies.
Personal information passwords: Passwords that include your birthday, dog’s name, or nickname leave you open to attack. While they’re easy for you to remember, they’re also easy for a hacker to discover—such as with a quick trip to your social media profile, particularly if it is not set to private.
If any of the above sounds familiar, you’ll want to replace any of your bad passwords with strong ones.
We can point to three things that make up a strong password, which makes it difficult to hack.
Your password is:
Long: A longer password is potentially a stronger password when it comes to a “brute force” attack, where a hacker uses an automated trial-and-error system to break it. For example, an eight-character password using uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols can get hacked in minutes. Kick it up to 16 characters and it becomes incredibly more difficult to break—provided it doesn’t rely on common words or phrases. McAfee can help you generate a strong password, for stronger security with our random password generator.
Complex: To increase the security of your password, it should have a combination of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, symbols, and numbers like mentioned above.
Unique: Every one of your accounts should have its own password.
Now, apply this to the hundred or so accounts you keep and creating strong passwords for all of them really does call for a lot of work.
Given its ease of use and the big security boost it gives you and all your accounts, the answer is yes.
A password manager does the work of creating strong, unique passwords for your accounts. These will take the form of a string of random numbers, letters, and characters. They won’t be memorable, but the manager does the memorizing for you. You only need to remember a single password to access the tools of your manager.
A strong password manager also stores your passwords securely. Our password manager protects your passwords by scrambling them with AES-256, one of the strongest encryption algorithms available. Only you can decrypt and access your info with the factors you choose. Additionally, our password manager uses multi-factor authentication (MFA), so you’ll be verified by at least two factors before being signed in.
Aside from the comfort of convenience a password manager can give you, it gives you another level of assurance—extra protection in an age of data breaches, because you’ll have unique passwords where one compromise won’t lead to others.
And whether or not you go with a password manager to create those strong and unique passwords, make sure you use MFA on every account that offers it. MFA offers another layer of protection by adding another factor into the login process, such as something you own like a text to your phone or notification to an authentication app. That way if a hacker has your password, they’ll still be locked out of your account because they lack that MFA code.
In some cases, you really don’t need some of your old accounts and the passwords that come along with them. Maybe they’re old and unused. Or maybe they were for a one-time purchase at an online store you won’t visit again. Deleting these accounts is a smart move because they’re yet more places where your personal info is stored—and subject to a data breach.
Our Online Account Cleanup can help, which you can find in all our McAfee+ plans. It scans for accounts in your name, gives you a full list, and shows you which types of accounts might be riskier than others. From there you can decide which ones you want to delete, along with the personal info linked to them. In our McAfee+ Ultimate plans, you get full-service Online Account Cleanup, which sends the data deletion requests for you.
Between this and a password manager, you’ll have one less thing to juggle—your passwords, and one less thing to worry about—if they’re secure from hackers.
The post Why “Strong Passwords” Aren’t Enough Anymore—and What to Do Instead appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Direct navigation — the act of visiting a website by manually typing a domain name in a web browser — has never been riskier: A new study finds the vast majority of “parked” domains — mostly expired or dormant domain names, or common misspellings of popular websites — are now configured to redirect visitors to sites that foist scams and malware.
A lookalike domain to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center website, returned a non-threatening parking page (left) whereas a mobile user was instantly directed to deceptive content in October 2025 (right). Image: Infoblox.
When Internet users try to visit expired domain names or accidentally navigate to a lookalike “typosquatting” domain, they are typically brought to a placeholder page at a domain parking company that tries to monetize the wayward traffic by displaying links to a number of third-party websites that have paid to have their links shown.
A decade ago, ending up at one of these parked domains came with a relatively small chance of being redirected to a malicious destination: In 2014, researchers found (PDF) that parked domains redirected users to malicious sites less than five percent of the time — regardless of whether the visitor clicked on any links at the parked page.
But in a series of experiments over the past few months, researchers at the security firm Infoblox say they discovered the situation is now reversed, and that malicious content is by far the norm now for parked websites.
“In large scale experiments, we found that over 90% of the time, visitors to a parked domain would be directed to illegal content, scams, scareware and anti-virus software subscriptions, or malware, as the ‘click’ was sold from the parking company to advertisers, who often resold that traffic to yet another party,” Infoblox researchers wrote in a paper published today.
Infoblox found parked websites are benign if the visitor arrives at the site using a virtual private network (VPN), or else via a non-residential Internet address. For example, Scotiabank.com customers who accidentally mistype the domain as scotaibank[.]com will see a normal parking page if they’re using a VPN, but will be redirected to a site that tries to foist scams, malware or other unwanted content if coming from a residential IP address. Again, this redirect happens just by visiting the misspelled domain with a mobile device or desktop computer that is using a residential IP address.
According to Infoblox, the person or entity that owns scotaibank[.]com has a portfolio of nearly 3,000 lookalike domains, including gmai[.]com, which demonstrably has been configured with its own mail server for accepting incoming email messages. Meaning, if you send an email to a Gmail user and accidentally omit the “l” from “gmail.com,” that missive doesn’t just disappear into the ether or produce a bounce reply: It goes straight to these scammers. The report notices this domain also has been leveraged in multiple recent business email compromise campaigns, using a lure indicating a failed payment with trojan malware attached.
Infoblox found this particular domain holder (betrayed by a common DNS server — torresdns[.]com) has set up typosquatting domains targeting dozens of top Internet destinations, including Craigslist, YouTube, Google, Wikipedia, Netflix, TripAdvisor, Yahoo, eBay, and Microsoft. A defanged list of these typosquatting domains is available here (the dots in the listed domains have been replaced with commas).
David Brunsdon, a threat researcher at Infoblox, said the parked pages send visitors through a chain of redirects, all while profiling the visitor’s system using IP geolocation, device fingerprinting, and cookies to determine where to redirect domain visitors.
“It was often a chain of redirects — one or two domains outside the parking company — before threat arrives,” Brunsdon said. “Each time in the handoff the device is profiled again and again, before being passed off to a malicious domain or else a decoy page like Amazon.com or Alibaba.com if they decide it’s not worth targeting.”
Brunsdon said domain parking services claim the search results they return on parked pages are designed to be relevant to their parked domains, but that almost none of this displayed content was related to the lookalike domain names they tested.
Samples of redirection paths when visiting scotaibank dot com. Each branch includes a series of domains observed, including the color-coded landing page. Image: Infoblox.
Infoblox said a different threat actor who owns domaincntrol[.]com — a domain that differs from GoDaddy’s name servers by a single character — has long taken advantage of typos in DNS configurations to drive users to malicious websites. In recent months, however, Infoblox discovered the malicious redirect only happens when the query for the misconfigured domain comes from a visitor who is using Cloudflare’s DNS resolvers (1.1.1.1), and that all other visitors will get a page that refuses to load.
The researchers found that even variations on well-known government domains are being targeted by malicious ad networks.
“When one of our researchers tried to report a crime to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), they accidentally visited ic3[.]org instead of ic3[.]gov,” the report notes. “Their phone was quickly redirected to a false ‘Drive Subscription Expired’ page. They were lucky to receive a scam; based on what we’ve learnt, they could just as easily receive an information stealer or trojan malware.”
The Infoblox report emphasizes that the malicious activity they tracked is not attributed to any known party, noting that the domain parking or advertising platforms named in the study were not implicated in the malvertising they documented.
However, the report concludes that while the parking companies claim to only work with top advertisers, the traffic to these domains was frequently sold to affiliate networks, who often resold the traffic to the point where the final advertiser had no business relationship with the parking companies.
Infoblox also pointed out that recent policy changes by Google may have inadvertently increased the risk to users from direct search abuse. Brunsdon said Google Adsense previously defaulted to allowing their ads to be placed on parked pages, but that in early 2025 Google implemented a default setting that had their customers opt-out by default on presenting ads on parked domains — requiring the person running the ad to voluntarily go into their settings and turn on parking as a location.
The sheer scope of cybercrime can be hard to fathom, even when you live and breathe it every day. It's not just the volume of data, but also the extent to which it replicates across criminal actors seeking to abuse it for their own gain, and to our detriment.
We were reminded of this recently when the FBI reached out and asked if they could send us 630 million more passwords. For the last four years, they've been sending over passwords found during the course of their investigations in the hope that we can help organisations block them from future use. Back then, we were supporting 1.26 billion searches of the service each month. Now, it's... more:
Just as it's hard to wrap your head around the scale of cybercrime, I find it hard to grasp that number fully. On average, that service is hit nearly 7 thousand times per second, and at peak, it's many times more than that. Every one of those requests is a chance to stop an account takeover. But the real scale goes well beyond the API itself. Because the data model is open source and freely available, many organisations use the Pwned Passwords Downloader to take the entire corpus offline and query it directly within their own applications. That tool alone calls the API around a million times during download, but the resulting data is then queried… well, who knows how many times after that. Pretty cool, right?
This latest corpus of data came to us as a result of the FBI seizing multiple devices belonging to a suspect. The data appeared to have originated from both the open web and Tor-based marketplaces, Telegram channels and infostealer malware families. We hadn't seen about 7.4% of them in HIBP before, which might sound small, but that's 46 million vulnerable passwords we weren't giving people using the service the opportunity to block. So, we've added those and bumped the prevalence count on the other 584 million we already had.
We're thrilled to be able to provide this service to the community for free and want to also quickly thank Cloudflare for their support in providing us with the infrastructure to make this possible. Thanks to their edge caching tech, all those passwords are queryable from a location just a handful of milliseconds away from wherever you are on the globe.
If you're hitting the API, then all the data is already searchable for you. If you're downloading it all offline, go and grab the latest data now. Either way, go forth and put it to good use and help make a cybercriminal's day just that much harder 😊
Pets, poisoned AI search results, and a phone call that sounds like it’s coming straight from the federal government, this week’s scams don’t have much in common except one thing: they’re getting harder to spot.
In today’s edition of This Week in Scams, we’re breaking down the biggest security lapses and the tactics scammers used to exploit them, and what you can do to stay ahead of the latest threats.
