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.

Microsoft today released software updates to plug nearly 200 security holes across its Windows operating systems and supported software, a record number of fixes for the company’s monthly Patch Tuesday cycle. Nearly three dozen of those bugs earned Microsoft’s most dire “critical” rating, and exploit code for at least three of the weaknesses is now publicly available.

The software giant said in a blog post last month that both its engineers and the security community are increasing using artificial intelligence tools to find bugs, meaning this month’s heavy Patch Tuesday may start to become the norm, said Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable.

“Some surveys put AI usage among security professionals generally at 90%, so it’s unsurprising that this volume of patches may be the norm,” Narang said. “Pandora’s proverbial box has been opened, and as more advanced AI models become available, we expect the norm to continue upward across the board, not just for Patch Tuesday.”

June’s zero-day bugs include CVE-2026-49160, a denial of service vulnerability affecting a range of web servers, including Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS). Microsoft says the flaw was reported by OpenAI’s Codex.

Two of the zero-days addressed this month appear to stem from recent vulnerability disclosures by Nightmare Eclipse, the nickname chosen by a security researcher who has been dropping exploits for various Windows flaws. One of those, dubbed “GreenPlasma,” leverages an elevation of privilege weakness in the Windows Collaborative Translation Framework, the same framework patched today in CVE-2026-45586.

Nightmare Eclipse also last month released “YellowKey,” an exploit for a Windows BitLocker vulnerability that allows an attacker with physical access to view encrypted data, and CVE-2026-50507 is a patch for an elevation of privilege bug in BitLocker.

Microsoft received heavy blowback on social media last month after it said in a blog post that it was considering taking legal action against the security researcher. The company later clarified on Twitter/X that while it has no intention of pursuing legal actions against researchers, it would report them to authorities if they break the law. The advisories for CVE-2026-49160 and CVE-2026-50507 do not credit any researchers in the acknowledgement section, saying only that “Microsoft recognizes the efforts of those in the security community who help us protect customers through coordinated vulnerability disclosure.”

Nightmare Eclipse claims to be a former employee of Microsoft, although Microsoft has not responded to questions about this claim. Rapid7 notes that a recent blog post by Nightmare Eclipse included an image of Albert Wesker, a character from the Resident Evil video game series who formerly worked as a researcher for a technology company before going rogue.

Nightmare Eclipse has pledged to release even more zero-day exploits for Windows in what they called a “bone shattering” drop planned for July 14 (the same day as next month’s Patch Tuesday). Immediately following the release of Microsoft patches today, the researcher published an exploit for what they claimed was a zero-day bug in Windows Defender.

While 200 vulnerabilities may be a record for Patch Tuesday, the actual number of security flaws Microsoft addressed this month is far higher, said Rapid7’s Adam Barnett.

“So far this month, Microsoft has provided patches to address 360 browser vulnerabilities, which is an order of magnitude more than has been typical in any given month over the past few years,” Barnett wrote. “As usual, browser [flaws] are not included in the Patch Tuesday count above. Indeed, the vast, and presumably sustained, uptick in the number of browser vulnerabilities has led to Microsoft no longer enumerating Chromium CVEs in the Security Update Guide.”

Microsoft also patched a zero-day vulnerability in Visual Studio Code that allows attackers to steal GitHub tokens with a single click. The company was forced to push a stopgap fix for the flaw on June 3, after a researcher published instructions showing how to exploit it. The researcher said they opted not to work with Microsoft because of a recent experience wherein Redmond silently patched a flaw they reported without offering credit or recognition.

Microsoft battled its own internal zero-day emergencies last week, after at least 72 of the company’s public code repositories were infected with a variant of the Shai-Hulud worm. Researchers found that all of the affected packages were connected to Microsoft official Azure Durable Task SDK, which got hit by the same Shai-Hulud worm in May.

