Nightmare Eclipse, the prolific zero-day vulnerability hunter with an axe to grind against Microsoft, released yet another exploit late Wednesday that the researcher claims will spawn a command prompt that provides total access to the BitLocker volume. This bug, called GreatXML, was “an accidental discovery,” according to the researcher, who said it only took four hours to find. They claim this exploit (published on GitHub and Git-based code-hosting platforms) can bypass BitLocker on any system that has ever run a Microsoft Defender Offline scan at any point in the past. GreatXML comes just a day after Nightmare released exploit code for RoguePlanet, which allows local privilege escalation and leads to SYSTEM-level control over an affected machine. This brings the researcher’s zero-day count to eight. The earlier six - RedSun, UnDefend, BlueHammer, YellowKey, GreenPlasma, and MiniPlasma - all have patches as of this week’s Patch Tuesday event. Redmond on Wednesday told The Register that it is aware of RoguePlanet, and “actively investigating the validity and potential applicability of these claims.” The Windows giant didn’t immediately respond to our inquiries about GreatXML, including when it planned to issue a patch. Microsoft has said none of the vulnerabilities were reported via its official channels prior to being made public. The company also banned Nightmare’s earlier GitHub account, and seemingly threatened legal action before dialing back its rhetoric after steep backlash from the security community. Nightmare Eclipse, who some researchers suggest is an ex-Microsoft employee, harbors a very personal grudge against the Windows giant and its communications with bug hunters. They have promised to keep the zero-days coming, but waffle on the timing. Last month, the researcher pledged a big July 14 drop: “I will make sure your bones are shattered that day,” and then added, “nothing will be released this June (or maybe I will release smtg, depending on circumstances).” On Tuesday, they changed course. “I will be unable to mass disclose zerodays in July 14th, RoguePlanet took way more time than expected and truly drained me. I might take a break but I can't say for sure what I will be doing for next month, maybe it's nothing, maybe it's smtg.” A day later, Nightmare released the “accidental” GreatXML BitLocker bypass. According to the researcher, the BitLocker bypass first requires copying “unattend.xml” and the “Recovery” directory to the root of the recovery partition. The next step is rebooting into WinRE by Shift-clicking Restart. “If everything was done correctly, a shell with unrestricted access to the bitlocker volume will spawn,” Nightmare wrote. Also, if the scan hasn’t even been initiated on the Windows system, first you’d need to either log in and initiate it, or “figure out a way to boot into WinRE in offline scan state.” Security sleuth Will Dormann followed Nightmare’s steps to reproduce GreatXML, and said the writeup seems “flawed.” In his testing, Dormann said the command prompt appeared the next time a Defender Offline scan ran. “And in order to trigger a Microsoft Defender Offline scan, you both need to be logged in to Windows, and also have admin credentials,” he wrote on social media. “And if you've already got that level of access, you can just turn off bitlocker.” “The writeup for GreatXML suggests that the prerequisite is that Windows Defender Offline has been executed at some point in the past,” Dormann added. “And that after planting two files in WinRE, all you need to do is [Shift]-reboot into WinRE, and Windows will automatically go into Microsoft Defender Offline scan mode. But this is not the case in any of the 3 lineages of Win11 that I have handy.” ®
McAfee is proud to be recognized with the SE Labs Home Anti-Malware Award 2026, one of the most respected independent recognitions in consumer cybersecurity. This marks the second year in a row that McAfee is being recognized with the Home Anti-Malware Award, proving our continued excellence and efficiency.
Now in its eighth year, the SE Labs Awards honor cybersecurity providers delivering outstanding protection across consumer, small business, and enterprise markets. And McAfee has earned top recognition in the Home Anti-Malware category two years in a row.
What Are the SE Labs Awards?
SE Labs is an independent cybersecurity testing and certification organization. Unlike awards based on self-reported data or marketing claims, SE Labs recognition is grounded in:
Continuous public testing: Products are evaluated through ongoing, real-world assessments, not one-time snapshots
Private assessments: Winners are also evaluated through confidential testing that mirrors actual threat environments
Eight years of credibility: The SE Labs Awards have built a track record as a trusted benchmark for both consumers and industry professionals
This makes the SE Labs Award a comprehensive measure of real-world security performance, not just lab scores.
