Citrix is urging customers to patch another critical NetScaler vulnerability after weeks of disclosures involving actively exploited flaws. CVE-2026-107406 affects NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway and can lead to remote code execution (RCE) or denial of service (DoS). It carries a CVSS v4.0 score of 9.5. The affected configurations depend on the software version. Older builds are vulnerable when configured as a SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) service provider (SP) or identity provider (IdP); some more recent builds are affected only in the identity provider configuration. Citrix's advisory lists the affected builds and required updates. Secure Private Access Hybrid deployments using NetScaler instances also need patching. Citrix classifies the flaw as CWE-119: improper restriction of operations within a memory buffer. Customers must update their own deployments. Citrix says it handles the necessary updates for its managed cloud services and Adaptive Authentication. Citrix did not say whether this vulnerability was already exploited as a zero-day before disclosure, but credited Michael Tucker, Chew Keong Tan, and Alex Bernier at JPMorgan Chase's XOR Team, along with Maxim Suhanov, for the discovery. Google researchers said a campaign exploiting CVE-2026-88772 had been underway since at least early September, with organizations in government, finance, legal, and education across North America and Europe likely affected. Citrix disclosed the flaw weeks later as part of a release that patched eight vulnerabilities. Citrix disclosed another exploited flaw, CVE-2026-88779, last Friday that carries a severity score of 8.7. Both that flaw and the newly disclosed vulnerability involve memory overflows affecting SAML configurations. The latter can also allow remote code execution, carries a higher severity score, and has not been identified by Citrix as exploited. ®

The FBI announced that it has seized seven web domains linked to hacking tools allegedly operated by a Chinese security firm called Integrity Technology Group and used by Beijing-backed cyber operatives to scan a South Carolina power company's network and other critical infrastructure systems for vulnerabilities. In a subsequent advisory, the FBI and other government agencies in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and Spain warned that Chinese government-linked attackers, enabled by Integrity Tech, are using botnets, malware, and other intrusion tools to target organizations worldwide and steal sensitive data, including from US critical infrastructure networks. “These actors exploit vulnerabilities by using scanning tools, cross-site scripting attacks, and password spraying on Microsoft Exchange servers, while establishing persistence through VPN software and exfiltrating emails and credentials using scripts,” according to the security alert. Based on this activity, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added five CVEs to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog: CVE-2015-3306 CVE-2015-5477 CVE-2016-3081 CVE-2021-3199 CVE-2023-22894 The court-authorized seizures are the latest in a long series of US law-enforcement attempts to disrupt a Beijing-backed cybercrew called Flax Typhoon and shut down its botnet. From 2021 until its disruption, Flax Typhoon allegedly used a version of this Mirai-based botnet to infect internet-connected devices with malware, scan networks for vulnerabilities, and launch additional cyberattacks, all while hiding the PRC government hackers’ true IP addresses and physical location. The feds allege Integrity Tech developed the botnet and a vulnerability scanner called Microscan, and operated a post-compromise tool called FishHub. The latter allegedly downloaded additional malware to the phishing victims’ networks and stole sensitive data. Court documents, unsealed on Thursday, allege Integrity Tech has contracts with the PRC government, and the feds have long linked Flax Typhoon to the private firm. “Flax Typhoon actors conducted successful computer intrusions against multiple victim entities which had been scanned using the Microscan tool,” according to the court documents. Victims include a university in Hsinchu, Taiwan, that Flax Typhoon compromised in March 2023, and a second university in Puli Township, Taiwan breached in August 2022. “On or about April 26, 2022, and on or about December 29, 2022, Flax Typhoon actors also used the Microscan tool to scan for vulnerabilities on the networks of a U.S. power company based in South Carolina, a multi-national Non-Governmental Organization, Japanese and Polish airports, and at least two Taiwanese critical infrastructure companies in the natural gas and power sectors,” the documents allege. Integrity Tech accessed Microscan through one of the seized domains, c0cc[.]cc. Meanwhile, five of the seized domains, 98aicai[.]com, 98aicode[.]com, outlook3650[.]com, youtubecard[.]com, and linkedinns[.]net, delivered the FishHub malware as recently as March, and infected about 20 Taiwanese universities. “Based on my training and experience I believe the tool was named FishHub because it facilitated phishing activity,” FBI special agent Adam James said in a seizure warrant affidavit. After FishHub downloaded a file onto victims' computers, that file used the