Our first story of 2026 revealed how a destructive new botnet called Kimwolf has infected more than two million devices by mass-compromising a vast number of unofficial Android TV streaming boxes. Today, we’ll dig through digital clues left behind by the hackers, network operators and services that appear to have benefitted from Kimwolf’s spread.

On Dec. 17, 2025, the Chinese security firm XLab published a deep dive on Kimwolf, which forces infected devices to participate in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and to relay abusive and malicious Internet traffic for so-called “residential proxy” services.

The software that turns one’s device into a residential proxy is often quietly bundled with mobile apps and games. Kimwolf specifically targeted residential proxy software that is factory installed on more than a thousand different models of unsanctioned Android TV streaming devices. Very quickly, the residential proxy’s Internet address starts funneling traffic that is linked to ad fraud, account takeover attempts and mass content scraping.

The XLab report explained its researchers found “definitive evidence” that the same cybercriminal actors and infrastructure were used to deploy both Kimwolf and the Aisuru botnet — an earlier version of Kimwolf that also enslaved devices for use in DDoS attacks and proxy services.

XLab said it suspected since October that Kimwolf and Aisuru had the same author(s) and operators, based in part on shared code changes over time. But it said those suspicions were confirmed on December 8 when it witnessed both botnet strains being distributed by the same Internet address at 93.95.112[.]59.

RESI RACK

Public records show the Internet address range flagged by XLab is assigned to Lehi, Utah-based Resi Rack LLC. Resi Rack’s website bills the company as a “Premium Game Server Hosting Provider.” Meanwhile, Resi Rack’s ads on the Internet moneymaking forum BlackHatWorld refer to it as a “Premium Residential Proxy Hosting and Proxy Software Solutions Company.”

Resi Rack co-founder Cassidy Hales told KrebsOnSecurity his company received a notification on December 10 about Kimwolf using their network “that detailed what was being done by one of our customers leasing our servers.”

“When we received this email we took care of this issue immediately,” Hales wrote in response to an email requesting comment. “This is something we are very disappointed is now associated with our name and this was not the intention of our company whatsoever.”

The Resi Rack Internet address cited by XLab on December 8 came onto KrebsOnSecurity’s radar more than two weeks before that. Benjamin Brundage is founder of Synthient, a startup that tracks proxy services. In late October 2025, Brundage shared that the people selling various proxy services which benefitted from the Aisuru and Kimwolf botnets were doing so at a new Discord server called resi[.]to.

When KrebsOnSecurity joined the resi[.]to Discord channel in late October as a silent lurker, the server had fewer than 150 members, including “Shox” — the nickname used by Resi Rack’s co-founder Mr. Hales — and his business partner “Linus,” who did not respond to requests for comment.

Other members of the resi[.]to Discord channel would periodically post new IP addresses that were responsible for proxying traffic over the Kimwolf botnet. As the screenshot from resi[.]to above shows, that Resi Rack Internet address flagged by XLab was used by Kimwolf to direct proxy traffic as far back as November 24, if not earlier. All told, Synthient said it tracked at least seven static Resi Rack IP addresses connected to Kimwolf proxy infrastructure between October and December 2025.

Neither of Resi Rack’s co-owners responded to follow-up questions. Both have been active in selling proxy services via Discord for nearly two years. According to a review of Discord messages indexed by the cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint, Shox and Linus spent much of 2024 selling static “ISP proxies” by routing various Internet address blocks at major U.S. Internet service providers.

In February 2025, AT&T announced that effective July 31, 2025, it would no longer originate routes for network blocks that are not owned and managed by AT&T (other major ISPs have since made similar moves). Less than a month later, Shox and Linus told customers they would soon cease offering static ISP proxies as a result of these policy changes.

DORT & SNOW

The stated owner of the resi[.]to Discord server went by the abbreviated username “D.” That initial appears to be short for the hacker handle “Dort,” a name that was invoked frequently throughout these Discord chats.

This “Dort” nickname came up in KrebsOnSecurity’s recent conversations with “Forky,” a Brazilian man who acknowledged being involved in the marketing of the Aisuru botnet at its inception in late 2024. But Forky vehemently denied having anything to do with a series of massive and record-smashing DDoS attacks in the latter half of 2025 that were blamed on Aisuru, saying the botnet by that point had been taken over by rivals.

Forky asserts that Dort is a resident of Canada and one of at least two individuals currently in control of the Aisuru/Kimwolf botnet. The other individual Forky named as an Aisuru/Kimwolf botmaster goes by the nickname “Snow.”

On January 2 — just hours after our story on Kimwolf was published — the historical chat records on resi[.]to were erased without warning and replaced by a profanity-laced message for Synthient’s founder. Minutes after that, the entire server disappeared.

