Author: HackWatchit

U.S. Offers $10M bounty for info on RedLine malware creator and state hackers Pierluigi Paganini June 06, 2025 The U.S. offers up to $10M for info on state hackers linked to RedLine malware and its creator, Maxim Rudometov, tied to attacks on U.S. infrastructure. The U.S. Department of State offers a reward of up to $10 million for information nation-state actors linked to the RedLine infostealer and its alleged author, Russian national Maxim Alexandrovich Rudometov. US authorities specifically target the used of the infostealer in cyber operations targeting critical infrastructure organizations in the United States. The bounty is part of…

Millions of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices running the open-source version of the Android operating system are part of the Badbox 2.0 botnet, the FBI has warned. Cyber criminals are using the botnet to perform ad fraud and click fraud. Access to and use of the compromised devices is also offered for sale through residential proxy services, which facilitate malware distribution, DDoS attacks, account takeover attacks, fake account creation, etc. “The Badbox 2.0 threat in particular is compelling in no small part because of the open-season nature of the operation. With the backdoor in place, infected devices could be instructed to carry…

In brief House Democrats convened a “minority day” hearing Friday to express concerns about the CLARITY Act. The crypto market structure bill would establish a framework for regulating most of the digital assets industry. Experts said Friday the bill contains loopholes that could allow traditional finance firms to evade regulation. Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee held their own hearing Friday to discuss a pending crypto market structure bill, during which witnesses laid out concerns about the legislation’s potentially wide-reaching implications for American securities markets.Whereas most hearings about the bill have thus far been convened by the committee’s Republican…

OpenAI just published its annual report on malicious uses of AI. By using AI as a force multiplier for our expert investigative teams, in the three months since our last report we’ve been able to detect, disrupt and expose abusive activity including social engineering, cyber espionage, deceptive employment schemes, covert influence operations and scams. These operations originated in many parts of the world, acted in many different ways, and focused on many different targets. A significant number appeared to originate in China: Four of the 10 cases in this report, spanning social engineering, covert influence operations and cyber threats, likely…

John Strand// We just finished up a walk through of how we bypassed Cylance in a previous engagement. To conclude this exciting week, I want to share a few comments and notes with everyone. First, we are a penetration testing firm. We test what customers give us to test. We do not test what the vendor wants us to test. We test where the rubber meets the road. Some have pointed out that the techniques we used were basic. Yes, many of the techniques we used were extremely rudimentary. But they worked! This, in and of itself, calls into question…

Breaches are not a matter of if but when, which is why relying solely on passwords is a dangerous oversight. As the Product Security Manager for Harmony SASE, I’ve seen the destruction firsthand, and I’m here to tell you that MFA is not just “good practice” — it’s the absolute minimum standard of care. Why MFA? Because Your Passwords Are Already Compromised Let’s start with the why. If you think your users’ passwords are secret, think again. Credential dumps from breached companies are traded daily on the dark web. Password reuse is rampant. Phishing attacks are more sophisticated than ever,…

is magical — until you’re stuck trying to decide which model to use for your dataset. Should you go with a random forest or logistic regression? What if a naïve Bayes model outperforms both? For most of us, answering that means hours of manual testing, model building, and confusion. But what if you could automate the entire model selection process?In this article, I’ll walk you through a simple but powerful Python automation that selects the best machine learning models for your dataset automatically. You don’t need deep ML knowledge or tuning skills. Just plug in your data and let Python do the…

Law enforcement authorities from over a dozen countries have arrested 20 suspects in an international operation targeting the production and distribution of child sexual abuse material. Starting in late 2024, the Spanish National Police discovered multiple instant messaging groups dedicated to the circulation of child sexual exploitation images and alerted authorities in other countries through INTERPOL and Europol after identifying 88 suspects in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Oceania. “In December 2024, INTERPOL invited Spanish investigators to Chile to attend the Latin America Victim Identification Task Force meeting,” the international police organization said. “There, they presented Operation Vibora to specialized…

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued Internet Exposure Reduction Guidance to help organizations address overlooked risks. CISA warns that misconfigured systems, default credentials, and outdated software are often publicly accessible via internet search and discovery tools, leaving critical vulnerabilities exposed and easily exploited by attackers. The document provides resources and recommendations to help organizations identify and mitigate these exposures. By following CISA’s Internet Exposure Reduction Guidance, organizations can proactively identify and remove these exposures, reducing their online footprint and strengthening their cybersecurity posture. Recognizing that the range and number of internet-accessible assets, including industrial internet of things…