Infoblox attributes the long-running Help TDS traffic distribution system, active since at least April 2017, to Hotejka, a small Russian-language affiliate program that appears to be a rebrand of ROI777 (exposed in 2018). The TDS fingerprints visitors and redirects them to browser-lock tech support scams that push victims to call centers,…
Researchers infiltrated a large-scale tech support scam operation that impersonates Microsoft. The operation relies on a malicious traffic distribution system (TDS) run by a Russian organization. It also abuses thousands of Cloudflare links to route victims to scam content. The article snippet gives no victim counts, losses or technical i…
Infoblox links the long-running Help TDS traffic distribution system, active since at least 2017, to the Russian-language affiliate program Hotejka, assessed with high confidence to be a rebrand of the traffic monetization operation ROI777. Help TDS supplies PHP templates and a malicious WordPress plugin that affiliates install on comprom…
Google announced new Chrome protections against scams and social engineering. They include a two-level Safe Browsing site warning, server-side Gemini scam analysis and detection of ClickFix commands. The Gemini and ClickFix features are part of Enhanced Protection, the Safe Browsing mode introduced in 2020, which Google said last year had…
Malone Lam, a 22-year-old Singaporean who used the aliases "Anne Hathaway", "$$$" and "King Greavy", has pleaded guilty to leading a group that stole more than US $245 million in cryptocurrency from victims across the United States. According to the US Department of Justice, the group operated from October 2023 to May 2025 and recruited a…
Google has updated Chrome with new scam protections for users running Enhanced Protection mode in Safe Browsing. The browser now distinguishes suspicious sites from known dangerous ones and shows a milder, dismissible warning for the former. Gemini-based detection now also covers fake antivirus and fake browser update scams, beyond the te…
On October 20, 2026, Google announced new Chrome defenses for users of Safe Browsing Enhanced Protection. They include a warning against ClickFix social engineering, in which suspicious commands copied by the user are scrubbed of personal information and sent to Safe Browsing for analysis (thehackernews.com, gbhackers.com). Google also ex…
Scammers continue to exploit Bitcoin/crypto ATMs as an irreversible payment channel in impersonation fraud. According to the FBI, 13,460 such complaints in 2025 resulted in $389 million in losses, a 23% rise in volume and 58% rise in losses over 2024. Victims over 50 lost more than $302M, and those over 60 accounted for $257.4M. The scam …
This ESET WeLiveSecurity article explains email bombing (also called form, list or subscription bombing) and cites a September report of a Virginia woman flooded with hundreds of emails in 24 hours. The flood hid a genuine bank alert about a fraudulent laptop purchase. Attackers use bots to sign a harvested email address up to many legiti…
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) opened a rulemaking in September asking whether platforms should be required to stop impersonation scam ads from reaching consumers, citing ad tools that generate copy, images and video and optimize targeting regardless of whether an ad is legitimate. The article reports that nearly one trillion scam …