Later that same day, several of the more active members of the now-defunct resi[.]to Discord server moved to a Telegram channel where they posted Brundage’s personal information, and generally complained about being unable to find reliable “bulletproof” hosting for their botnet.

Hilariously, a user by the name “Richard Remington” briefly appeared in the group’s Telegram server to post a crude “Happy New Year” sketch that claims Dort and Snow are now in control of 3.5 million devices infected by Aisuru and/or Kimwolf. Richard Remington’s Telegram account has since been deleted, but it previously stated its owner operates a website that caters to DDoS-for-hire or “stresser” services seeking to test their firepower.

BYTECONNECT, PLAINPROXIES, AND 3XK TECH

Reports from both Synthient and XLab found that Kimwolf was used to deploy programs that turned infected systems into Internet traffic relays for multiple residential proxy services. Among those was a component that installed a software development kit (SDK) called ByteConnect, which is distributed by a provider known as Plainproxies.

ByteConnect says it specializes in “monetizing apps ethically and free,” while Plainproxies advertises the ability to provide content scraping companies with “unlimited” proxy pools. However, Synthient said that upon connecting to ByteConnect’s SDK they instead observed a mass influx of credential-stuffing attacks targeting email servers and popular online websites.

A search on LinkedIn finds the CEO of Plainproxies is Friedrich Kraft, whose resume says he is co-founder of ByteConnect Ltd. Public Internet routing records show Mr. Kraft also operates a hosting firm in Germany called 3XK Tech GmbH. Mr. Kraft did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.

In July 2025, Cloudflare reported that 3XK Tech (a.k.a. Drei-K-Tech) had become the Internet’s largest source of application-layer DDoS attacks. In November 2025, the security firm GreyNoise Intelligence found that Internet addresses on 3XK Tech were responsible for roughly three-quarters of the Internet scanning being done at the time for a newly discovered and critical vulnerability in security products made by Palo Alto Networks.

LinkedIn has a profile for another Plainproxies employee, Julia Levi, who is listed as co-founder of ByteConnect. Ms. Levi did not respond to requests for comment. Her resume says she previously worked for two major proxy providers: Netnut Proxy Network, and Bright Data.

Synthient likewise said Plainproxies ignored their outreach, noting that the Byteconnect SDK continues to remain active on devices compromised by Kimwolf.

MASKIFY

Synthient’s January 2 report said another proxy provider heavily involved in the sale of Kimwolf proxies was Maskify, which currently advertises on multiple cybercrime forums that it has more than six million residential Internet addresses for rent.

Maskify prices its service at a rate of 30 cents per gigabyte of data relayed through their proxies. According to Synthient, that price range is insanely low and is far cheaper than any other proxy provider in business today.

“Synthient’s Research Team received screenshots from other proxy providers showing key Kimwolf actors attempting to offload proxy bandwidth in exchange for upfront cash,” the Synthient report noted. “This approach likely helped fuel early development, with associated members spending earnings on infrastructure and outsourced development tasks. Please note that resellers know precisely what they are selling; proxies at these prices are not ethically sourced.”

Maskify did not respond to requests for comment.

BOTMASTERS LASH OUT

Hours after our first Kimwolf story was published last week, the resi[.]to Discord server vanished, Synthient’s website was hit with a DDoS attack, and the Kimwolf botmasters took to doxing Brundage via their botnet.

The harassing messages appeared as text records uploaded to the Ethereum Name Service (ENS), a distributed system for supporting smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. As documented by XLab, in mid-December the Kimwolf operators upgraded their infrastructure and began using ENS to better withstand the near-constant takedown efforts targeting the botnet’s control servers.

By telling infected systems to seek out the Kimwolf control servers via ENS, even if the servers that the botmasters use to control the botnet are taken down the attacker only needs to update the ENS text record to reflect the new Internet address of the control server, and the infected devices will immediately know where to look for further instructions.

“This channel itself relies on the decentralized nature of blockchain, unregulated by Ethereum or other blockchain operators, and cannot be blocked,” XLab wrote.

The text records included in Kimwolf’s ENS instructions can also feature short messages, such as those that carried Brundage’s personal information. Other ENS text records associated with Kimwolf offered some sage advice: “If flagged, we encourage the TV box to be destroyed.”

Both Synthient and XLabs say Kimwolf targets a vast number of Android TV streaming box models, all of which have zero security protections, and many of which ship with proxy malware built in. Generally speaking, if you can send a data packet to one of these devices you can also seize administrative control over it.

