Pakistani Firm Shipped Fentanyl Analogs, Scams to US

A Texas firm recently charged with conspiring to distribute synthetic opioids in the United States is at the center of a vast network of companies in the U.S. and Pakistan whose employees are accused of using online ads to scam westerners seeking help with trademarks, book writing, mobile app development and logo designs, a new investigation reveals.

In an indictment (PDF) unsealed last month, the U.S. Department of Justice said Dallas-based eWorldTrade “operated an online business-to-business marketplace that facilitated the distribution of synthetic opioids such as isotonitazene and carfentanyl, both significantly more potent than fentanyl.”

Launched in 2017, eWorldTrade[.]com now features a seizure notice from the DOJ. eWorldTrade operated as a wholesale seller of consumer goods, including clothes, machinery, chemicals, automobiles and appliances. The DOJ’s indictment includes no additional details about eWorldTrade’s business, origins or other activity, and at first glance the website might appear to be a legitimate e-commerce platform that also just happened to sell some restricted chemicals

However, an investigation into the company’s founders reveals they are connected to a sprawling network of websites that have a history of extortionate scams involving trademark registration, book publishing, exam preparation, and the design of logos, mobile applications and websites.

Records from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) show the eWorldTrade mark is owned by an Azneem Bilwani in Karachi (this name also is in the registration records for the now-seized eWorldTrade domain). Mr. Bilwani is perhaps better known as the director of the Pakistan-based IT provider Abtach Ltd., which has been singled out by the USPTO and Google for operating trademark registration scams (the main offices for eWorldtrade and Abtach share the same address in Pakistan).

In November 2021, the USPTO accused Abtach of perpetrating “an egregious scheme to deceive and defraud applicants for federal trademark registrations by improperly altering official USPTO correspondence, overcharging application filing fees, misappropriating the USPTO’s trademarks, and impersonating the USPTO.”

Abtach offered trademark registration at suspiciously low prices compared to legitimate costs of over USD $1,500, and claimed they could register a trademark in 24 hours. Abtach reportedly rebranded to Intersys Limited after the USPTO banned Abtach from filing any more trademark applications.

FROM AXACT TO ABTACH

Many of Abtach’s employees are former associates of a similar company in Pakistan called Axact that was targeted by Pakistani authorities in a 2015 fraud investigation. Axact came under law enforcement scrutiny after The New York Times ran a front-page story about the company’s most lucrative scam business: Hundreds of sites peddling fake college degrees and diplomas.

People who purchased fake certifications were subsequently blackmailed by Axact employees posing as government officials, who would demand additional payments under threats of prosecution or imprisonment for having bought fraudulent “unauthorized” academic degrees. This practice created a continuous cycle of extortion, internally referred to as “upselling.”

“Axact took money from at least 215,000 people in 197 countries — one-third of them from the United States,” The Times reported. “Sales agents wielded threats and false promises and impersonated government officials, earning the company at least $89 million in its final year of operation.”

Dozens of top Axact employees were arrested, jailed, held for months, tried and sentenced to seven years for various fraud violations. But a 2019 research brief on Axact’s diploma mills found none of those convicted had started their prison sentence, and that several had fled Pakistan and never returned.

“In October 2016, a Pakistan district judge acquitted 24 Axact officials at trial due to ‘not enough evidence’ and then later admitted he had accepted a bribe (of $35,209) from Axact,” reads a history (PDF) published by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

In 2021, Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) charged Bilwani and nearly four dozen others — many of them Abtach employees — with running an elaborate trademark scam. The authorities called it “the biggest money laundering case in the history of Pakistan,” and named a number of businesses based in Texas that allegedly helped move the proceeds of cybercrime.

The FIA said the defendants operated a large number of websites offering low-cost trademark services to customers, before then “ignoring them after getting the funds and later demanding more funds from clients/victims in the name of up-sale (extortion).” The Pakistani law enforcement agency said that about 75 percent of customers received fake or fabricated trademarks as a result of the scams.

The FIA found Abtach operates in conjunction with a Karachi firm called Digitonics Labs, which earned a monthly revenue of around $2.5 million through the “extortion of international clients in the name of up-selling, the sale of fake/fabricated USPTO certificates, and the maintaining of phishing websites.”

According the Pakistani authorities, the accused also ran countless scams involving ebook publication and logo creation, wherein customers are subjected to advance-fee fraud and extortion — with the scammers demanding more money for supposed “copyright release” and threatening to release the trademark.

Also charged by the FIA was Junaid Mansoor, the owner of Digitonics Labs in Karachi. Mansoor’s U.K.-registered company Maple Solutions Direct Limited has run at least 700 ads for logo design websites since 2015, the Google Ads Transparency page reports. The company has approximately 88 ads running on Google as of today. 

Mr. Mansoor is actively involved with and promoting a Quran study business called quranmasteronline[.]com, which was founded by Junaid’s brother Qasim Mansoor (Qasim is also named in the FIA criminal investigation). The Google ads promoting quranmasteronline[.]com were paid for by the same account advertising a number of scam websites selling logo and web design services. 

Junaid Mansoor did not respond to requests for comment. An address in Teaneck, New Jersey where Mr. Mansoor previously lived is listed as an official address of exporthub[.]com, a Pakistan-based e-commerce website that appears remarkably similar to eWorldTrade (Exporthub says its offices are in Texas). Interestingly, a search in Google for this domain shows ExportHub currently features multiple listings for fentanyl citrate from suppliers in China and elsewhere.

The CEO of Digitonics Labs is Muhammad Burhan Mirza, a former Axact official who was arrested by the FIA as part of its money laundering and trademark fraud investigation in 2021. In 2023, prosecutors in Pakistan charged Mirza, Mansoor and 14 other Digitonics employees with fraud, impersonating government officials, phishing, cheating and extortion. Mirza’s LinkedIn profile says he currently runs an educational technology/life coach enterprise called TheCoach360, which purports to help young kids “achieve financial independence.”

Reached via LinkedIn, Mr. Mirza denied having anything to do with eWorldTrade or any of its sister companies in Texas.

