Microsoft today released updates to remedy at least 398 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software, including one weakness that is already being actively exploited and two others that were publicly detailed prior to today.

August’s overstuffed bundle of patch joy from Microsoft did not eclipse its recording breaking release of more than 570 security updates last month, but it is double June’s then-record batch of nearly 200 fixes. Microsoft has attributed the recent patch deluge to vulnerability discoveries aided by artificial intelligence, and experts roundly agree that Windows users should get used to the idea of Patch Tuesdays (the second Tuesday of each month) covering hundreds of newly discovered security flaws.

Fully 42 of the 398 flaws that Microsoft patched today earned Redmond’s most-dire “critical” rating, meaning they are severe enough that malware or malcontents could exploit them to gain remote control over a Windows computer with little to no help from the user.

The sole known “zero day” bug fixed by Microsoft this month is CVE-2026-68820, a privilege escalation weakness in a core Windows component called afd.sys, which the security firm Automox describes as “the driver behind Windows socket connections on effectively every endpoint.”

“This isn’t a front-door bug,” Automox’s Landon Miles wrote in a Patch Tuesday blog post. “It’s step two in a chain: an attacker phishes their way into a low-privilege foothold, then uses the driver flaw to take the box. The 7.0 score reflects the high attack complexity, because race conditions are fiddly. The exploit has to be thrown over and over until the timing lands. Someone is clearly landing it anyway.”

CVE-2026-62832 is another privilege escalation flaw that Microsoft has labeled likely to be exploited; this flaw, in the Windows User Profile Service, may be related to the recent “LegacyHive” public disclosure from the prolific bug hunter known as Nightmare Eclipse. The other publicly disclosed flaw is CVE-2026-72971, a low-impact local tampering vulnerability that Microsoft reckons is unlikely to be exploited.

Other major software makers are likewise increasing their patch volumes and cadence thanks to AI, including Adobe which last month moved to twice-monthly security bulletins published on the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of each month. Cisco, Google, Mozilla and Oracle also are shipping updates far more frequently and abundantly.

By all accounts, AI is quite good at finding security holes in software. But for now at least, patching the resulting bugpocalypse remains a heavily human-centric endeavor, and the jury is still out on whether AI technologies will turn out to be as good at fixing vulnerabilities as they are at finding and exploiting them. This is an important question when one considers that these same AI technologies also are suggesting fixes for the vulnerabilities they find.

Researchers at 1Password recently examined what happens when different large language models (LLMs) generate vulnerability patches for newly disclosed, complex vulnerabilities. They found the LLMs produced patches that failed to fix the flaw or added a new weakness in the process (or both) more than half the time.

Ed Skoudis, president of the SANS Technology Institute, said his team has seen excellent results using AI to generate patches, provided there are humans in the loop to test the suggested fixes and push for iterative improvements.

“AI is rapidly becoming astonishingly good at finding vulnerabilities, but this research shows that fixing them is a very different problem,” Skoudis wrote in a SANS newsletter today. “Don’t expect one-shot AI patching to work reliably. Instead, iterate, test, challenge, improve, and verify. AI can be an extraordinary patching partner, but today it still needs a skilled human at the keyboard.”

Tyler Reguly at Fortra says while reports of Microsoft patching hundreds of vulnerabilities in one go have prompted some organizations to try to patch faster, it’s important to bear in mind that only one of the almost 400 bugs addressed today is known to be actively exploited. Reguly suggested security leaders check in with their teams to see how they’re handling the increasing workloads, which often involve testing fixes before deploying them in production environments.

“If you’re a chief security officer talk to your teams about how they are shifting or modifying their workflows to better accommodate the patching shift that we’re seeing and support them across various organizational units by enabling the changes they want to see made,” Reguly said. “There’s no need to rush these updates, no matter what various vendors and organizations try to tell you. You need to make sure that you are rolling out safe updates that will not negatively impact your systems.”

Speaking of the humans behind the keyboards, don’t neglect to backup your system and/or data before applying this month’s monster patch load. The day after each month’s Patch Tuesday is sometimes derisively referred to as Reboot Wednesday, but it generally doesn’t hurt to wait a few days to apply these huge update bundles because it sometimes takes a couple of days for the occasional misbehaving patch to get ironed out properly by Microsoft.

For a clickable, per-patch breakdown by severity and urgency, check out this roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center.