five domains to retrieve additional malicious programs and code. The malware created a file listing, searched for specific files, compressed documents, and then exfiltrated the selected files to an attacker-controlled server. This gave Flax Typhoon remote access to compromised networks. In September 2024, the FBI said Integrity Tech and Flax Typhoon tore down their 260,000-device botnet after the FBI and its international pals went after them. As recently as this year, however, both private sector security researchers and Western governments warned that Chinese hackers continue to turn compromised routers and IoT devices into botnets and break into critical networks. In February, operational technology (OT) security provider Dragos said China’s state-sponsored spies haven't let up on their attempts to compromise America's critical infrastructure, and this includes a group whose activity overlaps with Flax Typhoon. This group focuses on gaining long-term access to OT engineering workstations and exfiltrating operational files, and it targets manufacturing, defense, automotive, electric power, oil and gas, and government organizations across the US, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region. In April, a 10-country joint advisory warned that basically every Chinese “Typhoon” group is using botnets “strategically, and at scale.” Some of these covert networks are built and maintained by Chinese infosec companies including Integrity Tech, which also controlled and managed the so-called Raptor Train network, the alert said. In late August, the FBI said that it had disrupted a different botnet and seized domains associated with two platforms that Chinese government-backed operatives allegedly used to target NASA, the US Senate, the Department of Energy, and several other government agencies and critical networks. The DOJ subsequently clarified that not all the named organizations had been compromised.®

Researchers found thousands of GPU servers exposing Nvidia's DCGM Exporter to the internet, with hundreds potentially vulnerable to a high-severity flaw that could let unauthenticated attackers crash the GPU monitoring service and disrupt AI workloads. DCGM Exporters read telemetry from the GPUs on a host, including its hardware, utilization, memory usage, power consumption, and error events. Each GPU has its own unique ID, or UUID, and all of these metrics are exposed in plaintext over HTTP. This exposure provides would-be attackers with detailed information useful for reconnaissance, including mapping GPU infrastructure, identifying potentially vulnerable systems, and monitoring workload activity. Michael Katchinskiy, a researcher at datacenter security startup Lava, found and reported the bug in the GPU health and performance monitoring service. In September, the GPU giant Nvidia released a fix for the flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-47483, and gave it an 8.2 CVSS high-severity rating. “Once we realized how much these endpoints revealed, the next question was: How many of them are exposed to the internet?” Katchinskiy said in a Thursday blog. So the researchers started scanning the internet for exposed DCGM Exporters. And the scale of exposure proved “especially significant,” he wrote. Over the course of four scans between March and May, the threat hunters found about 2,100 GPU servers exposing DCGM Exporter metrics to the open internet. These included 12,000 GPU UUIDs. None of these required authentication. The hosts belonged to about 300 organizations, according to Katchinskiy, and nearly half - 5,274 of the exposed GPUs, or 44 percent of the total - were located in the US. These GPUs represented about $100 million in hardware, and included Nvidia Blackwell Ultra B300 GPUs, H200s, and H100s - used to run large-scale AI workloads - plus consumer RTX 5090 and 4090 systems. While investigating the exposed systems, the Lava team found that about 25 percent of the exposed DCGM hosts also revealed data from Go’s /debug/pprof/ built-in profiling tool. The profiler collects and exposes runtime performance data such as CPU and memory usage for running Go applications. This includes CPU usage, memory allocations, goroutine states, and blocking events. “With enough concurrent unauthenticated requests, the exporter could run out of memory and crash, cutting off visibility into GPU health and activity,” Katchinskiy wrote. The CPU and memory pressure could also affect AI training or inference workloads. Nvidia fixed the issue in version 4.8.2, and operators should upgrade to that version or later. In addition to GPU telemetry, Lava looked into Prometheus Node Exporter, which monitors server hardware and operating systems, and also exposes metrics over HTTP. The team found 12,096 public Node Exporter hosts exposing data on server models, operating systems, firmware versions, hostnames, storage paths and networking hardware commonly used in GPU clusters. This information reveals how environments are built and configured, which could also be used by attackers for reconnaissance, matching the system to known vulnerabilities. The publicly exposed monitoring services affected customer infrastructure across neocloud and GPU cloud providers including Nebius, Voltage Park, Lambda, Northern Data, and DigitalOcean. Lava reported all of this to the affected providers, and Katchinskiy says that these providers worked with customers to address the exposures. For operators: the security shop says Nvidia DCGM Exporter, Node Exporter and Prometheus services should not be directly reachable from the public internet and recommends restricting them to authorized monitoring infrastructure. “The findings highlight a growing security gap in AI infrastructure: companies are spending millions on GPUs while leaving critical systems exposed,” Katchinskiy wrote. “Those exposures can reveal how AI environments are built and, in some cases, allow attackers to disrupt them.” ®