If you own a TV box that matches one of these model names and/or numbers, please just rip it out of your network. If you encounter one of these devices on the network of a family member or friend, send them a link to this story (or to our January 2 story on Kimwolf) and explain that it’s not worth the potential hassle and harm created by keeping them plugged in.

The Trump administration has pursued a staggering range of policy pivots this past year that threaten to weaken the nation’s ability and willingness to address a broad spectrum of technology challenges, from cybersecurity and privacy to countering disinformation, fraud and corruption. These shifts, along with the president’s efforts to restrict free speech and freedom of the press, have come at such a rapid clip that many readers probably aren’t even aware of them all.

FREE SPEECH

President Trump has repeatedly claimed that a primary reason he lost the 2020 election was that social media and Big Tech companies had conspired to silence conservative voices and stifle free speech. Naturally, the president’s impulse in his second term has been to use the levers of the federal government in an effort to limit the speech of everyday Americans, as well as foreigners wishing to visit the United States.

In September, Donald Trump signed a national security directive known as NSPM-7, which directs federal law enforcement officers and intelligence analysts to target “anti-American” activity, including any “tax crimes” involving extremist groups who defrauded the IRS. According to extensive reporting by journalist Ken Klippenstein, the focus of the order is on those expressing “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology,” as well as “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” and “anti-Christianity.”

Earlier this month, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo advising the FBI to compile a list of Americans whose activities “may constitute domestic terrorism.” Bondi also ordered the FBI to establish a “cash reward system” to encourage the public to report suspected domestic terrorist activity. The memo states that domestic terrorism could include “opposition to law and immigration enforcement” or support for “radical gender ideology.”

The Trump administration also is planning to impose social media restrictions on tourists as the president continues to ramp up travel restrictions for foreign visitors. According to a notice from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), tourists — including those from Britain, Australia, France, and Japan — will soon be required to provide five years of their social media history.

The CBP said it will also collect “several high value data fields,” including applicants’ email addresses from the past 10 years, their telephone numbers used in the past five years, and names and details of family members. Wired reported in October that the US CBP executed more device searches at the border in the first three months of the year than any other previous quarter.

The new requirements from CBP add meat to the bones of Executive Order 14161, which in the name of combating “foreign terrorist and public safety threats” granted broad new authority that civil rights groups warn could enable a renewed travel ban and expanded visa denials or deportations based on perceived ideology. Critics alleged the order’s vague language around “public safety threats,” creates latitude for targeting individuals based on political views, national origin, or religion. At least 35 nations are now under some form of U.S. travel restrictions.

CRIME AND CORRUPTION

In February, Trump ordered executive branch agencies to stop enforcing the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which froze foreign bribery investigations, and even allows for “remedial actions” of past enforcement actions deemed “inappropriate.”

The White House also disbanded the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative and KleptoCapture Task Force — units which proved their value in corruption cases and in seizing the assets of sanctioned Russian oligarchs — and diverted resources away from investigating white-collar crime.

Also in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi dissolved the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, an entity created during Trump’s first term designed to counter the influence of foreign governments on American politics.

In March 2025, Reuters reported that several U.S. national security agencies had halted work on a coordinated effort to counter Russian sabotage, disinformation and cyberattacks. Former President Joe Biden had ordered his national security team to establish working groups to monitor the issue amid warnings from U.S. intelligence that Russia was escalating a shadow war against Western nations.

In a test of prosecutorial independence, Trump’s Justice Department ordered prosecutors to drop the corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams. The fallout was immediate: Multiple senior officials resigned in protest, the case was reassigned, and chaos engulfed the Southern District of New York (SDNY) – historically one of the nation’s most aggressive offices for pursuing public corruption, white-collar crime, and cybercrime cases.

When it comes to cryptocurrency, the administration has shifted regulators at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) away from enforcement to cheerleading an industry that has consistently been plagued by scams, fraud and rug-pulls. The SEC in 2025 systematically retreated from enforcement against cryptocurrency operators, dropping major cases against Coinbase, Binance, and others.

Perhaps the most troubling example involves Justin Sun, the Chinese-born founder of crypto currency company Tron. In 2023, the SEC charged Sun with fraud and market manipulation. Sun subsequently invested $75 million in the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial (WLF) tokens, became the top holder of the $TRUMP memecoin, and secured a seat at an exclusive dinner with the president.

In late February 2025, the SEC dropped its lawsuit. Sun promptly took Tron public through a reverse merger arranged by Dominari Securities, a firm with Trump family ties. Democratic lawmakers have urged the SEC to investigate what they call “concerning ties to President Trump and his family” as potential conflicts of interest and foreign influence.