What the Home Anti-Malware Award Means
The Home Anti-Malware category specifically recognizes consumer security products that demonstrate exceptional ability to detect, block, and remedy malware threats targeting everyday users.
Winning this award means McAfee’s protection performed at a level SE Labs considers outstanding, not just effective on paper, but proven against the kind of threats real households face: ransomware, trojans, spyware, phishing-delivered payloads, and more.
Simon Edwards, Founder and CEO of SE Labs, offered this comment on the 2026 winners:
“The SE Labs Awards recognises the vendors that are making a real difference in keeping systems secure. Winning an award is a significant achievement. It reflects not only strong product performance in our tests but also the commitment of the teams behind the technology. Congratulations to McAfee on its success.”
Independent Validation. Not a Marketing Claim
There’s an important distinction between a company saying its product is effective and an independent lab proving it.
SE Labs operates separately from the vendors it tests. Its methodology is transparent, its testing is repeatable, and its results are used by journalists, analysts, and buyers to make real purchasing decisions.
When SE Labs names McAfee a winner, that recognition carries the weight of a process that can’t be paid for or manufactured.
That’s what makes this award meaningful, and what separates it from a badge a company designs for itself.
How McAfee Fights Malware
Malware today doesn’t just arrive as a suspicious download. It hides in phishing texts, fake links, malicious QR codes, and compromised websites. And by the time most people realize something is wrong, the damage is already done.
McAfee is built to stop threats at every point in that chain.
Scam Detector flags suspicious texts, emails, links, QR codes, and even deepfake videos before you engage
Secure VPN keeps your data private, especially on public Wi-Fi
Web Protection helps block risky sites, even if you do accidentally click
Password Manager doesn’t just help you make unique, strong passwords, it keeps them stored and organized for you
Despite all the hype around Mythos, Claude Fable 5 returned pretty mid-tier results on coding tasks: 59.8% passing functional solves and just 19.0% passing security solves on a benchmark of 200 real-world tasks.
A joint congressional report describes a spam operation that turned tens of thousands of fake podcasts into search-engine bait for illegal pharmacy and scam sites.
UPDATED Following notes from several readers, we followed up directly with VRChat on Thursday at 1945 GMT and they told us that the Maine Attorney General's office apparently posted a fake breach report. According to an email from VRChat's head of community, Charles Tupper, "VRChat did not submit this Notice of Data Incident, and the employee/email cited does not exist. We have no reason to believe that our data or systems have been compromised. We are in the process of contacting the Maine Attorney General's office to have this removed." In an effort to get to the bottom of this, The Register dialed the phone number on the report as well, but it connected to a line that is not in service. We also tried emailing the address on the report and got no reply. We could find no record of a Scott Caruso affiliated with VRChat. We apologize for the error, but generally speaking, government data breach reports are considered reliable. The fakers apparently even created a false notice that VRChat ostensibly sent to customers! If anybody knows who filed this apparently fake report and why, get in touch through our contact page, or through our secure tipline. The original story is below: Online chat platform VRChat says a recent cyberattack compromised the data belonging to nearly 2.5 million users. It confirmed the “data security incident” in a report filed with Maine’s attorney general, but has not disclosed it via public channels. The company’s report confirmed that its cloud environment was accessed between May 10-12, with the unauthorized intruder making off with information concerning 2,436,782 users. This included VRChat usernames, email addresses, whether a user was a VRChat+ subscriber, login histories (including device, hardware identifiers, and IP addresses), and Steam or Meta user IDs. It does not believe passwords, credit cards or other payment information, or government IDs used for age verification were affected. “VRChat sincerely regrets that this security incident occurred,” the company stated in its disclosure. “We understand that trust between our platform and its community is earned through consistent action, and we take full responsibility for the concern this event has caused. “The security and privacy of our players' information remain our highest priority, and we are committed to doing everything within our power to protect it.” VRChat said that after it was made aware of the intrusion, it contained the threat and implemented additional security controls, as well as engaging outside security experts. And in an unusual move for US breaches, the San Francisco-based company did not offer identity theft or credit monitoring services. Offering these kinds of services is not a legal requirement, but doing so is highly common, especially regarding attacks that affect so many individuals. VRChat does not publish the total number of registered users that it has on its books, but its documentation states that “the platform has grown to millions of users,” who have collectively published tens of millions of unique pieces of content for it since its first release in 2014. The part game, part chat platform is an online, open-world chatroom where people walk around interacting with one another via their 3D avatars. It has been compared to Second Life in that users explore other users' worlds, play mini-games, and partake in casual chit-chat, with support for both virtual reality headsets and conventional PCs. You can also think of it as something similar to Meta’s vision for the metaverse, just without all the coworking and KPI meetings, and with way more users. ®
The new open-source project could serve as the basis for a future of apps with features as complex as Slack, Discord, or Google Docs—but with added protection against surveillance.