If you’re a Petco customer, you’ll want to know about not one but two data security lapses in the past week.
First, as reported by TechCrunch on Monday, Petco followed Texas data privacy laws by filing a data breach with the attorney general’s office. In that filing, Petco reported that the affected data included names, Social Security numbers, and driver’s license numbers. Further info including account numbers, credit and debit card numbers, and dates of birth were also mentioned in the filing.
Also according to Techcrunch, the company filed similar notices in California and Massachusetts.
To date, Petco has not made a comment about the size of the breach and the number of people affected.
Different states have different policies for reporting data breaches. In some cases, that helps us put a figure to the size of the breach, as some states require companies to disclose the total number of people caught up in the breach. That’s not the case here, so the full scope of the attack remains in question, at least for right now.
As of Thursday, we know Petco reported that 329 Texans were affected along with seven Massachusetts residents, per the respective reports filed. California’s report does not contain the number of Californians affected, yet laws in that state require businesses to report breaches that affect 500 or more people, so at least 500 people were affected there.
Below you can see the form letter Petco sent to affected Californians in accordance with California’s data privacy laws:
In it, you can see that Petco discovered that “a setting within one of our software applications … inadvertently allowed certain files to become accessible online.” Further, Petco said that it “immediately took steps to correct the issue and to remove the files from further online access,” and that it “corrected” the setting and implemented unspecified “additional security measures.”
So while no foul play appears to have been behind the breach, it’s still no less risky and concerning for Petco’s customers. We’ll cover what you can do about that in a moment after we cover yet another data issue at Petco through its Vetco clinics.
Also within the same timeframe, yet more research and reporting from Techcrunch uncovered a second security lapse that exposed personal info online. From their article:
“TechCrunch identified a vulnerability in how Vetco’s website generates copies of PDF documents for its customers.
“Vetco’s customer portal, located at petpass.com, allows customers to log in and obtain veterinary records and other documents relating to their pet’s care. But TechCrunch found that the PDF generating page on Vetco’s website was public and not protected with a password.
“As such, it was possible for anyone on the internet to access sensitive customer files directly from Vetco’s servers by modifying the web address to input a customer’s unique identification number. Vetco customer numbers are sequential, which means one could access other customers’ data simply by changing a customer number by one or two digits.”
With the size and reach of the Petco breach still unknown, and the impact of the Vetco security lapse also unknown, we advise caution for all Petco customers. At minimum, monitor transactions and keep an eye on your credit report for any suspicious activity. And it’s always a good time to update a weak password.
For those who received a notification, we advise the following:
Check your credit, consider a security freeze, and get ID theft protection. You can get all three working for you with McAfee+ Advanced or McAfee+ Ultimate.
Monitor transactions across your accounts, also available in McAfee+ Advanced and Ultimate.
Keep an eye out for phishing attacks. Use our Scam Detector to spot any follow-on attacks.
Update your passwords. Strong and unique passwords are best. Our password manager can help you create and store them securely.
And use two-factor authentication on all your accounts. Enabling two-factor authentication provides an added layer of security.
What to do if your Social Security number was breached.
If you think your Social Security number was caught up in the breach, act quickly.
You might want to be careful when searching for customer service numbers while in AI mode. Or with an AI search engine. It could connect you to a scammer.
From The Times comes reports of scammers manipulating the AI in platforms like Google and Perplexity so that their search results return scam numbers instead of a proper customer service numbers for, say, British Airways.
How do they manipulate those results? By spamming the internet with false info that gets picked up and then amplified by AI.
“[S]cammers have started seeding fake call center numbers on the web so the AI is tricked into thinking it is genuine …
“Criminals have set up YouTube channels with videos claiming to help with customer support, which are packed with airline brand names and scam numbers designed to be scraped and reused by the AI.
“Bot-generated reviews on Yelp or video descriptions on YouTube are filled with fraudulent numbers as are airline and travel web forums.”
And with these tactics, scammers could poison the results for just about any organization, business, or brand. Not just airlines. Per The Times, “The scammers have also hijacked government sites, university domains, and even fitness sites to place scam numbers, which fools the AI into thinking they are genuine.”
This reveals a current limitation with many AI platforms. Largely they can’t distinguish when people deliberately feed them bad info, as seen in the case here.
Yet even as this attack is new, our advice remains the same: any time you want to ring up a customer service line, get the number directly from the company’s official website. Not from AI search and not by clicking a paid search result that shows up first (scammers can poison them too).
Are you under investigation for money laundering? Of course not. But this scam wants you to think so—and to pay up.
On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a consumer alert warning that people are reporting getting unexpected calls from someone saying they’re “FTC agent” John Krebs. Apparently “Agent Krebs” is telling people that they’re under investigation for money laundering—and that a deposit to a Bitcoin ATM can resolve the matter.
Of course, it’s a scam.
For starters, the FTC doesn’t have “agents.” And the idea of clearing one’s name in an investigation with a Bitcoin payment is a sure-fire sign of a scam. Lastly, any time someone asks for payment with Bitcoin or other payment methods that are near-impossible to recover (think wire transfers and gift cards), those are big red flags.
Apart from hanging up and holding on to your money, the FTC offers the following guidance, which holds true for any scam call:
As always, here’s a quick list of a few stories that caught our eye this week:
AI tools transform Christmas shopping as people turn to chatbots
National cybercrime network operating for 14 years dismantled in Indonesia
Why is AI becoming the go-to support for our children’s mental health?
We’ll see you next Friday with a special edition to close out 2025 … This Year in Scams.
The post This Week in Scams: Petco Breach Warning, and Watch Out for Fake Federal Calls appeared first on McAfee Blog.
It looks harmless enough.
A digital party invitation lands in your inbox or phone. You click to see the details. Then it asks you to log in or create an account before revealing the event.
That’s where the scam begins.
Fake e-vite phishing scams are on the rise, and they take advantage of something simple: social trust. You’re far more likely to click an invitation than a generic “account alert” or “delivery notice.”
And that’s exactly why scammers are using them.
In fact, here’s a screenshot of a fake phishing email I recently got this holiday season:
When you click the “open invitation” link, it immediately asks you to sign in or create an account with your personal information. That’s the step where scammers steal your private data.
A fake e-vite scam is a phishing attack that pretends to be a real invitation from platforms like Paperless Post or other digital invitation services.
The goal is to trick you into:
Once scammers have your login information, they can:
Here’s the most common flow:
Because this starts with something familiar and social, many people don’t realize it’s phishing until accounts are already compromised. Plus, scammers then use your email and name to trick friends and family into trusting more fake e-vites from your account.
Paperless Post has publicly acknowledged these scams and shared what legitimate messages actually look like.
Legitimate Paperless Post Emails Will Never:
Official Paperless Post Email Domains:
Legitimate invitations and account messages only come from:
Official support emails only come from:
If the sender does not match one of these exactly, it’s a scam.
Paperless Post also notes that verified emails may display a blue checkmark in supported inboxes to confirm authenticity.
If you see any of the following, do not click:
Modern phishing attacks don’t rely on sloppy design anymore. Many now use:
Invitation phishing is especially powerful because:
If you entered any information into a suspicious invitation page:
The faster you act, the more damage you can prevent.
The post Think That Party Invite Is Real? Fake E-Vite Scams Are the New Phishing Trap appeared first on McAfee Blog.
AI-powered browsers give you much more than a window to the web. They represent an entirely new way to experience the internet, with an AI “agent” working by your side.
We’re entering an age where you can delegate all kinds of tasks to a browser, and with that comes a few things you’ll want to keep in mind when using AI browsers like ChatGPT’s Atlas, Perplexity’s Comet, and others.
So, what’s the allure of this new breed of browser? The answer is that it’s highly helpful, and plenty more.
By design, these “agentic” AI browsers actively assist you with the things you do online. They can automate tasks and interpret your intentions when you make a request. Further, they can work proactively by anticipating things you might need or by offering suggestions.
In a way, an AI browser works like a personal assistant. It can summarize the pages in several open tabs, conduct research on just about any topic you ask it to, or even track down the lowest airfare to Paris in the month of May. Want it to order ink for your printer and some batteries for your remote? It can do that too. And that’s just to name a few possibilities.
As you can see, referring to the AI in these browsers as “agentic” fits. It truly works like an agent on your behalf, a capability that promises to get more powerful over time.
But as with any new technology, early adopters should balance excitement with awareness, especially when it comes to privacy and security. You might have seen some recent headlines that shared word of security concerns with these browsers.
The reported exploits vary, as does the harm they can potentially inflict. That ranges from stealing personal info, gaining access to Gmail and Google Drive files, installing malware, and injecting the AI’s “memory” with malicious instructions, which can follow from session to session and device to device, wherever a user logs in.
Our own research has shown that some of these attacks are now tougher to pull off than they were initially, particularly as the AI browser companies continue to put guardrails in place. If anything, this reinforces a long-standing truth about online security, it’s a cat-and-mouse game. Tech companies put protections in place, bad actors discover an exploit, companies put further protections in place, new exploits crop up, and so on. It’s much the same in the rapidly evolving space of AI browsers. The technology might be new, but the game certainly isn’t.
While these reports don’t mean AI browsers are necessarily unsafe to use, they do underscore how fast this space is evolving…and why caution is smart as the tech matures.
It’s still early days for AI-powered browsers and understanding the security and privacy implications of their use. With that, we strongly recommend the following to help reduce your risk:
Don’t let an AI browser do what you wouldn’t let a stranger do. Handle things like your banking, finances, and health on your own. And the same certainly goes for all the info tied to those aspects of your life.
Pay attention to confirmations. As of today, agentic browsers still require some level of confirmation from the user to perform key actions (like processing a payment, sending an email, or updating a calendar entry). Pay close attention to them, so you can prevent your browser from doing something you don’t want it to do.
Use the “logged out” mode, if possible. As of this writing, at least one AI browser, Atlas, gives you the option to use the agent in the logged-out mode.i This limits its access to sensitive data and the risk of it taking actions on your behalf with your credentials.
