404media.co - Infostealer data can include passwords, email and billing addresses, and the embarrassing websites you use. Farnsworth Intelligence is selling to divorce lawyers and other industries.
When your laptop is infected with infostealing malware, it’s not just hackers that might get your passwords, billing and email addresses, and a list of sites or services you’ve created accounts on, potentially including some embarrassing ones. A private intelligence company run by a young founder is now taking that hacked data from what it says are more than 50 million computers, and reselling it for profit to a wide range of different industries, including debt collectors; couples in divorce proceedings; and even companies looking to poach their rivals’ customers. Essentially, the company is presenting itself as a legitimate, legal business, but is selling the same sort of data that was previously typically sold by anonymous criminals on shady forums or underground channels.
Multiple experts 404 Media spoke to called the practice deeply unethical, and in some cases the use of that data probably illegal. The company is also selling access to a subset of the data to anyone for as little as $50, and 404 Media used it to uncover unsuspecting victims’ addresses.
The activities of the company, called Farnsworth Intelligence, show a dramatic shift in the bevvy of companies that collect and sell access to so-called open source intelligence, or OSINT. Historically, OSINT has included things like public social media profiles or flight data. Now, companies increasingly see data extracted from peoples’ personal or corporate machines and then posted online as fair game not just to use in their own investigations, but to repackage and sell too.
“To put it plainly this company is profiting off of selling stolen data, re-victimizing people who have already had their personal devices compromised and their data stolen,” Cooper Quintin, senior public interest technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told 404 Media. “This data will likely be used to further harm people by police using it for surveillance without a warrant, stalkers using it to gather information on their targets, high level scams, and other damaging motives.”
Infostealers are pieces of malware, often stealthily bundled in a piece of pirated software, that steal a victim’s cookies, login credentials, and often more information stored in their browser too. On its website, Farnsworth lays out several potential uses for that stolen data. This includes “skip tacing,” presumably a typo of skip tracing, which is where a private individual or company tracks someone down who owes a debt. The website says users can “find debtors up-to-date addresses.” Another use case is to “Find high impact evidence that can make/break the case of million dollar lawsuits, high value divorce cases, etc.” A third is to “generate lead lists of customers/users from competitors [sic] companies,” because the data could show which competing products they have login credentials for, and, presumably, use.
bleepingcomputer.com - The House of Dior (Dior) is sending data breach notifications to U.S. customers informing them that a May cybersecurity incident compromised their personal information.
The House of Dior (Dior) is sending data breach notifications to U.S. customers informing them that a May cybersecurity incident compromised their personal information.
Dior is a French luxury fashion house, part of the LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton) group, which is the world's largest luxury conglomerate.
The Dior brand alone generates an annual revenue of over $12 billion, operating hundreds of boutiques worldwide.
The security incident occurred on January 26, 2025, but the company only became aware of it on May 7, 2025, launching internal investigations to determine its scope and impact.
"Our investigation determined that an unauthorized party was able to gain access to a Dior database that contained information about Dior clients on January 26, 2025," reads the notice sent to affected individuals.
"Dior promptly took steps to contain the incident, and we have no evidence of subsequent unauthorized access to Dior systems."
Based on the findings of the investigation, the following information has been exposed:
Full names
Contact details
Physical address
Date of birth
Passport or government ID number (in some cases)
Social Security Number (in some cases)
The company clarifies that no payment details, such as bank account or payment card information, were contained in the compromised database, so this information remains safe.
krebsonsecurity.com - On Sunday, July 20, Microsoft Corp. issued an emergency security update for a vulnerability in SharePoint Server that is actively being exploited to compromise vulnerable organizations. The patch comes amid reports that malicious hackers have used the SharePoint flaw to breach U.S. federal and state agencies, universities, and energy companies.
In an advisory about the SharePoint security hole, a.k.a. CVE-2025-53770, Microsoft said it is aware of active attacks targeting on-premises SharePoint Server customers and exploiting vulnerabilities that were only partially addressed by the July 8, 2025 security update.
The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) concurred, saying CVE-2025-53770 is a variant on a flaw Microsoft patched earlier this month (CVE-2025-49706). Microsoft notes the weakness applies only to SharePoint Servers that organizations use in-house, and that SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 are not affected.
The Washington Post reported on Sunday that the U.S. government and partners in Canada and Australia are investigating the hack of SharePoint servers, which provide a platform for sharing and managing documents. The Post reports at least two U.S. federal agencies have seen their servers breached via the SharePoint vulnerability.
According to CISA, attackers exploiting the newly-discovered flaw are retrofitting compromised servers with a backdoor dubbed “ToolShell” that provides unauthenticated, remote access to systems. CISA said ToolShell enables attackers to fully access SharePoint content — including file systems and internal configurations — and execute code over the network.