PWNED Welcome, once again, to PWNED, the weekly screed where we highlight those who did not do the deed of securing their systems. If someone left their passwords or their access exposed, we will be writing about them here. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. This week’s terrifying tale of poor security hygiene comes courtesy of Luke Irwin, CEO and principal consultant at Aegis Cybersecurity. He’s been in the industry for more than a quarter of a century and he knows where the bits are buried. At one point, Irwin consulted for a company that was a large national facility services organization, a 2,000-employee firm that provided cleaning, security guards, industrial abseiling (cleaning the facade), and other things that other large businesses need to keep their physical plants running smoothly. The CEO had one very peculiar idea about how to keep his own house in order: he wanted to have access to every one of his employees’ login credentials. The chief executive had an Excel spreadsheet sitting right on his desktop with a complete list of all the employee usernames and passwords. Let that sink in for a second. One person had all the keys to the castle in a single, easily accessible file. In any decent security setup, no one in the company has access to anyone else’s password. Even the head of the IT department should not know another employee’s password. I say this as someone who used to work for a company where the IT department would ask you to DM them your password if you had computer problems. But this company’s CEO wanted the usernames and passwords for reasons I’m sure any of his employees would appreciate: so he could go into their email accounts! He had an experience where one colleague had sent secret information to the entire company via email and he had spent the evening logging into every single account and deleting the message before anyone could see it. Just in case other messages were sent in error in the future, the CEO wanted the ability to log into all the relevant accounts and delete them himself. Perhaps for the same reason, he would not allow MFA (multi-factor authentication), because that would have kept him out of people’s inboxes. He was adamant even though the company had been the victim of a ransomware incident previously. “Despite repeated advice, he held that position for around four months, until we were able to demonstrate that the IT team could remove messages centrally using fairly simple administrative commands, without needing everyone’s password,” Irwin said. Even after getting rid of the Excel sheet of shame, the boss still refused to turn on MFA and the company subsequently suffered two data breaches involving sensitive client data. Unfortunately, this company wasn’t the only one that Irwin worked with where the management had something against MFA. Another client, this one in the medical sector, was opposed to multi-factor authentication because it “made things just a little too hard” for the external consultants they were using to access their systems. During the time that Irwin worked with that company, they got lucky and no one breached them. But since then, he’s seen signs that their data was available on the dark web. No word on whether they ever switched MFA on. There’s plenty to learn from Irwin’s two clients, but it’s all pretty obvious. First, don’t let anyone, even administrators or CEOs, have other people’s passwords. If someone has to get into another person’s email account, have IT use administrative access. Second, always enable MFA, preferably MFA with passkeys. ®
Multiple reports indicate that Chinese operatives continue using every tech tool at their disposal – including American AI – to amass data on and manipulate everyone from security-clearance holders to everyday US citizens. And they’re trying to influence public opinion on building datacenters for AI, albeit without success so far. One of these reports found a “significant resurgence” of a botnet linked to Chinese government-backed goons, including Volt Typhoon, which previously used a covert network of connected devices to burrow deep into critical US networks and preposition for future destructive attacks. In January 2024, the FBI said it killed Volt’s KV-botnet, comprised of hundreds of end-of-life routers and other internet-connected devices. At the time, KV-botnet consisted of four clusters, with the KV cluster primarily being used as a covert data transfer network, and the JDY cluster used for scanning and reconnaissance. In a Wednesday report, Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs said that while the KV cluster became largely defunct after the law enforcement takedown, the JDY cluster remains an active threat, and has since surged to more than 1,500 compromised routers and IoT devices. “Analysis of this activity shows a clear focus on identifying vulnerable infrastructure shortly after public vulnerability disclosures, suggesting that reconnaissance output is rapidly operationalized by China-nexus advanced persistent threat (APT) actors,” the threat intel team wrote. “This targeted focus has been observed across a range of sectors, with the US military and associated entities as the most