In October, President Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance. In 2023, Zhao and his company pled guilty to failing to prevent money laundering on the platform. Binance paid a $4 billion fine, and Zhao served a four-month sentence. As CBS News observed last month, shortly after Zhao’s pardon application, he was at the center of a blockbuster deal that put the Trump’s family’s WLF on the map.

“Zhao is a citizen of the United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf and in May, an Emirati fund put $2 billion in Zhao’s Binance,” 60 Minutes reported. “Of all the currencies in the world, the deal was done in World Liberty crypto.”

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins has made the agency’s new posture towards crypto explicit, stating “most crypto tokens are not securities.” At the same time, President Trump has directed the Department of Labor and the SEC to expand 401(k) access to private equity and crypto — assets that regulators have historically restricted for retail investors due to high risk, fees, opacity, and illiquidity. The executive order explicitly prioritizes “curbing ERISA litigation,” and reducing accountability for fiduciaries while shifting risk onto ordinary workers’ retirement savings.

At the White House’s behest, the U.S. Treasury in March suspended the Corporate Transparency Act, a law that required companies to reveal their real owners. Finance experts warned the suspension would bring back shell companies and “open the flood gates of dirty money” through the US, such as funds from drug gangs, human traffickers, and fraud groups.

Trump’s clemency decisions have created a pattern of freed criminals committing new offenses, including Jonathan Braun, whose sentence for drug trafficking was commuted during Trump’s first term, was found guilty in 2025 of violating supervised release and faces new charges.

Eliyahu Weinstein, who received a commutation in January 2021 for running a Ponzi scheme, was sentenced in November 2025 to 37 years for running a new Ponzi scheme. The administration has also granted clemency to a growing list of white-collar criminals: David Gentile, a private equity executive sentenced to seven years for securities and wire fraud (functionally a ponzi-like scheme), and Trevor Milton, the Nikola founder sentenced to four years for defrauding investors over electric vehicle technology. The message: Financial crimes against ordinary investors are no big deal.

At least 10 of the January 6 insurrectionists pardoned by President Trump have already been rearrested, charged or sentenced for other crimes, including plotting the murder of FBI agents, child sexual assault, possession of child sexual abuse material and reckless homicide while driving drunk.

The administration also imposed sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC). On February 6, 2025, Executive Order 14203 authorized asset freezes and visa restrictions against ICC officials investigating U.S. citizens or allies, primarily in response to the ICC’s arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over alleged war crimes in Gaza.

Earlier this month the president launched the “Gold Card,” a visa scheme established by an executive order in September that offers wealthy individuals and corporations expedited paths to U.S. residency and citizenship in exchange for $1 million for individuals and $2 million for companies, plus ongoing fees. The administration says it is also planning to offer a “platinum” version of the card that offers special tax breaks — for a cool $5 million.

FEDERAL CYBERSECURITY

President Trump campaigned for a second term insisting that the previous election was riddled with fraud and had been stolen from him. Shortly after Mr. Trump took the oath of office for a second time, he fired the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — Chris Krebs (no relation) — for having the audacity to state publicly that the 2020 election was the most secure in U.S. history.

Mr. Trump revoked Krebs’s security clearances, ordered a Justice Department investigation into his election security work, and suspended the security clearances of employees at SentinelOne, the cybersecurity firm where Krebs worked as chief intelligence and public policy officer. The executive order was the first direct presidential action against any US cybersecurity company. Krebs subsequently resigned from SentinelOne, telling The Wall Street Journal he was leaving to push back on Trump’s efforts “to go after corporate interests and corporate relationships.”

The president also dismissed all 15 members of the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB), a nonpartisan government entity established in 2022 with a mandate to investigate the security failures behind major cybersecurity events — likely because those advisors included Chris Krebs.

At the time, the CSRB was in the middle of compiling a much-anticipated report on the root causes of Chinese government-backed digital intrusions into at least nine U.S. telecommunications providers. Not to be outdone, the Federal Communication Commission quickly moved to roll back a previous ruling that required U.S. telecom carriers to implement stricter cybersecurity measures.

Meanwhile, CISA has lost roughly a third of its workforce this year amid mass layoffs and deferred resignations. When the government shutdown began in October, CISA laid off even more employees and furloughed 65 percent of the remaining staff, leaving only 900 employees working without pay.

Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security has reassigned CISA cyber specialists to jobs supporting the president’s deportation agenda. As Bloomberg reported earlier this year, CISA employees were given a week to accept the new roles or resign, and some of the reassignments included relocations to new geographic areas.

The White House has signaled that it plans to cut an additional $491 million from CISA’s budget next year, cuts that primarily target CISA programs focused on international affairs and countering misinformation and foreign propaganda. The president’s budget proposal justified the cuts by repeating debunked claims about CISA engaging in censorship.