If possible, disable “model learning.” By turning it off, you reduce the amount of personal info stored and processed by the AI provider for AI training purposes, which can minimize security and privacy risks.
Set privacy controls to the strictest options available. Further, understand what privacy policies the AI developer has in place. For example, some AI providers have policies that allow people to review your interactions with the AI as part of its training. These policies vary from company to company, and they tend to undergo changes. Keeping regular tabs on the privacy policy of the AI browser you use makes for a privacy-smart move.
Keep yourself informed. The capabilities, features, and privacy policies of AI-powered browsers continue to evolve rapidly. Set up news alerts about the AI browser you use and see if any issues get reported and, if so, how the AI developer has responded. Do routine searches pairing the name of the AI browser with “privacy.”
McAfee’s award-winning protection helps you browse safer, whether you’re testing out new AI tools or just surfing the web.
McAfee offers comprehensive privacy services, including personal info scans and removal plus a secure VPN.
Plus, protections like McAfee’s Scam Detector automatically alert you to suspicious texts, emails, and videos before harm can happen—helping you manage your online presence confidently and safeguard your digital life for the long term. Likewise, Web Protection can help you steer you clear of suspicious websites that might take advantage of AI browsers.
The post How to Stay Safe on Your New AI Browser appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Microsoft today pushed updates to fix at least 56 security flaws in its Windows operating systems and supported software. This final Patch Tuesday of 2025 tackles one zero-day bug that is already being exploited, as well as two publicly disclosed vulnerabilities.
Despite releasing a lower-than-normal number of security updates these past few months, Microsoft patched a whopping 1,129 vulnerabilities in 2025, an 11.9% increase from 2024. According to Satnam Narang at Tenable, this year marks the second consecutive year that Microsoft patched over one thousand vulnerabilities, and the third time it has done so since its inception.
The zero-day flaw patched today is CVE-2025-62221, a privilege escalation vulnerability affecting Windows 10 and later editions. The weakness resides in a component called the “Windows Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver” — a system driver that enables cloud applications to access file system functionalities.
“This is particularly concerning, as the mini filter is integral to services like OneDrive, Google Drive, and iCloud, and remains a core Windows component, even if none of those apps were installed,” said Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7.
Only three of the flaws patched today earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating: Both CVE-2025-62554 and CVE-2025-62557 involve Microsoft Office, and both can exploited merely by viewing a booby-trapped email message in the Preview Pane. Another critical bug — CVE-2025-62562 — involves Microsoft Outlook, although Redmond says the Preview Pane is not an attack vector with this one.
But according to Microsoft, the vulnerabilities most likely to be exploited from this month’s patch batch are other (non-critical) privilege escalation bugs, including:
–CVE-2025-62458 — Win32k
–CVE-2025-62470 — Windows Common Log File System Driver
–CVE-2025-62472 — Windows Remote Access Connection Manager
–CVE-2025-59516 — Windows Storage VSP Driver
–CVE-2025-59517 — Windows Storage VSP Driver
Kev Breen, senior director of threat research at Immersive, said privilege escalation flaws are observed in almost every incident involving host compromises.
“We don’t know why Microsoft has marked these specifically as more likely, but the majority of these components have historically been exploited in the wild or have enough technical detail on previous CVEs that it would be easier for threat actors to weaponize these,” Breen said. “Either way, while not actively being exploited, these should be patched sooner rather than later.”
One of the more interesting vulnerabilities patched this month is CVE-2025-64671, a remote code execution flaw in the Github Copilot Plugin for Jetbrains AI-based coding assistant that is used by Microsoft and GitHub. Breen said this flaw would allow attackers to execute arbitrary code by tricking the large language model (LLM) into running commands that bypass the user’s “auto-approve” settings.
CVE-2025-64671 is part of a broader, more systemic security crisis that security researcher Ari Marzuk has branded IDEsaster (IDE stands for “integrated development environment”), which encompasses more than 30 separate vulnerabilities reported in nearly a dozen market-leading AI coding platforms, including Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini CLI, and Claude Code.
The other publicly-disclosed vulnerability patched today is CVE-2025-54100, a remote code execution bug in Windows Powershell on Windows Server 2008 and later that allows an unauthenticated attacker to run code in the security context of the user.
For anyone seeking a more granular breakdown of the security updates Microsoft pushed today, check out the roundup at the SANS Internet Storm Center. As always, please leave a note in the comments if you experience problems applying any of this month’s Windows patches.
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Internet security refers to tactics that protect your online activities from a variety of cyberthreats such as malware, phishing attacks, scams, and even unauthorized access by hackers. In this article, we will highlight the importance of internet security in safeguarding your digital network and outline what you can do to have a comprehensive online security system in place.
Internet usage has become central to our daily life. In 2024 alone, DataReportal reported that around 5.56 billion—that’s 67.9%—of the world’s population were connected to the internet. This was 136 million more than the year before, resulting in the creation of approximately 402.7 million terabytes of data each day. With this wealth of information, it is no wonder that cybercriminals are scrambling to make billions of dollars off the internet.
Globally, the average cost of data breaches rose by 10% between 2023 and 2024, totaling an estimated $4.88 million. This staggering amount included not only the loss in business revenues but also recovery costs and regulatory fines. For this reason, it has become important to implement internet security to protect our online personal data, activities, and devices from cyberthreats and unauthorized access.
While internet security is sometimes confused with, it’s important to point out their subtle distinctions. Internet security focuses on protecting your activities and data as they travel across the web, while cybersecurity is focused on protecting digital assets such as systems, networks, and data from cyberthreats. These two concepts work together to create your complete digital protection environment.
Internet security threats come in a variety of forms, complexities, and detectability. Some of the common threats we face today include:
While internet security threats may seem overwhelming at first glance, solutions are available to safeguard your computer or mobile devices. Below is a detailed look at some security measures.
Your home network serves as the foundation of your digital life, connecting all your devices and enabling your online activities. Having a strong network security foundation with multiple layers of protection will keep your connections and data safe from cyber threats.
Your router serves as the gateway between your home devices and the internet, making it a critical security component. Start by changing your router’s default administrator username and password immediately after setup. These factory defaults are widely known and easily exploited by attackers. Choose a strong, unique password that combines letters, numbers, and symbols to prevent unauthorized access to your router’s settings.
Enable WPA3 encryption on your wireless network, as it provides the strongest protection for your Wi-Fi connections. If your router doesn’t support WPA3, use WPA2 as a minimum standard. These protocols scramble your data as it travels between devices and your router, making it unreadable to anyone attempting to intercept your communications.
Create a unique network name or service set identifier (SSID) that doesn’t reveal your router manufacturer or model number, and pair it with a complex Wi-Fi password at least 12 characters long with a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters. Avoid using personal information such as your address or name in either your network name or password, as this information can help attackers guess your password.
Regularly update your router’s firmware to patch security vulnerabilities and improve performance. Check your router manufacturer’s website quarterly for updates if automatic updates aren’t available, as outdated firmware often contains known security flaws that cybercriminals actively exploit.
Separate the guest network for visitors and smart home devices to protect your primary network where you store sensitive data. If a guest’s device is compromised or if a smart device has security vulnerabilities, the threat can’t easily spread to your main computers and phones. Configure your guest network with a strong password and consider time limits for access.
Enable access point isolation, also called client isolation, on your wireless network to prevent potentially compromised devices from attacking other devices on the same network. If you are an advanced user, consider creating separate virtual networks (VLANs) for different device types, such as keeping work computers on a different network segment than entertainment devices.
Modern routers include built-in firewalls that monitor suspicious activity in incoming and outgoing network traffic, and block potentially harmful connections and unnecessary ports and services.
Antivirus programs are engineered to prevent, detect, and remove viruses and other types of malicious software. Antivirus software can run automatic scans on specific files or directories to make sure no malicious activity is present, and no network or data breach has occurred.
McAfee’s antivirus software comes with key security capabilities such as malware detection, quarantine, and removal, as well as options for scanning files and applications, and an advanced firewall for home network security.
Multi-factor authentication is an authentication method that requires at least two pieces of evidence before granting access to a website. Using this method adds another layer of security to your applications and reduces the likelihood of a data breach.
Web browsers vary widely in terms of the security features, with some offering just the basics and others providing a more complete range of features. Ideally, you should opt for a browser that offers the following security features:
When properly implemented, these steps help ensure that your internet connection remains private, your data stays secure, and unauthorized users can’t access your network resources. Regular maintenance of these security settings, combined with staying informed about emerging threats, gives you the foundation for safe and confident internet use.
These days, smartphones and tablets hold more personal information than ever before—from banking details and photos to work emails and location data. While this convenience makes life easier, it also creates new opportunities for cybercriminals to target your mobile devices. As you secure your network and desktop or laptop devices, so should you treat your mobile devices with the same care. Here are some straightforward security practices that you can implement to significantly reduce your exposure to mobile threats:
Here are answers to the most common questions about protecting yourself online.
What does internet security cover?
Internet security protects you from a wide range of online threats including viruses, malware, phishing attacks, identity theft, and data breaches. It also covers your devices, personal information, online accounts, and network connections to help you browse, shop, and communicate safely online.
How is internet security different from antivirus software?
While antivirus software focuses specifically on detecting and removing malicious programs, internet security provides comprehensive protection that includes antivirus plus additional features such as firewalls, web protection, email security, identity monitoring, and safe browsing tools.
Do Macs and smartphones need internet security protection?
Yes, all devices that connect to the internet can be targeted by cybercriminals. Mobile devices and Macs face increasing security threats including malicious apps, phishing attempts, and network attacks, making protection essential regardless of your device type.
How can I stay safe on public Wi-Fi?
Avoid accessing sensitive accounts or making purchases on public Wi-Fi networks. When you must use public Wi-Fi, stick to encrypted websites with the “https” in the URL, avoid automatic connections, and consider using a VPN for added protection.
How can you keep children safe online?
As children grow older, their internet use becomes more extensive. To keep them safe online, educate them about the risks of web browsing and about best practices to avoid online threats like not sharing passwords. Explain which information should be shared and which should be kept private. Instruct them to never click on links from unknown sources. Set up parental controls on certain websites to filter inappropriate content and keep a child-friendly interface.