“Moreover, I have no knowledge as to the companies you have mentioned,” said Mr. Mirza, who did not respond to follow-up questions.

The current disposition of the FIA’s fraud case against the defendants is unclear. The investigation was marred early on by allegations of corruption and bribery. In 2021, Pakistani authorities alleged Bilwani paid a six-figure bribe to FIA investigators. Meanwhile, attorneys for Mr. Bilwani have argued that although their client did pay a bribe, the payment was solicited by government officials. Mr. Bilwani did not respond to requests for comment.

THE TEXAS NEXUS

KrebsOnSecurity has learned that the people and entities at the center of the FIA investigations have built a significant presence in the United States, with a strong concentration in Texas. The Texas businesses promote websites that sell logo and web design, ghostwriting, and academic cheating services. Many of these entities have recently been sued for fraud and breach of contract by angry former customers, who claimed the companies relentlessly upsold them while failing to produce the work as promised.

For example, the FIA complaints named Retrocube LLC and 360 Digital Marketing LLC, two entities that share a street address with eWorldTrade: 1910 Pacific Avenue, Suite 8025, Dallas, Texas. Also incorporated at that Pacific Avenue address is abtach[.]ae, a web design and marketing firm based in Dubai; and intersyslimited[.]com, the new name of Abtach after they were banned by the USPTO. Other businesses registered at this address market services for logo design, mobile app development, and ghostwriting.

360 Digital Marketing’s website 360digimarketing[.]com is owned by an Abtach front company called Abtech LTD. Meanwhile, business records show 360 Digi Marketing LTD is a U.K. company whose officers include former Abtach director Bilwani; Muhammad Saad Iqbal, formerly Abtach, now CEO of Intersys Ltd; Niaz Ahmed, a former Abtach associate; and Muhammad Salman Yousuf, formerly a vice president at Axact, Abtach, and Digitonics Labs.

Google’s Ads Transparency Center finds 360 Digital Marketing LLC ran at least 500 ads promoting various websites selling ghostwriting services . Another entity tied to Junaid Mansoor — a company called Octa Group Technologies AU — has run approximately 300 Google ads for book publishing services, promoting confusingly named websites like amazonlistinghub[.]com and barnesnoblepublishing[.]co.

Rameez Moiz is a Texas resident and former Abtach product manager who has represented 360 Digital Marketing LLC and RetroCube. Moiz told KrebsOnSecurity he stopped working for 360 Digital Marketing in the summer of 2023. Mr. Moiz did not respond to follow-up questions, but an Upwork profile for him states that as of April 2025 he is employed by Dallas-based Vertical Minds LLC.

In April 2025, California resident Melinda Will sued the Texas firm Majestic Ghostwriting — which is doing business as ghostwritingsquad[.]com —  alleging they scammed her out of $100,000 after she hired them to help write her book. Google’s ad transparency page shows Moiz’s employer Vertical Minds LLC paid to run approximately 55 ads for ghostwritingsquad[.]com and related sites.

VICTIMS SPEAK OUT

Ms. Will’s lawsuit is just one of more than two dozen complaints over the past four years wherein plaintiffs sued one of this group’s web design, wiki editing or ghostwriting services. In 2021, a New Jersey man sued Octagroup Technologies, alleging they ripped him off when he paid a total of more than $26,000 for the design and marketing of a web-based mapping service.

The plaintiff in that case did not respond to requests for comment, but his complaint alleges Octagroup and a myriad other companies it contracted with produced minimal work product despite subjecting him to relentless upselling. That case was decided in favor of the plaintiff because the defendants never contested the matter in court.

In 2023, 360 Digital Marketing LLC and Retrocube LLC were sued by a woman who said they scammed her out of $40,000 over a book she wanted help writing. That lawsuit helpfully showed an image of the office front door at 1910 Pacific Ave Suite 8025, which featured the logos of 360 Digital Marketing, Retrocube, and eWorldTrade.

The lawsuit was filed pro se by Leigh Riley, a 64-year-old career IT professional who paid 360 Digital Marketing to have a company called Talented Ghostwriter co-author and promote a series of books she’d outlined on spirituality and healing.

“The main reason I hired them was because I didn’t understand what I call the formula for writing a book, and I know there’s a lot of marketing that goes into publishing,” Riley explained in an interview. “I know nothing about that stuff, and these guys were convincing that they could handle all aspects of it. Until I discovered they couldn’t write a damn sentence in English properly.”

Riley’s well-documented lawsuit (not linked here because it features a great deal of personal information) includes screenshots of conversations with the ghostwriting team, which was constantly assigning her to new writers and editors, and ghosting her on scheduled conference calls about progress on the project. Riley said she ended up writing most of the book herself because the work they produced was unusable.

“Finally after months of promising the books were printed and on their way, they show up at my doorstep with the wrong title on the book,” Riley said. When she demanded her money back, she said the people helping her with the website to promote the book locked her out of the site.

Riley decided to sue, naming 360 Digital Marketing LLC and Retrocube LLC, among others.  The companies offered to settle the matter for $20,000, which she accepted. “I didn’t have money to hire a lawyer, and I figured it was time to cut my losses,” she said.

Riley said she could have saved herself a great deal of headache by doing some basic research on Talented Ghostwriter, whose website claims the company is based in Los Angeles. According to the California Secretary of State, however, there is no registered entity by that name. Rather, the address claimed by talentedghostwriter[.]com is a vacant office building with a “space available” sign in the window.

California resident Walter Horsting discovered something similar when he sued 360 Digital Marketing in small claims court last year, after hiring a company called Vox Ghostwriting to help write, edit and promote a spy novel he’d been working on. Horsting said he paid Vox $3,300 to ghostwrite a 280-page book, and was upsold an Amazon marketing and publishing package for $7,500.

In an interview, Horsting said the prose that Vox Ghostwriting produced was “juvenile at best,” forcing him to rewrite and edit the work himself, and to partner with a graphical artist to produce illustrations. Horsting said that when it came time to begin marketing the novel, Vox Ghostwriting tried to further upsell him on marketing packages, while dodging scheduled meetings with no follow-up.

