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As scam compounds in Southeast Asia continue to drive massive campaigns targeting victims around the world, WIRED took a deeper look at how Elon Musk’s satellite internet service provider Starlink is keeping many of those compounds in Myanmar online. Meanwhile, FTC complaints obtained by WIRED allege that an “OpenAI” job scam used Telegram to recruit workers in Bangladesh for months before the fraudsters suddenly disappeared.
WIRED published the inside story of Russian tech executive Vladislav Klyushin, who—at Vladimir Putin’s behest—was part of a notable US-Russia prisoner swap last summer after he was convicted and incarcerated in the US for insider trading that netted him $93 million. Earlier this week, TVs at the headquarters of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, DC, showed an apparently AI-generated video on loop of Donald Trump kissing Elon Musk’s feet. The words “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING” were superimposed over the video.
WIRED conducted an investigation into Telegram groups devoted to doxing and harassing women who joined “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” groups on Facebook. And, as female entrepreneurs in tech face ever steeper odds of gaining support for a business, a team of female founders got seed funding and completed a series A round in a matter of months for the cloud container security firm Edera.
But wait, there’s more! Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.
After years of Russian cyber aggression against the United States and its longtime allies—including repeated election meddling, hack and leak operations, disinformation campaigns, elaborate espionage, and brazen, disruptive cyberattacks—multiple recent actions from the Trump administration have recast the US stance on the cybersecurity threats posed by the Kremlin, downplaying the risks of Russian hackers as US adversaries. The about-face comes as Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin have increasingly strengthened their ties. Consistent US intelligence community assessments of Russia’s activity in cyberspace and the threat it poses to the US would indicate, though, that such a change in approach could put the US at risk.
That deprioritization of the Russia threat has come in several different forms. US State Department deputy assistant secretary for international cybersecurity Liesyl Franz said during a speech in a United Nations working group last week that the US is concerned about digital attacks from China and Iran, but did not mention Russia. A recent memo distributed at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency laid out priorities for the agency, focusing on China and defense of US systems but omitted any reference to Russia. And on Friday, the cybersecurity news outlet The Record reported that, last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered US Cyber Command to stop all cyber operational planning against Russia, including offensive digital campaigns.
Eight days have passed since the cryptocurrency exchange ByBit revealed that hackers stole $1.4 billion worth of Ethereum-based assets from the company, a heist that is by some measures the biggest theft of crypto in history. Now the race is on to track the stolen funds across blockchains, prevent its liquidation, or even recover it—and that race is being propelled by $140 million in bounties offered by ByBit itself. ByBit earlier this week launched a website where it’s inviting crypto sleuths to submit tips about the destination of its stolen Ethereum funds and offering as a reward 5 percent of the value of any funds that those tracers can identify and help to freeze or seize. ByBit has offered another 5 percent of the value as a separate reward for any crypto exchange or other platform that obtains the funds.
As of Friday, the website counted a dozen bounty hunters currently registered as part of that crypto-tracing effort and put the tally of paid-out rewards at around $4.3 million. The site also includes a leaderboard of tracers who have successfully identified tranches of the funds by following them across blockchains or frozen funds—as well as a list of crypto exchanges who have, by contrast, liquidated the stolen funds on behalf of the thieves. So far only one exchange, known as eXch, has been flagged as liquidating $94 million of the stolen assets. ByBit notes that eXch has refused to respond to its messages, and the exchange didn’t respond to a BBC request for comment.
Earlier this week, the FBI took the unusual step of publicly identifying the hackers behind that massive ByBit hack: TraderTraitor, a group of state-sponsored cybercriminals working on behalf of the North Korean government. The FBI asked the crypto industry not to launder the funds of those hackers, a part of the larger umbrella group widely known as Lazarus that has long plagued the cryptocurrency world and has stolen billions in both crypto and non-crypto assets. In its alert, the bureau also released a list of Ethereum addresses associated with the stolen funds in an effort to help the crypto industry identify and seize any part of the $1.4 billion before it can be cashed out. Crypto tracing firm TRM Labs wrote in a post Thursday that around $400 million of the funds have already been moved and may have been successfully liquidated.
In July, an entity calling itself “NullBulge” published a 1.1-TB trove of data stolen from Disney’s internal Slack archive, tipping off a frenzied cleanup effort as Disney rushed to get a handle on leaked revenue numbers, employee information like passport numbers, and sensitive customer information. The breach occurred after a Disney employee, Matthew Van Andel, inadvertently downloaded malware onto his personal computer that collected his login credentials for a number of services, including, crucially, the password to his 1Password credential vault. “It’s impossible to convey the sense of violation,” he told The Wall Street Journal. Van Andel also had his credit card numbers and other personal data stolen, and then lost his job as well when a Disney audit of his work computer alleged that he had accessed porn from the device. Van Andel denies the accusation. The episode is just one in a series of breaches where malware that infects a worker’s personal computer can have major ramifications for the institution that employs them.
Mattia Ferrari, an Italian priest who works with a migrant-rescue group and has a close relationship with the Pope, revealed this week that he received a warning from Meta that his phone had been hacked with sophisticated spyware from Israeli-based Paragon. The news follows revelations that Luca Casarini, the founder of the NGO Mediterranea Saving Humans, where Ferrari served as a chaplain, also had his phone compromised by spyware, as did Italian investigative reporter Francesco Cancellato. The string of spyware infections targeting Italian activists and a journalist raises the question of who might be carrying out the hacking operations, with opposition leaders calling on the administration of Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni to address the issue. Meloni’s government has denied being behind the hacking incidents. Pope Francis, who is currently in critical condition with pneumonia, has mentioned speaking to Ferrari on the phone during a TV interview in January, raising the question of whether the spies who hacked Ferrari’s phone eavesdropped on a conversation with the pope himself.
