Hackers aligned with ShinyHunters have claimed credit for dozens of major data breaches since 2019, when the group was primarily operated by cybercriminals living in France. As those original members were arrested or jailed one by one, control over the ShinyHunters brand eventually passed to “Rey,” identified last year as a teenage hacker from Amman, Jordan. According to the FBI, ShinyHunters has extorted more than $70 million from victims so far this year.

In late September, ShinyHunters hacked the FBI recruitment website fbijobs.gov and taunted the agency by threatening to publish the stolen files, which reportedly included medical and psychological records, Social Security numbers and home addresses, and information about each employee’s unit and specialization.

The FBI jobs site hack has prompted the agency to move with uncommon speed to arrest, detain and question people who had any communications with Rey or other ShinyHunters suspects. Reuters reported on October 3 that Rey had been detained by Jordanian authorities and was cooperating with the FBI.

Rey was able to assume control over the hacking group because one of its alleged senior members had just been nabbed. On the evening of September 15, 2026, authorities in the Netherlands arrested convicted hacker and ShinyHunters suspect Pepijn van der Stap. Dutch police reportedly used flash-bang grenades in an effort to stun and apprehend Van der Stap as he was logged in to various online accounts.

According to a source close to the investigation, the authorities arrested Van der Stap while he was using his Signal instant messaging account, which allowed them to read recent communications with frequent contacts — including ransomware negotiators based in Canada and the United States.

Multiple sources with knowledge of the matter told KrebsOnSecurity that Van der Stap’s messages were the key to unraveling a murder-for-hire plot that emerged immediately following his arrest. The Dutch news outlet RTL reported last month the two murders were allegedly to be committed abroad, and that there are indications Van der Stap gave the order for the attacks (there is no indication those orders were ever carried out).

On October 9, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that the FBI arrested a 54-year-old Canadian cybersecurity executive named Edward Dubrovsky in connection with the ShinyHunters investigation. Dubrovsky, who recently published a book on handling cyber extortion that recommended always engaging with the hackers, was charged with threatening to disclose stolen or hacked data and interfering with interstate commerce through extortion, according to court records. Politico reports prosecutors have asked that Dubrovsky remain in custody pending trial, and that records related to his case remain under seal.

A source close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity that Van der Stap’s Signal messages showed he had frequent conversations with Mr. Dubrovsky and with at least one executive at a large U.S.-based consulting firm, and that these executives often knew the details about new ShinyHunters victims before the victims themselves had even learned of the breach.

That source shared another potentially explosive finding by federal investigators: the Dutch hacker’s chats showed Mr. Dubrovsky knew ShinyHunters had stolen highly sensitive data from FBI servers, and that he never informed the bureau of the data breach prior to ShinyHunters threatening on Twitter/X to publish the agency’s deeply personal personnel files.

SHINYWIRE

KrebsOnSecurity has learned from two sources close to the ShinyHunters probe that FBI investigators believe at least one executive at a U.S.-based consulting firm played an active role in operating the now-defunct ShinyHunters victim extortion website “shinywire[.]com.” KrebsOnSecurity is not naming the U.S. company or the suspected executive(s) for now because they have not yet been charged with a crime, but it is a prestigious firm with more than 1,000 associates.

A section of the homepage for the now-defunct Shinywire website.

The Shinywire website was active from approximately May 3, 2026 until October 16 and had entries for nearly 100 organizations hacked by ShinyHunters. Each entry urged victims to engage with the cybercrime group and discuss terms for payment. The pages also included samples of stolen files and promised those files would be published online if the victim ignored their demands.

The following screenshot shows a cached portion of the Shinywire extortion page for Intuitive Surgical, an American medical technology company that was breached in March 2026 after an employee fell for a targeted phishing email.

The Shinywire website, as indexed by urlscan.io. This listing is an extortion demand targeting Intuitive Surgical, an American medical technology company breached in March 2026 by a targeted phishing email attack that compromised an employee’s credentials.

Victim organizations that refused to engage or negotiate after seven days would find all of their stolen data published on the ShinyHunters victim shaming blog (a website that is only reachable via the anonymity network Tor).

In a story published October 15, The Globe and Mail wrote that a few months before Edward Dubrovsky was arrested by the FBI, the Canadian cybersecurity executive alleged in court documents he had become collateral damage in a campaign by a former business partner to “destroy” another industry executive.

The story noted that Dubrovsky filed the lawsuit in Ontario this year against Daniel Tobok, the former chief executive of Cypfer, a cybersecurity firm founded in Toronto with offices in the U.S., Britain, the Netherlands, the United Arab Emirates, and Mexico. The two first became business partners in 2017 and later developed Cypfer together, where Mr. Dubrovsky was a managing partner and chief operating officer. But by 2024, the two had a falling out, with Dubrovsky accusing Tobok of gradually excluding him from business matters and making “increasingly capricious business decisions.”

Mr. Tobok reportedly denied the allegations and filed a counterclaim, accusing Mr. Dubrovsky of accessing confidential information and unfairly competing with Cypfer through work at another firm called CyberSteward Inc. He also said Mr. Dubrovsky has misrepresented himself as a Cypfer founder, and is not a shareholder.

GHOSTBYTE

According to interviews with several former colleagues of Mr. Tobok, as far back as eight years ago he was known to ransomware purveyors by a particular nickname: Ghostbyte. In 2018, a Canadian company was hacked by Dharma, a prolific Russian-language ransomware affiliate program that first surfaced in 2016. The victim company told the Dharma ransomware representative they were leaning toward paying because some of the files were unrecoverable after being locked, but that they needed a better guarantee that Dharma would keep their word if paid.

A redacted copy of the Dharma rep’s reply is pictured below, and it shows the ransomware group urged the victim to contact a person at a Canadian IT firm that helps companies seeking such guarantees. The Dharma rep recommended the victim contact the email address ghostbyte@tutanota.com.

“If you want guarantees, you can write to the IT company,” the Dharma reply advised. “Take the phone and negotiate with them. This IT company often solves such problems in Canada. You can contact them and sign a contract for services. You’ll still have to pay.”

An email reply from the Dharma ransomware group to a victim, recommending they contact an email address that is connected to Mr. Tobok.

It’s unclear if Mr. Tobok ever used that Ghostbyte address offered by the Dharma representative, and he has not responded to multiple requests for comment. However, the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence finds an email address Mr. Tobok has frequently used — dtobok@me.com — is associated with two online accounts where the chosen username was “ghostbyte,” including a Snapchat account.

Incidentally, Constella also finds the Dharma rep’s email address luckygoodlucky@tuta.io is associated with a cryptocurrency address that processed 38 transactions totaling 43 bitcoin, ~$3.5 million at today’s value (the most recent transaction for this wallet is dated February 2019).

In a statement shared on October 14, Cypfer said the company’s business does not include making or facilitating ransomware payments, and that Cypfer learned of Dubrovsky’s arrest when the news first broke in the media.

“We had no prior knowledge of Mr. Dubrovsky’s arrest,” a spokesperson told KrebsOnSecurity via email. “CYPFER has not received any outreach from law enforcement and, to our knowledge, is not the target of any law enforcement investigation.”

The statement said CyberSteward and Cypfer are separate companies with no officers, directors or employees in common, and that Cypfer was recently acquired by the Apros Group, a holding company led by Jason Hogg, a former FBI special agent and former CEO of Aon Cyber Solutions Group. In 2020, Aon aquired Cytelligence, a security consulting firm where Mr. Tobok was founder and CEO and Mr. Dubrovsky was a managing partner.

CONFLICTING INTERESTS

It is not illegal in the United States to pay hackers for an encryption key to unlock servers infected with ransomware, or in exchange for a promise to delete any stolen files and refrain from publishing them online. While victim organizations can land in legal hot water if they pay a ransom to a group that is sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department, ShinyHunters is not among the ransomware groups currently sanctioned by the United States or by any other government.

Experts say ransomware victims are typically directed by their insurance provider to work with a specific incident response firm. But not all cyber forensics and breach response companies will agree to facilitate payments to ransomware groups on behalf of their clients. As a result, once victim firms make a decision to pay, the firms that eschew rewarding extortionists are invariably replaced by companies that have no such qualms.

In December 2024, ShinyHunters began extorting the education technology company PowerSchool, stealing private information on 62 million students and 9.5 million teachers in the U.S. and Canada. PowerSchool reportedly paid a $2.85 million ransom demand, and a “frequently asked questions” statement (PDF) about the breach says PowerSchool was assisted in that effort by CyberSteward (ShinyHunters affiliate Matthew Lane, 20, of Sterling, Mass., was sentenced in November 2025 to four years in prison for his admitted role in the PowerSchool hack).