Security experts have been sounding the alarm for years about the risks of using generic TV boxes that promise unlimited content streaming for a one-time fee, warning that they secretly rent the user’s Internet connection out to strangers. But a groundbreaking new analysis finds these devices also routinely spoof themselves as mobile phones clicking ads on AI-generated websites as part of a sprawling operation that seeks to defraud online merchants and advertising networks.

Pedro Falé is a threat researcher with the security firm Bitsight. Falé told KrebsOnSecurity he was able to peer inside a vast and complex ad fraud network by registering an expired domain name that was used to coordinate fake ad clicks across a particularly popular brand of these streaming devices known as H96.

Falé said the domain he scooped up was previously used for telemetry, periodically collecting full hardware information and the entire list of installed apps from tens of thousands of H96 streaming sticks plugged into television sets around the globe. But upon inspecting the traffic being funneled to the domain, he discovered nearly all of the TV boxes transmitting data claimed to be mobile phone models from a variety of manufacturers, including Samsung, Vivo, Huawei, and Xiaomi.

“We noticed something was wildly wrong,” Falé said. “Multiple devices reporting to this factory Android TV Box backdoor were ‘phones.'”

The researcher found all of the devices reported having the same two apps installed, and that those apps were made by a company called Zhejiang Fengwo IoT Technology Ltd, an entity founded in 2019 in mainland China which operates an ad-publishing portfolio under the name Fengwo Group. Further investigation into the Fengwo Group revealed it has registered multiple patents that match the inner workings of these apps.

“Bitsight TRACE identified several Hong Kong, Singapore, and single person ‘legal’ shell identities used to collect the monetization and traced the operation back to a mainland China company known as Zhejiang Fengwo IoT Technology Co., Ltd, which operates under the Fengwo Group,” Falé wrote in a report released today about their findings.

Falé said an analysis of the apps shows they help to coordinate an ad fraud network that uses these H96 devices as a captive traffic source to click on ads at AI-generated websites operated by the Fengwo Group.

Bitsight discovered the websites contain machine-generated news articles and graphics across a range of categories, including finance, health, education, gaming, music and food blogs. But they also found none of those sites displayed ads unless the device visiting the page matched the spoofed mobile profile of these H96 devices.

AI DIGITAL HUMANS

The domain for the Fengwo Group — fwgcloud[.]com — claims the company is “redefining the boundaries of human-AI interaction,” and that it has created more than 120,000 “AI digital humans” available to rent for everything from emotional companionship to 24/7 customer service and creative design.

Falé said the Fengwo Group’s domain shared its SSL certificate data with other domains associated with the apps found on H96 devices, specifically the phone spoofing mechanism. He noted the domain also has an internal wiki platform that directly ties the Fengwo Group to a proprietary implementation of a Google-built visual programming language called Blockly, which was originally designed to help kids learn how to write software.

According to Bitsight, the Fengwo Group’s employees use Blockly to build the sham websites, allowing low-skilled operators to drag blocks of code together in their Blockly editor — without any need to understand what the underlying code blocks do or how they work.

“An operator can drag blocks together in their Blockly editor, to define each fraud routine, given a task type,” reads Bitsight’s report. “Once the routine is saved, it gets exported as JavaScript and uploaded to the S3 buckets. An operator doesn’t need as much understanding of the underlying technicalities, as it is all set in place for ease of use.”

Bitsight even found one of the Fengwo Group app developers mentioning exactly these advantages, noting the developer remarked that “only a small number of highly-skilled developers are needed to build the template execution-unit images,” and that “developers who create execution units from those templates have significantly lower technical requirements, greatly reducing the company’s operating costs.”

Falé said if a user’s H96 streaming stick is selected for a specific fraud task, it will be pushed the appropriate Blockly module according to the task desired, which can include silently launching a web browser, visiting websites, browsing pages, managing tabs, and clicking on ads.

To ensure the TV boxes masquerading as mobile phones can reliably click on ads displayed via the AI-generated websites, the Fengwo group “fuses three vision and reasoning systems into a single interface,” allowing the bots to correctly identify an ad on the webpage and navigate the site much like a human would, the Bitsight report observed.

TV ON? PROXY. TV OFF? AD FRAUD

Bitsight found the H96 devices were either relaying residential proxy traffic or participating in ad fraud, but never both at the same time. In fact, they concluded that when these TV boxes detect an HDMI signal from an attached television — indicating the user intends to stream video content — the box is usually functioning as a residential proxy. When the TV is off, it switches back to waiting for ad fraud jobs.

Falé said he believes the TV boxes are set up this way because its ad fraud activities are far more resource intensive and could interfere with the device’s stated purpose — streaming video content over the Internet.