What are the signs that my account has been compromised?
Watch for unexpected password reset emails, unfamiliar login notifications, unusual account activity, friends receiving spam from your accounts, or unauthorized charges on your financial statements. If you notice any of these signs, change your passwords immediately and contact the relevant service providers.
How often should I update my software and devices?
Enable automatic updates whenever possible and install security patches as soon as they become available. Regular updates fix security vulnerabilities that criminals actively exploit, so staying current is one of your best defenses against cyber threats.
As more cyberthreats emerge and expand both in scope and sophistication, it’s essential that you protect your internet activities. Effective protection doesn’t have to be complicated. Taking steps to install antivirus software, create strong and unique passwords, enable your firewall, and use multi-factor authentication will help build a strong defense against online threats.
Start implementing these internet security measures today and enjoy the confidence that comes with knowing you’re protected online.
For added security, consider using an all-in-one antivirus solution like McAfee+ to safeguard your devices from online threats. Let McAfee handle your security while you focus on enjoying the internet.
The post What Is Internet Security? appeared first on McAfee Blog.
For this week in scams, we have fake AI-generated shopping images that could spoil your holidays, scammers use an Apple Support ticket in a takeover attempt, and a PlayStation scam partly powered by AI.
Let’s start with those fake ads, because holiday shopping is in full swing.
Turns out that three-quarters of people (74%) can’t correctly identify a fake AI-generated social media ad featuring popular holiday gifts—which could leave them open to online shopping scams.
That finding, and several others, comes by way of research from Santander, a financial services company in the UK.
Here’s a quick rundown of what else they found:
From the study … could you tell these ads are both fake?
In all, cheap and readily available AI tools make spinning up fake ads quick and easy work. The same goes for launching websites where those “goods” can get sold. In the past, we’ve seen scammers take two different approaches when they use social media ads and websites to lure in their victims:
During the holidays, scammers pump out ads that offer seemingly outstanding deals on hot items. Of course, the offer and the site where it’s “sold” is fake. Victims hand over their personal info and credit card number, never to see the items they thought they’d purchased. On top of the money a victim loses, the scammer also has their card info and can run up its tab or sell it to others on the dark web.
In this case, the scammer indeed sells and delivers something. But you don’t get what you paid for. The item looks, feels, fits, or works entirely differently than what was advertised. In this way, people wind up with a cheaply made item cobbled together with inferior materials. Worse yet, these scams potentially prop up sweatshops, child labor, and other illegal operations in the process. Nothing about these sites and the things they sell on them are genuine.
So, fake AI shopping ads are out there. What should you look out for? Here’s a quick list:
“I almost lost everything—my photos, my email, my entire digital life.”
So opens a recent Medium post from Eric Moret recounting how he almost handed over his Apple Account to a scammer armed with a real Apple Support ticket to make this elaborate phishing attack look legit.
Over the course of nearly 30 minutes, a scammer calmly and professionally walked Moret through a phony account takeover attempt.
It started with two-factor authentication notifications that claimed someone was trying to access his iCloud account. Three minutes later, he got a call from an Atlanta-based number. The caller said they were with Apple Support. “Your account is under attack. We’re opening a ticket to help you. Someone will contact you shortly.”
Seconds later came another call from the same number, which is where the scam fully kicked in. The person also said they were from Apple Support and that they’d opened a case on Moret’s behalf. Sure enough, when directed, Moret opened his email and saw a legitimate case number from a legitimate Apple address.
The caller then told him to reset his password, which he did. Moret received a text with a link to a site where he could, apparently, close his case.
Note that at no time did the scammers ask him for his two-factor authentication code throughout this process, which is always the sign of a scam. However, the scammers had another way to get it.
The link took him to a site called “appeal-apple dot com,” which was in fact a scam site. However, the page looked official to him, and he entered a six-digit code “confirmation code” sent by text to finish the process.
That “confirmation code” was actually a fresh two-factor authentication code. With that finally in hand, the scammers signed in. Moret received a notice that a new device had logged into his account. Moret quickly reset his password again, which kicked them out and stopped the attack.
Maybe you didn’t get a scam call from “Emma” or “Carl” at Wal-Mart, but plenty of people did. Around eight million in all. Now the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Enforcement Bureau wants to put a stop to them.
“Emma” and “Carl” are in fact a couple of AI voices fronting a scam framed around the bogus purchase of a PlayStation. It’s garnered its share of complaints, so much that the FCC has stepped in. It alleges that SK Teleco, a voice service provider, provisioned at least some of these calls, and that it must immediately stop.
According to the FCC, the call plays out like this:
“A preauthorized purchase of PlayStation 5 special edition with Pulse 3D headset is being ordered from your Walmart account for an amount of 919 dollars 45 cents. To cancel your order or to connect with one of our customer support representatives, please press ‘1.’ Thank you.”
Pressing “1” connects you to a live operator who asks for personal identifiable such as Social Security numbers to cancel the “purchase.”
If you were wondering, it’s unlawful to place calls to cellphones containing artificial or prerecorded voice messages absent an emergency purpose or prior express consent. According to the FCC’s press release, SK Teleco didn’t respond to a request to investigate the calls. The FCC further alleges that it’s unlikely the company has any such consent.
Per the FCC, “If SK Teleco fails to take swift action to prevent scam calls, the FCC will require all other providers to no longer accept call traffic from SK Teleco.”
We’ll see how this plays out, yet it’s a good reminder to report scam calls. When it comes to any kind of scam, law enforcement and federal agencies act on complaints.
Here’s a quick list of a few stories that caught our eye this week:
Scammers pose as law enforcement, threaten jail time if you don’t pay (with audio)
Deepfake of North Carolina lawmaker used in award-winning Brazilian Whirlpool video
What happens when you kick millions of teens off social media? Australia’s about to find out
We’ll see you next Friday with more updates, scam news, and ways you can stay safer out there.
The post This Week in Scams: Phony AI Ads, Apple Account Takeover Attempts, and a PlayStation Scam appeared first on McAfee Blog.
A sprawling academic cheating network turbocharged by Google Ads that has generated nearly $25 million in revenue has curious ties to a Kremlin-connected oligarch whose Russian university builds drones for Russia’s war against Ukraine.
The Nerdify homepage.
The link between essay mills and Russian attack drones might seem improbable, but understanding it begins with a simple question: How does a human-intensive academic cheating service stay relevant in an era when students can simply ask AI to write their term papers? The answer – recasting the business as an AI company – is just the latest chapter in a story of many rebrands that link the operation to Russia’s largest private university.
Search in Google for any terms related to academic cheating services — e.g., “help with exam online” or “term paper online” — and you’re likely to encounter websites with the words “nerd” or “geek” in them, such as thenerdify[.]com and geekly-hub[.]com. With a simple request sent via text message, you can hire their tutors to help with any assignment.
These nerdy and geeky-branded websites frequently cite their “honor code,” which emphasizes they do not condone academic cheating, will not write your term papers for you, and will only offer support and advice for customers. But according to This Isn’t Fine, a Substack blog about contract cheating and essay mills, the Nerdify brand of websites will happily ignore that mantra.
“We tested the quick SMS for a price quote,” wrote This Isn’t Fine author Joseph Thibault. “The honor code references and platitudes apparently stop at the website. Within three minutes, we confirmed that a full three-page, plagiarism- and AI-free MLA formatted Argumentative essay could be ours for the low price of $141.”
A screenshot from Joseph Thibault’s Substack post shows him purchasing a 3-page paper with the Nerdify service.
Google prohibits ads that “enable dishonest behavior.” Yet, a sprawling global essay and homework cheating network run under the Nerdy brands has quietly bought its way to the top of Google searches – booking revenues of almost $25 million through a maze of companies in Cyprus, Malta and Hong Kong, while pitching “tutoring” that delivers finished work that students can turn in.
When one Nerdy-related Google Ads account got shut down, the group behind the company would form a new entity with a front-person (typically a young Ukrainian woman), start a new ads account along with a new website and domain name (usually with “nerdy” in the brand), and resume running Google ads for the same set of keywords.
UK companies belonging to the group that have been shut down by Google Ads since Jan 2025 include:
–Proglobal Solutions LTD (advertised nerdifyit[.]com);
–AW Tech Limited (advertised thenerdify[.]com);
–Geekly Solutions Ltd (advertised geekly-hub[.]com).
Currently active Google Ads accounts for the Nerdify brands include:
-OK Marketing LTD (advertising geekly-hub[.]net), formed in the name of Olha Karpenko, a young Ukrainian woman;
–Two Sigma Solutions LTD (advertising litero[.]ai), formed in the name of Olekszij (Alexey) Pokatilo.
Google’s Ads Transparency page for current Nerdify advertiser OK Marketing LTD.
Mr. Pokatilo has been in the essay-writing business since at least 2009, operating a paper-mill enterprise called Livingston Research alongside Alexander Korsukov, who is listed as an owner. According to a lengthy account from a former employee, Livingston Research mainly farmed its writing tasks out to low-cost workers from Kenya, Philippines, Pakistan, Russia and Ukraine.
Pokatilo moved from Ukraine to the United Kingdom in Sept. 2015 and co-founded a company called Awesome Technologies, which pitched itself as a way for people to outsource tasks by sending a text message to the service’s assistants.
The other co-founder of Awesome Technologies is 36-year-old Filip Perkon, a Swedish man living in London who touts himself as a serial entrepreneur and investor. Years before starting Awesome together, Perkon and Pokatilo co-founded a student group called Russian Business Week while the two were classmates at the London School of Economics. According to the Bulgarian investigative journalist Christo Grozev, Perkon’s birth certificate was issued by the Soviet Embassy in Sweden.
Alexey Pokatilo (left) and Filip Perkon at a Facebook event for startups in San Francisco in mid-2015.