But that ransom payment did not stop future extortion attempts using the same stolen data. By May 2025, individual school districts were reportedly receiving separate ransom demands using samples of the same stolen files. While nobody has alleged ShinyHunters was behind the second wave of extortion against PowerSchool users, the incident drives home the reality that there is no technical way to verify the threat actors have deleted the stolen data as promised, or prevent others from abusing the same records.

A number of leading cyber incident response firms, including Coveware and Unit 221B, have consistently warned victims against paying ShinyHunters, noting that “destroyed” victim data is often kept, resold or used to extort the company’s clients directly later on.

The FBI echoed those sentiments in an alert on May 15, 2026 advising victims against paying the ShinyHunters group. Meanwhile, ShinyHunters members have been harassing and threatening employees at Coveware and Unit 221B for offering this advice.

The following screenshots show just how annoyed the ShinyHunters leaders were with Coveware’s relentless advice against paying the group. The first image is from a conversation on May 6, 2026 that took place between the group’s main account on Telegram and a co-conspirator. In that chat, snippets of which were shared with KrebsOnSecurity by a trusted source, ShinyHunters complained that Coveware was harming the group’s payment rates.

The operator of the ShinyHunters account on Telegram speaking privately with a co-conspirator and complaining that Coveware was harming their business.

“Go on my website, majority of those companies would’ve paid if it weren’t for Coveware giving them misinformation,” the ShinyHunters account wrote. “Someone (100% Coveware) is going out of their way to make sure i am not paid.”

In another conversation on April 11, 2026, the ShinyHunters Telegram account privately said they were trying to “eliminate the problem,” which they said was Coveware. Coveware declined to comment for this story.

“I’m sure the company will pay but in this specific case I am aware of Coveware and their involvement, and I’ve probably been not getting a lot of other negotiations mostly likely because Coveware keeps getting involved,” the ShinyHunters account bemoaned.

The operator of the ShinyHunters account on Telegram telling a co-conspirator they were “trying to eliminate the problem,” which they identified as Coveware advising victims not to pay the cybercrime group.

Mark Camillo is chief executive at CyberAcuView, an industry group founded in 2021 by a consortium of major cyber insurance carriers. Camillo said some firms charge a flat retainer fee, while those that specialize in helping companies negotiate a ransom payment tend to charge a percentage of the total ransom amount paid.

That latter dynamic, he said, is an inherent conflict of interest, as the negotiator has every incentive to make things more favorable to the attackers because they are financially incentivized to negotiate and pay out, and to not negotiate down on the price.

“It has come to the industry’s attention that many of the ransomware payers charge a percentage of the final payment which may or may not be disclosed,” Camillo said. “This makes no sense if they are also the negotiator. There needs to be more transparency in the process as no one in the ecosystem should be profiting purely on the size of the ransomware transaction or payment itself.”

Camillo said the firms doing this work would argue the fees are needed because there may be unexpectedly higher costs to secure larger quantities of cryptocurrency or more risk carrying the float, and because cryptocurrency exchanges may charge higher fees for high risk transactions.

“There definitely needs to be more visibility around the transaction and clarity on the increasing value of the crypto and the exchange’s percent in the transaction to get to the bottom of this and remove any misaligned incentives,” he said.

In recent months, the U.S. Department of Justice has prosecuted a number of ransomware negotiators alleged to have conspired with cybercriminals to defraud their clients. On October 7, the DOJ charged MonsterCloud CEO Zohar Pinhasi, 50, with wire fraud and conspiracy for allegedly charging customers to remediate ransomware attacks without paying the hackers. According to charging documents, Pinhasi secretly went behind his customers’ backs and paid hackers anyway, paying ransomware groups $8 million while charging customers $19 million.

In July, Angelo Martino, a 41-year-old ransomware negotiator from Land O’Lakes, Florida, was sentenced to 70 months in prison for conspiring with the Blackcat/ALPHV ransomware group to extort multiple victims. According to the DOJ, Martino was paid by BlackCat attackers to provide confidential information about the negotiating position and strategy of his employer’s clients and enable the ransomware actors to maximize the ransoms paid by the victims.

Heleket’s support agent on Telegram claims, despite all evidence to the contrary, that it is not affiliated with Cryptomus. Image: Richard Sanders.

On October 8, the U.K. issued sanctions (PDF) against Cryptomus — previously known as Certa Payments and Xeltox Enterprises — for processing payments that benefit the Russian government and its financial institutions. The sanctions freeze any Cryptomus assets at U.K. banks, and bar British companies from offering it any business, virtual or otherwise. Also targeted in these sanctions were the virtual payment platforms VexPay, TokenSpot, and the Tsunami Payments service.

As explained in our December 2024 investigation, “How Cryptocurrency Turns to Cash in Russian Banks,” Cryptomus has been a key payment processor for dozens of Russian cryptocurrency exchanges and websites hawking cybercrime services. The company has changed its name several times since emerging in 2022, most recently to “Heleket” last year after Canada levied a record CAD $176 million fine against the platform for anti-money laundering violations.

The blockchain data-crunching firm Chainalysis said the U.K. sanctions target the broader infrastructure supporting Russia’s wartime economy.

“Cryptomus and Heleket have emerged as major payment hubs for illicit activity,” Chainalysis wrote in an October 8 blog post. “Together, these services received more illicit funds across tracked categories than the mixers in our dataset and the number of illicit counterparties surged to more than 900 in a single month in late 2025.”

The Cryptomus support bot on Telegram, responding on Oct. 8 to an inquiry by saying the platform was suddenly unable to process transactions.

In April 2026, the blockchain analysis firm TRM Labs found Cryptomus had processed more than $7 billion in transactions since its inception in 2022, including transactions associated with child sexual abuse material vendors, terrorist financing networks, and human trafficking operations.

TRM noted that Cryptomus’s transaction volume cratered after the platform instituted new “know your customer” or KYC rules, and that the cryptocurrency platform responded to the Canadian fines by launching Heleket as a parallel service that continued to offer no-KYC payment processing.

Richard Sanders is a blockchain analyst and investigator who spent months mapping out Cryptomus’s payment infrastructure and transacting with its customers. Sanders said the U.K. sanctions on Cryptomus are important because Canada’s fine against the platform was ultimately unenforceable and uncollectible.

“A fine doesn’t stop a cryptocurrency payment processor from processing payments,” Sanders wrote on LinkedIn. “Sanctions kill the operation. The distinction matters.”

As our 2024 investigation noted, Cryptomus shared a Vancouver address with dozens of other foreign currency dealers and money transfer businesses — none of which appeared to be physically located there. Following the CAD $176 million fine for alleged money laundering violations, Cryptomus appealed the penalty, launched Heleket as a parallel service, and kept on processing large volumes of sketchy transactions, Sanders said.

Sanders said the sanctions also are notable because they are the first known instance of a “Five Eyes” country (referring to the Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. and the U.S.) sanctioning a cryptocurrency operation incorporated in another Five Eyes jurisdiction.

Where do entities like Cryptomus and Heleket derive their authority to offer international financial services? The answer appears to involve fake financial institutions overseen by a phony regulatory body positioned in a country that is not widely recognized as a sovereign nation.

Our 2024 investigation found the sole shareholder of Cryptomus’s parent company Certa Payments was a 25-year-old Ukrainian woman who also headed several other firms, including the WS Management and Advisory Corporation, which bills itself as the regulatory body that exclusively oversees licenses for cryptocurrency, foreign exchange and online gaming businesses incorporated in the disputed region in northwest Africa known as the Western Sahara.

That entity’s website — crasadr.com — says it assists applicants with bank setup and formation, online gaming licenses, and the creation and licensing of foreign exchange brokers. One of Certa Payments’ former sites — certa[.]website — also shared a server with 12 other domains, including rasd-state[.]ws, a website for the Central Reserve Authority of the Western Sahara.

The website crasadr dot com, the official website of the Central Reserve Authority of Western Sahara, which lists the entities awarded licenses for cryptocurrencies, gaming and foreign exchange services.

Just one of the weaknesses patched this week is considered a “zero day,” or already exploited in the wild. CVE-2026-96951 is a security feature bypass in the Windows Shell that affects Windows 10 and 11 systems, as well as some Server versions.

Windows 10 users might be wondering if they can still expect security updates after this month. Microsoft had been slated to stop shipping updates for Windows 10 systems in October 2025, but ended up adding another year of free updates after considerable pushback. A few months ago, Microsoft quietly extended that support for another year (until October 2027).

At least 78 of the flaws fixed this month are rated “critical,” meaning they could be exploited with little or no action by the user, and most of those critical bugs allow an attacker to execute code of their choice on the vulnerable system.

While Microsoft said there are no signs anyone is exploiting it yet, a security feature bypass in the .NET Framework (CVE-2026-108398) was publicly disclosed prior to today, potentially giving attackers advance time to work out how to exploit the bug.