The Trump administration has pursued a similar reorganization at the FBI: The Washington Post reported in October that a quarter of all FBI agents have now been reassigned from national security threats to immigration enforcement. Reuters reported last week that the replacement of seasoned leaders at the FBI and Justice Department with Trump loyalists has led to an unprecedented number of prosecutorial missteps, resulting in a 21 percent dismissal rate of the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office criminal complaints over eight weeks, compared to a mere .5% dismissal rate over the prior 10 years.

“These mistakes are causing department attorneys to lose credibility with federal courts, with some judges quashing subpoenas, threatening criminal contempt and issuing opinions that raise questions about their conduct,” Reuters reported. “Grand juries have also in some cases started rejecting indictments, a highly unusual event since prosecutors control what evidence gets presented.”

In August, the DHS banned state and local governments from using cyber grants on services provided by the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), a group that for more than 20 years has shared critical cybersecurity intelligence across state lines and provided software and other resources at free or heavily discounted rates. Specifically, DHS barred states from spending funds on services offered by the Elections Infrastructure ISAC, which was effectively shuttered after DHS pulled its funding in February.

Cybersecurity Dive reports that the Trump administration’s massive workforce cuts, along with widespread mission uncertainty and a persistent leadership void, have interrupted federal agencies’ efforts to collaborate with the businesses and local utilities that run and protect healthcare facilities, water treatment plans, energy companies and telecommunications networks. The publication said the changes came after the US government eliminated CIPAC — a framework that allowed private companies to share cyber and threat intel without legal penalties.

“Government leaders have canceled meetings with infrastructure operators, forced out their longtime points of contact, stopped attending key industry events and scrapped a coordination program that made companies feel comfortable holding sensitive talks about cyberattacks and other threats with federal agencies,” Cybersecurity Dive’s Eric Geller wrote.

Both the National Security Agency (NSA) and U.S. Cyber Command have been without a leader since Trump dismissed Air Force General Timothy Haugh in April, allegedly for disloyalty to the president and at the suggestion of far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. The nomination of Army Lt. Gen. William Hartman for the same position fell through in October. The White House has ordered the NSA to cut 8 percent of its civilian workforce (between 1,500 and 2,000 employees).

As The Associated Press reported in August, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence plans to dramatically reduce its workforce and cut its budget by more than $700 million annually. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said the cuts were warranted because ODNI had become “bloated and inefficient, and the intelligence community is rife with abuse of power, unauthorized leaks of classified intelligence, and politicized weaponization of intelligence.”

The firing or forced retirements of so many federal employees has been a boon to foreign intelligence agencies. Chinese intelligence agencies, for example, reportedly moved quickly to take advantage of the mass layoffs, using a network of front companies to recruit laid-off U.S. government employees for “consulting work.” Former workers with the Defense Department’s Defense Digital Service who resigned en-masse earlier this year thanks to DOGE encroaching on their mission have been approached by the United Arab Emirates to work on artificial intelligence for the oil kingdom’s armed forces, albeit reportedly with the blessing of the Trump administration.

PRESS FREEDOM

President Trump has filed multibillion-dollar lawsuits against a number of major news outlets over news segments or interviews that allegedly portrayed him in a negative light, suing the networks ABC, the BBC, the CBS parent company Paramount, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, among others.

The president signed an executive order aimed at slashing public subsidies to PBS and NPR, alleging “bias” in the broadcasters’ reporting. In July, Congress approved a request from Trump to cut $1.1 billion in federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the nonprofit entity that funds PBS and NPR.

Brendan Carr, the president’s pick to run the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), initially pledged to “dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.” But on January 22, 2025, the FCC reopened complaints against ABC, CBS and NBC over their coverage of the 2024 election. The previous FCC chair had dismissed the complaints as attacks on the First Amendment and an attempt to weaponize the agency for political purposes.

President Trump in February seized control of the White House Correspondents’ Association, the nonprofit entity that decides which media outlets should have access to the White House and the press pool that follows the president. The president invited an additional 32 media outlets, mostly conservative or right-wing organizations.

According to the journalism group Poynter.org, there are three religious networks, all of which lean conservative, as well as a mix of outlets that includes a legacy paper, television networks, and a digital outlet powered by artificial intelligence.  Trump also barred The Associated Press from the White House over their refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

Under Trump appointee Kari Lake, the U.S. Agency for Global Media moved to dismantle Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and other networks that for decades served as credible news sources behind authoritarian lines. Courts blocked shutdown orders, but the damage continues through administrative leave, contract terminations, and funding disputes.

