41 servers seized and 32 suspects arrested during Operation Secure.
More than 20,000 malicious IP addresses or domains linked to information stealers have been taken down in an INTERPOL-coordinated operation against cybercriminal infrastructure.
During Operation Secure (January – April 2025) law enforcement agencies from 26 countries worked to locate servers, map physical networks and execute targeted takedowns.
Ahead of the operation, INTERPOL cooperated with private-sector partners Group-IB, Kaspersky and Trend Micro to produce Cyber Activity Reports, sharing critical intelligence with cyber teams across Asia. These coordinated efforts resulted in the takedown of 79 per cent of identified suspicious IP addresses.
Participating countries reported the seizure of 41 servers and over 100 GB of data, as well as the arrest of 32 suspects linked to illegal cyber activities.
Infostealer malware is a primary tool for gaining unauthorized access to organizational networks. This type of malicious software extracts sensitive data from infected devices, often referred to as bots. The stolen information typically includes browser credentials, passwords, cookies, credit card details and cryptocurrency wallet data.
Additionally, logs harvested by infostealers are increasingly traded on the cybercriminal underground and are frequently used as a gateway for further attacks. These logs often enable initial access for ransomware deployments, data breaches, and cyber-enabled fraud schemes such as Business Email Compromise (BEC).
Following the operation, authorities notified over 216,000 victims and potential victims so they could take immediate action - such as changing passwords, freezing accounts, or removing unauthorized access.
Vietnamese police arrested 18 suspects, seizing devices from their homes and workplaces. The group's leader was found with over VND 300 million (USD 11,500) in cash, SIM cards and business registration documents, pointing to a scheme to open and sell corporate accounts.
As part of their respective enforcement efforts under Operation Secure, house raids were carried out by authorities in Sri Lanka and Nauru. These actions led to the arrest of 14 individuals - 12 in Sri Lanka and two in Nauru - as well as the identification of 40 victims.
The Hong Kong Police analysed over 1,700 pieces of intelligence provided by INTERPOL and identified 117 command-and-control servers hosted across 89 internet service providers. These servers were used by cybercriminals as central hubs to launch and manage malicious campaigns, including phishing, online fraud and social media scams.
Neal Jetton, INTERPOL’s Director of Cybercrime, said:
“INTERPOL continues to support practical, collaborative action against global cyber threats. Operation Secure has once again shown the power of intelligence sharing in disrupting malicious infrastructure and preventing large-scale harm to both individuals and businesses.”
Notes to editors
Operation Secure is a regional initiative organized under the Asia and South Pacific Joint Operations Against Cybercrime (ASPJOC) Project.
Participating countries: Brunei, Cambodia, Fiji, Hong Kong (China), India, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kiribati, Korea (Rep of), Laos, Macau (China), Malaysia, Maldives, Nauru, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Samoa, Singapore, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Vanuatu, Vietnam.
Microsoft announced it will expand the list of blocked attachments in Outlook Web and the new Outlook for Windows starting next month.
Microsoft announced it will expand the list of blocked attachments in Outlook Web and the new Outlook for Windows starting next month.
The company said on Monday in a Microsoft 365 Message Center update that Outlook will block .library-ms and .search-ms file types beginning in July.
"As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance security in Outlook Web and the New Outlook for Windows, we're updating the default list of blocked file types in OwaMailboxPolicy," Microsoft said. "Starting in early July 2025, the [.library-ms and .search-ms] file types will be added to the BlockedFileTypes list."
The technical infrastructure that underpins Telegram is controlled by a man whose companies have collaborated with Russian intelligence services. An investigation by IStories
Telegram, the wildly popular chat and messaging app, is the pride of the Russian IT industry. According to Pavel Durov, the enigmatic entrepreneur who created the service twelve years ago, it now has over a billion monthly active users around the world.
Among the reasons for this success is Telegram’s reputation for security, coupled with Durov’s image as a free speech champion who has defied multiple governments.
“Unlike some of our competitors, we don’t trade privacy for market share,” he wrote this April. “In its 12-year history, Telegram has never disclosed a single byte of private messages.”