Satnam Narang at Tenable said the number of flaws fixed this month far surpasses the previous record-setting year 2020, when Microsoft patched 1,261 CVEs.

“We’ve now crossed the 4,000 CVE mark with two months left to go,” he said.

Microsoft credits large language models for the high volume of bug discovery, and presumably AI gets credit for many of the patches used to fix these flaw. Meanwhile, security experts have been warning that these unusually large patch volleys from Microsoft are placing extra strain on corporate security teams, which often have to test individual updates before deploying them across a network to ensure the fixes don’t cause problems for other software.

Tyler Reguly, associate director of security research and development at Fortra, notes that just 26 Microsoft vulnerabilities appeared in the “Known Exploited Vulnerabilities” (KEV) catalog maintained by the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) so far this year, and security teams would do well to prioritize patching those 26 vulnerabilities first.

“Security leaders should focus on exploitable risk, and ask whether their teams have the clarity, capacity and support to act,” Reguly said.

Which vulnerabilities deserve the most scrutiny in your organization? The folks at Cisco Talos have a useful roundup of the more noteworthy flaws that Microsoft fixed today, and of course the SANS Internet Storm Center has a reliable roundup that indexes vulnerabilities by severity, CVE number and affected software.

The New York Times reported today that the FBI has arrested a Canadian man in Pennsylvania on suspicion of assisting ShinyHunters. The Times story did not identify the man, nor did a statement on Twitter/X about the arrest from FBI Director Kash Patel.

One source close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity the Canadian person arrested this week was visiting Pennsylvania for a cyber insurance conference, and that the suspect’s company specialized in handling ransomware negotiations with cybercrime groups. Another shared that control over the ShinyHunters investigation has been centralized at an FBI field office in Texas.

An online search reveals the Cyber Risk Summit was held at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel between Oct. 5 and Oct. 7. The conference had several sponsors, but according to the summit’s website its biggest sponsor was a Canadian security company called Cypfer.

According to LinkedIn, one of Cypfer’s “ex-founders” was Edward Dubrovsky, who is now associated with another Canadian security firm and sponsor called CyberSteward. In a post to LinkedIn approximately one month ago, Dubrovsky said he had plans to attend the Cyber Risk Summit with the rest of the CyberSteward team.

[Update: Oct. 10, 9:58 a.m. ET: A spokesperson for Cypfer said Dubrovsky was not a founder or co-founder as his LinkedIn profile claims, but instead served as a managing director before resigning in December 2025].

Edward Dubrovsky’s LinkedIn profile.

“Looking forward to continuing conversations around strategy & compliant driven coercive (ransomware, extortion) advisory, negotiations and settlement services that are global and truly agnostic,” Dubrovsky wrote.

Federal court records show that on October 8, an Edward Dobrovsky (note the slight misspelling of the last name) was arrested in Pennsylvania on cyber extortion and conspiracy charges. Several of those documents — including the core complaint — are now sealed. But a handful of them were indexed at Courtlistener.com, including a summary of the complaint, which charges the defendant with “conspiracy to threaten to impair the confidentiality of information with the intent to extort money,” and “interference with commerce by threats.”

Image: Courtlistener.com

The inmate locator at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons website reports that a 54-year-old Edward Dubrovsky is currently being held at a federal facility in Philadelphia. But the court records indexed by CourtListener include a notice filed on October 9 that moved the case to the Eastern District of Texas, which sources say is now the epicenter of the FBI’s ShinyHunters investigation. The FBI declined to comment for this story.

Dubrovsky’s LinkedIn profile states he is the author of Cyber Extortion Strategic Response, a 252-page book that promises to “take readers beyond the ransom note and into the decisions that determine how an organization responds, recovers, and protects what matters.”

Edward Dubrovsky’s book, which centers on the intricacies of ransomware negotiations.

“At the heart of the book is a critical distinction: communicating with a criminal is not the same as negotiating a payment, and negotiating is not a commitment to pay,” reads an excerpt from the book’s listing on Amazon. “Engagement can serve other objectives, including testing claims, gathering information, creating time, and preserving options while the organization evaluates its next move.”

Mr. Dubrovsky could not be immediately reached for comment. KrebsOnSecurity also sought comment from other executives at CyberSteward, and will update this post in the event they respond. The available court records in Dubrovsky’s case show that he does not currently have an attorney and has yet to be appointed a public defender by the courts.

ShinyHunters typically uses phishing and stolen credentials to siphon data from corporate accounts at software-as-a-service companies, and then threatens to publish the stolen data online unless a ransom demand is paid. According to the FBI, the group has extorted more than $70 million from victims so far this year.

Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity the FBI has been poring over devices that were seized last month when the Dutch police arrested the convicted cybercriminal Pepijn van der Stap in connection with the ShinyHunters investigation, and that charges against principals at other companies that specialize in ransomware negotiation may be forthcoming.

Immediately after Van der Stap’s arrest, another member of ShinyHunters named “Rey” assumed control over the group and began taunting the FBI over data the group stole from the agency’s online recruitment portal, which included each’s person’s unit and specialization, as well as medical and psychiatric records.

Last week, Reuters reported that Rey — identified as a teenager named Saif Al-din Khader — had been detained and was cooperating with FBI investigators. On October 7, we detailed how Rey was apprehended as the cybercrime group allegedly sought to extort a navigation and digital aviation unit that was divested by Boeing in late 2025.

This is likely to be a fast-moving story. Updates will be noted along with timestamps.

The logo for Jeppesen ForeFlight, a business unit divested last year by the aerospace firm Boeing.

On October 3, Reuters cited three unnamed sources saying a suspected ShinyHunters member in Amman named Saif Al-din Khader was detained by Jordanian authorities and was cooperating with the FBI. KrebsOnSecurity identified Rey as Khader in a November 2025 profile, in which the young man admitted working with multiple ransomware groups.

Rey was featured again in a September 28 exclusive about the Dutch police arresting 24-year-old convicted cybercriminal Pepijn van der Stap on suspicion of aiding in data thefts and extortions by ShinyHunters. The story noted that immediately following the Dutchman’s arrest on the evening of September 15, Rey assumed control over the ShinyHunters brand and boasted publicly about stealing highly sensitive data from the FBI and extorting the ransomware group Cl0p.

Rey taunted both the FBI and Cl0p with memes posted to his longtime account on Twitter/X, while simultaneously including images of the avatar used by Van Der Stap’s former hacker alias “Umbreon” in an apparent attempt to frame the Dutchman for both hacks.

A taunting meme uploaded to Twitter/X by Rey on Sept. 22. A giant sized version of the Pokemon character Umbreon can be seen in the bottom left.

As noted in our September 28 report, ShinyHunters gained access to the FBI site and other victims by exploiting a vulnerability (CVE-2026-35273) in PeopleSoft, a software-as-a-service platform from the tech giant Oracle that is broadly used by companies to manage hiring and human resources, benefits and payroll. Oracle quickly issued a fix for CVE-2026-35273, which ShinyHunters first began exploiting as a zero-day in June, and at the time Mandiant released web application firewall rules intended for organizations that couldn’t apply the security update quickly enough.

ShinyHunters told BleepingComputer in June that the original goal behind exploiting the PeopleSoft vulnerability was to breach the FBI’s own PeopleSoft database, but the hackers said those attacks were unsuccessful for some reason. In recent weeks, however, ShinyHunters turned to a well-known URL-encoding trick to bypass Mandiant’s suggested web application firewall rules.

In a report released Sept. 25, security experts at Mandiant and the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) confirmed that ShinyHunters had mass-exploited the PeopleSoft vulnerability to steal data from dozens of systems across a range of industries, including higher education, technology, healthcare, agriculture, transportation and government.

Reuters reported October 5 that the FBI has removed a contractor at Accenture over their failure to patch the FBI recruitment website hacked by ShinyHunters, which exposed sensitive data on more than 5,000 FBI personnel, including each’s person’s unit and specialization, as well as medical and psychiatric records.

‘REY’ MEANS KING, AS IN ROYAL

According to two sources familiar with the ShinyHunters investigation, a navigation and digital aviation unit recently divested by the global aerospace company Boeing was among the victims that ShinyHunters was in the process of extorting when Rey was apprehended by Jordanian authorities.

Those sources said the FBI’s investigation into ShinyHunters gained renewed urgency with the group’s attempted extortion of the former Boeing unit, which allegedly included the theft of sensitive information that sources said could pose operational safety and security risks.

In a brief statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity, Boeing acknowledged the extortion attempts by ShinyHunters, and said the incident concerned data stolen from Jeppesen ForeFlight, a subsidiary that Boeing sold in November 2025 to the private equity firm Thoma Bravo for $10.55 billion.