Despite repeated warnings from the FBI and security industry leaders about the security and privacy risks of using these streaming devices, major e-commerce providers like Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg and others continue to sell hundreds of different models and brands that bundle unofficial versions of Google’s Android operating system and are frequently marketed (via online influencers) as a way to access a broad array of streaming services and live broadcasts without a subscription.

In addition to enlisting the user’s TV box in ad fraud networks, these off-brand streaming devices almost universally come with residential proxy software pre-installed. This software rents the user’s Internet address out to anonymous paying customers, who run the gamut from aggressive content scraping firms to ticket scalpers and outright cybercriminals.

What’s more, because these generic (and generally dirt cheap) TV boxes are all horribly insecure by default and bereft of any kind of authentication, installing one on your home or office network only invites further mischief. In January, the proxy tracking service Synthient documented how multiple botnets had rapidly enslaved millions of TV boxes using a complex interplay of security vulnerabilities in both the residential proxy software and the streaming devices themselves.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

Bitsight said it tracked approximately 38,000 TV boxes globally phoning home to the expired Fengwo Group domain, and based on that number the report estimates this ad fraud network brings in revenues of close to $50,000 a day (not counting substantial revenue from the residential proxy side of the business). However, Falé emphasized that these estimates are highly conservative and based on telemetry from just one of the Fengwo Group’s core (but older) domains.

As for the Fengwo Group’s claim to have 120,000 “digital humans” at their disposal, Bitsight’s report concludes it could be just a clever marketing scheme and/or a way to avoid drawing suspicion to the company’s operations.

“Historically, when dealing with proxy services or DDoS, we sometimes see these websites undertake inconspicuous facades, so as not to advertise their DDoS capability or botnet size,” Falé wrote in the report. “This could also be the case here.”

If the Fengwo Group truly does have tens of thousands of “AI humans” at its beck and call, it does not appear to have dedicated any of them to fielding inquiries from its own website. KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from the Fengwo Group by emailing the contact address listed on the company’s homepage, but the request bounced back with the reply, “Your message couldn’t be delivered to postmaster@fwgcloud[.]com. Their inbox is full, or it’s getting too much mail right now.”

As Bitsight’s analysis shows, when it comes to TV boxes and streaming sticks, it’s best to stick to name brands from reputable manufacturers, and then to be sparing and careful with any apps you choose to install on the device — as many of those can bundle residential proxy software as well. Google says consumers can confirm whether or not a device is built with the official Android TV OS and Play Protect certification by following these instructions.

Additionally, Synthient maintains a running list of IoT devices that have been known to ship to consumers with residential proxy software and other malicious apps pre-installed. Careful readers will notice Synthient’s list includes other IoT devices apart from streaming sticks and boxes: As the FBI has warned, residential proxy software has also been found in other popular consumer IoT devices from random brands, particularly digital photo frames.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a postmortem on a recent data leak in which a contractor published dozens of internal CISA credentials — including AWS Govcloud keys — in a public GitHub repository for almost six months before being notified by KrebsOnSecurity. Experts say the gaps identified in the agency’s initial response provide important lessons that all security teams should absorb.

On May 15, 2026, the security firm GitGuardian asked for help in notifying CISA about the existence of a public GitHub repository called “Private CISA” that included 844 MB of sensitive CISA-related data. One of the exposed files, titled “importantAWStokens,” included the administrative credentials to three Amazon AWS GovCloud servers. Another file — “AWS-Workspace-Firefox-Passwords.csv” — listed plaintext usernames and passwords for dozens of internal CISA systems.

CISA quickly acknowledged our initial alert, but took more than 48 hours to invalidate the AWS keys and many other important secrets leaked in the GitHub repo. In its report on the data leak, CISA said the complexities of the agency’s systems and interconnections with federal and industry partners caused its key rotation to take longer than anticipated.

“Drawing on this experience, CISA encourages others to maintain mature and well-tested key management capabilities,” the report notes.

CISA also admitted it can do better when it comes to responding to security incident notifications from external parties. The postmortem stresses that clear and distinct reporting channels are essential to ensure that incidents affecting the organization itself are handled differently from those involving its products or customers.

“In CISA’s case, these channels were not well defined, leading the security researcher to try multiple avenues – including emailing the contractor, submitting through CISA’s vulnerability disclosure platform (which is intended for vulnerabilities impacting the broader cybersecurity community), and ultimately involving a reporter,” reads the analysis written by Preston Werntz and Brad Libbey, the acting chief information officer and acting chief information security officer at CISA, respectively.

