The cybercrime group Qilin has emerged as the world’s most active ransomware affiliate program, claiming at least 365 victim organizations in the past three months alone. But even top Russian hackers make operational security mistakes, and the administrator of Qilin has made a few key missteps over the last decade that all point to a 36-year-old man living in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Operating since September 2022, the Russia-based ransomware group Qilin is the currently the most industrious ransomware-as-a-service gang, according to a report (PDF) this month by the cybersecurity firm NCC Group (KrebsOnSecurity profiled the administrator of the second most active ransomware group — The Gentlemen — in June).

Qilin attracts affiliates to hack into companies and deploy ransomware by offering them at least 80 percent of any extortion amount paid by victims. Its members practice the “double extortion” model, stealing sensitive data before encrypting systems and threatening to publish the files online. Unlike most ransomware partnerships based out of Russia, Qilin is happy to team with English-speaking affiliates, and its leader has shared on Telegram that they’ve worked with ransomware groups like Scattered Spider and RansomHub.

The head of Qilin goes by the handle “Haise,” but they weren’t always known by this nickname. It is not uncommon for cybercriminals to change their handle periodically as an operational security (opsec) measure. Doing so is generally a smart move, because it helps to sever one’s ties to older identities that may not have been as careful on basic opsec, such as separating their real life identity from their cybercrime activities. But even those cautious criminals will sometimes have to reference their past monikers when applying for membership at a new forum. And forums eventually get hacked or seized. That is precisely what happened with Haise.

The cyber intelligence platform Intel 471 records that in June 2022, Haise applied for membership to RAMP, a closely-guarded Russian cybercrime forum that was created as a haven for ransomware affiliate programs. Intel 471 has indexed direct messages from RAMP (the forum was seized by the FBI in January 2026), and those missives show the RAMP administrator approved Haise’s application, referring to this user as Haise and by their Telegram username: Alexbigboss44.

Searching Intel 471 for Alexbigboss44 reveals this was the Telegram account name shared by the user Rjun on the Russian cybercrime forums Exploit and XSS two years earlier in 2020. The cyber intelligence platform Flashpoint finds Alexbigboss44 is a prolific participant in cybercriminal forums and Telegram channels, primarily focused on the illicit trade of traffic, logs, and corporate access [full disclosure: Flashpoint is an advertiser on this blog].

Flashpoint says this user was engaged in high-volume acquisition of Facebook logs and Google Ads accounts to facilitate fraudulent advertising and gambling schemes, and that they functioned as a broker and operator — managing a network of traffickers and purchasing compromised data to fuel their operations.

The link between the Qilin administrator Haise and the much older Rjun and Alexbigboss44 accounts was shared privately earlier this month by IntelHawk, which describes itself as an AI-based platform capable of de-anonymizing threat actors based on historical usernames, stylometry and other signals.

IntelHawk founder and chief technology officer Leo Bogod said an analysis of these identities shows a progression from novice arbitrageur and credit card fraudster in 2018–2019 to a more experienced participant and organizer of complex cybercrime-related activities in 2020–2023, with increasing attention to malware, botnets, and payment infrastructure.

Where does this connection between these threat actor identities lead? Intel 471 finds that by the time Alexbigboss44 was applying for membership to RAMP, Rjun was already a longtime member of several other Russian crime forums, including Darkmarket, Verified, and Zloy. Intel 471 says Rjun signed up at all of these sites with the email address mail-30a@mail.ru.

The identity threat protection firm Spycloud found the email address mail-30a@mail.ru at one time used the password “Rjun132” [Spycloud is also an advertiser on this blog]. A search for that email at the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence shows that it appeared in records maintained by gosuslugi.ru, the official digital platform for state and municipal services in the Russian Federation.

Gosuslugi was breached in late 2025, reportedly exposing more than 20 million records with full names, birth dates, and mobile numbers. According to the leaked Gosuslugi records (via Constella), the address mail-30a@mail.ru belongs to 36-year-old Aleksey Mikhailovich Yakovtsev from St. Petersburg, Russia.

Flashpoint finds Haise has long used a Telegram account with the user ID 118329521, recording more than 5,000 messages from this user since 2018. Records from Russia’s education watchdog Rosobrnadzor reveal that Mr. Yakovtsev went to grade school in Murmansk and that he holds a master’s degree in computing and information systems.