But IStories’ new investigation reveals a critical vulnerability.
When we investigated who controls the infrastructure that keeps Telegram’s billions of messages flowing, we found a man with no public profile but unparalleled access: Vladimir Vedeneev, a 45-year-old network engineer.
Vedeneev owns the company that maintains Telegram’s networking equipment and assigns thousands of its IP addresses. Court documents show that he was granted exclusive access to some of Telegram’s servers and was even empowered to sign contracts on Telegram’s behalf.
There is no evidence that this company has worked with the Russian government or provided any data. But two other closely linked Vedeneev companies — one of which also assigns Telegram IP addresses, and another which did so until 2020 — have had multiple highly sensitive clients tied to the security services. Among their clients is the FSB intelligence agency; a secretive “research computing center” that helped plan the invasion of Ukraine and developed tools to deanonymize internet users; and a flagship state-owned nuclear research laboratory.
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“If true, this reporting highlights the dangerous disconnect between what many believe about Telegram’s security and privacy features, and the reality," said John Scott-Railton, a Senior Researcher at The Citizen Lab. "When people don't know what is actually going on, but assume they have metadata privacy, they can unknowingly make risky choices, bringing danger to themselves and the people they’re communicating with. This is doubly true if the Russian government sees them as a threat."
A Ukrainian IT specialist who spoke with IStories on condition of anonymity said that the Russian military has used “man-in-the-middle” type surveillance in his country after capturing network infrastructure.
"You get physical access to the data transmission channel and install your equipment there,” he said. “In such an attack, the hackers aren’t even interested so much in the user's correspondence. They get metadata to analyze. And that means IP addresses, user locations, who exchanges data packets with whom, the kind of data it is… really, all possible information.”
Durov is currently under investigation in France after being arrested last August on charges related to the circulation of illegal content on Telegram. The company has since implemented a number of measures to crack down and step up its collaboration with the authorities. Durov has been released under judicial supervision and is allowed to travel.
He did not reply to requests for comment. Vedeneev spoke with IStories but declined to make any of his comments public.
This report uncovers a set of related threat clusters linked to PurpleHaze and ShadowPad operators targeting organizations, including cybersecurity vendors.
Discover how the FIN6 cybercrime group, also known as Skeleton Spider, leverages trusted cloud services like AWS to deliver stealthy malware through fake job applications and resume-themed phishing campaigns. Learn about their tactics, infrastructure, and how to defend against these evolving threats.
Skeleton Spider, also known as FIN6, is a long-running financially motivated cybercrime group that has continually evolved its tactics to maximize impact and profit. While the group initially gained notoriety for point-of-sale (POS) breaches and large-scale payment card theft, it has since shifted to broader enterprise threats, including ransomware operations.
In recent years, FIN6 has sharpened its focus on social engineering campaigns that exploit professional trust. By posing as job seekers and initiating conversations through platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed, the group builds rapport with recruiters before delivering phishing messages that lead to malware. One of their preferred payloads is more_eggs, a stealthy JavaScript-based backdoor that facilitates credential theft, system access, and follow-on attacks, including ransomware deployment.
This research combines technical insights and practical analysis for both general audiences and cybersecurity professionals. We examine how FIN6 uses trusted cloud services, such as AWS, to host malicious infrastructure, evade detection, and ultimately deploy malware through socially engineered lures.
A high-severity vulnerability was uncovered in Splunk Universal Forwarder for Windows that compromises directory access controls.
The flaw, designated CVE-2025-20298 with a CVSSv3.1 score of 8.0, affects multiple versions of the software and poses significant security risks to enterprise environments relying on Splunk’s data forwarding capabilities.
The vulnerability stems from incorrect permission assignment during the installation or upgrade of Universal Forwarder for Windows.
This security flaw is classified under CWE-732 (Incorrect Permission Assignment for Critical Resource), indicating a fundamental issue with access control mechanisms.