Other major software makers are also shipping outsized update bundles this month. Adobe has released updates to fix a massive number of critical vulnerabilities across a range of products, including Adobe Experience Manager, Acrobat Reader and Cold Fusion. On June 3, Google resolved a whopping 429 vulnerabilities in its latest Chrome browser update (Chrome automatically downloads updates but installing them usually requires a complete restart of the browser).

As ever, please consider backing up your data before applying operating system updates, and drop a note in the comments if you run into any problems with this month’s patches.

Further reading:

Microsoft’s Security Update Guide

Action1’s Patch Tuesday breakdown

SANS Internet Storm Center notes on Patch Tuesday

The Instagram accounts for the Obama White House and the Chief Master Sergeant of the U.S. Space Force were briefly defaced with pro-Iranian images and messages over the weekend, after instructions began circulating on Telegram showing how to trick Meta’s “AI support assistant” bot into resetting account passwords.

A screenshot from a video released on Telegram claiming to show how Meta’s AI customer support bot could be tricked into resetting a target’s password.

On May 31, word began to spread on several Telegram instant message channels that Meta’s AI bot would happily add an email address to an existing account as part of the bot’s standard password reset flow.

A video released on Telegram by pro-Iran hackers claimed to document a remarkably simple exploit that appears to have involved using a VPN connection with an IP address that is in or near the target’s usual hometown, requesting a password reset for the account, and then choosing to chat with Meta’s AI support assistant. From there, the video shows the attacker told the bot to link the account in question to a new email address, after which the bot dutifully sent that address a one-time code that allowed a password reset.

The Telegram account that posted the video also linked to screenshots of pro-Iran images, videos and messages that defaced the hacked Instagram accounts, saying hackers had used the exploit to hijack a number of valuable (read: short) Instagram account names that allegedly have a resale value of more than a half million dollars.

Meta has not responded to requests for comment on the video’s claims, but Meta’s Andy Stone said on Twitter/X that the issue had been resolved and that they were securing impacted accounts. The security blog thecybersecguru.com reports that Meta pushed an emergency patch over the weekend, and clarified that no back end database was breached.

“Instagram has notoriously poor human support infrastructure,” Cybersecguru wrote. “Recovering a locked account – especially a high-value one can take weeks of back-and-forth with an automated ticketing system. Meta’s solution was to deploy a conversational AI layer to handle common recovery workflows: relinking a lost email address, triggering a password reset, verifying account ownership. The assistant, presumably, was supposed to reduce friction for legitimate users stuck in account-access hell.”

Ian Goldin, a threat researcher at Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs, said we’re entering unchartered security territory as more large online platforms start allowing AI chatbots to handle sensitive account recovery requests. Just like human customer support employees can be social engineered into providing unauthorized access to someone’s account, AI bots are equally eager to help and vulnerable to persuasion and trickery, he said.

“AI chatbots create interesting new attack surface, and we’re likely going to see a lot more of these kinds of attacks,” Goldin said.

Securing your various online accounts means taking full advantage of the most secure form of multi-factor authentication (MFA) offered (such as a passkey or security key). In this case, even using the least robust form of MFA that Instagram offers — a one-time code sent via SMS — likely would have blocked the exploit: The hackers who released the video on Telegram said their exploit failed to work against any accounts that had MFA enabled.

Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested the co-owners of two related Internet hosting companies for operating IT infrastructure used by Russia to carry out cyberattacks, influence operations and disinformation campaigns inside the European Union. The two men were the focus of a 2025 KrebsOnSecurity story about how their hosting companies had assumed control over the technical infrastructure of Stark Industries Solutions, an Internet service provider sanctioned last year by the EU as a frequent staging ground for cyber mischief from Russia’s intelligence agencies.

An investigator with the Tax Intelligence and Investigation Service (FIOD), the Dutch financial crimes agency, during the raid. Image: FIOD.