“They have a money back guarantee, and when they wouldn’t refund my money I said I’m taking you to court,” Horsting recounted. “I tried to serve them in Los Angeles but found no such office exists. I talked to a salon next door and they said someone else had recently shown up desperately looking for where the ghostwriting company went, and it appears there are a trail of corpses on this. I finally tracked down where they are in Texas.”

It was the same office that Ms. Riley served her lawsuit against. Horsting said he has a court hearing scheduled later this month, but he’s under no illusions that winning the case means he’ll be able to collect.

“At this point, I’m doing it out of pride more than actually expecting anything to come to good fortune for me,” he said.

The following mind map was helpful in piecing together key events, individuals and connections mentioned above. It’s important to note that this graphic only scratches the surface of the operations tied to this group. For example, in Case 2 we can see mention of academic cheating services, wherein people can be hired to take online proctored exams on one’s behalf. Those who hire these services soon find themselves subject to impersonation and blackmail attempts for larger and larger sums of money, with the threat of publicly exposing their unethical academic cheating activity.

GOOGLE RESPONDS

KrebsOnSecurity reviewed the Google Ad Transparency links for nearly 500 different websites tied to this network of ghostwriting, logo, app and web development businesses. Those website names were then fed into spyfu.com, a competitive intelligence company that tracks the reach and performance of advertising keywords. Spyfu estimates that between April 2023 and April 2025, those websites spent more than $10 million on Google ads.

Reached for comment, Google said in a written statement that it is constantly policing its ad network for bad actors, pointing to an ads safety report (PDF) showing Google blocked or removed 5.1 billion bad ads last year — including more than 500 million ads related to trademarks.

“Our policy against Enabling Dishonest Behavior prohibits products or services that help users mislead others, including ads for paper-writing or exam-taking services,” the statement reads. “When we identify ads or advertisers that violate our policies, we take action, including by suspending advertiser accounts, disapproving ads, and restricting ads to specific domains when appropriate.”

Google did not respond to specific questions about the advertising entities mentioned in this story, saying only that “we are actively investigating this matter and addressing any policy violations, including suspending advertiser accounts when appropriate.”

From reviewing the ad accounts that have been promoting these scam websites, it appears Google has very recently acted to remove a large number of the offending ads. Prior to my notifying Google about the extent of this ad network on April 28, the Google Ad Transparency network listed over 500 ads for 360 Digital Marketing; as of this publication, that number had dwindled to 10.

On April 30, Google announced that starting this month its ads transparency page will display the payment profile name as the payer name for verified advertisers, if that name differs from their verified advertiser name. Searchengineland.com writes the changes are aimed at increasing accountability in digital advertising.

This spreadsheet lists the domain names, advertiser names, and Google Ad Transparency links for more than 350 entities offering ghostwriting, publishing, web design and academic cheating services.

KrebsOnSecurity would like to thank the anonymous security researcher NatInfoSec for their assistance in this investigation.

For further reading on Abtach and its myriad companies in all of the above-mentioned verticals (ghostwriting, logo design, etc.), see this Wikiwand entry.

ClickFix: How to Infect Your PC in Three Easy Steps

A clever malware deployment scheme first spotted in targeted attacks last year has now gone mainstream. In this scam, dubbed “ClickFix,” the visitor to a hacked or malicious website is asked to distinguish themselves from bots by pressing a combination of keyboard keys that causes Microsoft Windows to download password-stealing malware.

ClickFix attacks mimic the “Verify You are a Human” tests that many websites use to separate real visitors from content-scraping bots. This particular scam usually starts with a website popup that looks something like this:

Clicking the “I’m not a robot” button generates a pop-up message asking the user to take three sequential steps to prove their humanity.

Step 1 involves simultaneously pressing the keyboard key with the Windows icon and the letter “R,” which opens a Windows “Run” prompt that will execute any specified program that is already installed on the system.

Step 2 asks the user to press the “CTRL” key and the letter “V” at the same time, which pastes malicious code from the site’s virtual clipboard.

Step 3 — pressing the “Enter” key — causes Windows to download and launch malicious code through “mshta.exe,” a Windows program designed to run Microsoft HTML application files.

“This campaign delivers multiple families of commodity malware, including XWorm, Lumma stealer, VenomRAT, AsyncRAT, Danabot, and NetSupport RAT,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “Depending on the specific payload, the specific code launched through mshta.exe varies. Some samples have downloaded PowerShell, JavaScript, and portable executable (PE) content.”

According to Microsoft, hospitality workers are being tricked into downloading credential-stealing malware by cybercriminals impersonating Booking.com. The company said attackers have been sending malicious emails impersonating Booking.com, often referencing negative guest reviews, requests from prospective guests, or online promotion opportunities — all in a bid to convince people to step through one of these ClickFix attacks.

In November 2024, KrebsOnSecurity reported that hundreds of hotels that use booking.com had been subject to targeted phishing attacks. Some of those lures worked, and allowed thieves to gain control over booking.com accounts. From there, they sent out phishing messages asking for financial information from people who’d just booked travel through the company’s app.

Earlier this month, the security firm Arctic Wolf warned about ClickFix attacks targeting people working in the healthcare sector. The company said those attacks leveraged malicious code stitched into the widely used physical therapy video site HEP2go that redirected visitors to a ClickFix prompt.

An alert (PDF) released in October 2024 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services warned that the ClickFix attack can take many forms, including fake Google Chrome error pages and popups that spoof Facebook.

The ClickFix attack — and its reliance on mshta.exe — is reminiscent of phishing techniques employed for years that hid exploits inside Microsoft Office macros. Malicious macros became such a common malware threat that Microsoft was forced to start blocking macros by default in Office documents that try to download content from the web.

Alas, the email security vendor Proofpoint has documented plenty of ClickFix attacks via phishing emails that include HTML attachments spoofing Microsoft Office files. When opened, the attachment displays an image of Microsoft Word document with a pop-up error message directing users to click the “Solution” or “How to Fix” button.