CISA said it is refining its reporting channels to make them easier and faster for researchers. “Additionally, while many researchers rely on the security.txt file, organizations can ensure clarity by publishing reporting instructions in multiple prominent locations,” the CISA authors wrote.

Guillaume Valadon, the GitGuardian researcher who first contacted KrebsOnSecurity about the exposed CISA credentials, said CISA ignored nine automated alerts about the exposed credentials prior to our notification on May 15. Valadon’s company constantly scans public code repositories at GitHub and elsewhere for exposed secrets, automatically alerting the offending accounts of any apparent sensitive data exposures.

“Letting nine notification emails go unanswered is how a one-day incident becomes a six-month exposure,” Valadon wrote in an analysis of CISA’s report. “Make it trivial to report a leak about you, not just about your products. The person reporting a leak to you is not the threat. Publish a security.txt, but do not stop there. Put reporting instructions in several prominent places, and make sure a report about your own infrastructure does not land in a product-bug queue.”

The report’s authors also emphasized the importance of continuously scanning public code repositories like GitHub for exposed secrets, and said CISA has since rotated all secrets and created an action plan to improve management of developer secrets and to better monitor for them going forward.

The report notes that while CISA had developed a playbook for responding to cybersecurity incidents, that playbook somehow didn’t include what to do in situations involving GitHub or other cloud services. Valadon said the report validates the need to scan continuously — not just quarterly — for exposed secrets.

“The Private-CISA repository sat public for six months,” Valadon wrote. “Continuous monitoring of public GitHub surfaced it. Comprehensive internal scanning could have caught the plaintext passwords and committed backups long before they left the building.”

CISA gave itself passing grades on several areas of security preparedness that it said helped the agency gauge the scope and impact of the exposed secrets, including enhanced logging capabilities, and the adoption of zero-trust principles in both its production and development systems. CISA said those detailed logs allowed it to show that no customer or mission data was exposed, and that the leaked credentials were not used outside of CISA’s environments. The agency said the contractor who exposed the secrets had their system access revoked.

Valadon reckons the biggest takeaway is the CISA postmortem itself, and praised the agency for being transparent about what worked and what didn’t.

“To my knowledge, it is also the first time a national cybersecurity agency has publicly advocated for secrets scanning and for simplifying relations with security researchers,” Valadon wrote. “That is exactly the incident communication we should expect from every organization.”

A cybersecurity startup dangling millions of dollars to acquire zero-day security vulnerabilities in popular software is run by a pair of far-right conspiracy theorists and convicted felons whose most recent ventures included fake intelligence companies and a now-defunct AI-based lobbying platform they operated under assumed names.

The X/Twitter account IRIS C2 (@C2IRIS) has gained more than 4,000 followers since its creation in January 2025, posting frequently about security vulnerabilities, AI and software exploits. IRIS C2 says it is a company in McLean, Va. that sells offensive cybersecurity capabilities.

“Our business model is this,” reads a pinned post on top of the IRIS C2 account on X. “Attract the very best vulnerability researchers and exploit developers in the world to join our company. This mostly revolves around junior engineers with raw talent/extremely high IQ. We don’t care if they have a college degree/industry experience.”

The website linked in that profile — irisc2[.]com — says the company is hiring for a number of open positions, and a recent post on its LinkedIn page enthuses about an overwhelming number of applications from potential employees. The website claims IRIS C2 is in the business of acquiring “zero-day exploits, individual primitives, partial chains, and full capabilities across all major platforms. Payouts range from $10,000 to $7 million depending on target, reliability, and operational value.”

The government contracting portal g2exchange.com reports that irisc2[.]com is operated by a business based in Virginia called Calvexa Group LLC. The “contact” link on the website for Calvexa Group — calvexagroup[.]com — forwards visitors to irisc2[.]com. G2Exchange shows that while Calvexa Group LLC is registered as a federal contractor, it does not appear to be working on any direct government contracts.

A search on the Arlington, Va. address listed in the incorporation records for Calvexa Group LLC finds the property is occupied by Jack Burkman, the 60-year-old founder and managing partner of the lobbying firm Burkman & Associates. When approached with questions about IRIS C2, Burkman referred further inquiries to his longtime associate, 28-year-old Jacob Wohl.