The Dutch daily news outlet de Volkskrant reports that the Dutch financial crime agency FIOD on May 18 arrested a 57-year-old from Amsterdam and a 39-year-old from The Hague, charging them with violating sanctions law by directly or indirectly making economic resources available to EU-sanctioned entities.

The Dutch investigation focuses on Stark Industries, a sprawling hosting provider that materialized just two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine. As detailed in this May 2024 deep-dive, Stark quickly became the source of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against European targets, and emerged as a top supplier of proxy and anonymity services that showed up time and again in cyberattacks linked to Russia-backed hacking groups.

That report identified two Moldovan brothers — Ivan and Yuri Neculiti and their company PQHosting — who were providing one of Stark’s two main conduits to the larger Internet. In May 2025, the EU sanctioned PQHosting and the Neculiti brothers for aiding Russia’s hybrid warfare efforts. But as KrebsOnSecurity observed in September 2025, those sanctions failed to target Stark’s remaining connection to the Internet — an Internet service provider based in the Netherlands called MIRhosting.

MIRhosting is operated by Andrey Nesterenko, a 39-year-old Russian native who runs the business out of the Netherlands.  News that PQHosting and the Neculiti brothers were about to be sanctioned by the EU leaked in the media nearly two weeks before the sanctions were announced last year. During that time, the Stark network assets were transferred from PQHosting to a new entity called the[.]hosting, under the control of the Dutch entity WorkTitans BV.

And as our September 2025 report showed, WorkTitans was controlled by Nesterenko and a 57-year-old from Amsterdam named Youssef Zinad. On top of that, WorkTitans was getting connectivity to the larger Internet solely through MIRhosting, where Zinad had worked previously.

On May 18, Dutch financial crime investigators arrested Nesterenko and Zinad, and searched three businesses in Enschede and Almere and two data centers in Dronten and Schiphol-Rijk. A statement from the Dutch authorities said they also seized laptops, telephones and more than 800 servers.

A message to the-hosting customers immediately after 800 of its servers were seized by Dutch authorities. The message says that unfortunately data stored on the server has been lost and cannot be recovered.

De Volkskrant said it reviewed data showing WorkTitans and MIRhosting were the most-used networks in pro-Russian attacks on Danish government bodies between November 13 and 19, 2025, the week of Denmark’s municipal elections.

The publication wrote that prior to Nesterenko’s arrest, the MIRhosting founder denied that he knew his servers had been misused by pro-Russian cybercriminals. “He said he had ended all services with the Neculiti brothers when the EU sanctions came into force in May 2025,” and the he “reserved all rights to take action against ‘harmful and incorrect publications,” de Volkskrant wrote.

MIRhosting released a statement saying it has initiated an internal investigation into the alleged facts concerning the elections in Denmark, and that it has temporarily paused services to WorkTitans as a precautionary measure while the matter is being reviewed further.

“Based on our preliminary findings, there are no indications that the services over which we exercise control were actually used to influence the Danish elections,” the statement reads. “No anomalies or spikes were observed in our network traffic during the period mentioned in the publication; had large-scale DDoS attacks occurred, such activity would have been evident. Furthermore, prior to the media publication, we had not received any complaints, abuse reports, or official requests regarding suspicious activities or misuse of our network. Meanwhile, our regular operational activities continue, and our service to our other clients remains fully intact.”

Born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, Mr. Nesterenko grew up as a piano prodigy who performed publicly at a young age. In 2004, Nesterenko founded MIRhosting’s parent Innovation IT Solutions Corp., which has the notable distinction of being the company responsible for hosting stopgeorgia[.]ru, a hacktivist website for organizing cyberattacks against Georgia that appeared at the same time Russian forces invaded the former Soviet nation in 2008. That conflict was thought to be the first war ever fought in which a notable cyberattack and an actual military engagement happened simultaneously.

Responding to questions shared via email, Nesterenko said MIRhosting does not support cybercrime, sanctions evasion, or illegal activity, and that the allegations and arrest by Dutch authorities have been extremely harmful to him and his company.