Organizations that wish to do so can take advantage of Microsoft Group Policy restrictions to prevent Windows from executing the “run” command when users hit the Windows key and the “R” key simultaneously.

Trump 2.0 Brings Cuts to Cyber, Consumer Protections

One month into his second term, President Trump’s actions to shrink the government through mass layoffs, firings and withholding funds allocated by Congress have thrown federal cybersecurity and consumer protection programs into disarray. At the same time, agencies are battling an ongoing effort by the world’s richest man to wrest control over their networks and data.

The Trump administration has fired at least 130 employees at the federal government’s foremost cybersecurity body — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Those dismissals reportedly included CISA staff dedicated to securing U.S. elections, and fighting misinformation and foreign influence operations.

Earlier this week, technologists with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) arrived at CISA and gained access to the agency’s email and networked files. Those DOGE staffers include Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a 19-year-old former denizen of the “Com,” an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network.

The investigative journalist Jacob Silverman writes that Coristine is the grandson of Valery Martynov, a KGB double agent who spied for the United States. Silverman recounted how Martynov’s wife Natalya Martynova moved to the United States with her two children after her husband’s death.

“Her son became a Virginia police officer who sometimes posts comments on blogs about his historically famous father,” Silverman wrote. “Her daughter became a financial professional who married Charles Coristine, the proprietor of LesserEvil, a snack company. Among their children is a 19-year-old young man named Edward Coristine, who currently wields an unknown amount of power and authority over the inner-workings of our federal government.”

Another member of DOGE is Christopher Stanley, formerly senior director for security engineering at X and principal security engineer at Musk’s SpaceX. Stanley, 33, had a brush with celebrity on Twitter in 2015 when he leaked the user database for the DDoS-for-hire service LizardStresser, and soon faced threats of physical violence against his family.

My 2015 story on that leak did not name Stanley, but he exposed himself as the source by posting a video about it on his Youtube channel. A review of domain names registered by Stanley shows he went by the nickname “enKrypt,” and was the former owner of a pirated software and hacking forum called error33[.]net, as well as theC0re, a video game cheating community.

“A NATIONAL CYBERATTACK”

DOGE has been steadily gaining sensitive network access to federal agencies that hold a staggering amount of personal and financial information on Americans, including the Social Security Administration (SSA), the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the Treasury Department.

Most recently, DOGE has sought broad access to systems at the Internal Revenue Service that contain the personal tax information on millions of Americans, including how much individuals earn and owe, property information, and even details related to child custody agreements. The New York Times reported Friday that the IRS had reached an agreement whereby a single DOGE employee — 25-year-old Gavin Kliger — will be allowed to see only anonymized taxpayer information.

The rapidity with which DOGE has rifled through one federal database after another in the name of unearthing “massive fraud” by government agencies has alarmed many security experts, who warned that DOGE’s actions bypassed essential safeguards and security measures.

“The most alarming aspect isn’t just the access being granted,” wrote Bruce Schneier and Davi Ottenheimer, referring to DOGE as a national cyberattack. “It’s the systematic dismantling of security measures that would detect and prevent misuse—including standard incident response protocols, auditing, and change-tracking mechanisms—by removing the career officials in charge of those security measures and replacing them with inexperienced operators.”

Jacob Williams is a former hacker with the U.S. National Security Agency who now works as managing director of the cybersecurity firm Hunter Labs. Williams kicked a virtual hornet’s nest last week when he posted on LinkedIn that the network incursions by DOGE were “a bigger threat to U.S. federal government information systems than China.”

Williams said while he doesn’t believe anyone at DOGE would intentionally harm the integrity and availability of these systems, it’s widely reported (and not denied) that DOGE introduced code changes into multiple federal IT systems. These code changes, he maintained, are not following the normal process for vetting and review given to federal government IT systems.

“For those thinking ‘I’m glad they aren’t following the normal federal government IT processes, those are too burdensome’ I get where you’re coming from,” Williams wrote. “But another name for ‘red tape’ are ‘controls.’ If you’re comfortable bypassing controls for the advancement of your agenda, I have questions – mostly about whether you do this in your day job too. Please tag your employer letting them know your position when you comment that controls aren’t important (doubly so if you work in cybersecurity). All satire aside, if you’re comfortable abandoning controls for expediency, I implore you to decide where the line is that you won’t cross in that regard.”

The DOGE website’s “wall of receipts” boasts that Musk and his team have saved the federal government more than $55 billion through staff reductions, lease cancellations and terminated contracts. But a team of reporters at The New York Times found the math that could back up those checks is marred with accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, outdated data and other mistakes.

For example, DOGE claimed it saved $8 billion in one contract, when the total amount was actually $8 million, The Times found.

“Some contracts the group claims credit for were double- or triple-counted,” reads a Times story with six bylines. “Another initially contained an error that inflated the totals by billions of dollars. While the DOGE team has surely cut some number of billions of dollars, its slapdash accounting adds to a pattern of recklessness by the group, which has recently gained access to sensitive government payment systems.”

So far, the DOGE website does not inspire confidence: We learned last week that the doge.gov administrators somehow left their database wide open, allowing someone to publish messages that ridiculed the site’s insecurity.

APPOINTMENTS

Trump’s efforts to grab federal agencies by their data has seen him replace career civil servants who refused to allow DOGE access to agency networks. CNN reports that Michelle King, acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration for more than 30 years, was shown the door after she denied DOGE access to sensitive information.

King was replaced by Leland Dudek, formerly a senior advisor in the SSA’s Office of Program Integrity. This week, Dudek posted a now-deleted message on LinkedIn acknowledging he had been placed on administrative leave for cooperating with DOGE.

“I confess,” Dudek wrote. “I bullied agency executives, shared executive contact information, and circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done. I confess. I asked where the fat was and is in our contracts so we can make the right tough choices.”

According to Wired, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was also bracing this week for roughly 500 staffers to be fired, which could have serious impacts on NIST’s cybersecurity standards and software vulnerability tracking work.