“We are aware of claims by a threat actor regarding data allegedly associated with Boeing and our former subsidiary Jeppesen ForeFlight,” a Boeing spokesperson shared. “We are actively reviewing the matter with the Jeppesen ForeFlight team.”

A spokesperson for Jeppesen ForeFlight shared a written statement in response to questions, saying the company has seen no impact on their end. “Based on our investigation to date into this claim and proactive security posture, there was no impact to our operations or products.”

Rey’s alleged involvement in attempting to extort the former Boeing unit is noteworthy because there is strong evidence that his father works for Royal Jordanian Airlines, which is mostly controlled by the Jordanian government and operates its long-haul fleet on passenger planes built by Boeing. Rey claimed on Telegram in early 2025 that his father was an airline pilot, although that could not be independently confirmed.

However, as noted in our November 2025 profile of Rey, his family’s shared computer was at one point compromised by password-stealing malware, and the data collected by that malware clearly shows Rey’s father used the same credentials to log in at multiple online portals for Royal Jordanian Airlines employees.

Royal Jordanian Airlines has not yet responded to a request for comment. In advance of our September 28 story, KrebsOnSecurity once again emailed Rey’s father to seek comment and update him on his son’s alleged activities. Neither of the Khaders have responded. But just hours after that request was sent, Rey began deleting his various social media accounts, including the Twitter/X account he previously used to taunt the FBI, Cl0p, and other ShinyHunters victims.

Rey may have nixed many of his social media profiles, but his cybersecurity blog on GitHub somehow escaped the purge, and it shows that Rey was fixated on the leaders of the Cl0p ransomware group. In March 2026, Rey’s blog featured a lengthy post that identified two Russian men as the core developers and hackers behind Cl0p.

Rey’s blog on GitHub. This post doxes two Russian men as the core operators behind Cl0p, one of the oldest and most established ransomware groups still in operation today.

MURDER FOR HIRE?

Meanwhile, news outlets in the Netherlands reported explosive new allegations leveled at Van der Stap, whose supposed personal transformation from convicted to reformed hacker has been widely covered in the tech news media. The Dutch daily RTL reported on Sept. 29 that investigators suspect Van der Stap tried to orchestrate at least two murders. According to RTL, the murders were allegedly to be committed abroad, and there are indications Van der Stap gave the order for these attacks.

Van der Stap was released from prison after serving the better part of a four year sentence for data theft and extortion activity that prosecutors said netted between €1.5 million and €2.7 million. In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity on September 9, Van der Stap described his new role as “offensive security lead” at the Dutch cybersecurity company Neo Security, saying the job involved probing client networks for security vulnerabilities.

Neo Security’s owner Benjamin Korper told Reuters he has hired an outside firm to investigate whether Van der Stap had hacked Neo Security or its customers, but that so far investigators have found no evidence he acted against his employer or clients. Korper said Dutch forensic investigators visited his office on September 15, the night Van der ⁠Stap was arrested in a dramatic police raid that reportedly involved flash bang grenades.

A screenshot of a Sept 16 story by the Dutch news outlet at5.nl, describing a police raid on Van Der Stap’s residence that reportedly used flash-bang grenades.

Prior to his first arrest in 2023, Van der Stap was working as a software engineer at the Amsterdam-based cybersecurity startup Hadrian, while volunteering at the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) — even as he was hacking into and extorting a number of large organizations.

When asked in a recent interview why anyone should believe the word of a self-described “reformed” cybercriminal who had so casually deceived countless friends, co-workers and journalists for years, Van der Stap replied that his work spoke for itself and there was nothing he could say that would convince his worst critics.

“You can throw a bunch of nice words at someone, but you can’t convince them if they don’t want to be convinced,” Van der Stap told KrebsOnSecurity on Sept. 9. “I’m doing what I can to repay victims, and that’s all I can do. If someone doesn’t want to believe me, then that’s on them.”

FRANCHISING AND BURNING A BRAND

Cybercriminals aligned with ShinyHunters have been responsible for dozens of data breaches involving billions of stolen records, and breaches claimed by the group stretch back to at least 2019. But experts say the people recently operating behind the ShinyHunters name are not the same core members that populated the group in its early days, most of whom are French citizens who have been arrested (if not also imprisoned) on at least one prior occasion for alleged cybercrime activity.

More to the point, ShinyHunters has become something of a franchise. Think the Dread Pirate Roberts character in the 1980s cult movie classic “The Princess Bride,” only succession by death is replaced with succession by arrest, and there can be multiple simultaneous Dread Pirate Robertses. Sources close to the investigation say the FBI is focusing on a remaining handful of cybercriminal freelancers or affiliates who have been feeding the group stolen credentials to various software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms used by major companies in exchange for a cut of any data ransoms later paid by victims.

In the days after the news broke of Van der Stap’s arrest, a cybercrime-focused chat server on Telegram that was allegedly operated by Rey erupted with hot takes, with most participants heaping ridicule on the teenage hacker after he publicly backed down from threats against the FBI and Cl0p, and again when the ShinyHunters’s darknet website suddenly went offline. Several commentators accused Rey of resurrecting the ShinyHunters brand after its core members were rounded up in France, and making a mockery of the group’s name and reputation ever since.

“He bought the old forum PGP key and used it to make new Breachforum websites and Telegram channels larping as ShinyHunters to ransom companies and then sell the used data or resell his forum when he goes broke,” one member recounted.

A relatively new Telegram channel called “The Battle” has been doxing and needling Rey and other alleged ShinyHunters members for several weeks, and it has gained a considerable readership among the cybercrime communities operating on Telegram. One of the coordinators of that harassment campaign repeatedly portrayed Rey as clueless greenhorn who sought to ride the coattails of a cybercriminal brand that has long enjoyed a reputation for ruthlessly selling or publishing data stolen from victim companies who refuse to give in to extortion demands.

“Rey (Saif Al-Din Khader) made a serious mistake when he started pretending to be a member of ShinyHunters,” wrote the administrators of The Battle server on Telegram. “That group had already been dismantled, with many of its members either arrested or imprisoned, yet Rey still chose to use its name while carrying out his crimes. We’re aware of claims that [Rey] caused over $200 million in damages and helped around 5–6 friend groups in the community make money by using Shiny Hunters group aliases to negotiate deals for a 25–30% cut over the past few months.”

In an interview with The Register, ShinyHunters claimed they hacked the FBI to counter the agency’s narrative in a May 2026 alert that advised victims against paying a ransom to the group, which came off looking unprofessional and capricious in the FBI’s advisory.

A flash notice on ShinyHunters released by the FBI on May 15, 2026.

The public notice warned the group has been known to pursue a number of different victim harassment strategies, from sending threatening text messages and phone calls to victims and their family members to in some cases swatting victims. The FBI warned ShinyHunters members “may also falsely claim to have sensitive or compromising information, including embarrassing photographs or videos of victims, which frequently do not exist.”

The hackers told The Register their attack on the FBI “demonstrated our technical capabilities and directly refuted the misinformation disseminated by the FBI, journalists, and industry researchers.” At the same time, the group’s leaders seemed to acknowledge that the FBI’s warning materially harmed their prospects for convincing victims to pay, saying “this was fundamentally a public relations and marketing initiative for our business.”

According to three sources familiar with the matter, the Dutch man arrested by authorities this month is Pepijn van der Stap, a convicted cybercriminal from Almere and Lelystad in the Netherlands. Van der Stap was previously convicted in 2023 in connection with a string of data thefts and extortions that prosecutors said earned between €1.5 million and €2.7 million.

At his trial in late 2023, van der Stap admitted that he lived a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde existence, secretly using the hacker handle “Umbreon” to extort victims and post their data on English language hacking communities like the now-defunct RaidForums and Breached. By day, however, van der Stap was working as a software engineer at the Amsterdam-based cybersecurity startup Hadrian, while volunteering at the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD), a nonprofit security research group.

Pepijn van der Stap’s alter ego “Umbreon” selling a database on RaidForums, offering information on 2.3 million people from The Netherlands in September 2021. This user’s avatar is a depiction of the Pokemon character Umbreon. Image: KELA.

Van der Stap confessed to his data theft and extortion activity, and was sentenced to four years in prison (one of which was suspended). During his trial, van der Stap opted to remain in custody for a time rather than at home, saying he could not find better treatment on the outside for his ongoing psychological issues, which he claimed included PTSD related to childhood trauma. He was released from prison in December 2025.

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity on September 9, 2026, Van der Stap cast himself as a reformed hacker who was trying to turn his life around and make a positive contribution to society. Van der Stap is currently employed as offensive security lead at the Dutch company Neo Security, which did not respond to requests for comment.

Van der Stap said he was still dealing with civil lawsuits and restitution related to his previous cybercrime victims, and that he was trying his best to make amends. But not long after that interview, the Dutch hacker abruptly stopped replying to messages. Efforts by others close to him also repeatedly failed to elicit a response for the past two weeks.