The credential-hijacking Shai-Hulud worm has struck again, this time burrowing its way into a popular AI agent platform SDK. Multiple security researchers reported Thursday that they had detected Shai-Hulud infection in a recent release of the npm package for version 0.5.144 of Tensorlake’s SDK. That package has somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,000 downloads per week, while its GitHub repository has more than a thousand stars, suggesting it’s quite popular and that the infection could pose a serious risk to anyone who installed the malicious version. Analysis of the malicious release suggests it shares code and techniques with the Shai-Hulud variant dubbed ChainDrop by researchers, which was used in August to compromise npm dependencies including keyv and flat-cache. Like other variants of Shai-Hulud, the worm is designed to steal credentials and self-propagate. This particular version, according to supply chain security firm SafeDep, is designed to steal everything from crypto wallets to browser passwords, GitHub Actions secrets, cloud credentials, service-account tokens, and whatever else it can get its hands on. It exfiltrates that data and keeps an open line to its C2 infrastructure to await further instructions. To make matters worse, this Shai-Hulud variant monitors certain stolen GitHub tokens and, if one is revoked, can trigger the deletion of the infected user's home directory under specific conditions, making removal tricky. Socket recommends rebuilding compromised systems from a trusted source before restoring access to secrets, while researchers warn that the malicious token monitor should be disabled before revoking affected credentials. Tensorlake, for those unfamiliar, is a cloud-native platform for running isolated AI agents and untrusted AI-authored code. The infected npm SDK is used to create and manage Tensorlake environments. Socket warns that the malicious SDK's installation script can execute on the developer's machine or build server, outside Tensorlake's sandbox protections, potentially compromising the host before any AI-generated code is run. “Teams may isolate an agent’s generated code while installing its SDK on a developer workstation, application server, or build runner with access to deployment credentials and other secrets,” Socket noted. “Code executed during that installation inherits the permissions of the installing process.” That may sound bad, but it’s worth noting the malicious version wasn’t up for long - according to security firm Socket, the infected version was published to npm earlier this morning, UTC, and was flagged by its engine 11 minutes after publication. Npm removed the version, and Tensorlake has pulled the package as well, updating the version to 0.5.145. Best check to be sure you haven't installed the malicious version if you're a Tensorlake user. ®

The use of phishing emails as a means of stealing information or implanting damaging malware dates back to the mid-1990s. Although almost as old as the Internet, it remains the instrument of choice for threat actors wanting to pose as trusted organizations or individuals for the purposes of corporate infiltration. In fact its use is on the rise: according to the most recent figures from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), some 26 percent of all cybercrime complaints filed with them are now phishing-related. The bad news doesn’t stop there. Phishing is mutating in alarming new ways, raising all sorts of difficult questions for defenders and placing email security at a tricky inflection point. AI has for years been a useful tool in the hands of the cybercriminal. But the advent of Generative AI (GenAI) is proving a cyber game changer, transforming phishing from a widespread but easily identifiable nuisance into a lethal precision instrument. Aspiring phishers have historically been hindered by various constraints. Their attempts at chummy authenticity have often been undermined by easy-to-spot mistakes and amateurish formatting – blemishes that traditional email security is good at picking up. Personalised attacks have also been hard to launch at any kind of scale. GenAI sweeps all technical, linguistic, and operational restrictions aside by automating sophistication. Attackers no longer have to choose between individually targeted “spear phishing” which takes much effort to coordinate, and large-scale attacks that lack finesse. Now, with minimal expertise and at low cost, they can hit thousands of victims with minutely tailored phishes at the press of a button. Today’s Large Language Models (LLMs) generate polished and contextual text in any language, backing it with realistic brand graphics and convincing