A search on this Telegram ID in Constella shows it is linked to the Russian phone number +79602347275. Pivoting on that phone number in Constella reveals it is connected to the email addresses aleksey1990yakov@mail.ru and rjun123321@mail.ru. IntelHawk finds that +79602347275 belongs to Yakovtsev’s biological sister, and that Aleksey often used his sister’s email address when registering at different websites.

That phone number appears on several airline flight records at Russian travel agencies that have experienced a data breach in recent years, and those records show Aleksey Yakovtsev, born August 18, 1990, flew between St. Petersburg and Murmansk at least three times between 2013 and 2014.

More recent flight records show that while Mr. Yakovtsev has not traveled by plane outside of Russia, he does fly frequently between Saint Petersburg and Sochi. Often called the “Russian Riviera,” Sochi is Russia’s largest resort city, situated along the coast of the Black Sea and about 1,200 miles south of Saint Petersburg by plane.

Attempts to reach Mr. Yakovtsev via email and phone were unsuccessful.

Further reading: Gang Exposed, an anonymous Twitter/X account that has a history of successfully deanonymizing suspected ransomware actors, reached similar conclusions about Haise’s real-life identity, crediting IntelHawk’s platform for helping to connect the dots.

Microsoft did another four-digit patch drop today, releasing updates to fix almost 1,100 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software. This month’s Patch Tuesday addresses 63 critical flaws — including a zero-day in Microsoft Outlook — and comes amid important security updates from other software makers, including Adobe, Apple, Google and Mozilla.

November’s patch release from Redmond tackles 1,093 vulnerabilities, fixing 63 “critical” flaws that can be exploited to seize control over a Windows system with little or no help from users. Nearly half of those critical bugs are remote code execution vulnerabilities. Overall, 535 of the flaws addressed this month allow an attacker to elevate their privileges on a vulnerable device.

This latest round of updates means Microsoft has shipped more than 5,100 security patches so far this year, a staggering number considering that a year ago Microsoft was averaging around 100 patches per month. Microsoft credits advances in artificial intelligence for helping to find (and fix) such a large volume of security bugs in recent months. Last month, Microsoft pushed more than 1,400 fixes.

According to Redmond, just one of the flaws is already seeing active exploitation: CVE-2026-124194, a spoofing bug in Outlook. The advisory for CVE-2026-124194 says it affects Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise and editions of Microsoft Office.

Several other major software makers pushed security updates this week to fix critical weaknesses in their products. Apple on Monday released out-of-cycle security updates to fix at least nine vulnerabilities in iOS/iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and visionOS. Among the weaknesses reportedly fixed in Apple’s release include an iMessage flaw that could let a remote attacker join a group chat and receive its messages; the updates also fix a separate iMessage flaw that could let someone added to a group access messages sent before they joined.

Lee Neely, an instructor at the SANS Institute, noted that Apple backported the fix to iOS 18.

“I take notice when Apple releases fixes to more than two versions,” Neely wrote in a SANS newsletter today. “You really need to get to version 27.2.1 of their OSes and push folks who are holding onto devices which cannot run the current version. The best plan often involves setting an upgrade date for old hardware. Run through all your Apple devices and make sure everything is up to date, don’t assume the fixes went out automatically.”

Google this week released Chrome version 157.0.8103.50, which resolves nine security holes, including CVE-2026-125350, the sixth zero-day vulnerability this year for Chrome (this bug also being patched in Chromium-based browsers like Edge). The latest Chrome version follows its November 3 release, which fixed 213 vulnerabilities. A new version of Mozilla Firefox out today (Firefox 160) resolves almost 100 CVEs, about half of them high severity.

Adobe today released patches for at least 110 vulnerabilities across a range of products, with nearly half of the flaws rated high severity. Adobe said there is no evidence any of the security holes it addressed this month are being actively exploited.

Chris Goettl, vice president of product management at Ivanti, said it’s easy for security teams at large enterprises to feel overwhelmed by the volume and criticality of patches from Microsoft lately. But he notes that while some 95,000 vulnerabilities have been assigned CVEs this year across all vendors, only 217 have so far this year been added to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) list maintained by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

“Roughly four in ten of this year’s exploited vulnerabilities sit in operating systems, endpoint software, browsers, and server platforms, which a continuous patch strategy can close quickly,” Goettl said.”The rest calls for exposure management alongside patching, especially the 44% that sit in edge devices and IT management or remote access tools, the internet-facing systems that hold privileged access. Teams that can quickly identify those assets, confirm exposure and act on confirmed exploitation can focus on the small slice of vulnerabilities attackers are actively using, while the rest stays on the normal patch cadence.”