Around the time Perkon and Pokatilo launched Awesome Technologies, Perkon was building a social media propaganda tool called the Russian Diplomatic Online Club, which Perkon said would “turbo-charge” Russian messaging online. The club’s newsletter urged subscribers to install in their Twitter accounts a third-party app called Tweetsquad that would retweet Kremlin messaging on the social media platform.
Perkon was praised by the Russian Embassy in London for his efforts: During the contentious Brexit vote that ultimately led to the United Kingdom leaving the European Union, the Russian embassy in London used this spam tweeting tool to auto-retweet the Russian ambassador’s posts from supporters’ accounts.
Neither Mr. Perkon nor Mr. Pokatilo replied to requests for comment.
A review of corporations tied to Mr. Perkon as indexed by the business research service North Data finds he holds or held director positions in several U.K. subsidiaries of Synergy University, Russia’s largest private education provider. Synergy has more than 35,000 students, and sells T-shirts with patriotic slogans such as “Crimea is Ours,” and “The Russian Empire — Reloaded.”
The president of Synergy University is Vadim Lobov, a Kremlin insider whose headquarters on the outskirts of Moscow reportedly features a wall-sized portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the pop-art style of Andy Warhol. For a number of years, Lobov and Perkon co-produced a cross-cultural event in the U.K. called Russian Film Week.
Synergy President Vadim Lobov and Filip Perkon, speaking at a press conference for Russian Film Week, a cross-cultural event in the U.K. co-produced by both men.
Mr. Lobov was one of 11 individuals reportedly hand-picked by the convicted Russian spy Marina Butina to attend the 2017 National Prayer Breakfast held in Washington D.C. just two weeks after President Trump’s first inauguration.
While Synergy University promotes itself as Russia’s largest private educational institution, hundreds of international students tell a different story. Online reviews from students paint a picture of unkept promises: Prospective students from Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and other nations paying thousands in advance fees for promised study visas to Russia, only to have their applications denied with no refunds offered.
“My experience with Synergy University has been nothing short of heartbreaking,” reads one such account. “When I first discovered the school, their representative was extremely responsive and eager to assist. He communicated frequently and made me believe I was in safe hands. However, after paying my hard-earned tuition fees, my visa was denied. It’s been over 9 months since that denial, and despite their promises, I have received no refund whatsoever. My messages are now ignored, and the same representative who once replied instantly no longer responds at all. Synergy University, how can an institution in Europe feel comfortable exploiting the hopes of Africans who trust you with their life savings? This is not just unethical — it’s predatory.”
This pattern repeats across reviews by multilingual students from Pakistan, Nepal, India, and various African nations — all describing the same scheme: Attractive online marketing, promises of easy visa approval, upfront payment requirements, and then silence after visa denials.
Reddit discussions in r/Moscow and r/AskARussian are filled with warnings. “It’s a scam, a diploma mill,” writes one user. “They literally sell exams. There was an investigation on Rossiya-1 television showing students paying to pass tests.”
The Nerdify website’s “About Us” page says the company was co-founded by Pokatilo and an American named Brian Mellor. The latter identity seems to have been fabricated, or at least there is no evidence that a person with this name ever worked at Nerdify.
Rather, it appears that the SMS assistance company co-founded by Messrs. Pokatilo and Perkon (Awesome Technologies) fizzled out shortly after its creation, and that Nerdify soon adopted the process of accepting assignment requests via text message and routing them to freelance writers.
A closer look at an early “About Us” page for Nerdify in The Wayback Machine suggests that Mr. Perkon was the real co-founder of the company: The photo at the top of the page shows four people wearing Nerdify T-shirts seated around a table on a rooftop deck in San Francisco, and the man facing the camera is Perkon.
Filip Perkon, top right, is pictured wearing a Nerdify T-shirt in an archived copy of the company’s About Us page. Image: archive.org.
Where are they now? Pokatilo is currently running a startup called Litero.Ai, which appears to be an AI-based essay writing service. In July 2025, Mr. Pokatilo received pre-seed funding of $800,000 for Litero from an investment program backed by the venture capital firms AltaIR Capital, Yellow Rocks, Smart Partnership Capital, and I2BF Global Ventures.
Meanwhile, Filip Perkon is busy setting up toy rubber duck stores in Miami and in at least three locations in the United Kingdom. These “Duck World” shops market themselves as “the world’s largest duck store.”
This past week, Mr. Lobov was in India with Putin’s entourage on a charm tour with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Although Synergy is billed as an educational institution, a review of the company’s sprawling corporate footprint (via DNS) shows it also is assisting the Russian government in its war against Ukraine.
Synergy University President Vadim Lobov (right) pictured this week in India next to Natalia Popova, a Russian TV presenter known for her close ties to Putin’s family, particularly Putin’s daughter, who works with Popova at the education and culture-focused Innopraktika Foundation.
The website bpla.synergy[.]bot, for instance, says the company is involved in developing combat drones to aid Russian forces and to evade international sanctions on the supply and re-export of high-tech products.
A screenshot from the website of synergy,bot shows the company is actively engaged in building armed drones for the war in Ukraine.
KrebsOnSecurity would like to thank the anonymous researcher NatInfoSec for their assistance in this investigation.
Update, Dec. 8, 10:06 a.m. ET: Mr. Pokatilo responded to requests for comment after the publication of this story. Pokatilo said he has no relation to Synergy nor to Mr. Lobov, and that his work with Mr. Perkon ended with the dissolution of Awesome Technologies.
“I have had no involvement in any of his projects and business activities mentioned in the article and he has no involvement in Litero.ai,” Pokatilo said of Perkon.
Mr. Pokatilo said his new company Litero “does not provide contract cheating services and is built specifically to improve transparency and academic integrity in the age of universal use of AI by students.”
“I am Ukrainian,” he said in an email. “My close friends, colleagues, and some family members continue to live in Ukraine under the ongoing invasion. Any suggestion that I or my company may be connected in any way to Russia’s war efforts is deeply offensive on a personal level and harmful to the reputation of Litero.ai, a company where many team members are Ukrainian.”
Update, Dec. 11, 12:07 p.m. ET: Mr. Perkon responded to requests for comment after the publication of this story. Perkon said the photo of him in a Nerdify T-shirt (see screenshot above) was taken after a startup event in San Francisco, where he volunteered to act as a photo model to help friends with their project.
“I have no business or other relations to Nerdify or any other ventures in that space,” Mr. Perkon said in an email response. “As for Vadim Lobov, I worked for Venture Capital arm at Synergy until 2013 as well as his business school project in the UK, that didn’t get off the ground, so the company related to this was made dormant. Then Synergy kindly provided sponsorship for my Russian Film Week event that I created and ran until 2022 in the U.K., an event that became the biggest independent Russian film festival outside of Russia. Since the start of the Ukraine war in 2022 I closed the festival down.”
“I have had no business with Vadim Lobov since 2021 (the last film festival) and I don’t keep track of his endeavours,” Perkon continued. “As for Alexey Pokatilo, we are university friends. Our business relationship has ended after the concierge service Awesome Technologies didn’t work out, many years ago.”
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China-based phishing groups blamed for non-stop scam SMS messages about a supposed wayward package or unpaid toll fee are promoting a new offering, just in time for the holiday shopping season: Phishing kits for mass-creating fake but convincing e-commerce websites that convert customer payment card data into mobile wallets from Apple and Google. Experts say these same phishing groups also are now using SMS lures that promise unclaimed tax refunds and mobile rewards points.
Over the past week, thousands of domain names were registered for scam websites that purport to offer T-Mobile customers the opportunity to claim a large number of rewards points. The phishing domains are being promoted by scam messages sent via Apple’s iMessage service or the functionally equivalent RCS messaging service built into Google phones.
An instant message spoofing T-Mobile says the recipient is eligible to claim thousands of rewards points.
The website scanning service urlscan.io shows thousands of these phishing domains have been deployed in just the past few days alone. The phishing websites will only load if the recipient visits with a mobile device, and they ask for the visitor’s name, address, phone number and payment card data to claim the points.
A phishing website registered this week that spoofs T-Mobile.
If card data is submitted, the site will then prompt the user to share a one-time code sent via SMS by their financial institution. In reality, the bank is sending the code because the fraudsters have just attempted to enroll the victim’s phished card details in a mobile wallet from Apple or Google. If the victim also provides that one-time code, the phishers can then link the victim’s card to a mobile device that they physically control.
Pivoting off these T-Mobile phishing domains in urlscan.io reveals a similar scam targeting AT&T customers:
An SMS phishing or “smishing” website targeting AT&T users.
Ford Merrill works in security research at SecAlliance, a CSIS Security Group company. Merrill said multiple China-based cybercriminal groups that sell phishing-as-a-service platforms have been using the mobile points lure for some time, but the scam has only recently been pointed at consumers in the United States.
“These points redemption schemes have not been very popular in the U.S., but have been in other geographies like EU and Asia for a while now,” Merrill said.
A review of other domains flagged by urlscan.io as tied to this Chinese SMS phishing syndicate shows they are also spoofing U.S. state tax authorities, telling recipients they have an unclaimed tax refund. Again, the goal is to phish the user’s payment card information and one-time code.
A text message that spoofs the District of Columbia’s Office of Tax and Revenue.
Many SMS phishing or “smishing” domains are quickly flagged by browser makers as malicious. But Merrill said one burgeoning area of growth for these phishing kits — fake e-commerce shops — can be far harder to spot because they do not call attention to themselves by spamming the entire world.
Merrill said the same Chinese phishing kits used to blast out package redelivery message scams are equipped with modules that make it simple to quickly deploy a fleet of fake but convincing e-commerce storefronts. Those phony stores are typically advertised on Google and Facebook, and consumers usually end up at them by searching online for deals on specific products.
A machine-translated screenshot of an ad from a China-based phishing group promoting their fake e-commerce shop templates.
With these fake e-commerce stores, the customer is supplying their payment card and personal information as part of the normal check-out process, which is then punctuated by a request for a one-time code sent by your financial institution. The fake shopping site claims the code is required by the user’s bank to verify the transaction, but it is sent to the user because the scammers immediately attempt to enroll the supplied card data in a mobile wallet.