web addresses. At a stroke, Gen AI has democratized this type of crime, putting it in reach of anyone capable of the most elementary research. “Thanks to AI, the historic signals that exposed a phishing email – poor grammar, misspelt words – are now ironed out and replaced with perfect language,” notes Dave Baggett, SVP Cybersecurity with software developer Kaseya. “These emails can be highly targeted with the help of AI. You can create an email that pinpoints, say, a pharma company by using authentic terminology. It’s an incredibly powerful tool for the bad guys.” And let’s not forget that where this new AI-enabled phishing is successful, it is not just a single unwary employee whose data is at risk. Once past the perimeter, a bad actor can get to work burrowing into the cloud and SaaS platforms that now underpin global commerce and communications. All in all, it’s easy to understand how losses from phishing attacks have gone up 274 percent in the last couple of years, according to the FBI. This new email security landscape is an alarming development for corporate IT bosses, and also for MSPs who must be super wary on behalf of customers who don’t have the expertise to pick up attacks at this pitch of sophistication on their own. AI is for the good guys too It’s not all bad news on the email security front line. As threat actors have been perfecting their use of GenAI, defenders have been developing AI-driven counter solutions in parallel. Where old school protection relied on spotting the kind of anomalies that GenAI has now ironed out, newer solutions are geared more towards contextual analysis. They are not so much trying to spot clumsy typos and dodgy attachments as model an attacker’s intent before damage is done. Today defenders can use AI to analyze subtle patterns that are in tune with the layered structure of modern phishing campaigns. The aim is to determine whether a message aligns with expected behavioral patterns. This level of finesse is made necessary by the insidious nature of modern phishing which means that technically clean email messages, in other words ones that are free of malware-loaded attachments or booby-trapped links, can still contain malicious potential. Modern cybercriminals often bypass automated security filters by the simple means of exploiting human psychology and trusted infrastructure. Social engineering, supercharged by GenAI, can be a sharper sword than a malware payload. A phish will often seek to impersonate a boss or a colleague using a plain text email. Attackers can set GenAI to scour LinkedIn, looking for people who have just started new jobs. Green employees are more vulnerable to a phish that looks like an email from a new superior they haven’t got to know yet. Once trust is established, what will typically follow is a demand for, say, an urgent wire transfer, or a casual request for payroll details or passwords. Attackers can develop a relationship over multiple emails to “groom” the victim before striking. Traditional filters see nothing suspicious. Spotting this sort of attack demands a smarter grade of tool. “Since attackers are relying on manipulation of fallible individuals, security must now support them at the moment where wrong decisions can be made,” says Baggett. “Good email security will replace generic warnings with easily digestible context about why a message might be risky and advice about the need for further verification.” Where once an inbox was a passive delivery channel, says Baggett, it is now an active layer of risk mitigation, tooled up to stamp out a phishing attempt before it escalates into account compromise and devastating financial loss. A huge asymmetry The good guys are fighting back. But as Baggett points out, there remains a huge asymmetry between bad actor and defender: “Attackers can use LLMs, basically for free, to create perfect phishing templates,” he says. “On the other hand, if defenders took every inbound email and put it through a frontier LLM model, that’s about 100x too expensive. We just can’t use the same tools at the criminals.” One option for defenders is to use smaller, more specialized models, distilled from larger ones. A compact model could be tuned, for example, to the sentiment or meaning of each phrase in an email, and set to pick up a threatening tone or a favor being asked. Where chunky LLMs just cost too much, another choice might be to run a subset of the overall inbound mail through a big model: “Admins can be given a way to run particular mails through a frontier LLM,” says Baggett. “That model will have been trained to understand certain critical aspects of email security.” Better use could be made of pre-LLM tools such as computer vision, which can help process, analyze and understand visual data like digital images and videos. Other ancillary tools that could enrich the defensive mix include sender analysis to look into the origin and authenticity of an email message, and linked-content inspection that can examine an email in depth without triggering any embedded threats. There are some reasons to hope for a safer future as AI technology evolves. As inference becomes smarter and models get better, it should become possible to run a higher percentage of emails through a large scale LLM, believes Baggett. This, however, may not be achievable for some