“And cuts last week at the US Digital Service included the cybersecurity lead for the central Veterans Affairs portal, VA.gov, potentially leaving VA systems and data more vulnerable without someone in his role,” Wired’s Andy Greenberg and Lily Hay Newman wrote.

NextGov reports that Trump named the Department of Defense’s new chief information security officer: Katie Arrington, a former South Carolina state lawmaker who helped steer Pentagon cybersecurity contracting policy before being put on leave amid accusations that she disclosed classified data from a military intelligence agency.

NextGov notes that the National Security Agency suspended her clearance in 2021, although the exact reasons that led to the suspension and her subsequent leave were classified. Arrington argued that the suspension was a politically motivated effort to silence her.

Trump also appointed the former chief operating officer of the Republican National Committee as the new head of the Office of National Cyber Director. Sean Cairncross, who has no formal experience in technology or security, will be responsible for coordinating national cybersecurity policy, advising the president on cyber threats, and ensuring a unified federal response to emerging cyber-risks, Politico writes.

DarkReading reports that Cairncross would share responsibility for advising the president on cyber matters, along with the director of cyber at the White House National Security Council (NSC) — a group that advises the president on all matters security related, and not just cyber.

CONSUMER PROTECTION?

The president also ordered staffers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to stop most work. Created by Congress in 2011 to be a clearinghouse of consumer complaints, the CFPB has sued some of the nation’s largest financial institutions for violating consumer protection laws.

The CFPB says its actions have put nearly $18 billion back in Americans’ pockets in the form of monetary compensation or canceled debts, and imposed $4 billion in civil money penalties against violators. The CFPB’s homepage has featured a “404: Page not found” error for weeks now.

Trump has appointed Russell Vought, the architect of the conservative policy playbook Project 2025, to be the CFPB’s acting director. Vought has publicly favored abolishing the agency, as has Elon Musk, whose efforts to remake X into a payments platform would otherwise be regulated by the CFPB.

The New York Times recently published a useful graphic showing all of the government staffing changes, including the firing of several top officials, affecting agencies with federal investigations into or regulatory battles with Musk’s companies. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee also have released a comprehensive account (PDF) of Musk’s various conflicts of interest.

As the Times notes, Musk and his companies have repeatedly failed to comply with federal reporting protocols aimed at protecting state secrets, and these failures have prompted at least three federal reviews. Those include an inquiry launched last year by the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General. Four days after taking office, Trump fired the DoD inspector general along with 17 other inspectors general.

The Trump administration also shifted the enforcement priorities of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) away from prosecuting misconduct in the cryptocurrency sector, reassigning lawyers and renaming the unit to focus more on “cyber and emerging technologies.”

Reuters reports that the former SEC chair Gary Gensler made fighting misconduct in a sector he termed the “wild west” a priority for the agency, targeting not only cryptocurrency fraudsters but also the large firms that facilitate trading such as Coinbase.

On Friday, Coinbase said the SEC planned to withdraw its lawsuit against the crypto exchange. Also on Friday, the cryptocurrency exchange Bybit announced on X that a cybersecurity breach led to the theft of more than $1.4 billion worth of cryptocurrencies — making it the largest crypto heist ever.

ORGANIZED CRIME AND CORRUPTION

On Feb. 10, Trump ordered executive branch agencies to stop enforcing the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which froze foreign bribery investigations, and even allows for “remedial actions” of past enforcement actions deemed “inappropriate.”

Trump’s action also disbanded the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative and KleptoCapture Task Force — units which proved their value in corruption cases and in seizing the assets of sanctioned Russian oligarchs — and diverted resources away from investigating white-collar crime.

That’s according to the independent Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an investigative journalism outlet that until very recently was funded in part by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The OCCRP lost nearly a third of its funding and was forced to lay off 43 reporters and staff after Trump moved to shutter USAID and freeze its spending. NBC News reports the Trump administration plans to gut the agency and leave fewer than 300 staffers on the job out of the current 8,000 direct hires and contractors.

The Global Investigative Journalism Network wrote this week that the sudden hold on USAID foreign assistance funding has frozen an estimated $268 million in agreed grants for independent media and the free flow of information in more than 30 countries — including several under repressive regimes.

Elon Musk has called USAID “a criminal organization” without evidence, and promoted fringe theories on his social media platform X that the agency operated without oversight and was rife with fraud. Just months before the election, USAID’s Office of Inspector General announced an investigation into USAID’s oversight of Starlink satellite terminals provided to the government of Ukraine.

KrebsOnSecurity this week heard from a trusted source that all outgoing email from USAID now carries a notation of “sensitive but unclassified,” a designation that experts say could make it more difficult for journalists and others to obtain USAID email records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). On Feb. 20, Fedscoop reported also hearing the same thing from multiple sources, noting that the added message cannot be seen by senders until after the email is sent.

FIVE BULLETS

On Feb. 18, Trump issued an executive order declaring that only the U.S. attorney general and the president can provide authoritative interpretations of the law for the executive branch, and that this authority extends to independent agencies operating under the executive branch.

Trump is arguing that Article II, Clause 1 of the Constitution vests this power with the president. However, jurist.org writes that Article II does not expressly state the president or any other person in the executive branch has the power to interpret laws.

“The article states that the president is required to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed,'” Juris noted. “Jurisdiction to interpret laws and determine constitutionality belongs to the judicial branch under Article III. The framers of the Constitution designed the separation of duties to prevent any single branch of government from becoming too powerful.”

The executive order requires all agencies to submit to “performance standards and management objectives” to be established by the White House Office of Management and Budget, and to report periodically to the president.

Those performance metrics are already being requested: Employees at multiple federal agencies on Saturday reported receiving an email from the Office of Personnel Management ordering them to reply with a set of bullet points justifying their work for the past week.

“Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager,” the notice read. “Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments. Deadline is this Monday at 11:59 p.m. EST.”