According to Merrill, it is only during the check-out process that these fake shops will fetch the malicious code that gives them away as fraudulent, which tends to make it difficult to locate these stores simply by mass-scanning the web. Also, most customers who pay for products through these sites don’t realize they’ve been snookered until weeks later when the purchased item fails to arrive.
“The fake e-commerce sites are tough because a lot of them can fly under the radar,” Merrill said. “They can go months without being shut down, they’re hard to discover, and they generally don’t get flagged by safe browsing tools.”
Happily, reporting these SMS phishing lures and websites is one of the fastest ways to get them properly identified and shut down. Raymond Dijkxhoorn is the CEO and a founding member of SURBL, a widely-used blocklist that flags domains and IP addresses known to be used in unsolicited messages, phishing and malware distribution. SURBL has created a website called smishreport.com that asks users to forward a screenshot of any smishing message(s) received.
“If [a domain is] unlisted, we can find and add the new pattern and kill the rest” of the matching domains, Dijkxhoorn said. “Just make a screenshot and upload. The tool does the rest.”
The SMS phishing reporting site smishreport.com.
Merrill said the last few weeks of the calendar year typically see a big uptick in smishing — particularly package redelivery schemes that spoof the U.S. Postal Service or commercial shipping companies.
“Every holiday season there is an explosion in smishing activity,” he said. “Everyone is in a bigger hurry, frantically shopping online, paying less attention than they should, and they’re just in a better mindset to get phished.”
As we can see, adopting a shopping strategy of simply buying from the online merchant with the lowest advertised prices can be a bit like playing Russian Roulette with your wallet. Even people who shop mainly at big-name online stores can get scammed if they’re not wary of too-good-to-be-true offers (think third-party sellers on these platforms).
If you don’t know much about the online merchant that has the item you wish to buy, take a few minutes to investigate its reputation. If you’re buying from an online store that is brand new, the risk that you will get scammed increases significantly. How do you know the lifespan of a site selling that must-have gadget at the lowest price? One easy way to get a quick idea is to run a basic WHOIS search on the site’s domain name. The more recent the site’s “created” date, the more likely it is a phantom store.
If you receive a message warning about a problem with an order or shipment, visit the e-commerce or shipping site directly, and avoid clicking on links or attachments — particularly missives that warn of some dire consequences unless you act quickly. Phishers and malware purveyors typically seize upon some kind of emergency to create a false alarm that often causes recipients to temporarily let their guard down.
But it’s not just outright scammers who can trip up your holiday shopping: Often times, items that are advertised at steeper discounts than other online stores make up for it by charging way more than normal for shipping and handling.
So be careful what you agree to: Check to make sure you know how long the item will take to be shipped, and that you understand the store’s return policies. Also, keep an eye out for hidden surcharges, and be wary of blithely clicking “ok” during the checkout process.
Most importantly, keep a close eye on your monthly statements. If I were a fraudster, I’d most definitely wait until the holidays to cram through a bunch of unauthorized charges on stolen cards, so that the bogus purchases would get buried amid a flurry of other legitimate transactions. That’s why it’s key to closely review your credit card bill and to quickly dispute any charges you didn’t authorize.
Unfortunately in today’s world, scammers are coming at us from all angles to trick us to get us to part with our hard-earned money. We all need to be vigilant in protecting ourselves online. If you aren’t paying attention, even if you know what to look for, they can get you. There are numerous ways to detect fake sites or emails, phishing, and other scams.
Before we delve into the signs of fake websites, we will first take a closer look at the common types of scam that use websites, what happens when you accidentally access a fake website, and what you can do in case you unknowingly purchased items from it.
Fake or scam websites are fraudulent sites that look legitimate while secretly attempting to steal your personal information, money, or account access.
These deceptive platforms masquerade as trustworthy businesses or organizations, sending urgent messages such as popular shopping websites offering fantastic limited-time deals, banking websites requesting immediate account verification, government portals claiming you owe taxes or are eligible for refunds, and shipping companies asking for delivery fees.
The urgency aims to trick you into logging in and sharing sensitive details—credit card numbers, Social Security information, login credentials, and personal data. Once you submit your data, the scammers will steal your identity, drain your accounts, or sell your details to other criminals on the dark web.
These scam websites have become increasingly prevalent because they’re relatively inexpensive to create and can reach millions of potential victims quickly through email and text campaigns, social media ads, and search engine manipulation.
Cybersecurity researchers and consumer protection agencies discover these fraudulent sites through various methods, including monitoring suspicious domain registrations, analyzing reported phishing attempts, and tracking unusual web traffic patterns. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, losses from cyber-enabled fraud amounted to $13.7 billion, with fake websites representing a significant portion of these losses.
Visiting a fake website, accidentally or intentionally, can expose you to several serious security risks that can impact your digital life and financial well-being:
Scammers use different tricks to make fake websites look real, but most of them fall into familiar patterns. Knowing the main types of scam sites helps you recognize danger faster. This section lists the most common categories of scam websites, how they work, and the red flags that give them away before they can steal your information or money.
Understanding these common scam types helps you recognize fake sites before they can steal your information or money. When in doubt, verify legitimacy by visiting official websites directly through bookmarks or search engines rather than clicking suspicious links.
For the latest warnings and protection guidance, check resources from the Federal Trade Commission and the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.
You can protect yourself by learning to recognize the warning signs of fake sites. By understanding what these scams look like and how they operate, you’ll be better equipped to shop, bank, and browse online with confidence. Remember, legitimate companies will never pressure you to provide sensitive information through unsolicited emails or urgent pop-up messages.
Most scams usually start out from social engineering tactics such as phishing, smishing, and fake social media messages with suspicious links, before leading you to a fake website.
From these communications, the scammers impersonate legitimate organizations before finally executing their malevolent intentions. To avoid being tricked, it is essential to recognize the warning signs wherever you encounter them.
Fake emails are among the most common phishing attempts you’ll encounter. If you see any of these signs in an unsolicited email, it is best not to engage:
Smishing messages bear the same signs as phishing emails and have become increasingly sophisticated. These fake messages often appear to come from delivery services, banks, or government agencies. Common tactics include fake package delivery notifications, urgent banking alerts, or messages claiming you’ve won prizes or need to verify account information.
Legitimate organizations typically don’t include clickable links in unsolicited text messages, especially for account-related actions. When in doubt, don’t click the link—instead, open your banking app directly or visit the official website by typing the URL manually.
Social media platforms give scammers new opportunities to create convincing fake profiles and pages. They might impersonate customer service accounts, create fake giveaways, or send direct messages requesting personal information. These fake sites often use profile pictures and branding that closely resemble legitimate companies.
Unusual sender behavior is another indicator of a scam across all platforms. This includes messages from contacts you haven’t heard from in years, communications from brands you don’t typically interact with, or requests that seem out of character for the supposed sender.
Scammers have become increasingly cunning in creating fake websites that closely mimic legitimate businesses and services. Here are some real-life examples of how cybercriminals use fake websites to victimize consumers:
Scammers exploit your trust in the United States Postal Service (USPS), designing sophisticated fake websites to steal your personal information, payment details, or money. They know you’re expecting a package or need to resolve a delivery issue, making you more likely to enter sensitive information without carefully verifying the site’s authenticity.
USPS-themed smishing attacks arrive as text messages stating your package is delayed, undeliverable, or requires immediate action. Common phrases include “Pay $1.99 to reschedule delivery” or “Your package is held – click here to release.”
Scammers use various URL manipulation techniques to make their fake sites appear official. Watch for these red flags:
Always verify package information and delivery issues through official USPS channels before taking any action on suspicious websites or messages:
Reporting fake USPS websites helps protect others from falling victim to these scams and assists law enforcement in tracking down perpetrators.
Remember that legitimate USPS services are free for standard delivery confirmation and tracking. Any website demanding payment for basic package tracking or delivery should be treated as suspicious and verified through official USPS channels before providing any personal or financial information.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, tech support scams cost Americans nearly $1.5 billion in 2024. These types of social engineering attacks are increasingly becoming sophisticated, making it more important than ever to verify security alerts through official channels.
Sadly, many scammers are misusing the McAfee name to create fake tech support pop-up scams and trick you into believing your computer is infected or your protection has expired and hoping you’ll act without thinking.
These pop-ups typically appear while you’re browsing and claim your computer is severely infected with viruses, malware, or other threats. They use official-looking McAfee logos, colors, and messaging to appear legitimate to get you to call a fake support number, download malicious software, or pay for unnecessary services.
Learning to detect fake sites and pop-ups protects you from scam. Be on the lookout for these warning signs:
If you see a suspicious pop-up claiming to be from McAfee, here’s exactly what you should do:
To check if your McAfee protection is genuinely active and up-to-date:
Remember, legitimate McAfee software updates and notifications come through the installed program itself, not through random browser pop-ups. Your actual McAfee protection works quietly in the background without bombarding you with alarming messages.
Stay protected by trusting your installed McAfee software and always verifying security alerts through official McAfee channels such as your installed McAfee dashboard or the official website.
Be prepared and know how to respond quickly when something doesn’t feel right. If you suspect you’ve encountered a fake website, trust your instincts and take these protective steps immediately.
Recognizing fake sites and emails becomes easier with practice. The key is to trust your instincts—if something feels suspicious or too good to be true, take a moment to verify through official channels. With the simple verification techniques covered in this guide, you can confidently navigate the digital world and spot fake sites and emails before they cause harm.
Your best defense is to make these quick security checks a regular habit—verify URLs, look for secure connections, and trust your instincts when something feels off. Go directly to the source or bookmark your most-used services and always navigate to them. Enable two-factor authentication on important accounts, and remember that legitimate companies will never ask for sensitive information via email. Maintaining healthy skepticism about unsolicited communications will protect not only your personal information but also help create a safer online environment for everyone.
For the latest information on fake websites and scams and to report them, visit the Federal Trade Commission’s scam alerts or the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.