prominent.” While the botnet resurgence poses the most pressing threat, and the security shop recommends all enterprises implement CISA and NCSC guidance for mitigating Volt Typhoon activity and defending against China-nexus covert networks of compromised devices, another report indicates that China’s attempts at influence operations haven’t died down, either. Using American AI for covert ops about … American AI OpenAI in a Wednesday report said it banned ChatGPT accounts likely originating from China after they used the American AI company’s models to generate content for covert operations about – wait for it – American AI. While neither of the two clusters seemed to have much success in sowing chaos or swaying opinions, the fact that they tried at all is significant, according to Ben Nimmo, principal investigator on OpenAI’s Intelligence and Investigations team. “Neither campaign appears to have gained much authentic engagement,” Nimmo told reporters. “They're important for what they reveal about the intentions of influence operators from China and the narratives they're testing and seeking to amplify.” The first cluster used ChatGPT to generate social media content and images for an operation claiming datacenters and AI applications are increasing electricity demand and causing higher costs for ordinary Americans. “For example, they asked for comic strips about a power grid operator’s capacity auction prices based on reporting from a legitimate regional paper,” the report says. “They asked ChatGPT to focus the comments on rising capacity prices as a consequence of peak electricity demand, framing the new demand as coming from data centers and AI applications and argued that these costs were ultimately passed to ordinary households.” The operators then posted these comments and images on X, likely using fake accounts, with links to real news stories about datacenters. OpenAI suspects the operators are part of a social-media team at a private Chinese tech company that provides services for Chinese provincial-level government clients. “This was not a case of an influence operation creating a debate,” Nimmo said. “The debate existed already. This was an influence operation from China trying to interfere in it. We didn't see any signs that they succeeded.” The second cluster of banned ChatGPT accounts also likely originated in China and used OpenAI’s models to write comments and draw political cartoons criticizing US tech policies and tariffs. “Interestingly, the operators specified in their prompts that the content should not include cartoons of Xi Jinping in the output and should only include President Trump,” Nimmo said. These accounts, all writing prompts in simplified Chinese and using VPNs to access the AI systems, also used ChatGPT to edit work reports and help design social media monitoring systems. “This isn't the first time that we've seen actors in China trying to come up with ideas for social media monitoring,” Nimmo said. In February, OpenAI said it banned ChatGPT accounts believed to be linked to Chinese government entities attempting to use AI models to surveil individuals and social media accounts. If AI doesn't work, bribery might? If Chinese agents can’t use AI systems to unearth sensitive information, there are always fake websites and job offers promising cash for state secrets. We’ve seen Beijing-linked government snoops use these tactics in the past, and according to the US Justice Department, they’re still using this scam (because it works). On Wednesday, the feds said they obtained a warrant for and seized 13 fake consulting company websites used to target US persons, including current and former security clearance holders with access to classified and sensitive government information. The domains include centrikglobalconsulting.com, rightinfoconsult.com, finnaclevesperconsulting.com, cydfconsulting.com, pulsewaveglobal.com, catalystglobalsolutions.com, thehorizzen.com, geoindopacific.com, gpf-ina.org, safesec-group.com, thetruthinfo.com, Vandercons.com, and gulfpeace.org. Since November 2023, these websites and associated job postings on social media, LinkedIn, and other hiring platforms advertised “consulting” jobs, including “Senior Analyst” and “International Affairs Consultant” positions. Suspected PRC operatives used the sites and job listings to recruit applicants and bribe them for sensitive information, DOJ alleges. “The conspirators have encouraged applicants and recruits to share confidential and sensitive information in violation of their official duties and of particular interest to the People's Republic of China (PRC) government,” according to the court documents. “The recruiters pressured candidates to share confidential information and reports from ‘insider sources' in violation of their official duties.” The court documents allege the conspirators then paid the recruits for these reports using online accounts in the names of fictitious individuals, and cryptocurrency to hide their identities and the source of the payments. ®
US lawmakers are alarmed that Bill Pulte, a housing official with no intelligence experience, is poised to take charge of one of the government's most powerful surveillance tools.