“The transition to the.hosting was not intended to evade sanctions,” Nesterenko wrote. “The hardware and customer portfolio had already been transferred to WorkTitans before the sanctions appeared. Closing or damaging a legitimate Dutch infrastructure company will not stop cybercrime, but it will harm many people who have done nothing wrong.”

Far less is public about the 57-year-old Zinad, who reportedly has been keeping a low profile since our story last year. De Volkskrant reported that Zinad blocked access to his LinkedIn account, had gone months without responding to emails, WhatsApp messages and phone calls, and told a colleague that illness was forcing him to lead a somewhat more reclusive life.

Mr. Zinad’s now-defunct LinkedIn profile. It was full of posts for MIRhosting’s services.

Mr. Nesterenko claims Zinad was never an employee of MIRhosting.

“He helped me and MIRhosting with certain business tasks under a normal business-to-business arrangement between companies,” Nesterenko explained.

However, in previous emails to KrebsOnSecurity, Nesterenko carbon copied Mr. Zinad (who had a @mirhosting.com email), explaining that he was part of the company’s legal team. Also, the Dutch website stagemarkt[.]nl lists Youssef Zinad as an official contact for MIRhosting’s offices in Almere.

Mr. Zinad has never responded to requests for comment. Nor did de Volkskrant have any luck tracking him down. The publication said it repeatedly asked Mr. Zinad (referred to here as simply “Z”), but he reportedly avoided every form of contact.

“‘I am unavailable but will respond to your message as soon as possible,’ reads an automated reply on WhatsApp on 2 October 2025,” de Volkskrant reported. “It is the only response de Volkskrant would receive in months. He did not pick up his phone and did not call back. When an acquaintance asked him via LinkedIn to contact the reporter, he blocked access to his LinkedIn page. At an address in Almere where Z.’s personal limited company is registered, no one was present in April. The corner house’s blinds were drawn, and a pile of rubbish bags lay outside next to a container, as if someone had recently left. A neighbour said he knew the man but did not know where he was staying. Z. was later arrested at a residence in Amsterdam.”

Lawmakers in both houses of Congress are demanding answers from the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) after KrebsOnSecurity reported this week that a CISA contractor intentionally published AWS GovCloud keys and a vast trove of other agency secrets on a public GitHub account. The inquiry comes as CISA is still struggling to contain the breach and invalidate the leaked credentials.

On May 18, KrebsOnSecurity reported that a CISA contractor with administrative access to the agency’s code development platform had created a public GitHub profile called “Private-CISA” that included plaintext credentials to dozens of internal CISA systems. Experts who reviewed the exposed secrets said the commit logs for the code repository showed the CISA contractor disabled GitHub’s built-in protection against publishing sensitive credentials in public repos.

CISA acknowledged the leak but has not responded to questions about the duration of the data exposure. However, experts who reviewed the now-defunct Private-CISA archive said it was originally created in November 2025, and that it exhibits a pattern consistent with an individual operator using the repository as a working scratchpad or synchronization mechanism rather than a curated project repository.

In a written statement, CISA said “there is no indication that any sensitive data was compromised as a result of the incident.” But in a May 19 a letter (PDF) to CISA’s Acting Director Nick Andersen, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) said the credential leak raises serious questions about how such a security lapse could occur at the very agency charged with helping to prevent cyber breaches.

“This reporting raises serious concerns regarding CISA’s internal policies and procedures at a time of significant cybersecurity threats against U.S. critical infrastructure,” Sen. Hassan wrote.

A May 19 letter from Sen. Margaret Hassan (D-NH) to the acting director of CISA demanded answers to a dozen questions about the breach.

Sen. Hassan noted that the incident occurred against the backdrop of major disruptions internally at CISA, which lost more than a third of it workforce and almost all of its senior leaders after the Trump administration forced a series of early retirements, buyouts, and resignations across the agency’s various divisions.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee, echoed the senator’s concerns.

