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…
The DNS root zone is scheduled to switch its key-signing key (KSK) on October 11, 2026, only the second root KSK rollover ever. KSK-2024 (key tag 38696) will replace KSK-2017 (key tag 20326) as signer of the root DNSKEY set. DNSSEC-validating resolvers that do not trust the new key could fail validation and make healthy websites under any…
Following reported Ukrainian drone strikes on three Yandex facilities in Russia between October 7 and 11, claims spread that Russian bot farms and influence operations had been knocked offline. Cloudflare analyzed Radar and Bot Management data for the two Yandex ASNs, AS13238 (search) and AS200350 (Yandex.Cloud). It found no evidence that…
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, securityweek.co…
The F5 Labs 2026 State of PQC on the Web report scanned the top 1 million domains with TLS 1.3 handshakes. It found that 54% support post-quantum (hybrid) key exchange, but the figure is driven mainly by CDNs, especially Cloudflare and Fastly, which enable PQC by default. Excluding Cloudflare-hosted domains, adoption falls to 22%. Sectors…
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…
On August 12, 2026, an npm user (rootdaddy-msrc, author field r00tdaddy) published 21 packages that squatted the unscoped CLI binary names declared in the bin field of Google-affiliated scoped packages, such as ngsw-config (from @angular/service-worker) and bazelisk (from @bazel/bazelisk). Scoped publishing, registry allowlists and lockfi…
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,…
Since mid-2025 the Kremlin has sharply escalated restrictions on digital communications, according to Insikt Group (Recorded Future). Measures include VPN blocking, state-managed regional internet shutdowns, throttling of Telegram and WhatsApp, promotion of the state-owned Max messenger, and expanded surveillance of Russian and foreign en…
Unit 42 analyzed the operational environment of a previously unreported, financially motivated, English-speaking actor using the handle BUGSTER. The actor ran the Hermes Agent framework with DeepSeek V4 as its reasoning engine and the Cursor IDE as a secondary tool, with safety controls disabled in both. With AI-generated scripts and reco…