They are angry at Redmond and will have their revenge. Nightmare Eclipse, the prolific bug hunter and possibly disgruntled ex-Microsoft employee, disclosed another zero-day vulnerability just hours after Redmond issued a record-breaking number of CVEs and fixes for June Patch Tuesday. The latest zero-day, RoguePlanet, targets Microsoft Defender and works against fully patched Windows 10 and Windows 11 systems, according to the researcher, who also released proof-of-concept exploit code for the security flaw. Assuming the attacker can win a race condition, this bug allows local privilege escalation and leads to SYSTEM-level control over an affected machine. Nightmare Eclipse (aka Chaotic Eclipse) is a disgruntled bug hunter with a deep understanding of Windows and an even deeper grudge against Microsoft. They claim to be an ex-employee, and accuse Redmond of ignoring vulnerability reports and refusing to communicate with them. "When I actively asked you to communicate with me, you refused, humiliated me and made sure to insult me in front of people," they wrote in an earlier blog post that also promised a “bone shattering” drop on July 14. "You defame me in public with your CVE-2026-45585 advisory even though you literally deleted the Microsoft account I used to report bugs to you with and I got zero pennies from doing so and I still happily did like an idiot," the post continued. Possibly as an outlet for this anger, and reportedly in response to Redmond's lack of action, Nightmare began releasing their findings to the public. RoguePlanet marks the seventh Microsoft zero-day that they found and disclosed - accompanied by either a PoC exploit or technical details - before Redmond issued a fix. Microsoft's initial response to those disclosures was widely interpreted as a threat of legal action, prompting massive outrage from the broader infosec community before Redmond sought to calm the backlash by stating it had "no intention to pursue action against individuals conducting or publishing security research." As of Tuesday, the previous six zero-days all have patches. Three of them, RedSun, UnDefend, and BlueHammer, came under attack soon after Nightmare published working exploit code for each and before Microsoft released security updates to address the flaws. The other three, YellowKey, GreenPlasma, and MiniPlasma, all have been fixed as of June’s Patch Tuesday. YellowKey (aka CVE-2026-45585) is a security feature bypass bug in Windows BitLocker. An attacker with physical access to the vulnerable system could bypass the BitLocker Device Encryption feature and gain access to the device's encrypted data. GreenPlasma (aka CVE-2026-45586) and MiniPlasma (aka CVE-2020-17103) are both privilege escalation flaws in the Collaborative Translation Framework (CTFMON) and the Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver that can be abused by an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally and gain SYSTEM access. When asked about RoguePlanet, a Microsoft spokesperson told The Register that the Windows giant is “aware of the reported vulnerability and is actively investigating the validity and potential applicability of these claims." The spokesperson continued: "Microsoft is committed to investigating security issues and updating impacted products to protect customers as soon as possible. Importantly, we support coordinated vulnerability disclosure, an industry standard that protects customers and supports the research community by ensuring their findings are thoroughly investigated and addressed before being made public." Soon after Nightmare published a PoC for RoguePlanet, the ThreatLocker threat intelligence team validated the exploit code and said that they were “actively assessing impact, affected systems, and additional mitigations,” promising to share more findings “as they become available.” Tharros Labs senior vulnerability analyst and long-time respected security sleuth Will Dormann said he tested the exploit code, too. “It's reportedly not 100% reliable, but it worked on the first attempt for me,” Dormann wrote. Nightmare, for their part, rolled back the promise of a “bone shattering” drop on July 14. “(Un)fortunately I will be unable to mass disclose zerodays in July 14th, RoguePlanet took way more time than expected and truly drained me,” the researcher said on Tuesday. “I might take a break but I can't say for sure what I will be doing for next month, maybe it's nothing, maybe it's smtg. But the big thing is not happening. I did not intend to spread a mass panic with that post and I apologize for doing so.”®
A cybercrime group known as The Gentlemen has emerged as the second most active ransomware gang by victim count, rapidly attracting a talented pool of hackers through an aggressive recruitment strategy that promises affiliates 90 percent of any ransom paid by victims. This post examines clues pointing to a real life identity for the administrator of The Gentlemen ransomware group.