The post Ways to Tell if a Website Is Fake appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Normally, when someone sends feedback like this, I ignore it, but it happens often enough that it deserves an explainer, because the answer is really, really simple. So simple, in fact, that it should be evident to the likes of Bruce, who decided his misunderstanding deserved a 1-star Trustpilot review yesterday:
Now, frankly, Trustpilot is a pretty questionable source of real-world, quality reviews anyway, but the same feedback has come through other channels enough times that let's just sort this out once and for all. It all begins with one simple question:
You think you know - and Bruce thinks he knows - but you might both be wrong. To explain the answer to the question, we need to start with how HIBP ingests data, and that really is pretty simple: someone sends us a breach (which is typically just text files of data), and we run the open source Email Address Extractor tool over it, which then dumps all the unique addresses into a file. That file is then uploaded into the system, where the addresses are then searchable.
The logic for how we extract addresses is all in that Github repository, but in simple terms, it boils down to this:
That is all! We can't then tell if there's an actual mailbox behind the address, as that would require massive per-address processing, for example, sending an email to each one and seeing if it bounces. Can you imagine doing that 7 billion times?! That's the number of unique addresses in HIBP, and clearly, it's impossible. So, that means all the following were parsed as being valid and loaded into HIBP (deep links to the search result):
I particularly like that last one, as it feels like a sentiment Bruce would express. It's also a great example as it's clearly not "real"; the alias is a bit of a giveaway, as is the domain ("foo" is commonly used as a placeholder, similar to how we might also use "bar", or combine them as "foo bar"). But if you follow the link and see the breach it was exposed in, you'll see a very familiar name:
Which brings us to the next question:
This is also going to seem profoundly simple when you see it. Here goes:
Any questions, Bruce? This is just as easily explainable as why we considered it a valid address and ingested it into HIBP: the email address has a valid structure. That is all. That's how it got into Adobe, and that's how it then flowed through into HIBP.
Ah, but shouldn't Adobe verify the address? I mean, shouldn't they send an email to the address along the lines of "Hey, are you sure you want to sign up for this service?" Yes, they should, but here's the kicker: that doesn't stop the email address from being added to their database in the first place! The way this normally works (and this is what we do with HIBP when you sign up for the free notification service) is you enter the email address, the system generates a random token, and then the two are saved together in the database. A link with the token is then emailed to the address and used to verify the user if they then follow that link. And if they don't follow that link? We delete the email address if it hasn't been verified within a few days, but evidently, Adobe doesn't. Most services don't, so here we are.
This is also going to seem profoundly obvious, but genuinely random email addresses (not "thisisfuckinguseless@") won't show up in HIBP. Want to test the theory? Try 1Password's generator (yes, Bruce, they also sponsor HIBP):
Now, whack that on the foo.com domain and do a search:
Huh, would you look at that? And you can keep doing that over and over again. You’ll get the same result because they are fabricated addresses that no one else has created or entered into a website that was subsequently breached, ipso facto proving they cannot appear in the dataset.
Today is HIBP's 12th birthday, and I've taken particular issue with Bruce's review because it calls into question the integrity with which I run this service. This is now the 218th blog post I've written about HIBP, and over the last dozen years, I've detailed everything from the architecture to the ethical considerations to how I verify breaches. It's hard to imagine being any more transparent about how this service runs, and per the above, it's very simple to disprove the Bruces of the world. If you've read this far and have an accurate, fact-based review you'd like to leave, that'd be awesome 😊
The holidays are the season of giving; unfortunately, it’s also the season when scammers try to cash in on the spirit of generosity
If you’re seeing a heartfelt charity ad on social media, a touching email, or a surprise text asking you to donate, it’s worth pausing for a moment. Is it genuine charity—or a scam built to tug at your heartstrings?
The good news: staying safe doesn’t mean stopping your generosity. With a few quick checks, you can give confidently and protect yourself.
Charity fraud is when scammers pose as legitimate nonprofits—or misuse the name of a real charity—to trick people into donating money or giving away personal information.
In some cases, the organization is completely fake. In others, it’s a real charity that uses donations in misleading or unethical ways, passing very little money to the actual cause.
The first type involves flat-out fraud, where the organization is a front for a scam, through and through. Any money you give goes straight into the scammer’s pocket. As does your personal and payment info, which can lead to further fraud.
These are real, registered charities. But They keep the majority of donations for overhead instead of helping the cause.
This second type often involves questionable practices by the organization. According to the Better Business Bureau, reputable organizations keep 35% or less of their funds for operations.
Meanwhile, some less-than-reputable organizations keep up to 95% of funds, leaving only 5% for advancing the cause they advocate. (For a closer look at some examples, the independent watchdog group Charity Watch published a blog highlighting some of the worst charities they audited in 2024.)
Common to both, they’ll indeed play on your emotions, and they’ll urge you to donate now. As it is with so many scams and shady deals on the internet, you’ll find a sense of urgency central to their message.
For starters, reputable charities often have dot-org as their domain extension—versus dot-com or any one of the hundreds of permutations available today.
Charities leave a paper trail, one that can get audited. And fake ones won’t leave a trail at all. With a quick look at some reputable online resources, you can quickly find out if the charity you want to support is legit.
In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has a site full of resources so that you can make your donation truly count. Resources like Charity Watch and Charity Navigator, along with the BBB’s Wise Giving Alliance can also help you identify the best charities. You can also look up a charity’s Form 990 tax return online.
This goes hand-in-hand with the above. If you feel like you’re getting rushed to donate, it could be a sign of a scam. Step back and indeed do your research with a few clicks to the resources listed above.
This protects you in two ways. If you fall victim to a scam, you can contest the charges with your credit card company. And if a scammer tries to use your card again for other purchases, you can contest those too. Also, in the U.S., credit cards offer you additional protection that debit cards don’t. That’s thanks to the Fair Credit Billing Act (FCBA). It limits your liability to $50 for fraudulent charges on a credit card if you report the loss to your issuer within 60 days.
The following is a sure-fire red flag: requests for payment in cash, gift cards, cryptocurrency, or wire transfers. Don’t ever use these forms of payment for charities, let alone anything else online.
Better yet, donate directly. Rather than respond to calls, ads, emails or texts, donate on your terms. After you give your possible donation some time and thought, you can go directly to the website of a charitable organization that you’ve researched.
Get a scam detector. You can combine your healthy skepticism and awareness with the right technology, like our Scam Detector and Web Protection.
Both will alert you if a link you received might take you to a sketchy site. It’ll also block those sites if you accidentally tap or click on a bad link.
Clean up your personal info online. Scams over email, phone, and text all require the same thing: your contact info.
In many cases, scammers get it from data broker sites. Data brokers buy, collect, and sell detailed personal info, which they compile from several public and private sources, such as local, state, and federal records, plus third parties like supermarket shopper’s cards and mobile apps that share and sell user data.
Moreover, they’ll sell it to anyone who pays for it, including people who’ll use that info for scams. You can help reduce those scam texts and calls by removing your info from those sites. Our Personal Data Cleanup scans some of the riskiest data broker sites and shows you which ones are selling your personal info.
Monitor your identity and credit. The problem with many scams is that you only find out about it once the damage is done, like when a scammer uses your phished card number to make additional purchases in your name.
Actively monitoring your identity and credit can spot a problem before it becomes an even bigger one. You can take care of both easily with our credit monitoring and identity monitoring.
Additionally, our identity theft coverage can help if the unexpected happens with up to $2 million in identity theft coverage and identity restoration support if determined you’re a victim of identity theft.
You’ll find these protections, and plenty more, in McAfee+.
If you want to give back and help protect people from online fraud, McAfee has partnered with Fight Cyber Crime, a legitimate U.S. nonprofit dedicated to helping victims of online scams.
You might remember them from our Scam Stories partnership earlier this year, sharing real stories from real scam victims to raise awareness about threats facing us every day on and offline.
Visit their site to learn more or make a donation: https://fightcybercrime.org/about/donate/
Supporting validated charities like Fight Cyber Crime is one way to make a real impact this holiday season—without putting yourself at risk.
The post How to Spot Charity Scams and Donate Safely this Giving Season appeared first on McAfee Blog.
When it comes to online safety, independent testing matters. And in the latest AV-Comparatives Real-World Protection Test, McAfee earned the highest possible rating, ADVANCED+, with a 99.5% protection rate. It’s the kind of recognition that helps shoppers understand which tools truly hold up in real-life conditions, not just in controlled lab environments.
For anyone navigating today’s mix of emails, downloads, suspicious links, and AI-driven scams, independent results like these are a clear signal: strong protection still makes a real difference.
The Real-World Protection Test is an independent evaluation run by AV-Comparatives, a trusted third-party security testing lab. The test measures how well antivirus and online protection tools block real threats that people encounter every day, including dangerous URLs, malicious downloads, phishing pages, and harmful files attempting to run on a device.
This type of testing is widely cited by major tech publications and review sites because it reflects actual user behavior rather than controlled lab simulations.
According to AV-Comparatives, their Real-World Protection Test is designed to measure how security products perform in situations people face every day: clicking a link, opening a file, visiting a site for the first time.
It’s one of the most widely cited sources in tech journalism and consumer product reviews, and it often shapes how online shoppers evaluate cybersecurity tools.
Here’s why tests like these are used in tech reviews, buying guides, and search engine rankings:
McAfee has earned an ADVANCED+ rating in all tests since June 2022, demonstrating our consistency and reliability in the moments that matter most: when a threat appears disguised as something routine.
The latest evaluation included 19 consumer security products, each tested across the full attack chain, from the moment a malicious URL is accessed to the instant a dangerous file tries to execute.
Unlike benchmark tests that focus on one part of the process, this assessment mirrors real user behavior. AV-Comparatives notes that the methodology is meant to be “as realistic as possible,” and the results often reveal meaningful differences in both protection and false positives.
With this round of testing, McAfee maintains its cycle of highest ratings in every Real-World Protection Test, while several well-known competitors were downgraded due to high false-positive counts.
A high protection score matters most when you’re simply going about your day — shopping, banking, downloading a file, or clicking a link you think is safe. Independent recognition signals three core things:
Strong results indicate that advanced threats, misleading links, and malicious downloads are blocked before they can cause harm.
