2026-08-14 19:24:35
It can be daunting to determine who’s responsible for showing ads on the websites we visit, or who’s harvesting data from the mobile apps we use every day. That information is already semi-public, but it is not easily parsed and traditionally much of it has remained walled away in the hands of large advertising platforms. Not anymore: A powerful and free new service called DecryptAds scrapes and correlates this adtech data and makes it simple to quickly learn a great deal about the entities that are tracking you.
A Decryptads summary of the advertising partnerships declared by espn.com.
The newly launched decryptads.com says it is constantly scraping the files that websites and apps make publicly available to disclose the companies that are permitted to run ads or collect user data. These files include:
–ads.txt: all of the adtech companies and data brokers that may run ads or harvest data from the site;
–app-ads.txt: entities that can harvest data from or display ads on mobile and smart TV apps;
–buyers.json/sellers.json: the entities buying, selling or reselling ad inventory for a given site or app.
Zach Edwards is chief research officer for DecryptAds and a threat researcher at the security company Infoblox. Edwards said he and two other founders decided the service was needed because the adtech data in these files is generally only useful when it can be cross-referenced to build a more complete picture of the advertising ecosystem for each website or app.
“It’s an adtech tool but we’re trying to approach adtech from a security perspective,” Edwards said. “It’s really built for a lot of privacy and security use cases that have been dramatically underserved.”
Those use cases, he said, include tracking down the source of malicious ads that try to foist malware on targeted users, identifying ad networks located in adversarial nations, and detecting the fast growing swarms of AI-generated slop websites and apps. And as decryptads.com demonstrates, these potential security and privacy threats are near impossible to detect just by viewing a single apps.txt or app-ads.txt file.
“Supply-chain integrity issues rarely live in a single file,” the site explains. “They show up as broken cross-references between ads.txt, app-ads.txt, and sellers.json files; as cloned declaration sets across unrelated domains; as seller removals that only make sense when viewed across exchanges; and even as supply paths in bid logs that never actually appear in any given publisher’s authorized-seller list.”
A search in DecryptAds for the hugely popular sports network espn.com reveals 143 ad partners and 19 registered data broker domains are listed within its ads.txt and app-ads.txt files. That data broker information is gradually becoming available because four states — California, Oregon, Texas and Vermont — have recently passed laws requiring data brokers to register if they buy or sell data on consumers from those states. DecryptAds reports that almost half of those data brokers are collecting geolocation data from espn.com visitors who aren’t blocking ads, while another three disclose that they collect device fingerprints and sensitive personal information.
A visual representation of the complex ad supply chain declared by espn.com. Image: decryptads.com.
DecryptAds also makes it easy to learn the beneficiaries and national origins of the advertising firms lurking in apps and websites, displaying a conspicuous warning when adtech partners of an app or website are based in “geo-risk” areas like China and Russia, or in countries with strong financial and political ties to both — such as Cyprus and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
According to DecryptAds, espn.com works with four different advertising entities that are based in either Russia, China or the UAE, including the adtech firm Between Digital, which lists a New York address. However, the dossier on Between Digital flags them as a Russian firm, showing that their publisher offers (PDF) are processed through Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest private commercial bank and one of several financial institutions placed under U.S. sanctions in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine. KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from both Between Digital and the company’s founder, and will update this story in the event that either replies.
A search for several top U.S. military news websites — including armytimes.com, airforcetimes.com, defensenews.com, navytimes.com, marinecorpstimes.com and federaltimes.com — shows they all allow Between Digital to serve ads and track users, as well as two entities in the UAE and another in the ownership secrecy haven of Panama. DecryptAds reports that Between Digital is collecting ad data on approximately 55,000 partner websites.
The “Geo Risk” section of decryptads.com.
Pivoting on Between Digital’s app-ads.txt file reveals hundreds of domains featuring simple web-based games that are frequently interrupted by ads. Edwards said Between Digital’s own declarations show the company is listed as both a publisher and a reseller on approximately two-thirds of their portfolio.