A graphic created and shared by The Gentlemen ransomware group administrator Hastalamuerte on Breachforums in May 2026. Credit: ke-la.com.
Experts at the security firm Check Point Software have been closely covering exploits of The Gentlemen, a so-called “ransomware-as-a-service” (RaaS) offering that pays affiliates handsomely to help spread the group’s malware.
“A 90/10 affiliate revenue split — compared to the industry standard 80/20 — is accelerating the group’s growth by attracting experienced operators from competing programs,” the researchers wrote in April.
Check Point found The Gentlemen are the second most active ransomware group by victim count so far this year, claiming at least 332 published victims since the group’s inception in mid-2025 and more than 240 in 2026 alone.
According to Check Point, the group targets Internet-facing devices (VPNs, firewalls) as their entry point, and once inside moves quickly to encrypt entire networks within hours.
Check Point says the administrator and primary operator of the ransomware group uses the nickname Zeta88 on the Russian-language cybercrime forums, and that this individual was previously known under the moniker Hastalamuerte. Check Point noted that a breach of the group’s backend infrastructure made it clear that Hastalamuerte/Zeta88 is the person who assembles the locker and RaaS panel, manages payments, and is essentially the administrator of the entire program who receives 10 percent of all ransoms.
WHO IS HASTALAMUERTE?
The cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 shows that the user Hastalamuerte is a Russian and English speaking person who registered on almost a dozen cybercrime forums between 2019 and the present day, including Exploit, Breachforums, Ramp_V2, BHF, Raidforums, and Nulled.
Intel 471 reveals that Hastalamuerte registered on Breachforums in January 2025 from an Internet address in Izhevsk, the capital city of Russia’s Udmurt Republic. Likewise, the user Zeta88 signed up at the English-language cybercrime forum Breached in August 2022 from a different Internet address in Izhevsk.
Intel 471 finds Hastalamuerte registered on Raidforums in 2020 using the email address hastalamuerte1488@protonmail.com (1488 is a common combination of two numeric symbols associated with white supremacy). A lookup on this address at the open source intelligence service Epieos shows it is connected to an account at Apple and to a phone number ending in 04.
Epieos says that Protonmail address is also linked to a GitHub account under the username SantaMuerte. That account is marked private, but a history of this user’s activity shows they are watching and developing a number of malware tools and exploits.
In April 2020, Hastalamuerte said on the crime forum Nulled that they could be contacted at the Telegram instant messenger name @hastalamuerte18, and the threat intelligence company Flashpoint finds this username is assigned the unique Telegram ID number 30907522 [full disclosure: Flashpoint is an advertiser on this blog].
The breach tracking service Constella Intelligence reports that Hastalamuerte’s Telegram ID is connected to another username — “bu4vs” — and to the Russian phone number 79127650004. Pivoting on this phone number in Constella fetches multiple records from hacked Russian government databases showing it is assigned to one Alexander Andreevich Yapaev, a 36-year-old from Izhevsk.
Constella reveals that phone number was used to create an account at the Russian social media platform Pikabu under the name “4apai18,” and shows Mr. Yapaev has signed up at a number of websites using the common surname Ivanov, or else “Chapaev” (the numeral 4 is often used as shorthand for a “ch” sound in Russian).
A search in Intel 471 for cybercrime forum members with the nickname SantaMuerte unearths an account by the same name created in 2020 on the Russian hacking forum Codeby. Intel 471 shows this user originally registered on Codeby with the not-so-subtle nickname Alexandr 4apaev.
Constella finds Mr. Yapaev regularly used the email address bu4vs@mail.ru. Meanwhile, Epieos shows this address is connected to a LinkedIn account for Alexander Yapaev, who lists himself as the head of B2B marketing at the company Uralenergo Udmurtia, one of Russia’s largest suppliers of electrotechnical and lighting products.
Mr. Yapaev did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Nearly every time we publish one of these Breadcrumbs stories, readers are curious to know why it seems like so many cybercriminals from Russia apparently do little to hide their real life identities. The truth is that — Russian or not — most didn’t exactly set out to be arch criminals, but instead got drawn into the scene gradually over several years as their skills broadened and sharpened.