Burkman and Wohl have a storied history of creating fake intelligence companies and using them to spread false claims about and frame public figures, including fabricated sexual assault claims against then FBI director Robert Mueller, and Pete Buttigieg, then mayor of South Bend, Indiana and a Democratic candidate for the presidency. In 2019, Burkman and Wohl held press conferences falsely alleging extramarital affairs by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and then-2020 presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, Wohl and Burkman were prosecuted by multiple U.S. states for making thousands of robocalls to residents of battleground states and disseminating false claims about mail-in ballots. They were indicted in Cleveland on 15 felony counts of orchestrating a robocall scheme aimed at suppressing the black vote in Detroit, and were sentenced in late 2025 to probation after their appeals to dismiss the charges were rejected.

In 2022, Wohl and Burkman both pleaded guilty to a single felony charge of telecommunications fraud in Ohio, and sentenced to a fine, probation, and community service. In March 2023, a judge in a New York civil case ruled that Wohl and Burkman had violated federal and state civil rights laws, and the two agreed to pay a $1 million settlement.

In June 2023, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) imposed a $5.1 million fine against Wohl and Burkman for their robocall campaigns, at the time the largest fine ever sought by the FCC under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

By the age of 17, Wohl had started multiple investment firms, and cultivated the nickname “Wohl of Wall Street” after appearing on Fox News in 2015 to discuss his new hedge funds. In 2017, the Arizona Corporation Commission charged Wohl and his investment funds with 14 counts of securities fraud, and ordered him to pay $35,000 in restitution. In 2019, Wohl pleaded guilty in California to four felony counts of selling unregistered securities and was sentenced to two years of probation.

The market for previously unknown security vulnerabilities has always been populated by a colorful mix of researchers, academics, charlatans, clout-chasers and people actively involved in cybercrime communities. But the market for selling offensive security services to the U.S. government tends to be far more circumspect. Plenty of government contractors recruit vulnerability researchers and pay for the exclusive rights to novel software exploits, yet none of them do so quite as brazenly and openly as IRIS C2.

Indeed, KrebsOnSecurity was unaware of IRIS C2 until last month, when an attendee at a regional cybersecurity conference shared that Wohl and Calvexa Group were pestering people at the conference about selling their vulnerability research.

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Wohl said Mr. Burkman was not involved in the day-to-day operations of IRIS C2. Wohl shared that IRIS C2 originally began as a penetration testing company, but shifted its focus recently to selling phone-hacking services to the government. Several times throughout the interview, Mr. Wohl mentioned working on federal government contracts, but when pressed for specifics said he was not at liberty to speak publicly about them.

Mr. Wohl said he does not have any formal education or training in computer science or information security, and that most of his knowledge on the matter is self-taught.

“I know more about tech than anyone,” Wohl bragged. “My background has always been extremely technical, and I’ve always been deeply into tech. People know me as someone who is able to create spectacularly exquisite capabilities that would make your head spin.”

Wohl said security researchers bring the company unique vulnerability findings “on a regular basis,” but that in many cases those findings are preliminary and not fully fleshed-out.

“Let’s say someone finds a flaw in a media decoder on a phone,” Wohl said. “A lot of times what we receive is an exploit primitive, where the idea is there but the [execution] needs work. You need that exploit to be stable and reliable, and that’s what we do.”

Wohl claims IRIS C2 has approximately 40 employees, although he said none of them are allowed to list their employment on LinkedIn for operational security reasons. In May, the author of the IRIS C2 account on X said that his girlfriend had no idea what he did for a living. But if IRIS C2 has any other employees, they may be similarly unaware of Mr. Wohl’s history of outright fabrications — or even his real name.

In September 2024, Politico reported that Burkman and Wohl were bragging about big companies supposedly buying services from their now-defunct company LobbyMatic, which claimed to use artificial intelligence to assist in political lobbying efforts. However, Politico found the pair were running the company using pseudonyms, with Wohl reportedly adopting the name “Jay Klein” and Burkman using the moniker “Bill Sanders.” Politico reported that two of the former LobbyMatic employees resigned after learning of their true identities, while other employees only learned after they had left the company.

Update, July 9, 9:44 a.m. ET: Several readers pointed our attention to a March 31 publication from journalist Molly White, which reported that Burkman and Wohl were paid a $300,000 retainer by a Canadian cryptocurrency fraudster wanted by the United States and several other countries for allegedly stealing $65 million from the crypto platforms KyberSwap and Indexed Finance. According to that report, the two were hired to pursue a “presidential pardon to avert a miscarriage of justice” on behalf of the accused hacker, who has not yet been convicted.