“It means they are basically playing both sides of the bidding equation, which creates opportunities to direct client spend at your owned and operated properties or client infrastructure, essentially creating opportunities for conflicts of interest,” Edwards told KrebsOnSecurity. “The problem we have right now is that for years we’ve had almost no one policing these ads.txt and app-ads.txt files.”
The Opera Web browser remains quite popular, and probably many users are unaware that since 2016 it has been majority owned and controlled by the Chinese company Kunlun Tech (the operational headquarters of Opera remain in Oslo, Norway).
Opera.com’s profile at DecryptAds identifies 27 registered data brokers collecting information, including 15 adtech partners in the UAE, six in China, three in Cyprus, two in Russia and one each in Hong Kong and Ukraine. DecryptAds makes clear, however, that these companies represent just seven percent of the adtech partners specified in Opera.com’s ads.txt and app-ads.txt files.
One feature of DecryptAds that sent this author down multiple hours-long research rabbit holes is its Legal Dossier lookup, which takes several minutes for each search but eventually churns out oodles of useful information about who owns a particular domain or app, when it was registered, and any aliases or relationships it may have to adtech companies and other websites or apps.
For example, last month KrebsOnSecurity wrote about researchers from Bitsight who found that an extremely popular line of TV streaming sticks called H96 quietly rent out each user’s Internet connection to strangers. Bitsight also discovered that when these devices aren’t being used to stream pirated video content, they are spoofing themselves as mobile phones clicking ads on AI-generated slop websites.
Bitsight concluded that the same Chinese company that made several of the malicious apps common to all of these H96 streaming sticks — the Fengwo Group — also also ran the network of ads and AI slop websites being clicked on by tens of thousands of these devices that are pretending to be mobile phones.
Examples of ad landing pages linked to the Fengwo Group. These sites were designed to show ads only to H96 devices that were spoofing their device type as mobile phones. Image: Bitsight.
A DecryptAds legal dossier on the (now dormant) Fengwo Group domain name for the AI slop website pictured on the left in the screenshot above (medicalbeautyhub dot com) shows it shares a seller ID (1674071) with a gaming website — giacoloredstones[.]com — which features yet another seller ID (103488000).
Pivoting on that latter seller ID reveals hundreds of active websites within Russia’s Yandex ad system featuring extremely low-quality games or simple utilities that pepper visitors with ads.
Edwards said that when advertising networks suspect a given advertiser is engaged in unauthentic clicks or displaying malicious ads, very often those networks will quietly remove the offender from their list of approved partners without letting anyone else know about their suspicions.
This practice, he said, makes it easier for dodgy adtech firms to avoid accountability and continue victimizing others. To address that visibility gap, DecryptAds features a quiet removals feed that records and correlates all of the sellers.json removals across ad exchanges for the same seller domain or name.
A screenshot of the Quiet Removals Feed at decryptads.com.
“The way the adtech industry works, someone will write a report about ad fraud and only share it with their own clients and they won’t make it public,” Edwards said. “The ban is just removing them from the sellers.json file, but they told nobody. One day it was there, the next it was gone. So if you’re trying to navigate who is suspicious, that’s usually tough to do because there are a lot of adtech companies removing things all at once.”
Malvertising, the term given to the practice of inserting malicious ads that foist malware or redirect visitors to phishing pages, remains an all-too-frequent occurrence in the modern adtech industry. But Edwards said these malicious ads are far more commonly found now on newly generated AI slop websites than on high traffic destinations that typically employ a variety of technologies and third party tools to quickly flag bad ads.
“None of these slop AI content farms are paying for that kind of protection,” he said. “They’re just signing up the lowest quality partners, and it essentially becomes a greased rail to target the users of those sites with malicious ads. Most malvertising attacks don’t happen on espn.com or huffpost.com, but rather [on] some lower quality content farm and someone just went there because it came up in a search.”
Edwards said the AI slop websites are populated with machine-generated blog posts and images, and cover a wide array of themes from home improvement and decorating to food recipes, hunting, cars and consumer technology. He said organizations that get hit with malicious ads are often at a loss for what to do next, unaware that in most cases the answer is one of the entities listed inside the website’s ads.txt or app-ads.txt file.