The LinkedIn profile for Pepijn van der Stap.

According to two sources with knowledge of the matter, Van der Stap was arrested by Dutch authorities on or around September 16, and has been held in custody for questioning since. One source said a colleague of theirs personally witnessed Dutch authorities carting items out of Van der Stap’s residence.

Authorities in the Netherlands have been asking the public for help in identifying the voice in a recorded telephone call from February 2026 in which a native Dutch-speaking ShinyHunters member social engineered their way into Odido, the nation’s largest mobile telecommunications provider. In that intrusion, ShinyHunters tricked an Odido employee into logging in at a spoofed website, and then used that access to steal data on more than 6.2 million Dutch people.

Responding to Dutch news media, ShinyHunters confirmed that the suspect in the audio clip is indeed a member of the hacker collective.

“Our team member has our full support – emotionally, mentally, and financially,” the hackers said. “Everything has been arranged, including a criminal defense lawyer. We do not look down on our staff and members; we take excellent care of them,” reads a statement ShinyHunters shared with NL Times. It remains unclear if the Dutch police have matched the Odido caller to a confirmed real-life identity. The Dutch police unit handling the Odido incident did not respond to requests for comment.

The group also lashed out at the authorities in the Netherlands. “The Dutch police will need all the luck in the world – and everyone’s prayers – if they want to catch him before we carry out another large-scale data theft in the Netherlands,” the ShinyHunters statement said. “Frankly, the Dutch police are a big joke; they are incapable of doing anything. Incompetent. Irrelevant. Unimportant. Useless.”

FBI, CL0P HACKS

Just days after sources say Van der Stap was detained by Dutch authorities, ShinyHunters claimed credit for an unusually brazen breach at the FBI’s job application site apply.fbijobs.gov. According to reporting from 404 Media, the data stolen from the FBI site includes Social Security numbers and personal information on more than 5,000 officials.

404 Media and Reuters reported the FBI data included each person’s job title or team, such as special agent, threat intake examiner, major cybercrimes unit, and those investigating cyber threats from foreign state-backed actors. Reuters examined documents shared by ShinyHunters and found they included sensitive psychiatric and medical files of FBI staff. The FBI issued a brief statement confirming the hack.

ShinyHunters said it gained access to the FBI site and other victims by exploiting a recently patched vulnerability (CVE-2026-35273) in PeopleSoft, a software-as-a-service platform from the software giant Oracle that is broadly used by companies to manage hiring and human resources, benefits and payroll. Oracle quickly issued a fix for the Peoplesoft vulnerability that ShinyHunters reportedly began exploiting as a zero-day in June, and at the time Mandiant released web application firewall rules intended for organizations who couldn’t apply the security update quickly enough.

But on Friday, BleepingComputer reported that ShinyHunters used a URL-encoding trick to bypass Mandiant’s suggested web application firewall rules designed to mitigate the threat from the PeopleSoft flaw. In a report released Sept. 25, security experts at Mandiant and the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) confirmed that ShinyHunters had mass-exploited the PeopleSoft vulnerability to steal data from dozens of systems across a range of industries, including higher education, technology, healthcare, agriculture, transportation and government.

Van der Stap’s former hacker alias Umbreon was hidden in plain sight throughout the imagery ShinyHunters used to spread news about the FBI hack: The defacement image that ShinyHunters left behind on the hacked FBI jobs site included an ASCII art design featuring the Pokemon character Umbreon. The message at the top read, “This site has been seized by ShinyHunters. rooting your systems since ’19 ;)” The image appears identical to a defacement message ShinyHunters used in their 2020 hack of the English-language cybercrime community Hackforums.

The defacement message left by ShinyHunters on the FBI jobs site included an ASCII art rendition of the Pokemon character Umbreon. Image: Bleeping Computer.

Multiple sources close to the ShinyHunters investigation said the group’s recent risky attacks against the FBI and one of Russia’s most venerated ransomware groups amounted to a major pivot away from the more measured tenor of the hacking gang’s operations. Those sources said the sudden shift came about after ShinyHunters was taken over by a teenage cybercriminal from Amman, Jordan who goes by the nickname Rey and operates as part of a cybercrime group called ScatteredLapsussHunters (SLSH), which experts say is an amalgamation of three hacking groups — Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$ and ShinyHunters.

Those sources said Rey had an ongoing beef with the Dutch hacker over control of the ShinyHunters brand and data, and that the inclusion of the oversized Umbreon Pokemon image in the FBI jobs site defacement was likely an attempt by Rey to pin the hack on the Dutchman.

Rey was first publicly identified by the cybersecurity firm KELA in March 2025. In advance of our November 2025 profile of Rey, KrebsOnSecurity messaged Rey’s father and asked for permission to interview his teenage son. Rey’s dad merely forwarded the message to his son, who admitted to participating in ransomware attacks and said he was trying to extricate himself from the SLSH hacker group.

BLAMING UMBREON

Immediately after news of the FBI jobs site hack was picked up in the media, Rey’s main account on Twitter/X (Ryan Moran/@rmoskovy) was taunting the Cl0p ransomware group and the FBI, crudely depicting them as the twin towers in New York being struck by planes labeled “cl0p drama” and “fbi breach claim.” In the foreground of the city is the giant Pokemon figure of Umbreon.

A taunting meme uploaded to Twitter/X by Rey’s now-defunct account on Sept. 22. A giant float-sized version of the Pokemon character Umbreon can be seen in the bottom left.

On Sept. 24, KrebsOnSecurity again contacted Rey’s dad, asking to interview him and his son for a story on Rey’s apparent ascendency as the head of ShinyHunters. Just hours after that request, Rey deleted his longtime Twitter/X account. Meanwhile, Rey’s dad, who works for the Royal Jordanian Airlines, has failed to respond to a half-dozen emailed requests for comment about his son’s alleged activities.

Where does the bad blood between SLSH and ShinyHunters come from? According to a story in Wired this month, ShinyHunters and SLSH members briefly partnered earlier this year to help better monetize important stolen credentials collected by TeamPCP, an upstart group that was having great success compromising global code supply chains with malicious software but hadn’t been able to profit much from their stolen data (two alleged leaders of TeamPCP were arrested last month in Australia, and in an interview the TeamPCP leader claimed they made just $20,000).

The Wired story noted how Mandiant had infiltrated TeamPCP and was secretly responsible for having the crime group’s stolen credentials burned so quickly: Mandiant was secretly feeding those credentials to the major cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft, who quickly invalidated the stolen keys. Meanwhile, the formerly cooperating hacker groups began to blame one another for causing the credentials to become worthless.

Wired’s Andy Greenberg reported that a few weeks after partnering with TeamPCP, “ShinyHunters went rogue, carrying out its own extortions with TeamPCP’s credentials but without giving the supply-chain hackers their cut.”

Mandiant researcher Austin Larsen told KrebsOnSecurity earlier this month that ShinyHunters has been enjoying a successful extortion spree so far this year, and is on track to pull in nearly $100 million in extortion payments from cybercrime victims in 2026.

Van der Stap claims he was never motivated by money and that his earlier hacker activity was driven by a desire to have the world’s most complete collection of stolen databases. Speaking with reporters from Bloomberg in 2024, Van der Stap said that singular focus in turn fueled his desire to carry out cyberattacks.

“The hacking was very easy for me, and it wasn’t a compulsion,” he told Bloomberg. “My habit was collecting. Collecting data, organizing data, downloading data, creating folders.”

DIVD, the nonprofit security research group where Van der Stap previously served as a volunteer, disclosed on LinkedIn last week that the organization was dealing with an internal cybersecurity incident that appears to have involved the malicious use of artificial intelligence. DIVD has released few details about that incident, but a spokesperson for the nonprofit told KrebsOnSecurity it does not appear related to ShinyHunters, nor are there any signs the matter involves the work of a previous volunteer.

Update: 3:44 p.m. ET: Corrected Van der Stap’s age, which is 24 (not 23).

Update, 4:54 p.m. ET: The Dutch police have confirmed the arrest of a 24-year-old in connection with the ShinyHunters investigation. In a statement on Twitter/X, the Dutch police said the man will appear on Tuesday, September 29 before the chambers of the Rotterdam District Court, and that it will provide more information tomorrow.

Sept. 29, 9:42 a.m. ET: The Dutch news outlet RTL reports that investigators suspect Van der Stap tried to orchestrate at least two murders. RTL reported the two murders were allegedly to be committed abroad, and that there are indications the suspect gave the order for this.

The FBI released a short video message on the ShinyHunters investigation from Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division, who thanked Dutch law enforcement partners for their assistance and urged remaining ShinyHunters members to turn themselves in.