Please don’t neglect to back up any important data if you haven’t recently; generally speaking, this is a task best accomplished before applying operating system updates. As ever, if you experience any issues applying this month’s bundle of love from Microsoft, please drop a comment about it in the space below.

Several staffers at the White House are using computers or mobile devices equipped with residential proxy services that render their internet address available for others to rent, security experts warned today. One of the proxy services is a Russian company whose founder’s web hosting business was ground zero for cyberattacks against election systems in Arizona and Illinois in 2016.

The security firm Layer3 Intel said it detected multiple residential proxy nodes beaconing out from the internet address network reserved for the Executive Office of the President (AS2650). Layer3 said the proxy activity was relatively persistent between October 5 to November 3, and that a review of the proxies available from AS2650 showed they exited from the White House network 236 times during that period.

The proxy tracking company Synthient said on Twitter/X that the activity it saw coming from AS2650 was related to multiple Windows 11 installations of a service called Infatica, a proxy program that is often integrated into “free” mobile and desktop applications. Infatica’s founder Vladimir Fomenko is a Russian man whose hosting firm King Servers was home to six of the eight internet addresses used by Russia’s state security services to compromise databases for election systems in Arizona and Illinois in 2016.

There are dozens of residential proxy providers with varying degrees of legitimacy, many of them based in China or Russia. But at a minimum, they all make it simple for customers to rent someone else’s internet address as a way to anonymize their web traffic or spoof their true location. From a website’s perspective, the traffic from a proxy network user appears to originate from the rented IP address, not from the proxy service customer.

Layer3 Intel said the proxy exit nodes at the White House came from six internet addresses, on 26 of the 30 days, and that most of the activity happens in the evening, between 5 p.m. and midnight.

Incredibly, Infatica was not the only proxy service that reportedly has been reselling access to White House internet addresses: Layer3 Intel said it found 28 separate residential proxy services were able to exit through this network.

“This is public access,” the Layer3 Intel team wrote. “Anybody can obtain it by signing up to a public residential proxy service, paying a few dollars and sending requests through it. We did not selectively target this network or try to make our probes exit from it. We caught this by chance, simply by requesting global rotating access through these services.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As detailed in several stories here over the past year, residential proxy services are a major source of unwanted and often malicious traffic, including account takeover and other cybercrime activity, advertising fraud, and mass content scraping for AI projects.

They can also introduce serious security risks. In late 2025, it was discovered that cybercriminals were mass exploiting a widespread vulnerability in these services that allowed them to probe each proxy endpoint’s local network for vulnerable systems to infect with malware. In January 2026, dozens of proxy services were forced to patch their networks after Synthient Founder Ben Brundage showed how cybercriminals were abusing a vulnerability in these residential proxy services to seize control over devices inside the local networks of unsuspecting users.

“Some of these resellers sell bandwidth for as low as 60 cents a Gigabyte, that means for less than a dollar you can gain access into some of the most confidential and trusted networks,” Brundage told KrebsOnSecurity. “The reseller ecosystem further enables this with any criminal able to buy access while skipping KYC [Know Your Customer] processes.”

All too often, these proxy services are beaconing out from employee devices brought into the workplace. App developers can embed software development kits (SDKs) provided by the residential proxy networks to monetize their software, allowing them to receive a small amount of money on each installation.

As risky as residential proxies can be for unsuspecting end users, they are all too commonly found on government and corporate networks. In a webinar in January 2026, the proxy tracking service Spur found residential proxies in nearly 300 government owned and operated networks, 318 utility companies, 166 healthcare companies or hospitals, and 141 companies in banking and finance. In a blog post earlier this year, the security firm Infoblox said it discovered that fully 65% of its customer base was querying one or more residential proxy related domains.