years. There’s also the possibility of using LLMs not just to spot potentially malicious emails but also to analyze the settings and admin controls of existing security tools. In this way, the knowledge required to use the tools to best effect becomes much less. “Security tools can be complex and feature hundreds of settings,” points out Baggett. “Some require expertise that our customers don’t have. There are a number of things we believe tools should be doing to help defenders, for example reduce alert fatigue.” The criminal fraternity may, of course, also find ways to harness better tools for new purposes. At the moment, most attacks are conceived and designed by humans. But ultimately, this job may be taken over by agentic models able to figure out new tactics for themselves. Machines may soon be able to plan and supervise attacks at scale. Great tools, available now Luckily defenders don’t have to sit back and be at the mercy of future developments. There are some great tools available today that help them even up the odds and cut the complexity from checking email. INKY Smart Insights, for example, uses GenAI to reduce a lengthy manual email investigation to a few seconds of automated triage. For the purposes of hard-pressed administrators it can turn a mess of technical email evidence into a plain-language verdict and enable the creation of cogent reports. Along with Kaseya Intelligence it can support decision-making across the broader security environment. “Smart Insights will identify problems and give a narrative explanation of its reasoning,” enthuses Baggett. “It will do that in a way that’s not overly technical, making the tool valuable to someone who doesn’t have expertise in email security.” The hard-pressed MSP, for example, can leverage Smart Insights to provide key information for their customers in an abbreviated and digestible format. In short, it allows them to enjoy the sophistication of LLMs but without adding hugely to their overheads. The war on GenAI-powered phishing is far from won. But so long as defenders can understand the potential of the smart tools at their disposal, they have a fighting chance of keeping the bad guys at bay and essential channels of communication safe. Find out more at Kaseya’s Cybersecurity Summit – details here Sponsored by Kaseya

Britain and Germany have announced a partnership to counter cyberattacks and sabotage, particularly from Russia, as Prime Minister Andy Burnham heads to Berlin for talks. Under the arrangement announced Thursday, the countries will share information and coordinate efforts to monitor, deter, and disrupt hostile activity, including threats to critical infrastructure. The announcement comes ahead of Burnham's first face-to-face meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, where security won't be the only item on the agenda. The PM is also expected to raise Britain's relationship with the EU, including the possibility of rejoining the bloc. Burnham has floated several options for undoing parts of Brexit, from rejoining the customs union or single market to returning to the EU outright. According to the Financial Times, he wants Germany's backing for closer economic ties before a UK-EU summit on November 20. On the security front, both governments worry about Russia's appetite for cyberattacks, sabotage, and other operations that fall short of outright military confrontation. "Attacks on our infrastructure, our businesses and our democracies are not a distant threat," Burnham said ahead of the meeting. "They reach into people's homes and workplaces, and they are designed to make us weaker and more divided." He added: "Britain and Germany are joining forces to find, expose and disrupt this activity." The partnership builds on the Kensington Treaty, signed in July 2025 and ratified on Thursday, which already committed the two countries to working more closely on defense, cybersecurity, technology, and economic security. The announcement offers little operational detail. It names no agencies, specifies no additional funding, and does not explain how the countries will disrupt hostile operations. The deal lands amid increasingly stark warnings from European intelligence agencies about Moscow's activities. Germany's foreign intelligence chief, Martin Jaeger, warned this week that the confrontation with Russia had entered a more dangerous phase, while German authorities have blamed Moscow for an attempted drone attack at Leipzig airport in August. Britain has been dusting off its own tools for dealing with hostile states. The government has fast-tracked legislation giving the Home Secretary new powers to designate state-backed organizations and proxy groups, while Burnham has asked security chiefs to establish a National Centre for Information Defence to tackle foreign disinformation campaigns. ®

Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we highlight some of the lowlights in corporate security. This week, we’ll talk about two scenarios, one that ended in tragedy and another that shows the power of a good defense over dedicated phishing attacks. 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. Both stories come courtesy of Dave Hatter, a cybersecurity and compliance consultant with Intrust IT. In his many years of experience with the company, Hatter has had to work for a variety of small companies that needed help with their security, whether they knew it or not. One time several years ago, the new CFO at a small construction company phoned Intrust and expressed interest in hiring them. However, the proposal was vetoed by the owner of the company, an older gentleman who thought his business was too small to interest hackers and that his existing, one-person IT staff was all he could afford. “We got a guy, my brother’s uncle’s cousin does my IT, don’t need you guys,” Hatter quotes the owner as saying. “We hear this all the time. Thanks for shopping. You’re too expensive.” Three weeks later, Hatter got a call from a local accountant friend who begged him to help a client who'd been hit with a ransomware attack. Hatter said he couldn’t really give more than general guidance, but would talk to the victim anyway. As soon as he called the number, Hatter realized that the ransomware victim was actually the same construction company that had turned down his services a few weeks earlier. The business had an old unpatched Windows server that contained all its most important data. There was a backup drive, but it was connected to the same server, so both devices were encrypted by the ransomware. “Their entire backup is this external drive, which, of course, is now encrypted,” Hatter said. “So, literally, they can't pay their employees. They don't know who owes them money.” Hatter could not help the company, and he never found out whether it paid the ransom. However, the org, which had been around for years, went out of business within months. This sad story shows the importance of having real backups that are off-site or in the cloud and patching whatever servers you have. You can never assume that your company is too small to be attacked because ransomware gangs want your money and they are just as happy to take on small businesses as large ones, which are likely to be harder targets. The other incident involved two companies in the landscaping and construction business. Somebody broke into an executive’s email account at company one and started sending phishing emails to company number two. The miscreants had also set up email filtering rules in the first company’s account so that the messages from the phishing campaign were routed to buried folders where the real-life account holder would never see them. The phishing mails took the form of RFPs (requests for proposal) – a perfect lure, because who wouldn't want new business? They were perfectly crafted, with no grammar errors or obvious tells, and the return address matched company one's. However, instead of attaching the RFP as a PDF or PowerPoint file, it had a button for the user to click to download it. “If I can get in your email and send out emails as you, the recipients, especially if they've interacted with me before, aren't going to have any guard up,” Hatter said. “Especially if there's no crazy language or crazy requests in there because they've got an email from me before.” Upon clicking the download button, the user was transported to a Microsoft 365 login screen that looked identical to the real one but was not on the microsoft.com domain. The user was then invited to put in their email address and password to gain access to the desired file. Because the user had 2FA, this fake page also asked them for their limited-time 2FA code. Behind the scenes, the threat actors were transmitting the login to Microsoft so that Microsoft itself would send an SMS message to the victim at company number two. Then the victim would pass along the one-time passcode via the fake login site. A classic man-in-the-middle attack. It worked, and the threat actors now had access to the Microsoft 365 account and email for the victim at company number two. This could've allowed them to do almost anything using that person’s email. If the victim had access to bank accounts or customer data, the attackers could have initiated password resets from the account, then conducted fraudulent money transfers, or stolen personal information. At the very least, they could've used the victim's account to phish other contacts. Fortunately, Hatter's client had installed a piece of software his company made called TarBot, which runs in the Microsoft 365 environment and uses Entra ID P2 to help customers identify suspicious logins. “It throws off a bunch of telemetry, statistics, metrics, whatever you want to call it, that allows our software to say, this is an anomalous login, revoke the token, and make the user log in again,” Hatter said. He said his company is not the only one to make apps like TarBot that detect suspicious logins. So the bad guys were kicked out after just a few minutes. But Hatter says the better way to stop these attacks is to use phishing-resistant MFA, such as hardware keys (like the YubiKey line) or passkeys. With today’s AI-assisted phishing, telltale signs such as bad grammar or obviously fake login pages are becoming few and far between. ®

