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In recent years we've seen an evolution of the online funnel that turns kids into cybercriminals. 

Over the last decade, cybercrime's reach has broadened, it's become more lucrative and more violent. Governments need to attack and disrupt this funnel at all levels, instead of solely focussing on prosecuting these kids after the damage is done.

Bloomberg has described the path that turned one key individual associated with Scattered Spider from a self-described "weird kid" into an inmate, having been sentenced to ten years in prison. Noah Urban, now 20 years old, stole more than USD$13 million in cryptocurrency after becoming involved in SIM swapping when he was 15. 

The US Secret Service has raided and dismantled a SIM farm operating at five locations across the New York tri-state area.

Officials seized 300 SIM servers running more than 100,000 SIM cards.

Officials began investigating the SIM farms after they were used earlier this year to make anonymous threats against senior US officials. According to the NYT, two White House and one Secret Service official were on the receiving end of some of those threats.

A cyberattack has disrupted flights at multiple airports across Europe and elsewhere over the weekend.

The attack brought down self-service kiosks used by passengers to check in, drop luggage, and print boarding passes for their flights.

While the kiosks are installed in hundreds of airports, the disruption forced an usually large number of travelers to manual check-in counters, creating cascading delays that slowly bogged down the larger airports as time went on.

The US Department of Defense has more than 70,000 individuals working on cybersecurity and cyberspace operations, according to a report published this week that provided the first accurate number for such a task force.

The figure includes 61,000 military and civilian personnel and 9,500 temporary contractors, spread across 504 organizations. They work for Cyber Command, the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Space Force.

The report, from the US Government Accountability Office, was commissioned by Congress in 2023, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, to help lawmakers identify all the Pentagon's cyber capabilities and help review and optimize its operations, in light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and after several hacks of US government networks.

In 2024, the number of US investors in the spyware market skyrocketed, and the country became the largest investor by deal count, according to new research from the Atlantic Council. The researchers say these investments undermine US government efforts to control abusive spyware, but we think they present an opportunity to exert more control over the industry. 

Spyware is not inherently bad. Abusive spyware is used to violate human rights, rather than for lawful purposes.

The increase in US investment is a key finding of an update to the Atlantic Council's 2024 Mythical Beasts report. That report mapped the global spyware industry through to the end of 2023. At the time vendors were concentrated in Israel, India and Italy. The US was the third-largest investor by deal count. 

The internet's top AI chatbots provide answers with false claims twice as much as they did last year.

The disinformation rates of the top 10 leading chatbots have doubled, going from 18% in August 2024 to 35% a year later, according to a study from disinformation-fighting group NewsGuard.

Chatbots reproduced false claims on topics such as health, politics, international affairs, companies, and business brands.

The District of Columbia Office of the Attorney General has filed a lawsuit against the largest crypto ATM operator in the US, Athena Bitcoin.

The lawsuit alleges the company knew its Bitcoin ATMs were being used to collect funds from scam victims, but instead of stopping the transfers, it charged large hidden fees and then refused to provide refunds to victims.

Officials say that 93% of all deposits made across the seven Bitcoin ATMs the company operates in DC were the result of scams.

The UK's privacy watchdog highlighted a strange trend in the country where students are increasingly behind the hacks of their own schools.

The UK Information Commissioner's Office says it studied 215 insider-caused breaches in the UK educational sector between 2022 and mid-2024 and found that students were behind 57% of the intrusions.

Where a stolen password was used to breach a school system, students were involved in almost all cases (97%).

The Salesloft Drift breach is a great example of the sprawling impact that a breach of a single service provider can have. Given that modern business models routinely involve software-as-a-service, these kinds of single-compromise-large-blast-radius attacks will become the new norm.

Salesloft's Drift application is an AI chatbot used by companies to convert website visitors into sales leads. Because it is typically integrated into Salesforce, its recent compromise has resulted in the theft of a large volume of Salesforce data from potentially hundreds of organisations. That stolen data also includes authentication tokens for various other services. 

The breach began with the compromise of Salesloft's GitHub account in March. Over three months the threat actor conducted reconnaissance and downloaded content from multiple repositories. The actor, which Google is tracking as UNC6395, then moved to Drift's AWS environment and stole OAuth tokens for Drift's customers.

The US Department of Justice unsealed charges on Tuesday against a major figure in the ransomware underground, a Ukrainian national who was involved in or managed at least seven ransomware platforms.

The charging documents identify Volodymyr Viktorovich Tymoshchuk as the administrator of the LockerGoga, MegaCortex, and Nefilim ransomware operations.

From his role, he coordinated or was involved in the hacks and extortions of more than 250 US organizations, and hundreds more around the world.