“Arrests have a way of changing who is willing to talk, and seized infrastructure has a way of showing us who’s left,” Leatherman said. “The longer you stay in this, the more we learn about you. You know how to find us, and we know how to find you. I suggest you reach out to us while the choice is still yours.”

One of several selfies from the Facebook page of Cameron Wagenius.

Cameron John Wagenius, 22, was stationed at a U.S. Army base in South Korea when he adopted the cybercriminal persona “Kiberphant0m.” Working with three alleged co-conspirators, Kiberphant0m downloaded data from several large customers of the cloud data storage service Snowflake that had exposed credentials and did not enforce multi-factor authentication (Snowflake has since mandated MFA on all accounts).

In October 2024, Kiberphant0m bragged on the cybercrime forums that he’d stolen the call and text metadata (e.g. source and destination number, timestamp, duration, etc.) for tens of millions of AT&T customers. Kiberphant0m claimed to have hacked into more than dozen telecommunications companies worldwide, including Verizon’s Push-to-Talk business, and publicly extorted these companies in exchange for a promise not to publish the stolen data.

In late November 2025, KrebsOnSecurity warned that Kiberphant0m was likely a U.S. soldier stationed in South Korea. Less than a month later, Wagenius was arrested and charged in two separate federal indictments, and soon pleaded guilty to all counts in both cases.

At his sentencing hearing in Seattle today, Wagenius was sentenced to nearly six years in federal prison, and ordered to pay $294,978 in restitution.

Federal prosecutors said Wagenius was assisted in his efforts to extort victim companies by Kenneth Schuchman, a 28-year old man from Vancouver, Washington who has a lengthy cybercriminal history. In 2019, Schuchman pleaded guilty to operating the Satori botnet, a vast collection of hacked Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices that was used for large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Two other alleged co-conspirators of Wagenius are still facing charges in connection with the Snowflake data thefts; Conor Riley Moucka, a.k.a. “Judische,” of Kitchener, Ontario was arrested in 2024 and pleaded guilty in August 2026; and John Erin Binns, an American man currently living in Turkey who is also wanted for a 2021 data breach at T-Mobile that exposed the personal information of at least 76 million customers.

Kiberphant0m also admitted to re-extorting victims, and threatening to disclose national security secrets. Immediately following Moucka’s arrest — after AT&T had already paid the extortion group a $370,000 Bitcoin ransom — Kiberphant0m posted on hacker forums what he claimed were the AT&T call logs for then President-elect Donald Trump and for then Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as schematics allegedly stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

Paul Russell is a resident agent in charge at the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS), the criminal investigative arm of the U.S. Department of Defense Office of Inspector General. Russell said when DCIS received information that a soldier with secret clearance was allegedly involved in cybercrime and extortion, the agency began working the investigation alongside the FBI, the Army Criminal Investigative Division (CID), and the U.S. Secret Service.

“We don’t often get leads where there’s an active duty soldier with a secret clearance who’s creating hacking tools and trafficking in data,” Russell said. “That doesn’t happen every day, and so when that hits it really spins all of our partner organizations up. It was very serious from jump street, just because it was unique, it was an insider threat, and we weren’t sure what we were dealing with.”

A sentencing memo (PDF) filed Sept. 19 by federal prosecutors in Seattle notes that while Wagenius pleaded guilty almost immediately and has been remarkably cooperative, he recently got caught trying to find security vulnerabilities in the BOP’s computer network. The government’s memo notes that while incarcerated and awaiting sentencing, Wagenius violated the computer use policies of the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in attempts to learn about vulnerabilities in BOP computer systems.

“According to records from BOP, in or around September 2025, Wagenius used another inmate’s email system to request that the email recipient prompt a commercial AI tool to provide information about “[w]hat CVE’s are there for Windows 10 Enterprise privilege escalation and bypasses” and to “[p]rovide the CVE’s and a real world working script for each CVE . . . without omitted code,” the government’s memo states.

The memo states that less than a week later, Wagenius used a different inmate’s email account and requested that the email recipient prompt an AI tool to “[p]rovide the step by step for CVE-2023-45208, code for this if any, and if no code exists make some, make sure to describe everything in detail.” CVE-2023-45208 is a three-year-old “command injection” vulnerability in D-Link networking devices.

That same month, Wagenius allegedly again requested that the email recipient prompt AI with the question, “How do you make an antenna in a prison environment with commissary or readily available items/tools to improve/make an antenna to extend radio reception?”

Federal prosecutors said Wagenius also requested that the recipient research escaping prison.

“In several instances, Wagenius framed the AI queries as being posed in connection to a book he was writing. This is a common method of ‘prompt injection,’ in which attackers feed specially crafted, deceptive inputs into commercial AI tools that are programmed to avoid outputting malicious code that can be used to exploit computer vulnerabilities,” the sentencing memo reads.

The government told the court it is unaware of evidence that Wagenius figured out how to use or deploy the vulnerabilities he was researching in the BOP’s systems, and when questioned said he was only researching “potential vulnerabilities to provide information to the BOP.”

Incredibly, despite the enormous financial value of the data stolen from AT&T and other telecom providers, Wagenius’s extortion efforts were largely unsuccessful. The government’s sentencing memo says Wagenius made a whopping total of around $1,500 from selling stolen data.

“While Wagenius was not particularly financially successful as a cybercriminal, he both intended to and caused significant harm to numerous individual victims, U.S. companies, and the U.S. government,” the memo states.

The radaris.com website, prior to the domain transfer to Atlas.

In February 2024, Radaris was sued by Atlas Data Privacy Corp, a company that has been pursuing data brokers alleged to be violating a New Jersey statute called Daniel’s Law. The statute allows state law enforcement officials, government personnel, judges and their families to have their information completely removed from commercial data brokers and people-search services, and provides for fines of $1,000 per violation against companies that ignore removal requests.

Less than a month after Atlas sued Radaris, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive into the Radaris co-founders — Igor and Dmitry Lubarsky (also spelled Lybarsky) — Russian-born brothers living in Massachusetts who operate a dizzying array of people-search companies as well as a number of Russian language dating services and affiliate programs.

Attorneys for the Lubarsky brothers threatened to sue for defamation if the story wasn’t removed and an apology issued. Their attorney asserted that our reporting was wildly inaccurate, and that the true owners of the company were Ukrainians living in Ukraine.

The Lubarsky brothers Dmitry or “Dan” (left) and Gary/Igor.

KrebsOnSecurity doubled down and showed how the Lubarsky brothers built and operated Radaris and other data broker companies using a fictitious CEO’s name. Our follow-up story noted that Radaris’s attorney — a lawyer with the Boston Law Group named Val Gurvits — admitted his clients had invented the CEO pseudonym “Gary Norden,” and that Radaris also had issued multiple press releases over the years that quoted the fake CEO while seeking money from potential investors.

Attorneys for Radaris waited until the last minute to appear in court and contest what was all but certain to be a default judgment in favor of the plaintiffs, and then told the court that Atlas had failed to serve the real owners and operators of Radaris and several of its sister data broker companies.

Atlas re-filed the lawsuit in June 2025, this time dramatically expanding the number of Radaris family data brokers accused of violating Daniel’s Law. Matt Adkisson, president and CEO of Atlas, said Radaris turned to a tried-and-true playbook: Delaying in court until the last possible minute, and playing shell games with Radaris’s true country of origin and the individuals listed as owners and operators of these sites.

“We refer to this period as their island-hopping phase. Privacy policies changed constantly, and new entities kept appearing from places like the Marshall Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Seychelles,” Adkisson told KrebsOnSecurity. “Behind the scenes, it felt like a shell game. Defense lawyers told the court that certain entities merely operated the domains and were the proper parties to sue. But by the time a judgment neared, those entities would be discarded and new entities would appear. Meanwhile, the lawyers claimed the other entities that actually owned the domains should not be held responsible.”

Adkisson said when the defendants updated their terms of service to state that Radaris was suddenly managed by a company in the Marshall Islands, Atlas hired an investigator in that country and soon learned the brand new entity that Radaris claimed was managing the company didn’t even exist yet.

Mr. Gurvits stepped forward as Radaris’s attorney in a class action lawsuit the company temporarily lost in 2017 because it never contested the claim in court. When the plaintiffs told the judge they couldn’t collect on the $7.5 million default judgment, the court ordered the domain registry Verisign to transfer the radaris.com domain name to the plaintiffs.

Mr. Gurvits appealed that verdict, arguing the lawsuit hadn’t named the actual owners of the Radaris domain name — a Cyprus company called Bitseller Expert Limited — and thus taking the domain away would be a violation of their due process rights.

The judge in the 2017 case ruled in Radaris’ favor — halting the domain transfer — and told the plaintiffs they could refile their complaint. Soon after, the operator of Radaris changed from Bitseller to Andtop Company, an entity formed (PDF) in the Marshall Islands in Oct. 2020. The plaintiffs never re-filed their lawsuit.