President Trump this term has fired most of the people involved in processing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for government agencies. FOIA is an indispensable tool used by journalists and the public to request government records, and to hold leaders accountable.

Petitioning the government, particularly when it ignores your requests, often requires challenging federal agencies in court. But that becomes far more difficult if the most competent law firms start to shy away from cases that may involve crossing the president and his administration. On March 22, the president issued a memorandum that directs heads of the Justice and Homeland Security Departments to “seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable and vexatious litigation against the United States,” or in matters that come before federal agencies.

The Trump administration announced increased vetting of applicants for H-1B visas for highly skilled workers, with an internal State Department memo saying that anyone involved in “censorship” of free speech should be considered for rejection.

Executive Order 14161, issued in 2025 on “foreign terrorist and public safety threats,” granted broad new authority that civil rights groups warn could enable a renewed travel ban and expanded visa denials or deportations based on perceived ideology. Critics charged that the order’s vague language around “public safety threats” creates latitude for targeting individuals based on political views, national origin, or religion.

CONSUMER PROTECTION, PRIVACY

At the beginning of this year, President Trump ordered staffers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to stop most work. Created by Congress in 2011 to be a clearinghouse of consumer complaints, the CFPB has sued some of the nation’s largest financial institutions for violating consumer protection laws. The CFPB says its actions have put nearly $18 billion back in Americans’ pockets in the form of monetary compensation or canceled debts, and imposed $4 billion in civil money penalties against violators.

The Trump administration said it planned to fire up to 90 percent of all CFPB staff, but a recent federal appeals court ruling in Washington tossed out an earlier decision that would have allowed the firings to proceed. Reuters reported this week that an employee union and others have battled against it in court for ten months, during which the agency has been almost completely idled.

The CFPB’s acting director is Russell Vought, a key architect of the GOP policy framework Project 2025. Under Vought’s direction, the CFPB in May quietly withdrew a data broker protection rule intended to limit the ability of U.S. data brokers to sell personal information on Americans.

Despite the Federal Reserve’s own post-mortem explicitly blaming Trump-era deregulation for the 2023 Silicon Valley Bank collapse, which triggered a fast-moving crisis requiring emergency weekend bailouts of banks, Trump’s banking regulators in 2025 doubled down. They loosened capital requirements, narrowed definitions of “unsafe” banking practices, and stripped specific risk categories from supervisory frameworks. The setup for another banking crisis requiring taxpayer intervention is now in place.

The Privacy Act of 1974, one of the few meaningful federal privacy laws, was built on the principles of consent and separation in response to the abuses of power that came to light during the Watergate era. The law states that when an individual provides personal information to a federal agency to receive a particular service, that data must be used solely for its original purpose.

Nevertheless, it emerged in June that the Trump administration has built a central database of all US citizens. According to NPR, the White House plans to use the new platform during upcoming elections to verify the identity and citizenship status of US voters. The database was built by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Governmental Efficiency and is being rolled out in phases to US states.

DOGE

Probably the biggest ungotten scoop of 2025 is the inside story of what happened to all of the personal, financial and other sensitive data that was accessed by workers at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). President Trump tapped Elon Musk to lead the newly created department, which was mostly populated by current and former employees of Musk’s various technology companies (including a former denizen of the cybercrime community known as the “Com”). It soon emerged that the DOGE team was using artificial intelligence to surveil at least one federal agency’s communications for hostility to Mr. Trump and his agenda.

DOGE employees were able to access and synthesize data taken from a large number of previously separate and highly guarded federal databases, including those at the Social Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Personnel Management, and the U.S. Department of the Treasury. DOGE staffers did so largely by circumventing or dismantling security measures designed to detect and prevent misuse of federal databases, including standard incident response protocols, auditing, and change-tracking mechanisms.

For example, an IT expert with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleges that DOGE employees likely downloaded gigabytes of data from agency case files in early March, using short-lived accounts that were configured to leave few traces of network activity. The NLRB whistleblower said the large data outflows coincided with multiple blocked login attempts from addresses in Russia, which attempted to use valid credentials for a newly-created DOGE user account.

The stated goal of DOGE was to reduce bureaucracy and to massively cut costs — mainly by eliminating funding for a raft of federal initiatives that had already been approved by Congress. The DOGE website claimed those efforts reduced “wasteful” and “fraudulent” federal spending by more than $200 billion. However, multiple independent reviews by news organizations determined the true “savings” DOGE achieved was off by a couple of orders of magnitude, and was likely closer to $2 billion.