In a social media post Saturday, Musk said the directive came at the behest of President Trump, and that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. Meanwhile, Bloomberg writes the Department of Justice has been urging employees to hold off replying out of concern doing so could trigger ethics violations. The National Treasury Employees Union also is advising its employees not to respond.

A legal battle over Trump’s latest executive order is bound to join more than 70 other lawsuits currently underway to halt the administration’s efforts to massively reduce the size of the federal workforce through layoffs, firings and attrition.

KING TRUMP?

On Feb. 15, the president posted on social media, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” citing a quote often attributed to the French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte. Four days later, Trump referred to himself as “the king” on social media, while the White House nonchalantly posted an illustration of him wearing a crown.

Trump has been publicly musing about running for an unconstitutional third-term in office, a statement that some of his supporters dismiss as Trump just trying to rile his liberal critics. However, just days after Trump began his second term, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) introduced a bill to amend the Constitution so that Trump — and any other future president — can be elected to serve a third term.

This week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Rep. Ogles reportedly led a group of Trump supporters calling itself the “Third Term Project,” which is trying to gain support for the bill from GOP lawmakers. The event featured images of Trump depicted as Caesar.

Russia continues to be among the world’s top exporters of cybercrime, narcotics, money laundering, human trafficking, disinformation, war and death, and yet the Trump administration has suddenly broken with the Western world in normalizing relations with Moscow.

This week President Trump stunned U.S. allies by repeating Kremlin talking points that Ukraine is somehow responsible for Russia’s invasion, and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a “dictator.” The president repeated these lies even as his administration is demanding that Zelensky give the United States half of his country’s mineral wealth in exchange for a promise that Russia will cease its territorial aggression there.

President Trump’s servility toward an actual dictator — Russian President Vladimir Putin — does not bode well for efforts to improve the cybersecurity of U.S. federal IT networks, or the private sector systems on which the government is largely reliant. In addition, this administration’s baffling moves to alienate, antagonize and sideline our closest allies could make it more difficult for the United States to secure their ongoing cooperation in cybercrime investigations.

It’s also startling how closely DOGE’s approach so far hews to tactics typically employed by ransomware gangs: A group of 20-somethings with names like “Big Balls” shows up on a weekend and gains access to your servers, deletes data, locks out key staff, takes your website down, and prevents you from serving customers.

When the federal executive starts imitating ransomware playbooks against its own agencies while Congress largely gazes on in either bewilderment or amusement, we’re in four-alarm fire territory. At least in theory, one can negotiate with ransomware purveyors.

Patch Tuesday, October 2024 Edition

Microsoft today released security updates to fix at least 117 security holes in Windows computers and other software, including two vulnerabilities that are already seeing active attacks. Also, Adobe plugged 52 security holes across a range of products, and Apple has addressed a bug in its new macOS 15 “Sequoia” update that broke many cybersecurity tools.

One of the zero-day flaws — CVE-2024-43573 — stems from a security weakness in MSHTML, the proprietary engine of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser. If that sounds familiar it’s because this is the fourth MSHTML vulnerability found to be exploited in the wild so far in 2024.

Nikolas Cemerikic, a cybersecurity engineer at Immersive Labs, said the vulnerability allows an attacker to trick users into viewing malicious web content, which could appear legitimate thanks to the way Windows handles certain web elements.

“Once a user is deceived into interacting with this content (typically through phishing attacks), the attacker can potentially gain unauthorized access to sensitive information or manipulate web-based services,” he said.

Cemerikic noted that while Internet Explorer is being retired on many platforms, its underlying MSHTML technology remains active and vulnerable.

“This creates a risk for employees using these older systems as part of their everyday work, especially if they are accessing sensitive data or performing financial transactions online,” he said.

Probably the more serious zero-day this month is CVE-2024-43572, a code execution bug in the Microsoft Management Console, a component of Windows that gives system administrators a way to configure and monitor the system.

Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, observed that the patch for CVE-2024-43572 arrived a few months after researchers at Elastic Security Labs disclosed an attack technique called GrimResource that leveraged an old cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability combined with a specially crafted Microsoft Saved Console (MSC) file to gain code execution privileges.

“Although Microsoft patched a different MMC vulnerability in September (CVE-2024-38259) that was neither exploited in the wild nor publicly disclosed,” Narang said. “Since the discovery of CVE-2024-43572, Microsoft now prevents untrusted MSC files from being opened on a system.”

Microsoft also patched Office, Azure, .NET, OpenSSH for Windows; Power BI; Windows Hyper-V; Windows Mobile Broadband, and Visual Studio. As usual, the SANS Internet Storm Center has a list of all Microsoft patches released today, indexed by severity and exploitability.

Late last month, Apple rolled out macOS 15, an operating system update called Sequoia that broke the functionality of security tools made by a number of vendors, including CrowdStrike, SentinelOne and Microsoft. On Oct. 7, Apple pushed an update to Sequoia users that addresses these compatibility issues.

Finally, Adobe has released security updates to plug a total of 52 vulnerabilities in a range of software, including Adobe Substance 3D Painter, Commerce, Dimension, Animate, Lightroom, InCopy, InDesign, Substance 3D Stager, and Adobe FrameMaker.

Please consider backing up important data before applying any updates. Zero-days aside, there’s generally little harm in waiting a few days to apply any pending patches, because not infrequently a security update introduces stability or compatibility issues. AskWoody.com usually has the skinny on any problematic patches.

And as always, if you run into any glitches after installing patches, leave a note in the comments; chances are someone else is stuck with the same issue and may have even found a solution.

Bug Left Some Windows PCs Dangerously Unpatched

Microsoft Corp. today released updates to fix at least 79 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and related software, including multiple flaws that are already showing up in active attacks. Microsoft also corrected a critical bug that has caused some Windows 10 PCs to remain dangerously unpatched against actively exploited vulnerabilities for several months this year.

By far the most curious security weakness Microsoft disclosed today has the snappy name of CVE-2024-43491, which Microsoft says is a vulnerability that led to the rolling back of fixes for some vulnerabilities affecting “optional components” on certain Windows 10 systems produced in 2015. Those include Windows 10 systems that installed the monthly security update for Windows released in March 2024, or other updates released until August 2024.

Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said that while the phrase “exploitation detected” in a Microsoft advisory normally implies the flaw is being exploited by cybercriminals, it appears labeled this way with CVE-2024-43491 because the rollback of fixes reintroduced vulnerabilities that were previously know to be exploited.

“To correct this issue, users need to apply both the September 2024 Servicing Stack Update and the September 2024 Windows Security Updates,” Narang said.

Kev Breen, senior director of threat research at Immersive Labs, said the root cause of CVE-2024-43491 is that on specific versions of Windows 10, the build version numbers that are checked by the update service were not properly handled in the code.

“The notes from Microsoft say that the ‘build version numbers crossed into a range that triggered a code defect’,” Breen said. “The short version is that some versions of Windows 10 with optional components enabled was left in a vulnerable state.”

Zero Day #1 this month is CVE-2024-38226, and it concerns a weakness in Microsoft Publisher, a standalone application included in some versions of Microsoft Office. This flaw lets attackers bypass Microsoft’s “Mark of the Web,” a Windows security feature that marks files downloaded from the Internet as potentially unsafe.

Zero Day #2 is CVE-2024-38217, also a Mark of the Web bypass affecting Office. Both zero-day flaws rely on the target opening a booby-trapped Office file.

Security firm Rapid7 notes that CVE-2024-38217 has been publicly disclosed via an extensive write-up, with exploit code also available on GitHub.

According to Microsoft, CVE-2024-38014, an “elevation of privilege” bug in the Windows Installer, is also being actively exploited.

June’s coverage of Microsoft Patch Tuesday was titled “Recall Edition,” because the big news then was that Microsoft was facing a torrent of criticism from privacy and security experts over “Recall,” a new artificial intelligence (AI) feature of Redmond’s flagship Copilot+ PCs that constantly takes screenshots of whatever users are doing on their computers.

At the time, Microsoft responded by suggesting Recall would no longer be enabled by default. But last week, the software giant clarified that what it really meant was that the ability to disable Recall was a bug/feature in the preview version of Copilot+ that will not be available to Windows customers going forward. Translation: New versions of Windows are shipping with Recall deeply embedded in the operating system.

It’s pretty rich that Microsoft, which already collects an insane amount of information from its customers on a near constant basis, is calling the Recall removal feature a bug, while treating Recall as a desirable feature. Because from where I sit, Recall is a feature nobody asked for that turns Windows into a bug (of the surveillance variety).

When Redmond first responded to critics about Recall, they noted that Recall snapshots never leave the user’s system, and that even if attackers managed to hack a Copilot+ PC they would not be able to exfiltrate on-device Recall data.

But that claim rang hollow after former Microsoft threat analyst Kevin Beaumont detailed on his blog how any user on the system (even a non-administrator) can export Recall data, which is just stored in an SQLite database locally.

As it is apt to do on Microsoft Patch Tuesday, Adobe has released updates to fix security vulnerabilities in a range of products, including Reader and Acrobat, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, ColdFusion, Adobe Audition, and Photoshop. Adobe says it is not aware of any exploits in the wild for any of the issues addressed in its updates.

Seeking a more detailed breakdown of the patches released by Microsoft today? Check out the SANS Internet Storm Center’s thorough list. People responsible for administering many systems in an enterprise environment would do well to keep an eye on AskWoody.com, which often has the skinny on any wonky Windows patches that may be causing problems for some users.

As always, if you experience any issues applying this month’s patch batch, consider dropping a note in the comments here about it.

April’s Patch Tuesday Brings Record Number of Fixes

If only Patch Tuesdays came around infrequently — like total solar eclipse rare — instead of just creeping up on us each month like The Man in the Moon. Although to be fair, it would be tough for Microsoft to eclipse the number of vulnerabilities fixed in this month’s patch batch — a record 147 flaws in Windows and related software.

Yes, you read that right. Microsoft today released updates to address 147 security holes in Windows, Office, Azure, .NET Framework, Visual Studio, SQL Server, DNS Server, Windows Defender, Bitlocker, and Windows Secure Boot.

“This is the largest release from Microsoft this year and the largest since at least 2017,” said Dustin Childs, from Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI). “As far as I can tell, it’s the largest Patch Tuesday release from Microsoft of all time.”

Tempering the sheer volume of this month’s patches is the middling severity of many of the bugs. Only three of April’s vulnerabilities earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating, meaning they can be abused by malware or malcontents to take remote control over unpatched systems with no help from users.

Most of the flaws that Microsoft deems “more likely to be exploited” this month are marked as “important,” which usually involve bugs that require a bit more user interaction (social engineering) but which nevertheless can result in system security bypass, compromise, and the theft of critical assets.

Ben McCarthy, lead cyber security engineer at Immersive Labs called attention to CVE-2024-20670, an Outlook for Windows spoofing vulnerability described as being easy to exploit. It involves convincing a user to click on a malicious link in an email, which can then steal the user’s password hash and authenticate as the user in another Microsoft service.

Another interesting bug McCarthy pointed to is CVE-2024-29063, which involves hard-coded credentials in Azure’s search backend infrastructure that could be gleaned by taking advantage of Azure AI search.

“This along with many other AI attacks in recent news shows a potential new attack surface that we are just learning how to mitigate against,” McCarthy said. “Microsoft has updated their backend and notified any customers who have been affected by the credential leakage.”

CVE-2024-29988 is a weakness that allows attackers to bypass Windows SmartScreen, a technology Microsoft designed to provide additional protections for end users against phishing and malware attacks. Childs said one of ZDI’s researchers found this vulnerability being exploited in the wild, although Microsoft doesn’t currently list CVE-2024-29988 as being exploited.

“I would treat this as in the wild until Microsoft clarifies,” Childs said. “The bug itself acts much like CVE-2024-21412 – a [zero-day threat from February] that bypassed the Mark of the Web feature and allows malware to execute on a target system. Threat actors are sending exploits in a zipped file to evade EDR/NDR detection and then using this bug (and others) to bypass Mark of the Web.”