With only four false positives out of nearly 500 samples, McAfee flagged less than 1% of clean files incorrectly. For context: the industry average in this test was 10 false positives, and one competitor even misidentified 75, meaning it labeled nearly 16% of harmless activity as a threat.
The takeaway is simple: strong protection shouldn’t get in your way, and these results show it doesn’t.
Criminals now use AI to make fake emails, websites, and support messages look real. Testing that mirrors those real-world conditions helps consumers see which tools stay ahead of that curve.
McAfee’s threat protection, the same technology validated in this test, is built into McAfee+ Premium, McAfee+ Advanced, McAfee+ Ultimate, McAfee Total Protection, and McAfee LiveSafe.
McAfee’s built-in Scam Detector, included in all core plans, automatically detects scams across text, email, and video, blocks dangerous links, and identifies deepfakes—stopping harm before it happens.
The post McAfee Named ADVANCED+ in Real-World Protection — What That Means for You appeared first on McAfee Blog.
A prolific cybercriminal group that calls itself “Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters” has dominated headlines this year by regularly stealing data from and publicly mass extorting dozens of major corporations. But the tables seem to have turned somewhat for “Rey,” the moniker chosen by the technical operator and public face of the hacker group: Earlier this week, Rey confirmed his real life identity and agreed to an interview after KrebsOnSecurity tracked him down and contacted his father.
Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters (SLSH) is thought to be an amalgamation of three hacking groups — Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$ and ShinyHunters. Members of these gangs hail from many of the same chat channels on the Com, a mostly English-language cybercriminal community that operates across an ocean of Telegram and Discord servers.
In May 2025, SLSH members launched a social engineering campaign that used voice phishing to trick targets into connecting a malicious app to their organization’s Salesforce portal. The group later launched a data leak portal that threatened to publish the internal data of three dozen companies that allegedly had Salesforce data stolen, including Toyota, FedEx, Disney/Hulu, and UPS.
The new extortion website tied to ShinyHunters, which threatens to publish stolen data unless Salesforce or individual victim companies agree to pay a ransom.
Last week, the SLSH Telegram channel featured an offer to recruit and reward “insiders,” employees at large companies who agree to share internal access to their employer’s network for a share of whatever ransom payment is ultimately paid by the victim company.
SLSH has solicited insider access previously, but their latest call for disgruntled employees started making the rounds on social media at the same time news broke that the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike had fired an employee for allegedly sharing screenshots of internal systems with the hacker group (Crowdstrike said their systems were never compromised and that it has turned the matter over to law enforcement agencies).
The Telegram server for the Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters has been attempting to recruit insiders at large companies.
Members of SLSH have traditionally used other ransomware gangs’ encryptors in attacks, including malware from ransomware affiliate programs like ALPHV/BlackCat, Qilin, RansomHub, and DragonForce. But last week, SLSH announced on its Telegram channel the release of their own ransomware-as-a-service operation called ShinySp1d3r.
The individual responsible for releasing the ShinySp1d3r ransomware offering is a core SLSH member who goes by the handle “Rey” and who is currently one of just three administrators of the SLSH Telegram channel. Previously, Rey was an administrator of the data leak website for Hellcat, a ransomware group that surfaced in late 2024 and was involved in attacks on companies including Schneider Electric, Telefonica, and Orange Romania.
A recent, slightly redacted screenshot of the Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters Telegram channel description, showing Rey as one of three administrators.
Also in 2024, Rey would take over as administrator of the most recent incarnation of BreachForums, an English-language cybercrime forum whose domain names have been seized on multiple occasions by the FBI and/or by international authorities. In April 2025, Rey posted on Twitter/X about another FBI seizure of BreachForums.
On October 5, 2025, the FBI announced it had once again seized the domains associated with BreachForums, which it described as a major criminal marketplace used by ShinyHunters and others to traffic in stolen data and facilitate extortion.
“This takedown removes access to a key hub used by these actors to monetize intrusions, recruit collaborators, and target victims across multiple sectors,” the FBI said.
Incredibly, Rey would make a series of critical operational security mistakes last year that provided multiple avenues to ascertain and confirm his real-life identity and location. Read on to learn how it all unraveled for Rey.
According to the cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, Rey was an active user on various BreachForums reincarnations over the past two years, authoring more than 200 posts between February 2024 and July 2025. Intel 471 says Rey previously used the handle “Hikki-Chan” on BreachForums, where their first post shared data allegedly stolen from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
In that February 2024 post about the CDC, Hikki-Chan says they could be reached at the Telegram username @wristmug. In May 2024, @wristmug posted in a Telegram group chat called “Pantifan” a copy of an extortion email they said they received that included their email address and password.
The message that @wristmug cut and pasted appears to have been part of an automated email scam that claims it was sent by a hacker who has compromised your computer and used your webcam to record a video of you while you were watching porn. These missives threaten to release the video to all your contacts unless you pay a Bitcoin ransom, and they typically reference a real password the recipient has used previously.
“Noooooo,” the @wristmug account wrote in mock horror after posting a screenshot of the scam message. “I must be done guys.”
A message posted to Telegram by Rey/@wristmug.
In posting their screenshot, @wristmug redacted the username portion of the email address referenced in the body of the scam message. However, they did not redact their previously-used password, and they left the domain portion of their email address (@proton.me) visible in the screenshot.
Searching on @wristmug’s rather unique 15-character password in the breach tracking service Spycloud finds it is known to have been used by just one email address: cybero5tdev@proton.me. According to Spycloud, those credentials were exposed at least twice in early 2024 when this user’s device was infected with an infostealer trojan that siphoned all of its stored usernames, passwords and authentication cookies (a finding that was initially revealed in March 2025 by the cyber intelligence firm KELA).
Intel 471 shows the email address cybero5tdev@proton.me belonged to a BreachForums member who went by the username o5tdev. Searching on this nickname in Google brings up at least two website defacement archives showing that a user named o5tdev was previously involved in defacing sites with pro-Palestinian messages. The screenshot below, for example, shows that 05tdev was part of a group called Cyb3r Drag0nz Team.
Rey/o5tdev’s defacement pages. Image: archive.org.
A 2023 report from SentinelOne described Cyb3r Drag0nz Team as a hacktivist group with a history of launching DDoS attacks and cyber defacements as well as engaging in data leak activity.
“Cyb3r Drag0nz Team claims to have leaked data on over a million of Israeli citizens spread across multiple leaks,” SentinelOne reported. “To date, the group has released multiple .RAR archives of purported personal information on citizens across Israel.”
The cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint finds the Telegram user @05tdev was active in 2023 and early 2024, posting in Arabic on anti-Israel channels like “Ghost of Palestine” [full disclosure: Flashpoint is currently an advertiser on this blog].
Flashpoint shows that Rey’s Telegram account (ID7047194296) was particularly active in a cybercrime-focused channel called Jacuzzi, where this user shared several personal details, including that their father was an airline pilot. Rey claimed in 2024 to be 15 years old, and to have family connections to Ireland.
Specifically, Rey mentioned in several Telegram chats that he had Irish heritage, even posting a graphic that shows the prevalence of the surname “Ginty.”
Rey, on Telegram claiming to have association to the surname “Ginty.” Image: Flashpoint.
Spycloud indexed hundreds of credentials stolen from cybero5dev@proton.me, and those details indicate that Rey’s computer is a shared Microsoft Windows device located in Amman, Jordan. The credential data stolen from Rey in early 2024 show there are multiple users of the infected PC, but that all shared the same last name of Khader and an address in Amman, Jordan.
The “autofill” data lifted from Rey’s family PC contains an entry for a 46-year-old Zaid Khader that says his mother’s maiden name was Ginty. The infostealer data also shows Zaid Khader frequently accessed internal websites for employees of Royal Jordanian Airlines.
The infostealer data makes clear that Rey’s full name is Saif Al-Din Khader. Having no luck contacting Saif directly, KrebsOnSecurity sent an email to his father Zaid. The message invited the father to respond via email, phone or Signal, explaining that his son appeared to be deeply enmeshed in a serious cybercrime conspiracy.
Less than two hours later, I received a Signal message from Saif, who said his dad suspected the email was a scam and had forwarded it to him.
“I saw your email, unfortunately I don’t think my dad would respond to this because they think its some ‘scam email,'” said Saif, who told me he turns 16 years old next month. “So I decided to talk to you directly.”
Saif explained that he’d already heard from European law enforcement officials, and had been trying to extricate himself from SLSH. When asked why then he was involved in releasing SLSH’s new ShinySp1d3r ransomware-as-a-service offering, Saif said he couldn’t just suddenly quit the group.
“Well I cant just dip like that, I’m trying to clean up everything I’m associated with and move on,” he said.
The former Hellcat ransomware site. Image: Kelacyber.com
He also shared that ShinySp1d3r is just a rehash of Hellcat ransomware, except modified with AI tools. “I gave the source code of Hellcat ransomware out basically.”
Saif claims he reached out on his own recently to the Telegram account for Operation Endgame, the codename for an ongoing law enforcement operation targeting cybercrime services, vendors and their customers.
“I’m already cooperating with law enforcement,” Saif said. “In fact, I have been talking to them since at least June. I have told them nearly everything. I haven’t really done anything like breaching into a corp or extortion related since September.”
Saif suggested that a story about him right now could endanger any further cooperation he may be able to provide. He also said he wasn’t sure if the U.S. or European authorities had been in contact with the Jordanian government about his involvement with the hacking group.
“A story would bring so much unwanted heat and would make things very difficult if I’m going to cooperate,” Saif said. “I’m unsure whats going to happen they said they’re in contact with multiple countries regarding my request but its been like an entire week and I got no updates from them.”
Saif shared a screenshot that indicated he’d contacted Europol authorities late last month. But he couldn’t name any law enforcement officials he said were responding to his inquiries, and KrebsOnSecurity was unable to verify his claims.
“I don’t really care I just want to move on from all this stuff even if its going to be prison time or whatever they gonna say,” Saif said.
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