Researchers at Eye Security said they first spotted large-scale exploitation of the SharePoint flaw on July 18, 2025, and soon found dozens of separate servers compromised by the bug and infected with ToolShell. In a blog post, the researchers said the attacks sought to steal SharePoint server ASP.NET machine keys.
“These keys can be used to facilitate further attacks, even at a later date,” Eye Security warned. “It is critical that affected servers rotate SharePoint server ASP.NET machine keys and restart IIS on all SharePoint servers. Patching alone is not enough. We strongly advise defenders not to wait for a vendor fix before taking action. This threat is already operational and spreading rapidly.”
Microsoft’s advisory says the company has issued updates for SharePoint Server Subscription Edition and SharePoint Server 2019, but that it is still working on updates for supported versions of SharePoint 2019 and SharePoint 2016.
CISA advises vulnerable organizations to enable the anti-malware scan interface (AMSI) in SharePoint, to deploy Microsoft Defender AV on all SharePoint servers, and to disconnect affected products from the public-facing Internet until an official patch is available.
The security firm Rapid7 notes that Microsoft has described CVE-2025-53770 as related to a previous vulnerability — CVE-2025-49704, patched earlier this month — and that CVE-2025-49704 was part of an exploit chain demonstrated at the Pwn2Own hacking competition in May 2025. That exploit chain invoked a second SharePoint weakness — CVE-2025-49706 — which Microsoft unsuccessfully tried to fix in this month’s Patch Tuesday.
Microsoft also has issued a patch for a related SharePoint vulnerability — CVE-2025-53771; Microsoft says there are no signs of active attacks on CVE-2025-53771, and that the patch is to provide more robust protections than the update for CVE-2025-49706.
This is a rapidly developing story. Any updates will be noted with timestamps.
In the summer of 2005, Tan Dailin was a 20-year-old grad student at Sichuan University of Science and Engineering when he came to the attention of the People’s Liberation Army of China.
Tan was part of a burgeoning hacker community known as the Honkers—teens and twentysomethings in late-’90s and early-’00s China who formed groups like the Green Army and Evil Octal and launched patriotic cyberattacks against Western targets they deemed disrespectful to China. The attacks were low-sophistication—mostly website defacements and denial-of-service operations targeting entities in the US, Taiwan, and Japan—but the Honkers advanced their skills over time, and Tan documented his escapades in blog posts. After publishing about hacking targets in Japan, the PLA came calling.
The subsequent timeline of events is unclear, but Tan, who went by the hacker handles Wicked Rose and Withered Rose, then launched his own hacking group—the Network Crack Program Hacker (NCPH). The group quickly gained notoriety for winning hacking contests and developing hacking tools. They created the GinWui rootkit, one of China’s first homegrown remote-access backdoors and then, experts believe, used it and dozens of zero-day exploits they wrote in a series of “unprecedented” hacks against US companies and government entities over the spring and summer of 2006. They did this on behalf of the PLA, according to Adam Kozy, who tracked Tan and other Chinese hackers for years as a former FBI analyst who now heads the SinaCyber consulting firm, focused on China.
Tan revealed online at the time that he and his team were being paid about $250 a month for their hacking, though he didn’t say who paid or what they hacked. The pay increased to $1,000 a month after their summer hacking spree, according to a 2007 report by former threat intelligence firm VeriSign iDefense.
At some point, Tan switched teams and began contracting for the Ministry of State Security (MSS), China’s civilian intelligence agency, as part of its notorious hacking group known as APT 41. And in 2020, when Tan was 36, the US Justice Department announced indictments against him and other alleged APT 41 members for hacking more than 100 targets, including US government systems, health care organizations, and telecoms.
Tan’s path to APT 41 isn’t unique. He’s just one of many former Honkers who began their careers as self-directed patriotic hackers before being absorbed by the state into its massive spying apparatus.
Not a lot has been written about the Honkers and their critical role in China’s APT operations, outside of congressional testimony Kozy gave in 2022. But a new report, published this month by Eugenio Benincasa, senior cyberdefense researcher at the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zürich university in Switzerland, expands on Kozy’s work to track the Honkers’ early days and how this group of skilled youths became some of China’s most prolific cyberspies.
“This is not just about [Honkers] creating a hacker culture that was implicitly aligned with national security goals,” Benincasa says, “but also the personal relations they created [that] we still see reflected in the APTs today.”
Early Days
The Honker community largely began when China joined the internet in 1994, and a network connecting universities and research centers across the country for knowledge-sharing put Chinese students online before the rest of the country. Like US hackers, the Honkers were self-taught tech enthusiasts who flocked to electronic bulletin boards (dial-up forums) to share programming and computer hacking tips. They soon formed groups like Xfocus, China Eagle Union, and The Honker Union of China and came to be known as Red Hackers or Honkers, a name derived from the Mandarin word “hong,” for red, and “heike,” for dark visitor—the Chinese term for hacker.