At the same time DOGE was slashing federal programs, President Trump fired at least 17 inspectors general at federal agencies — the very people tasked with actually identifying and stopping waste, fraud and abuse at the federal level. Those included several agencies (such as the NLRB) that had open investigations into one or more of Mr. Musk’s companies for allegedly failing to comply with protocols aimed at protecting state secrets. In September, a federal judge found the president unlawfully fired the agency watchdogs, but none of them have been reinstated.

Where is DOGE now? Reuters reported last month that as far as the White House is concerned, DOGE no longer exists, even though it technically has more than half a year left to its charter. Meanwhile, who exactly retains access to federal agency data that was fed by DOGE into AI tools is anyone’s guess.

KrebsOnSecurity would like to thank the anonymous researcher NatInfoSec for assisting with the research on this story.

A prolific cybercriminal group that calls itself “Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters” has dominated headlines this year by regularly stealing data from and publicly mass extorting dozens of major corporations. But the tables seem to have turned somewhat for “Rey,” the moniker chosen by the technical operator and public face of the hacker group: Earlier this week, Rey confirmed his real life identity and agreed to an interview after KrebsOnSecurity tracked him down and contacted his father.

Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters (SLSH) is thought to be an amalgamation of three hacking groups — Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$ and ShinyHunters. Members of these gangs hail from many of the same chat channels on the Com, a mostly English-language cybercriminal community that operates across an ocean of Telegram and Discord servers.

In May 2025, SLSH members launched a social engineering campaign that used voice phishing to trick targets into connecting a malicious app to their organization’s Salesforce portal. The group later launched a data leak portal that threatened to publish the internal data of three dozen companies that allegedly had Salesforce data stolen, including Toyota, FedEx, Disney/Hulu, and UPS.

Last week, the SLSH Telegram channel featured an offer to recruit and reward “insiders,” employees at large companies who agree to share internal access to their employer’s network for a share of whatever ransom payment is ultimately paid by the victim company.

SLSH has solicited insider access previously, but their latest call for disgruntled employees started making the rounds on social media at the same time news broke that the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike had fired an employee for allegedly sharing screenshots of internal systems with the hacker group (Crowdstrike said their systems were never compromised and that it has turned the matter over to law enforcement agencies).

Members of SLSH have traditionally used other ransomware gangs’ encryptors in attacks, including malware from ransomware affiliate programs like ALPHV/BlackCat, Qilin, RansomHub, and DragonForce. But last week, SLSH announced on its Telegram channel the release of their own ransomware-as-a-service operation called ShinySp1d3r.

The individual responsible for releasing the ShinySp1d3r ransomware offering is a core SLSH member who goes by the handle “Rey” and who is currently one of just three administrators of the SLSH Telegram channel. Previously, Rey was an administrator of the data leak website for Hellcat, a ransomware group that surfaced in late 2024 and was involved in attacks on companies including Schneider Electric, Telefonica, and Orange Romania.

Also in 2024, Rey would take over as administrator of the most recent incarnation of BreachForums, an English-language cybercrime forum whose domain names have been seized on multiple occasions by the FBI and/or by international authorities. In April 2025, Rey posted on Twitter/X about another FBI seizure of BreachForums.

On October 5, 2025, the FBI announced it had once again seized the domains associated with BreachForums, which it described as a major criminal marketplace used by ShinyHunters and others to traffic in stolen data and facilitate extortion.

“This takedown removes access to a key hub used by these actors to monetize intrusions, recruit collaborators, and target victims across multiple sectors,” the FBI said.

Incredibly, Rey would make a series of critical operational security mistakes last year that provided multiple avenues to ascertain and confirm his real-life identity and location. Read on to learn how it all unraveled for Rey.

WHO IS REY?

According to the cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, Rey was an active user on various BreachForums reincarnations over the past two years, authoring more than 200 posts between February 2024 and July 2025. Intel 471 says Rey previously used the handle “Hikki-Chan” on BreachForums, where their first post shared data allegedly stolen from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In that February 2024 post about the CDC, Hikki-Chan says they could be reached at the Telegram username @wristmug. In May 2024, @wristmug posted in a Telegram group chat called “Pantifan” a copy of an extortion email they said they received that included their email address and password.

The message that @wristmug cut and pasted appears to have been part of an automated email scam that claims it was sent by a hacker who has compromised your computer and used your webcam to record a video of you while you were watching porn. These missives threaten to release the video to all your contacts unless you pay a Bitcoin ransom, and they typically reference a real password the recipient has used previously.

“Noooooo,” the @wristmug account wrote in mock horror after posting a screenshot of the scam message. “I must be done guys.”

In posting their screenshot, @wristmug redacted the username portion of the email address referenced in the body of the scam message. However, they did not redact their previously-used password, and they left the domain portion of their email address (@proton.me) visible in the screenshot.