“We are concerned that this incident reflects a diminished security culture and/or an inability for CISA to adequately manage its contract support,” Thompson wrote in a May 19 letter to the acting CISA chief that was co-signed by Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill), the ranking member of the panel’s Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection. “It’s no secret that our adversaries — like China, Russia, and Iran — seek to gain access to and persistence on federal networks. The files contained in the ‘Private-CISA’ repository provided the information, access, and roadmap to do just that.”

KrebsOnSecurity has learned that more a week after CISA was first notified of the data leak by the security firm GitGuardian, the agency is still working to invalidate and replace many of the exposed keys and secrets.

On May 20, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Dylan Ayrey, the creator of TruffleHog, an open-source tool for discovering private keys and other secrets buried in code hosted at GitHub and other public platforms. Ayrey said CISA still hadn’t invalidated an RSA private key exposed in the Private-CISA repo that granted access to a GitHub app which is owned by the CISA enterprise account and installed on the CISA-IT GitHub organization with full access to all code repositories.

“An attacker with this key can read source code from every repository in the CISA-IT organization, including private repos, register rogue self-hosted runners to hijack CI/CD pipelines and access repository secrets, and modify repository admin settings including branch protection rules, webhooks, and deploy keys,” Ayrey told KrebsOnSecurity. CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, and it refers to a set of practices used to automate the building, testing and deployment of software.

KrebsOnSecurity notified CISA about Ayrey’s findings on May 20. Ayrey said CISA appears to have invalidated the exposed RSA private key sometime after that notification. But he noted that CISA still hasn’t rotated leaked credentials tied to other critical security technologies that are deployed across the agency’s technology portfolio (KrebsOnSecurity is not naming those technologies publicly for the time being).

CISA responded with a brief written statement in response to questions about Ayrey’s findings, saying “CISA is actively responding and coordinating with the appropriate parties and vendors to ensure any identified leaked credentials are rotated and rendered invalid and will continue to take appropriate steps to protect the security of our systems.”

Ayrey said his company Truffle Security monitors GitHub and a number of other code platforms for exposed keys, and attempts to alert affected accounts to the sensitive data exposure(s). They can do this easily on GitHub because the platform publishes a live feed which includes a record of all commits and changes to public code repositories. But he said cybercriminal actors also monitor these public feeds, and are often quick to pounce on API or SSH keys that get inadvertently published in code commits.

The Private-CISA GitHub repo exposed dozens of plaintext credentials to important CISA GovCloud resources.

In practical terms, it is likely that cybercrime groups or foreign adversaries also noticed the publication of these CISA secrets, the most egregious of which appears to have happened in late April 2026, Ayrey said.

“We monitor that firehose of data for keys, and we have tools to try to figure out whose they are,” he said. “We have evidence attackers monitor that firehose as well. Anyone monitoring GitHub events could be sitting on this information.”

James Wilson, the enterprise technology editor for the Risky Business security podcast, said organizations using GitHub to manage code projects can set top-down policies that prevent employees from disabling GitHub’s protections against publishing secret keys and credentials. But Wilson’s co-host Adam Boileau said it’s not clear that any technology could stop employees from opening their own personal GitHub account and using it to store sensitive and proprietary information.

“Ultimately, this is a thing you can’t solve with a technical control,” Boileau said on this week’s podcast. “This is a human problem where you’ve hired a contractor to do this work and they have decided of their own volition to use GitHub to synchronize content from a work machine to a home machine. I don’t know what technical controls you could put in place given that this is being done presumably outside of anything CISA managed or even had visibility on.”

Update, 3:05 p.m. ET: Added statement from CISA. Corrected a date in the story (Truffle Security said it found the repo gained some of its most sensitive secrets in late April 2026, not 2025).