Update, 7:46 p.m. ET: A previous version of this story said there were no zero-day vulnerabilities fixed this month. BleepingComputer reports that Microsoft has since confirmed that there are actually two zero-days. One is the flaw Childs just mentioned (CVE-2024-21412), and the other is CVE-2024-26234, described as a “proxy driver spoofing” weakness.

Satnam Narang at Tenable notes that this month’s release includes fixes for two dozen flaws in Windows Secure Boot, the majority of which are considered “Exploitation Less Likely” according to Microsoft.

“However, the last time Microsoft patched a flaw in Windows Secure Boot in May 2023 had a notable impact as it was exploited in the wild and linked to the BlackLotus UEFI bootkit, which was sold on dark web forums for $5,000,” Narang said. “BlackLotus can bypass functionality called secure boot, which is designed to block malware from being able to load when booting up. While none of these Secure Boot vulnerabilities addressed this month were exploited in the wild, they serve as a reminder that flaws in Secure Boot persist, and we could see more malicious activity related to Secure Boot in the future.”

For links to individual security advisories indexed by severity, check out ZDI’s blog and the Patch Tuesday post from the SANS Internet Storm Center. Please consider backing up your data or your drive before updating, and drop a note in the comments here if you experience any issues applying these fixes.

Adobe today released nine patches tackling at least two dozen vulnerabilities in a range of software products, including Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, Commerce, InDesign, Experience Manager, Media Encoder, Bridge, Illustrator, and Adobe Animate.

KrebsOnSecurity needs to correct the record on a point mentioned at the end of March’s “Fat Patch Tuesday” post, which looked at new AI capabilities built into Adobe Acrobat that are turned on by default. Adobe has since clarified that its apps won’t use AI to auto-scan your documents, as the original language in its FAQ suggested.

“In practice, no document scanning or analysis occurs unless a user actively engages with the AI features by agreeing to the terms, opening a document, and selecting the AI Assistant or generative summary buttons for that specific document,” Adobe said earlier this month.

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Fat Patch Tuesday, February 2024 Edition

Microsoft Corp. today pushed software updates to plug more than 70 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related products, including two zero-day vulnerabilities that are already being exploited in active attacks.

Top of the heap on this Fat Patch Tuesday is CVE-2024-21412, a “security feature bypass” in the way Windows handles Internet Shortcut Files that Microsoft says is being targeted in active exploits. Redmond’s advisory for this bug says an attacker would need to convince or trick a user into opening a malicious shortcut file.

Researchers at Trend Micro have tied the ongoing exploitation of CVE-2024-21412 to an advanced persistent threat group dubbed “Water Hydra,” which they say has being using the vulnerability to execute a malicious Microsoft Installer File (.msi) that in turn unloads a remote access trojan (RAT) onto infected Windows systems.

The other zero-day flaw is CVE-2024-21351, another security feature bypass — this one in the built-in Windows SmartScreen component that tries to screen out potentially malicious files downloaded from the Web. Kevin Breen at Immersive Labs says it’s important to note that this vulnerability alone is not enough for an attacker to compromise a user’s workstation, and instead would likely be used in conjunction with something like a spear phishing attack that delivers a malicious file.

Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said this is the fifth vulnerability in Windows SmartScreen patched since 2022 and all five have been exploited in the wild as zero-days. They include CVE-2022-44698 in December 2022, CVE-2023-24880 in March 2023, CVE-2023-32049 in July 2023 and CVE-2023-36025 in November 2023.

Narang called special attention to CVE-2024-21410, an “elevation of privilege” bug in Microsoft Exchange Server that Microsoft says is likely to be exploited by attackers. Attacks on this flaw would lead to the disclosure of NTLM hashes, which could be leveraged as part of an NTLM relay or “pass the hash” attack, which lets an attacker masquerade as a legitimate user without ever having to log in.

“We know that flaws that can disclose sensitive information like NTLM hashes are very valuable to attackers,” Narang said. “A Russian-based threat actor leveraged a similar vulnerability to carry out attacks – CVE-2023-23397 is an Elevation of Privilege vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook patched in March 2023.”

Microsoft notes that prior to its Exchange Server 2019 Cumulative Update 14 (CU14), a security feature called Extended Protection for Authentication (EPA), which provides NTLM credential relay protections, was not enabled by default.

“Going forward, CU14 enables this by default on Exchange servers, which is why it is important to upgrade,” Narang said.

Rapid7’s lead software engineer Adam Barnett highlighted CVE-2024-21413, a critical remote code execution bug in Microsoft Office that could be exploited just by viewing a specially-crafted message in the Outlook Preview pane.

“Microsoft Office typically shields users from a variety of attacks by opening files with Mark of the Web in Protected View, which means Office will render the document without fetching potentially malicious external resources,” Barnett said. “CVE-2024-21413 is a critical RCE vulnerability in Office which allows an attacker to cause a file to open in editing mode as though the user had agreed to trust the file.”

Barnett stressed that administrators responsible for Office 2016 installations who apply patches outside of Microsoft Update should note the advisory lists no fewer than five separate patches which must be installed to achieve remediation of CVE-2024-21413; individual update knowledge base (KB) articles further note that partially-patched Office installations will be blocked from starting until the correct combination of patches has been installed.

It’s a good idea for Windows end-users to stay current with security updates from Microsoft, which can quickly pile up otherwise. That doesn’t mean you have to install them on Patch Tuesday. Indeed, waiting a day or three before updating is a sane response, given that sometimes updates go awry and usually within a few days Microsoft has fixed any issues with its patches. It’s also smart to back up your data and/or image your Windows drive before applying new updates.

For a more detailed breakdown of the individual flaws addressed by Microsoft today, check out the SANS Internet Storm Center’s list. For those admins responsible for maintaining larger Windows environments, it often pays to keep an eye on Askwoody.com, which frequently points out when specific Microsoft updates are creating problems for a number of users.

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