The vulnerability manifests when Universal Forwarder for Windows versions below 9.4.2, 9.3.4, 9.2.6, and 9.1.9 are newly installed or upgraded to an affected version.
During these processes, the installation directory—typically located at C:\Program Files\SplunkUniversalForwarder—receives incorrect permissions that allow non-administrator users to access the directory and all its contents.
This represents a significant breach of the principle of least privilege, a cornerstone of enterprise security frameworks.
The CVSSv3.1 vector CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H indicates that while the attack requires low-level privileges and user interaction, it can result in high impact across confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
The network attack vector component suggests potential for remote exploitation under certain circumstances.
The scope of this vulnerability is considerable, affecting four major release branches of Splunk Universal Forwarder for Windows.
Specifically, the vulnerability impacts versions in the 9.4 branch below 9.4.2, the 9.3 branch below 9.3.4, the 9.2 branch below 9.2.6, and the 9.1 branch below 9.1.9.
Socket's Threat Research Team discovered two malicious npm packages that masquerade as legitimate utilities while implementing backdoors designed to destroy production systems. Published by npm user botsailer using email anupm019@gmail[.]com, both express-api-sync and system-health-sync-api secretly register hidden endpoints that, when triggered with the right credentials, execute file deletion commands that wipe out entire application directories.
Throughout late 2024 and early 2025, iVerify detected anomalous activity on iPhones belonging to individuals affiliated with political campaigns, media organizations, A.I. companies and governments operating in the United States and European Union.
Specifically, we detected exceedingly rare crashes typically associated with sophisticated zero-click attacks via iMessage – an exploitation technique previously unobserved in any systematic way in the United States. Subsequent forensic examination of several of these devices ultimately revealed a previously unknown vulnerability in the “imagent” process which, owing to its relative position in the operating system and functionality, would provide attackers a primitive for further exploitation. This vulnerability was patched by Apple in iOS 18.3. We’ve dubbed this vulnerability NICKNAME.
In the course of our investigation, we discovered evidence suggesting – but not definitively proving – this vulnerability was exploited in targeted attacks as recently as March of this year. Specifically, we learned that Apple sent Threat Notifications to at least one device belonging to a senior government official in the EU on which we saw the highly anomalous crashes. Likewise, one device demonstrated behavior frequently associated with successful exploitation, specifically the creation and deletion of iMessage attachments in bulk within a matter of seconds on several occasions after an anomalous crash. We only observed these crashes on devices belonging to extremely high value targets. And these crashes constituted only .0001% of the crash log telemetry taken from a sample of 50,000 iPhones.
Today, the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced the launch of the FAIR Package Manager project, a federated and independent repository of trusted plugins and themes for web hosts, commercial plugin and tool developers in the WordPress ecosystem and end users. The FAIR Package Manager project, through its contributors, creates net new interoperability, making the web publishing ecosystem more innovative and accessible for all.
Vendor-neutral package management for content management systems like WordPress provides critical universal infrastructure that addresses the new realities of content, e-commerce and AI. The FAIR Package Manager project helps make plugins and tools more discoverable and lets developers choose where to source those plugins depending on the needs of their supply chain. By giving commercial plugin developers, hosts, and application developers more options to control the tools they rely on, the FAIR Package Manager project promotes innovation and protects business continuity.
“The FAIR Package Manager project paves the way for the stability and growth of open source content management, giving contributors and businesses additional options governed by a neutral community,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation. ”We look forward to the growth in community and contributions this important project attracts.”
DNS4EU, an EU-based DNS resolution service created to strengthen European Union’s digital sovereignty, has become reality.
What is DNS?
The Domain Name System (DNS) “translates” human-readable domain names into IP addresses and back, and is essential for accessing websites.
Most users use DNS resolver services provided by their internet service provider (because they are automatically configured) or a public DNS provider like Google or Cloudflare.
DNS4EU is meant to be a resilient, fast, reliable, secure, privacy-friendly and EU-based alternative for those.
The goal of DNS4EU
DNS4EU is an initiative co-funded by the European Union and supported by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA), though the service is expected to be commercialised, “since it has to be sustainable without operational costs from the EU after 2025.”