“A lot of serious organizations are starting to understand that if we’re not breaking down this ad data, we’re not going to know who’s targeting government people with zero-click payloads on an almost daily basis,” he said.
Edwards maintains that truly getting a handle on the malvertising and AI slop problems will require more data-sharing by the major ad networks. Specifically, he says those platforms do not broadly share what’s known as the “supply chain object” or SCO, structured data attached to each advertising bid request that lets buyers see every seller, reseller and intermediary involved in passing an ad impression from the publisher to the final buyer.
“That SCO tells you who sold it or resold it, and who was the final entity that bought the impression that served that malware payload,” Edwards explained. “You may see the malicious zero-click redirection, but without the supply chain object — which is only served server side — you won’t know who targeted your people with malware and won’t have a way to try and prevent it properly. But if we can encourage the adtech industry to expose that SCO, it will get easier to find the culprit behind any one bad ad.”
DecryptAds also offers an application programming interface (API) that allows researchers to automate queries and integrate the site’s functionality into popular AI platforms.
The only sane reaction to the examples described above is to block all online ads outright. This approach is broadly endorsed by security experts because it also makes it more difficult for adtech firms and data brokers to build detailed profiles on you and track your movements around the web and in the real world.
However, much depends on how you normally prefer to browse the Internet, and how much trust you place in third party browser plugins and extensions. For those primarily surfing via a regular desktop or laptop Web browser, uBlock Origin Lite is an excellent free and well-maintained open source option. uBlock Origin also should work with mobile browsers like Firefox, but apparently only on Android-based devices.
Adblock Plus is a decent option for iPhone and iPad users. For power users, Adblock and uBlock Origin both support custom blocking rules from easylist.to, which publishes a frequently updated list that removes most advertisements from webpages.
The well established browser extension NoScript blocks all non-approved Javascript code, and it generally does a fine job blocking most ads from loading. However, script blockers like NoScript may not be suitable for average users who don’t enjoy constantly having to referee which scripts should be allowed to load so that each site displays properly.
More technically inclined/adventuresome readers should strongly consider a hardware approach to blocking ads at the local network level, because that is easily the cheapest, most secure and scalable way to do it. A tiny, low-cost and broadly available computer known as a Raspberry Pi can be turned into a powerful ad blocker for all devices on a local network when fitted with a microSD memory card and a free program called Pi-hole. Once you’ve set it up properly and changed your router’s network settings to use the Pi-hole’s DNS sinkhole and DHCP servers, it should prevent ads from displaying on any devices connected to that network.
Bear in mind that ad blockers often do little to block ads and/or tracking that occurs from within mobile apps that users have chosen to install on their devices. Many websites now push users to install a mobile app, supposedly in order to more fully access and enjoy the site’s services and content. But in my experience, they’re not doing this because the user experience is somehow way better on the app (as LinkedIn tries to convince us non-app users several times a week via email). On the contrary, I find most mobile apps to be horribly designed, annoying, and/or completely unnecessary, and when given the option I will almost always choose to interact with a website or service directly in a Web browser.
No, the cold truth is that big web destinations tend to get pushy with their apps because they make it easier for these companies to keep you on their platforms longer and to collect (and in many cases resell) far more precise data about who, what and where their users are. Also, companies pushing customers the hardest to install mobile apps always seem to liberally opt everyone in to having their data used to train large language models these days. So be cautious about the apps you install on your mobile devices (including any smart TVs!), and poke around their listings at DecryptAds if you want to learn more about their privacy practices and any relationships they may have to adtech firms.
2026-08-12 05:28:35
Microsoft today released updates to remedy at least 398 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software, including one weakness that is already being actively exploited and two others that were publicly detailed prior to today.
Image: Shutterstock, Mallika Home Studio.