Another important dynamic is that the Russian government generally either co-opts or ignores cybercriminal activity within its borders so long as the hackers do not steal from or attack Russian businesses and citizens. As a result, successful cybercriminals in Russia are usually insulated from prosecution and arrest by foreign law enforcement agencies provided they occasionally pay off the right people and do not travel abroad. And cybercriminals who intend to strictly adhere to those unwritten rules may (at least initially) be less concerned about covering their tracks online.
But the simplest explanation is that cybercriminals of all nationalities tend to make a number of basic operational security mistakes early in their careers, when they are less savvy and have far less to lose by their carelessness. A review of Hastalamuerte’s early posts on the crime forums (circa 2019-2020) shows a relatively unsophisticated and low-skilled hacker still trying to learn the ropes and earn a positive reputation on these communities.
For example, in June 2020 Hastalamuerte’s Telegram account joined a multi-month training program (@pntst) to learn how to use popular penetration testing tools, and their candid posts to this hacker training camp show Hastalamuerte struggling to use these tools effectively. A Google-translated record of Hastalmuerte’s posts to @pntst is here.
Update, June 11, 10:23 a.m. ET: The threat research group PRODAFT has released a detailed writeup on the history and current operations of The Gentlemen. PRODAFT said its findings match the same persona with “high confidence,” and found the administrator (Zeta88/Hastalamuerte) supplies affiliates with initial access directly, primarily Fortinet SSL-VPN credentials obtained through brute-force attacks or sourced from the group’s own leak database. They also discovered the administrator is using AI to develop and maintain the ransomware and associated tooling, as well as to assist with post-exploitation activity.
The ACLU is suing two Florida police departments over the arrest of a Fort Myers man in a child-abduction case, saying officers treated a flawed face-recognition match as a near-certain ID.
GitHub will change npm's defaults so the install command no longer runs scripts automatically, disabling a feature commonly exploited by malicious packages such as the notorious Shai-Hulud worm. Maintainer Leo Balter said: "Install-time lifecycle scripts are the single largest code-execution surface in the npm ecosystem. Every npm install runs scripts from every transitive dependency, so a single compromised package anywhere in your tree can execute arbitrary code on a developer machine or CI (continuous integration) runner." In npm 12, due July, three security-focused defaults are changing. Scripts configured for preinstall, install, or postinstall will no longer run unless explicitly permitted via allow-scripts. The --allow-git flag, which pulls dependencies from remote URLs, will default to off, closing an attack path where a malicious .npmrc file could override the Git executable and achieve arbitrary code execution. Finally, allow-remote will default to none, blocking dependency downloads from remote URLs entirely. It will still be possible to allow scripts to run via an allowlist in the package.json configuration file. This will be pinned to the installed version of a package by default. These are breaking changes, and Balter recommended developers run the commands to allow scripts for every currently installed package in a project that requires them. "This gets you protected against new, unexpected scripts immediately," he said. The next step is to review these packages and deny scripts for those where they are not needed. Some packages require script approval to function, including native modules that compile on install, testing tools like Playwright and Puppeteer (which fetch binaries via postinstall), and Electron, which wraps the Chromium browser engine for cross-platform desktop applications. These features have been available since npm version 11.10.0, released in February, but as opt-in flags rather than defaults. That version also introduced min-release-age, which blocks installation of package version newer than a specified number of days, designed as a safeguard against newly published malicious packages. Best security practice for developers using npm 11.16, the current version, is to set these flags on in .npmrc or via environment variables, which will also prepare a project for the changes in version 12. One annoyance is that the existing flag ignore-scripts does not support an allowlist, other than via an additional tool. The ignore-scripts setting will override allow-scripts, so developers will need to remove it, if set to true, to enable approved scripts to run. The allowScripts setting exists in npm 11 but is advisory only. Will this fix npm security issues? Unfortunately not. "Now all the malware can move from the install script to the module itself where it will inevitably still be run," said one developer. Another common view is that developers should use pnpm, which already has safer defaults than npm, including a minimum release age. There is consensus, though, that these changes do improve npm security and are long overdue. The pull request for this change includes the remark that "npm is the only remaining major package manager that runs dependency install scripts by default. pnpm v10+, Yarn Berry, Bun, and Deno all block them." ®
Login