It is developed and managed by a consortium of private cybersecurity companies, CERTs, and academic institutions from 10 European Union countries, with Czech cybersecurity company Whalebone as its leader.
“The DNS4EU initiative aligns with the EU’s strategic goal of enhancing its digital autonomy by providing an alternative to the existing public DNS services provided by non-european entities,” says the group.
One of the largest food distributors in the U.S. reported a cyberattack to regulators on Monday, explaining that the incident has disrupted its operations and ability to fulfil customer orders.
United Natural Foods released a public statement and filed documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) saying the cyberattack began on June 5.
The statement said the Rhode Island-based company identified unauthorized activity on its systems on Thursday, prompting officials to take systems offline. The action “has temporarily impacted the Company’s ability to fulfill and distribute customer orders.”
“The incident has caused, and is expected to continue to cause, temporary disruptions to the Company’s business operations,” United Natural Foods said. “The Company has implemented workarounds for certain operations in order to continue servicing its customers where possible. The Company is continuing to work to restore its systems to safely bring them back online.”
Law enforcement has been notified and the company said it has hired a cybersecurity firm to remediate the incident. The investigation into the attack “remains ongoing and is in its early stages.”
The press statement published on Monday said the company is working closely with “customers, suppliers, and associates” to minimize the disruption. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
United Natural Foods is the main supplier for Whole Foods and is considered the largest health and specialty food distributor in the United States and Canada. The company reported $8.2 billion in net sales last quarter.
As AI and digital technologies advance, the European cyber threat landscape continues to evolve, presenting new challenges that require stronger partnerships and enhanced solutions. Ransomware groups and state-sponsored actors from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea continue to grow in scope and sophistication, and European cyber protection cannot afford to stand still.
That is why, today, in Berlin, we are announcing a new Microsoft initiative to expand our longstanding work to help defend Europe’s cybersecurity. Implementing one of the five European Digital Commitments I shared in Brussels five weeks ago, we are launching a new European Security Program that adds to the company’s longstanding global Government Security Program.
This new program expands the geographic reach of our existing work and adds new elements that will become critical to Europe’s protection. It puts AI at the center of our work as a tool to protect traditional cybersecurity needs and strengthens our protection of digital and AI infrastructure.
We are launching the European Security Program with three new elements:
UNC6040 uses vishing to impersonate IT support, deceiving victims into granting access to their Salesforce instances.
Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) is tracking UNC6040, a financially motivated threat cluster that specializes in voice phishing (vishing) campaigns specifically designed to compromise organizations' Salesforce instances for large-scale data theft and subsequent extortion. Over the past several months, UNC6040 has demonstrated repeated success in breaching networks by having its operators impersonate IT support personnel in convincing telephone-based social engineering engagements. This approach has proven particularly effective in tricking employees, often within English-speaking branches of multinational corporations, into actions that grant the attackers access or lead to the sharing of sensitive credentials, ultimately facilitating the theft of organization’s Salesforce data. In all observed cases, attackers relied on manipulating end users, not exploiting any vulnerability inherent to Salesforce.
A prevalent tactic in UNC6040's operations involves deceiving victims into authorizing a malicious connected app to their organization's Salesforce portal. This application is often a modified version of Salesforce’s Data Loader, not authorized by Salesforce. During a vishing call, the actor guides the victim to visit Salesforce's connected app setup page to approve a version of the Data Loader app with a name or branding that differs from the legitimate version. This step inadvertently grants UNC6040 significant capabilities to access, query, and exfiltrate sensitive information directly from the compromised Salesforce customer environments. This methodology of abusing Data Loader functionalities via malicious connected apps is consistent with recent observations detailed by Salesforce in their guidance on protecting Salesforce environments from such threats.
In some instances, extortion activities haven't been observed until several months after the initial UNC6040 intrusion activity, which could suggest that UNC6040 has partnered with a second threat actor that monetizes access to the stolen data. During these extortion attempts, the actor has claimed affiliation with the well-known hacking group ShinyHunters, likely as a method to increase pressure on their victims.