A mind map of various entities tied to Radaris and the company’s co-founders. Click to enlarge.

“That seemed to be their modus operandi,” said Raj Parikh, a partner at PEM Law in New Jersey who handles most of the Daniel’s Law litigation for Atlas. “In the past, they won by attrition. Plaintiffs’ attorneys tired of the procedural games and just gave up. That strategy worked for a decade, and it probably would have worked in this case too, since any financial recovery from foreign actors will be difficult. But we were acutely aware of the threat this website posed to law enforcement officers and other public officials in New Jersey, and decided early on to commit whatever time and resources were necessary to remove that threat.”

On August 26, the judge in the New Jersey case found the defendants were given multiple chances to appear and defend the claims against them but had failed to do so. Mr. Gurvits declined to comment on the case, saying it had been assigned to another attorney, a Mr. Victor Worms. In response to questions, Mr. Worms asserted the New Jersey court transferred Radaris.com to Atlas as part of a default judgment against Radaris.com, which is not a legal entity.

“We have made a motion to vacate that default judgment on the grounds that it is void since a non-entity has no legal capacity to sue or be sued,” Worms replied. “We also intend to pursue all appropriate appeals because we believe the transfer of Radaris.com amounts to a forfeiture in violation of various constitutional principles.”

While radaris.com still comes up prominently in results when searching online for U.S. residents by name, the domain no longer sells detailed personal dossiers on millions of Americans. Its homepage now displays a notice from Atlas, as well as links to our previous reporting on Radaris.

EMAIL CONFIRMATIONS

Atlas told KrebsOnSecurity that it has obtained more than 10,000 emails and documents in the course of litigation, and that those messages confirm our previous reporting on the owners and operators of Radaris and its myriad companies.

Atlas said the emails clearly establish that the nominal legal vehicles — Radaris America, Inc.; Bitseller Expert Limited; Digital Orbit Corp; Core Solutions Group Inc; Lucky Solutions Inc; Virtura Corp; Veripages Inc.; Nuform Solutions Inc.; Growth Data Advisors Inc.; Property Experts, Inc — are all administered by the same three or four people from the same mailboxes, share one bank or payment card set, and are all managed from one virtual office address.

“The corpus establishes, with documentary evidence generated independently by banks, payment processors, hosting providers, registrars, software-as-a-service vendors and the operators’ own systems, that radaris.com and at least twenty-five other people-search websites are one operation run by a small Boston-area group whose administrative, financial and technical functions sit on the difive.com mail domain and its successors (centerex.com, scienteco.com, eprofit.com, realmo.com, pub360.com),” reads a summary shared by Atlas.

Atlas said the emails show Radaris.com earns approximately $42,000 a month, while Veripages.com earns around $45,000 monthly via its partnership with the Lifetime Value Company, a marketing and advertising firm whose brands include PeopleLooker, PeopleSmart, NumberGuru, and Bumper, a car history site.

According to Atlas, the emails also showed the Radaris family of websites earns as much as $25,000 each month from their partnership with Onerep, a company that claims to help people remove their information from people-search sites. In March 2024, KrebsOnSecurity revealed how the Belarusian founder of Onerep had launched and operated dozens of people-search sites over the years and was continuing to operate one of them (Nuwber), effectively spreading the disease and selling the cure.

The domain radaris.com now redirects to this notice from Atlas about the court-ordered domain transfer.

All told, the New Jersey court has so far transferred 14 domain names from the Radaris family of companies to Atlas. Radaris.com now redirects to a notice of the court-ordered domain transfer.

THE ROAD AHEAD

The Radaris family of companies is still potentially facing fines of $1,000 per alleged violation of Daniel’s Law. For the time being, however, Daniel’s Law is facing a constitutional challenge from virtually all of the 150 other consumer data broker firms being sued by Atlas.

The data broker industry responded by having at least 70 of the Atlas lawsuits moved to federal court, challenging the New Jersey statute as overly broad and a violation of the First Amendment. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has not yet issued a decision on the constitutional challenge, but either way the case is widely expected to be appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, at least 14 other states have now passed laws modeled after the New Jersey statute, with more states considering similar measures. However, West Virginia’s Daniel’s Law was ruled facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment by a federal district court in August 2025.

Justin Sherman is a privacy expert and author of the forthcoming book “The Middlemen,” which examines how the data broker industry powers modern surveillance. Sherman said federal lawmakers have long faced intense lobbying by the technology industry against more restrictive U.S. data privacy laws, but that many powerful industries are now working against passing comprehensive data privacy legislation.

“These days at the federal level, add in the intense amount of lobbying against these laws from social media companies, big tech, cryptocurrency firms, and now AI proponents in the mix who claim that limiting their data scraping is somehow going to collapse the whole U.S. economy under Chinese rule,” he said.

Sherman said people-search companies will continue to thrive unless and until Congress enacts meaningful consumer privacy and data protection laws that are relevant to life in the 21st century. That’s because virtually all state privacy laws exempt records that might be considered “public” or “government” documents, including voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal records, court documents, death records, professional licenses, bankruptcy filings, and more.

At least 25 states have passed or implemented laws requiring age verification for residents seeking to access adult content online, but there is no federal law that limits how the companies that are scanning everyone’s drivers license can use, share or keep the data provided. Had such restrictions been enshrined in law, we may have avoided the recent breach at IDScan.net, which exposed the drivers license information on more than 153 million Americans when the records were briefly turned into a point-and-click identity theft service on the dark web.

“The average person can look at Daniel’s Law and have a perfectly normal reaction, which is that everyone should be covered, not just police and judges,” Sherman said. “But we don’t need more wake-up calls. We’ve had eight million wake-up calls already on the need for better privacy laws. The lack of comprehensive federal privacy law is not for a lack of knowledge, and anyone claiming otherwise is either not reading the news or kidding themselves.”

Image: Shutterstock.com, Kirill Makarov.

This month’s patch bundle obliterates the software giant’s previous record set in July, when it released updates for at least 570 security vulnerabilities. September’s Patch Tuesday brings this year’s total to more than 2,600, more than twice Microsoft’s previous record-setting patch year in 2020 (1,245) and with three more months to go.

There are two “zero-day” flaws fixed this month that are being actively exploited: both CVE-2026-81963 and CVE-2026-85880 allow an attacker to elevate their privileges on Windows system.

Fully 113 of the bugs addressed today earned Microsoft’s “critical” rating, meaning they could be abused by malware or miscreants to seize control over a vulnerable Windows machine with little or no help from the user.

Among the more serious critical flaws this month is CVE-2026-69730, a DNS weakness present in Windows Server 2012 onward and on Windows 10. Microsoft warns that an unauthenticated attacker could leverage this weakness simply by sending a specially crafted packet to an affected system, and that it is likely to be exploited.

Also scary is CVE-2026-69829, a critical, remote code execution flaw in the Windows Shell. This vulnerability has a CVSS base score of 9.8 (10 is the most severe), and can be exploited with low attack complexity, no privileges, and no user interaction.

Microsoft’s summary of the security updates released today. Image: msrc.microsoft.com.

Microsoft is hardly alone in shipping monster patch bundles lately. Many other large software companies, including Adobe, Cisco, Google, Mozilla and Oracle, all have recently credited AI-assisted research with increasing their patch cadence and volume (Google said today it is now going to ship security updates every two weeks).

Tyler Reguly, associate director of security research and development at Fortra, said one core challenge with deploying Windows updates is that they need to be tested before being installed across an organization because not all third-party software works seamlessly in the face of changes to the underlying operating system.

“It’s time to put our CISOs and CSOs on notice,” Reguly said. “How are you helping your teams through these difficult times? Do you have your teams deploy after hours and on weekends to avoid disruption to the business environment? Do you reward them for that effort? Time to dig into your budget and buy dinner for your teams that are working on Saturday to get patches rolled out before users return to work on Monday.”

Satnam Narang is senior staff research engineer at Tenable. Narang said it’s important to recognize that while the number of vulnerabilities being patched by Microsoft is rising, the number of flaws that can and will affect most organizations remains quite low.

“AI-assisted vulnerability discovery in 2026 is creating larger haystacks, but it isn’t finding more needles,” he said. “It’s critical that organizations understand which vulnerabilities actually apply to them, whether they pose a threat by being reachable and exploitable, and prioritize remediation based on this risk context.”

Of course, regular Windows users don’t need to test patches before deploying them, but they still need to open Windows Update periodically or else assent to the program’s nag notices about pending updates. And at the rate these Windows patch releases are ballooning in size, it’s probably best not to let them pile up month after month.

Enterprise Windows admins will want to keep an eye on askwoody.com for news of any updates that appear to be causing problems. As always, the SANS Internet Storm Center has a per-patch breakdown ordered by severity and urgency.