The United States Department of Justice has charged a man with fraud after he allegedly told clients he could decrypt files locked up by ransomware but actually paid ransoms – and seemingly got away with it for years. The Feds allege that Zohar Pinhasi – aka “Zack Silver” and “Zack Green” – ran a Florida company called “MonsterCloud” that advised ransomware victims not to pay because it had a way to recover encrypted data. “The charges relate to Pinhasi’s claimed ability to decrypt ransomware without paying cybercriminals, purportedly using ‘proprietary tools’ and ‘advanced decryption techniques' on behalf of distressed business owners who came to his company,” according to a DoJ press release. “In fact, Pinhasi allegedly used a portion of his clients’ fees to pay off the ransomware attackers, and then kept the rest, often extracting a substantial markup.” In one case, Pinhasi allegedly charged his client $150,000, paid the $8,200 ransom, and pocketed the rest – but didn’t admit he had paid the ransom. That scheme allegedly worked so well that Pinhasi charged clients more than $19 million and paid more than $8 million in ransom payments. The DOJ’s indictment [PDF] says MonsterCloud’s website mentions its use of “advanced decryption techniques and cutting-edge technology” – the same language found on this monstercloud.com page. The site also contains this claim: “At MonsterCloud, we are not a team of IT Experts. We are the most sophisticated Counter Cyber Terrorism team in the world.” The indictment suggests MonsterCloud was nothing of the sort, and that its claims rang hollow for years. “MonsterCloud's website included ‘testimonials’ and other promotional content, including from at least one compensated spokesperson,” the indictment states. “In May 2019, one such spokesperson – an individual who had provided a paid testimonial for the MonsterCloud website – contacted the defendant Zohar Pinhasi with questions about Pinhasi’s business practices and truthfulness.” “Among other things, the spokesperson asked Pinhasi whether MonsterCloud actually had any proprietary software that would allow MonsterCloud to decrypt encrypted data. Pinhasi responded: ‘MonsterCloud doesn't hold any proprietary technology [to] decrypt the ransomware data.’” Pinhasi faces two counts of wire fraud, and one of wire fraud conspiracy. He could do twenty years on each count, if convicted. The FBI is investigating this case, and it appears further charges could follow as the indictment states Pinhasi had “multiple co-conspirators, individuals whose identities are both known and unknown to the Grand Jury, including MonsterCloud employees and contractors.” ®

Imagine going to a Google website at its correct URL, only to be redirected to a crim's illegitimate copy. Attackers hijacked top-level domains, allowing them to alter DNS records and mint fraudulent HTTPS certificates for several Google domains, and those belonging to other organizations. Google said it became aware of the series of attacks last week in the .gh (Ghana), .sl (Sierra Leone), and .as (American Samoa) country-code top-level namespaces (ccTLDs). “During these hijacks, attackers modified authoritative DNS records and obtained unauthorized HTTPS certificates covering several Google domains, as well as domains belonging to other organizations,” Google security warned on Tuesday. Google did not say which specific domains or organizations were affected. The attacks did not compromise Google’s systems, and Chrome quickly blocked suspected counterfeit certificates across the affected ccTLDs - meaning Chrome browser users are already protected - according to the Chocolate Factory. “Due to the nature of the attacks, we have no reason to believe the Certification Authorities (CAs) that issued the impacted certificates did anything wrong,” the alert said. These types of attacks allow criminals to impersonate legitimate organizations and websites without triggering any browser security alerts. The attacker controls the traffic routing (via DNS) and the private key associated with the unauthorized certificate, which means they can potentially intercept or modify data sent by users to the impersonated site - and abuse the trusted organization's brand to distribute malware or conduct phishing attacks. “While Chrome took steps during these incidents to identify and block suspected unauthorized certificates across the affected ccTLDs, browser-side intervention should not be relied on to protect your users,” Google warned domain owners. “Due to the complexity of DNS hijacks, we cannot guarantee that our analysis identified every affected domain, nor do Chrome interventions reliably protect non-Chrome users.” To ensure that their domains and users are protected, Google recommends ongoing monitoring of Certificate Transparency (CT) logs across all of an organization’s domains, including parked or regional ccTLD properties. This provides near real-time alerts whenever someone obtains a certificate for one of your domains. And if you operate a domain in .gh, .sl, or .as, definitely review recent CT log entries for unexpected certificates. Organizations can also publish restrictive Certification Authority Authorization (CAA) DNS records, which allow domain owners to specify which CAs are permitted to issue certificates for their domains. While this won’t stop certificates from being issued during a DNS hijacking attack, it helps safeguard domains after DNS control is restored. Google recommends CAA policies that restrict issuance to specific authorized accounts and validation methods and prevent attackers from using cached validation state to mint new certificates after a hijacking ends.®