Google said today it worked with industry partners to dismantle a botnet made up of more than 1.3 million Android TV set-top boxes that ship with malicious software which secretly rents the user’s Internet connection out to strangers and conducts advertising fraud. Experts involved in the takedown say the action is likely to sever the botnet’s access to more than 10 million additional compromised systems, including other Internet of Things (IoT) products such as Android-based healthcare devices and karaoke machines.

A report from the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said Google has severed ties with Videostrong Technology Co., a TV box manufacturer in China that GTIG and other industry experts concluded was responsible for including malware that enrolled more than 1.3 million set-top boxes in a botnet dubbed “XCPE” (named after one of the malware’s core code components).

The report said the XCPE botnet loaded the user’s device with software that makes their Internet address available for resale by multiple “residential proxy” services, which allow customers to rent Internet addresses as a way to anonymize their web traffic or spoof their true location. As detailed in several stories here over the past year, residential proxy services are a major source of unwanted and often malicious traffic, including account takeover activity, advertising fraud, and mass content scraping for AI projects.

“Videostrong monetized the backdoor by selling access to criminal affiliates and loading those affiliates’ malware modules onto infected devices,” the GTIG post reads, noting that Google took legal action to take down the domains and servers Videostrong used to control the botnet and install additional malware. “A device manufacturer intentionally infecting their users with malware is an unacceptable breach of trust, and represents a serious risk to those users. Without users’ knowledge or consent, infected devices were offered as a distribution mechanism for a wide array of criminal actors.”

The report notes that while TV boxes made up the the majority of the botnet, the same XCPE malware was found in other Android-based IoT products, including telehealth devices, karaoke machines, and even digital signage systems.

Google said it requires all Android device makers to pass compatibility and security tests to ensure their products don’t harm users, but that Videostrong nevertheless found a way to load their malicious software immediately after a user boots up one of these devices for the first time (Google says it has since addressed that weakness).

The GTIG report calls out a number of residential proxy providers whose software development kits were routinely downloaded by devices infected by the XCPE botnet. Those include AppSalt, also known as Honeygain, which is owned by the Vilnius, Lithuania-based Oxylabs. In October 2026, Oxylabs was relaunched under a new brand called Source, after receiving $130 million in funding from private equity firm Warburg Pincus that reportedly valued the business at $3.6 billion. Oxylabs did not respond to a request for comment.

Another provider linked to the botnet was NetNut, a once sprawling residential proxy company operated by the publicly-traded Israeli company Alarum Technologies. In July 2026, the FBI worked with industry partners to seize hundreds of domains associated with NetNut, saying the company was responsible for operating a separate botnet called Popa that enslaved TV boxes as residential proxies. Other proxy providers named in the GTIG report include EarnFM, Traffmonetizer, Jaguar, LINKFOG, BMW/IPWeb and GaGaNode.

Google’s announcement credits a number of industry partners, including Synthient, a startup that tracks proxy providers. In January 2026, Synthient published research into the rapid spread of the Kimwolf botnet, which at the time was hammering networks worldwide with record-smashing DDoS attacks. Synthient documented how Kimwolf infected millions of Android set-top boxes virtually overnight, using a widespread vulnerability in these residential proxy services to compromise other Android-based devices inside the local networks of unsuspecting TV box users.

Synthient’s research caused dozens of residential proxy providers to patch their networks, which helped to fragment the Kimwolf botnet into much smaller pieces that made its incessant and disruptive DDoS attacks far easier for network operators to manage. It also attracted the attention of the Motion Picture Association (MPA), a trade group representing the major Hollywood studios, which partnered with Synthient to purchase and tear apart a number of popular Android TV set-top boxes — including some that were being infected by Kimwolf and other IoT botnets.

In a report published today, Synthient examined a popular, pre-infected TV box sold under the brand MECOOL by a publicly traded company in China called Skyworth Technology, concluding that MECOOL also bundled the malware from Videostrong Technology Co. and likewise installed AppSalt/Honeygain and other proxy components.

Synthient founder Ben Brundage told KrebsOnSecurity that Videostrong’s malware also distributed software for the proxy service Grass. In our November 2025 story, “Is Your Android TV Streaming Box Part of a Botnet?” we quoted a researcher from Censys who found the popular Superbox TV streaming device bundled Grass’s residential proxy software. We also quoted the Grass founder, who denied any affiliation with the TV box maker.