O5TDEV

Searching on @wristmug’s rather unique 15-character password in the breach tracking service Spycloud finds it is known to have been used by just one email address: cybero5tdev@proton.me. According to Spycloud, those credentials were exposed at least twice in early 2024 when this user’s device was infected with an infostealer trojan that siphoned all of its stored usernames, passwords and authentication cookies (a finding that was initially revealed in March 2025 by the cyber intelligence firm KELA).

Intel 471 shows the email address cybero5tdev@proton.me belonged to a BreachForums member who went by the username o5tdev. Searching on this nickname in Google brings up at least two website defacement archives showing that a user named o5tdev was previously involved in defacing sites with pro-Palestinian messages. The screenshot below, for example, shows that 05tdev was part of a group called Cyb3r Drag0nz Team.

A 2023 report from SentinelOne described Cyb3r Drag0nz Team as a hacktivist group with a history of launching DDoS attacks and cyber defacements as well as engaging in data leak activity.

“Cyb3r Drag0nz Team claims to have leaked data on over a million of Israeli citizens spread across multiple leaks,” SentinelOne reported. “To date, the group has released multiple .RAR archives of purported personal information on citizens across Israel.”

The cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint finds the Telegram user @05tdev was active in 2023 and early 2024, posting in Arabic on anti-Israel channels like “Ghost of Palestine” [full disclosure: Flashpoint is currently an advertiser on this blog].

‘I’M A GINTY’

Flashpoint shows that Rey’s Telegram account (ID7047194296) was particularly active in a cybercrime-focused channel called Jacuzzi, where this user shared several personal details, including that their father was an airline pilot. Rey claimed in 2024 to be 15 years old, and to have family connections to Ireland.

Specifically, Rey mentioned in several Telegram chats that he had Irish heritage, even posting a graphic that shows the prevalence of the surname “Ginty.”

Spycloud indexed hundreds of credentials stolen from cybero5dev@proton.me, and those details indicate that Rey’s computer is a shared Microsoft Windows device located in Amman, Jordan. The credential data stolen from Rey in early 2024 show there are multiple users of the infected PC, but that all shared the same last name of Khader and an address in Amman, Jordan.

The “autofill” data lifted from Rey’s family PC contains an entry for a 46-year-old Zaid Khader that says his mother’s maiden name was Ginty. The infostealer data also shows Zaid Khader frequently accessed internal websites for employees of Royal Jordanian Airlines.

MEET SAIF

The infostealer data makes clear that Rey’s full name is Saif Al-Din Khader. Having no luck contacting Saif directly, KrebsOnSecurity sent an email to his father Zaid. The message invited the father to respond via email, phone or Signal, explaining that his son appeared to be deeply enmeshed in a serious cybercrime conspiracy.

Less than two hours later, I received a Signal message from Saif, who said his dad suspected the email was a scam and had forwarded it to him.

“I saw your email, unfortunately I don’t think my dad would respond to this because they think its some ‘scam email,'” said Saif, who told me he turns 16 years old next month. “So I decided to talk to you directly.”

Saif explained that he’d already heard from European law enforcement officials, and had been trying to extricate himself from SLSH. When asked why then he was involved in releasing SLSH’s new ShinySp1d3r ransomware-as-a-service offering, Saif said he couldn’t just suddenly quit the group.

“Well I cant just dip like that, I’m trying to clean up everything I’m associated with and move on,” he said.

He also shared that ShinySp1d3r is just a rehash of Hellcat ransomware, except modified with AI tools. “I gave the source code of Hellcat ransomware out basically.”

Saif claims he reached out on his own recently to the Telegram account for Operation Endgame, the codename for an ongoing law enforcement operation targeting cybercrime services, vendors and their customers.

“I’m already cooperating with law enforcement,” Saif said. “In fact, I have been talking to them since at least June. I have told them nearly everything. I haven’t really done anything like breaching into a corp or extortion related since September.”

Saif suggested that a story about him right now could endanger any further cooperation he may be able to provide. He also said he wasn’t sure if the U.S. or European authorities had been in contact with the Jordanian government about his involvement with the hacking group.

“A story would bring so much unwanted heat and would make things very difficult if I’m going to cooperate,” Saif said. “I’m unsure whats going to happen they said they’re in contact with multiple countries regarding my request but its been like an entire week and I got no updates from them.”

Saif shared a screenshot that indicated he’d contacted Europol authorities late last month. But he couldn’t name any law enforcement officials he said were responding to his inquiries, and KrebsOnSecurity was unable to verify his claims.

“I don’t really care I just want to move on from all this stuff even if its going to be prison time or whatever they gonna say,” Saif said.