Hackers leak data of 88 million AT&T customers with decrypted SSNs; latest breach raises questions about links to earlier Snowflake-related attack.
Hackers have leaked what they claim is AT&T’s database which was reportedly stolen by the ShinyHunters group in April 2024 after they exploited major security flaws in the Snowflake cloud data platform. But is this really the Snowflake-linked data? We took a closer look.
As seen by the Hackread.com research team, the data was first posted on a well-known Russian cybercrime forum on May 15, 2025. It was re-uploaded on the same forum on June 3, 2025, after which it began circulating among other hackers and forums.
After analyzing the leaked data, we found it contains a detailed set of personal information. Each of these data points poses a serious privacy risk on its own, but together, they create full identity profiles that could be exploited for fraud or identity theft. The data includes:
Full names
Date of birth
Phone numbers
Email addresses
Physical addresses
44 Million Social Security Numbers (SSN) (43,989,219 in total)
Hackers are actively exploiting CVE-2025-49113, a critical vulnerability in the widely used Roundcube open-source webmail application that allows remote execution.
The security issue has been present in Roundcube for over a decade and impacts versions of Roundcube webmail 1.1.0 through 1.6.10. It received a patch on June 1st.
It took attackers just a couple of days to reverse engineer the fix, weaponize the vulnerability, and start selling a working exploit on at least one hacker forum.
Roundcube is one of the most popular webmail solutions as the product is included in offers from well-known hosting providers such as GoDaddy, Hostinger, Dreamhost, or OVH.
"Email armageddon"
CVE-2025-49113 is a post-authentication remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability that received a critical severity score of 9.9 out of 10 and is described as “email armageddon.”
It was discovered and reported by Kirill Firsov, the CEO of the cybersecurity company FearsOff, who decided to publish the technical details before the end of the responsible disclosure period because an exploit had become available.
Cisco has released patches to address three vulnerabilities with public exploit code in its Identity Services Engine (ISE) and Customer Collaboration Platform (CCP) solutions.
The most severe of the three is a critical static credential vulnerability tracked as CVE-2025-20286, found by GMO Cybersecurity's Kentaro Kawane in Cisco ISE. This identity-based policy enforcement software provides endpoint access control and network device administration in enterprise environments.
The vulnerability is due to improperly generated credentials when deploying Cisco ISE on cloud platforms, resulting in shared credentials across different deployments.
Unauthenticated attackers can exploit it by extracting user credentials from Cisco ISE cloud deployments and using them to access installations in other cloud environments. However, as Cisco explained, threat actors can exploit this flaw successfully only if the Primary Administration node is deployed in the cloud.
"A vulnerability in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) cloud deployments of Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to access sensitive data, execute limited administrative operations, modify system configurations, or disrupt services within the impacted systems," the company explained.
Hello and welcome back to another blog post. After some time of absence due to a lot of changes in my personal life ( finished university, started a new job, etc), I am happy to finally be able to present something new.
Chapter 1: Captcha-verified Victim
This story starts with a message by one of my long time internet contacts:
Figure 1: Shit hit the Fan
I assume, some of you can already tell from this message alone that something terrible had just happend to him.
The legitimate website of the German Association for International Law had redirected him to an apparent Cloudflare Captcha site asking him to execute a Powershell command on device that does a Webrequest (iwr = Invoke-WebRequest) to a remote website (amoliera[.]com) and then pipes the response into “iex” which stands for Invoke-Expression.
Thats a text-book example for a so called FakeCaptcha attack.
For those of you that do not know what the FakeCaptcha attack technique is, let me give you a short primer:
A Captcha in itself is a legitimate method Website Owners use to differentiate between bots (automated traffic) and real human users. It often involves at-least clicking a button but can additionally require the website visitor to solve different form of small tasks like clicking certain images out of a collection of random images or identifying a bunch of obscurely written letters. The goal is to only let users visit the website that are able to solve these tasks, which are often designed to be hard for computers but easy for human beings. Well, most of the times.