Canadian authorities on Wednesday arrested a 23-year-old Ottawa man on suspicion of building and operating Kimwolf, a fast spreading Internet-of-Things botnet that enslaved millions of devices for use in a series of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks over the past six months. KrebsOnSecurity publicly named the suspect in February 2026 after the accused launched a volley of DDoS, doxing and swatting campaigns against this author and a security researcher. He now faces criminal hacking charges in both Canada and the United States.

A criminal complaint unsealed today in an Alaska district court charges Jacob Butler, a.k.a. “Dort,” of Ottawa, Canada with operating the Kimwolf DDoS botnet. A statement from the Department of Justice says the complaint against Butler was unsealed following the defendant’s arrest in Canada by the Ontario Provincial Police pursuant to a U.S. extradition warrant. Butler is currently in Canadian custody awaiting an initial court hearing scheduled for early next week.

The government said Kimwolf targeted infected devices which were traditionally “firewalled” from the rest of the internet, such as digital photo frames and web cameras. The infected systems were then rented to other cybercriminals, or forced to participate in record-smashing DDoS attacks, as well as assaults that affected Internet address ranges for the Department of Defense. Consequently, the DoD’s Defense Criminal Investigative Service is investigating the case, with assistance from the FBI field office in Anchorage.

“KimWolf was tied to DDoS attacks which were measured at nearly 30 Terabits per second, a record in recorded DDoS attack volume,” the Justice Department statement reads. “These attacks resulted in financial losses which, for some victims, exceeded one million dollars. The KimWolf botnet is alleged to have issued over 25,000 attack commands.”

On March 19, U.S. authorities joined international law enforcement partners in seizing the technical infrastructure for Kimwolf and three other large DDoS botnets — named Aisuru, JackSkid and Mossad — that were all competing for the same pool of vulnerable devices.

On February 28, KrebsOnSecurity identified Butler as the Kimwolf botmaster after digging through his various email addresses, registrations on the cybercrime forums, and posts to public Telegram and Discord servers. However, Dort continued to threaten and harass researchers who helped track down his real-life identity and dramatically slow the spread of his botnet.

Dort claimed responsibility for at least two swatting attacks targeting the founder of Synthient, a security startup that helped to secure a widespread critical security weakness that Kimwolf was using to spread faster and more effectively than any other IoT botnet out there. Synthient was among many technology companies thanked by the Justice Department today, and Synthient’s founder Ben Brundage told KrebsOnSecurity he’s relieved Butler is in custody.

“Hopefully this will end the harassment,” Brundage said.

An excerpt from the criminal complaint against Butler, detailing how he ordered a swatting attack against Ben Brundage, the founder of the security firm Synthient.

The government says investigators connected Butler to the administration of the KimWolf botnet through IP address, online account information, transaction records, and online messaging application records obtained through the issuance of legal process. The criminal complaint against Butler (PDF) shows he did little to separate his real-life and cybercriminal identities (something we demonstrated in our February unmasking of Dort).

In April, the Justice Department joined authorities across Europe in seizing domain names tied to nearly four-dozen DDoS-for-hire services, although because of a bureaucratic mix-up the list of seized domains has remain sealed until today. The DOJ said at least one of those services collaborated with Butler’s Kimwolf botnet.

A statement from the Ontario Provincial Police said a search warrant was executed on March 19 at Butler’s address in Ottawa, where they seized multiple devices. As a result of that investigation, Butler was arrested and charged this week with unauthorized user of computer; possession of device to obtain unauthorized use of computer system or to commit mischief; and mischief in relation to computer data. He is scheduled to remain in custody until a hearing on May 26.

In the United States, Butler is facing one count of aiding and abetting computer intrusion. If extradited, tried and convicted in a U.S. court, Butler could face up to 10 years in prison, although that maximum sentence would likely be heavily tempered by considerations in the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, which make allowances for mitigating factors such as youth, lack of criminal history and level of cooperation with investigators.