That November 2025 story noted that Superbox and similar Android TV set-top boxes gain new customers primarily by engaging influencers on Tiktok and other social networks who praise the product’s ability to offer hundreds of (pirated) pay TV streaming services for a one-time fee.

Likewise, Synthient’s report observes that the MECOOL set-top boxes exploded in popularity after the product was endorsed in 2023 by the Youtube channel Linux Tech Tips, which has an audience of nearly 17 million subscribers.

The GTIG report estimates the XCPE botnet takedown should sever access to at least 10 million additional compromised devices, noting that the various proxy and ad fraud affiliates of Videostrong “each have diversified distribution channels for their modules beyond XCPE.”

Synthient’s Brundage echoed that conclusion, calling the 1.3 million number “highly conservative.”

“The scale of affected devices is likely way higher,” he said. “This is probably the largest operation against backdoored TV boxes that we’ve seen.”

Further reading:
Plume Security Labs white paper on the XCPE botnet (PDF)
Black Lotus Labs writeup on LinkedIn
TrendAI’s analysis
Synthient’s list of affected devices, broken down by model number

Expect to see quite a few websites serving error pages today: Nearly 70 percent of websites need to update their core software to fix a pair of vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to seize full control over affected servers. Experts say there are working exploits for the flaws, and that these critical bugs are already being exploited in the wild.

The flaws at issue are present in PHP, the programming language that powers sites running on a large number of web publishing systems, including Drupal, Magento, Joomla and WordPress. Earlier today, PHP released an emergency security update to fix two critical bugs that can allow an attacker to execute code of their choosing on a vulnerable server.

Reuters reports that government websites in Europe and elsewhere went offline today after the PHP vulnerabilities were disclosed. Cloudflare said it has already detected some exploitation of the flaw, and that at 3:02 am (UTC) it implemented web application firewall rules to protect websites from attack traffic seeking to exploit the bugs, which could cause a denial of service condition, remote code execution, and data exposure.

OpenAI, which was involved in the vulnerability research and outreach, said “given the severity of these flaws and PHP’s widespread use, we consider this one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory.”

Censys, a company that tracks the technology used by Internet hosts, said a recent scan identified approximately 2.58 million Internet facing hosts and 54.9 million web properties running PHP.

Security experts at Wiz said every PHP version released in the last decade is affected by at least one of these vulnerabilities [full disclosure: Wiz is an advertiser on this blog].

“These findings rank among the most severe vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, and arguably in software history,” reads a blog post published today by a team of researchers at Wiz, which was one of several organizations credited with discovering the vulnerabilities. “The underlying flaws had been present for decades, but demonstrating their exploitability required an exceptionally complex chain of steps, at the edge of what human researchers could practically achieve. Frontier AI models substantially reduced that barrier, turning a longstanding flaw into an exploit.”

The Wiz researchers say it is likely the PHP vulnerabilities will be mass-exploited to install web-based backdoors or “web shells,” which give attackers a web-based panel that allows them to remotely control infected sites. Wiz said that prior to the PHP bugs being publicly disclosed, the company worked with the PHP team, Calif and OpenAI to measure the size of the problem and coordinate patch verification and disclosure.

The PHP zero-day vulnerabilities are being tracked by their CVE numbers, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, and they affect all web servers running PHP 5.4 or later. The bugs are fixed in PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35.

According to Wiz, PHP is so deeply embedded in many web applications that we are likely to see organizations struggling to patch these vulnerabilities for some time to come, comparing this PHP vulnerability pair with the Log4Shell weakness that emerged in 2021 — a widespread, severe-as-it-gets security flaw in Log4j, a popular Java logging framework.

“A vulnerability in core PHP reaches far beyond a single application,” the Wiz researchers wrote. “PHP runs across clouds, hosting providers, content-delivery networks and millions of independently managed servers. Reducing exposure before the technical details became public required coordinated work across that entire ecosystem.”

The SANS Internet Storm Center is keeping an eye on major software platforms that are shipping updates to deal with these PHP flaws. For example, Ubuntu just released updated PHP packages. For a technical deep-dive on these vulnerabilities that tells the timeline of the discovery of these bugs in a comic book style, check out this post from Calif, another technology company credited with finding the PHP flaws.

This is a fast-moving story. Updates will be noted here with timestamps.

Update, 2:30 pm ET: Add figures from Censys and a link to Calif’s writeup.