Over on SuspectFile, @amvinfe has been busy exposing Akira’s false promises to its victims. In two posts this week, he reports on what happened with one business in New Jersey and one in Germany that decided to pay Akira’s ransom demands. He was able to report on it all because Akira failed to secure its negotiations chat server. Anyone who knows where to look can follow along if a victim contacts Akira to try to negotiate any payment for a decryptor or data deletion.
In one case, the victim paid Akira $200k after repeatedly asking for — and getting — assurances that this would all be kept confidential. In the second case, Akira demanded $6.9 million but eventually accepted that victim’s offer of $800k. The negotiations made clear that Akira had read the terms of the victim’s cyberinsurance policy and used that to calculate their demands.
If the two victims hoped to keep their names or their breaches out of the news, they may have failed. Although SuspectFile did not name them, others with access to the chats might report on the incidents. Anyone who read the chats would possess the file lists of everything Akira claimed to have exfiltrated from each victim. Depending on their file-naming conventions, filenames may reveal proprietary or sensitive information and often reveal the name of the victim.
So the take-home messages for current victims of Akira:
Akira has not been keeping its negotiations with you secure and confidential.
Paying Akira’s ransom demands is no guarantee that others will not obtain your data or find out about your breach.
Even just negotiating with Akira may be sufficient to provide researchers and journalists with data you do not want shared.
If you pay Akira and they actually give you accurate information about how they gained access and elevated privileges, you are now more at risk from other attackers while you figure out how to secure your network.
The AFP has played a key role in a landmark international operation targeting perpetrators of online sextortion, which resulted in the arrest of 22 suspects in Nigeria.
CORRECTION: The arrest of two Nigerian-based offenders linked to the suicide of a 16-year-old child in New South Wales in 2023 was NOT part of Operation Artemis. Those arrests occurred after Operation Artemis, when they were conducted by Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to assist a NSW Police Force investigation.
The AFP has played a key role in a landmark international operation targeting perpetrators of online sextortion, which resulted in the arrest of 22 suspects in Nigeria.
Operation Artemis was a joint operation led by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation in partnership with the AFP, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). It focused on dismantling an organised criminal network allegedly responsible for a wave of online sextortion crimes which targeted thousands of teenagers globally.
The network’s scheme, which coerced victims into sharing sexually explicit images before threatening to distribute those images unless payment was made, had devastating consequences.
In the United States alone, more than 20 teenage suicides have been linked to sextortion-related cases since 2021. While many victims were based in North America, the ripple effects of the offending extended to Australia and other nations.
The hack into the account of the country’s top security official has drawn criticism online.
Malaysia’s home minister had his WhatsApp account hacked and then abused to send malicious links to his contacts, according to police.
The attacker reportedly used a virtual private network (VPN) to compromise the account of Datuk Seri Saifuddin Nasution Ismail, authorities said at a press conference on Friday, adding that no victims have reported financial losses so far. They did not elaborate on how the hack was carried out.
The Ministry of Home Affairs, which oversees law enforcement, immigration and censorship, confirmed the incident and urged the public not to respond to any messages or calls claiming to be from the minister, especially those involving financial or personal requests.
The breach is under investigation and law enforcement is working to determine the hacker’s location.
Mobile phishing scams have become increasingly common in Malaysia. Local media have reported that citizens are frequently targeted by fraudsters posing as police, bank officials or court representatives.
The recent WhatsApp incident follows similar attacks on other high-ranking officials. In March, scammers hijacked the WhatsApp account of parliamentary speaker Johari Abdul and tricked some of his contacts into sending money. In 2022, threat actors accessed Telegram and Signal accounts belonging to former Prime Minister Ismail Sabri. And in 2015, hackers took over the Royal Malaysia Police’s Twitter and Facebook accounts, posting pro-Islamic State group messages.
Nasution Ismail faced online criticism and ridicule following the WhatsApp hack, with local media reporting that citizens questioned the strength of Malaysia’s cybersecurity measures, given that the country’s top security official had been successfully targeted by hackers.