A record available at this identity theft service that includes the drivers license for U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, one of several high-ranking U.S. government officials whose drivers licenses can be found for sale.

On Monday, Aug. 31, a source alerted KrebsOnSecurity to a service advertised by a new user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more than 170 million people in North America. The source brought it to my attention because the proprietor of this identity theft service offered my Virginia drivers license as a free sample in their initial sales thread on Exploit.

The service, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 million drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada, as well as more than 10 million identification cards; more than three million travel documents and/or international IDs; and at least 579,000 medical cards.

A quick look around Nexus finds they are likely not exaggerating about that 153 million number: Running a blank search in Nexus (with no search parameters entered) returns approximately 11.5 million pages of results, with roughly 15 results displayed per page. It includes documents from people in both Canada and the United States, but the bulk of these records are on Americans: searching for just Canadian drivers licenses returns approximately 1.1 million results, with the largest concentration from Ontario (473,673 records).

Curiously, the identity records include not only drivers licenses but also marijuana dispensary cards. Some of the records list their “source” as “CDL,” presumably short for “commercial drivers license.” Other records carry the source notation of “CAC,” which may refer to Common Access Cards, government issued identity cards that grant physical access to government buildings and secure rooms.

The people behind Nexus claim the license images are coming from an active breach at “a major identity verification company” whose customers include multiple Fortune 500 companies.

The record totals listed by the Nexus identity theft service. The number of drivers license records increased by nearly 400,000 in the span of just 24 hours.

“We have been continuously exfiltrating new data for over a year into our private database,” the service enthused in its introductory post on Exploit. “Records are available to preview before purchase with pertinent information redacted. Customer photos are displayed if available.”

Indeed, over the past 24 hours, the number of drivers license records listed as available in Nexus has increased by nearly 400,000, suggesting that freshly stolen license data is being harvested and uploaded to this service on a semi-regular basis.

The record featuring my drivers license includes six image files: three pairs of photos of the license’s front and back, a basic image scan, as well as infrared and ultraviolet versions of the same images. A date and timestamp is appended to each image file, and the timestamp on my license scan corresponds to a date in June 2025 when I took a flight to the midwest United States to attend a family funeral.

Some of the 153 million+ license scans — including mine — feature six image files with date and timestamps appended to the filenames. Not all records include photos, and some that do feature photos do not display the associated filenames.

Intent on discovering the source of this data, KrebsOnSecurity asked more than a dozen friends and family members for permission to search for their licenses in this service. Each person whose license could be found (nine of them) confirmed having traveled on or very close to the dates in the timestamps attached to their images. It is unclear what timezone these timestamps are in, but from reviewing car rental records shared by several people who helped with this research, it appears the timezone is set to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

At first, I thought the source of the data might have something to do with airports. However, that theory went out the window when it became apparent there were no passports in this data set. Also, only some of those who helped with this research said they showed their drivers license at the airport on the day of their travel. One person whose license was in Nexus hadn’t flown at all recently, but was renting a car from Hertz for several months around the date of their timestamp.

Two of those who agreed to help are federal employees who said they shared other forms of government identification when passing through airport security. However, those individuals each said they shared their state-issued drivers licenses later that day when renting vehicles at their respective destinations, and that both rented their cars from Hertz.

After finding a note in my calendar for the day of my June 2025 flight reminding me to bring my passport, I remembered that I also never actually shared my drivers license when I went through security at Reagan National Airport on that day because I did not yet have a Real ID, a security-enhanced drivers license that is now required by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for all domestic travel. Instead, I showed the TSA agent my government-issued U.S. passport.

Here’s where it gets interesting: I was able to find my mother’s drivers license in this service as well, and the timestamps for her images are just a few seconds apart from mine. That’s notable because we both handed our licenses to the Hertz rental car representative at the same time.

According to my mom, the only place she gave her drivers license to that day was the rental car company, and if memory serves that is also true for me. I don’t recall if the rental car representative inserted our licenses into any kind of machine, but I remember they held onto them for several minutes behind the counter while we were signing various forms. KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from Hertz and will update this story in the event they reply.

Zach Edwards is a well-known security and privacy researcher who recently launched a service called DecryptAds to help people better understand how online advertisers are tracking them. A scan of Edwards’s drivers license is available for purchase on this identity theft service, and Edwards said the timestamp on his record corresponds to the middle of a trip last month to Las Vegas for the annual DEFCON security conference.

Edwards told KrebsOnSecurity that although he did not rent a car in Vegas, he did hand over his license at the TSA checkpoint, at a marijuana dispensary in Vegas, and at his hotel (the Aria). But he said the only one of those three that for sure scanned his ID in some kind of device was the dispensary.

To enter Planet13’s weed dispensary in Las Vegas, one must pass through a red telephone booth. Image: Zach Edwards.

Edwards said the dispensary he visited that day was Planet13, a multi-state chain with stores in California, Florida, Illinois and Nevada. In 2022, the New Orleans-based identity provider idscan.net published a press release announcing an exclusive identity verification agreement with Planet13’s dispensaries nationally. IDScan says it processes ID verification for more than 1,000 marijuana dispensaries in 19 U.S. states.

The “trust” page of idscan.net states that the company provides identity verification services for numerous big brands, including Hertz, Target, Fedex, Motorola Solutions, the financial services giant Jack Henry, and Caesars Entertainment. And as idscan.net’s own documentation states, the technology scans IDs with both infrared and ultraviolet light. Idscan.net says the company’s systems and technology perform more than 21 million verifications monthly, at more than 20,000 locations around the world.

Image: idscan.net.

Contacted by KrebsOnSecurity, idscan.net said it was investigating the matter, but the company has not yet shared an official statement or a substantive reply to specific questions sent via email.

“At this point I’m not able to share any additional information, but the updates you have provided have been welcome, and helpful to our team’s investigation,” wrote Jillian Kossman, a marketing and operations leader at idscan.net.

During the course of my research for this story, word got around to the FBI that I was poking at the apparent source of this new identity theft service’s data. Probably they were tipped off when I shared with a trusted source that Nexus also is selling the drivers license information for the assistant director of the FBI (I did not find FBI Director Kash Patel’s license in Nexus).

Earlier this afternoon, I was added to a conference call with a half-dozen FBI agents, including senior leaders from the agency’s cyber division. During that call, the FBI shared that earlier today their New Orleans field office opened an official investigation into an apparent breach involving idscan.net.

Edwards said that as more in-person and online experiences require sharing drivers licenses, vendors who collect this sensitive data need to be held to a higher standard.

“This episode should further strengthen the resolve for people who are fighting back against online ID schemes which are requiring countless providers to ask for drivers licenses in order to access services under the guise of protecting kids,” Edwards told KrebsOnSecurity. “These systems are putting sensitive data into more and more 3rd party vendors, and we don’t have nearly the oversight to ensure they are safe.”

Larry Baldwin is principal intelligence researcher at the cybersecurity firm Cybera. Baldwin said a front and back scan of his drivers license available at Nexus contains timestamps that correspond to the date of a car rental from Hertz on a recent vacation.

Baldwin said the Nexus identity theft service presents multiple serious security and privacy threats, noting that state-issued drivers licenses are commonly used as proof of one’s identity when opening new lines of credit. Baldwin said the service could also dangerously expose many people who do not wish to be found but who cannot meaningfully change their appearance (or at least not enough to fool today’s AI-based image matching tools).

This category of people, he said, includes those fleeing domestic violence, and even people who have been assigned a whole new life and identity as part of the federal government’s witness protection program, which is generally reserved for criminal defendants in racketeering and conspiracy investigations who agree to cooperate with federal authorities.

“Just when it seems like we’re making some headway in improving authentication controls through drivers license verification systems, this happens and the very thing those improvements are dependent on are compromised,” Baldwin said.

Update, Sept. 8: IDscan.net published a brief notice saying it has “determined that an unauthorized third party may have accessed and/or copied certain customer information, including full names and drivers license or other government-issued identification numbers.” The statement said IDscan.net is notifying affected individuals and offering credit protection services.

Update, Sept. 2, 6:05 p.m. ET: A spokesperson for Caesars Entertainment said Caesars has not been a client of IDScan.net and has not used VeriScan since February 2025, despite IDScan.net listing them as a client on their website. That person said Caesars had no active VeriScan accounts at the time of the incident and did not authorize IDScan.net to retain data from its accounts, and that IDScan.net said the incident should have no impact on Caesars Entertainment.

Update, 8:56 p.m. ET: Shortly after this story was published, the Nexus identity theft service website vanished from the darkweb, replacing its login page with a plain text message that reads, “This service is no longer available.”

This is a potentially fast-moving story. Any changes or updates will be noted here along with a timestamp.