August’s overstuffed bundle of patch joy from Microsoft did not eclipse its recording breaking release of more than 570 security updates last month, but it is double June’s then-record batch of nearly 200 fixes. Microsoft has attributed the recent patch deluge to vulnerability discoveries aided by artificial intelligence, and experts roundly agree that Windows users should get used to the idea of Patch Tuesdays (the second Tuesday of each month) covering hundreds of newly discovered security flaws.
Fully 42 of the 398 flaws that Microsoft patched today earned Redmond’s most-dire “critical” rating, meaning they are severe enough that malware or malcontents could exploit them to gain remote control over a Windows computer with little to no help from the user.
The sole known “zero day” bug fixed by Microsoft this month is CVE-2026-68820, a privilege escalation weakness in a core Windows component called afd.sys, which the security firm Automox describes as “the driver behind Windows socket connections on effectively every endpoint.”
“This isn’t a front-door bug,” Automox’s Landon Miles wrote in a Patch Tuesday blog post. “It’s step two in a chain: an attacker phishes their way into a low-privilege foothold, then uses the driver flaw to take the box. The 7.0 score reflects the high attack complexity, because race conditions are fiddly. The exploit has to be thrown over and over until the timing lands. Someone is clearly landing it anyway.”
CVE-2026-62832 is another privilege escalation flaw that Microsoft has labeled likely to be exploited; this flaw, in the Windows User Profile Service, may be related to the recent “LegacyHive” public disclosure from the prolific bug hunter known as Nightmare Eclipse. The other publicly disclosed flaw is CVE-2026-72971, a low-impact local tampering vulnerability that Microsoft reckons is unlikely to be exploited.
Other major software makers are likewise increasing their patch volumes and cadence thanks to AI, including Adobe which last month moved to twice-monthly security bulletins published on the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of each month. Cisco, Google, Mozilla and Oracle also are shipping updates far more frequently and abundantly.
By all accounts, AI is quite good at finding security holes in software. But for now at least, patching the resulting bugpocalypse remains a heavily human-centric endeavor, and the jury is still out on whether AI technologies will turn out to be as good at fixing vulnerabilities as they are at finding and exploiting them. This is an important question when one considers that these same AI technologies also are suggesting fixes for the vulnerabilities they find.
Researchers at 1Password recently examined what happens when different large language models (LLMs) generate vulnerability patches for newly disclosed, complex vulnerabilities. They found the LLMs produced patches that failed to fix the flaw or added a new weakness in the process (or both) more than half the time.
Ed Skoudis, president of the SANS Technology Institute, said his team has seen excellent results using AI to generate patches, provided there are humans in the loop to test the suggested fixes and push for iterative improvements.
“AI is rapidly becoming astonishingly good at finding vulnerabilities, but this research shows that fixing them is a very different problem,” Skoudis wrote in a SANS newsletter today. “Don’t expect one-shot AI patching to work reliably. Instead, iterate, test, challenge, improve, and verify. AI can be an extraordinary patching partner, but today it still needs a skilled human at the keyboard.”
Tyler Reguly at Fortra says while reports of Microsoft patching hundreds of vulnerabilities in one go have prompted some organizations to try to patch faster, it’s important to bear in mind that only one of the almost 400 bugs addressed today is known to be actively exploited. Reguly suggested security leaders check in with their teams to see how they’re handling the increasing workloads, which often involve testing fixes before deploying them in production environments.
“If you’re a chief security officer talk to your teams about how they are shifting or modifying their workflows to better accommodate the patching shift that we’re seeing and support them across various organizational units by enabling the changes they want to see made,” Reguly said. “There’s no need to rush these updates, no matter what various vendors and organizations try to tell you. You need to make sure that you are rolling out safe updates that will not negatively impact your systems.”
Speaking of the humans behind the keyboards, don’t neglect to backup your system and/or data before applying this month’s monster patch load. The day after each month’s Patch Tuesday is sometimes derisively referred to as Reboot Wednesday, but it generally doesn’t hurt to wait a few days to apply these huge update bundles because it sometimes takes a couple of days for the occasional misbehaving patch to get ironed out properly by Microsoft.
For a clickable, per-patch breakdown by severity and urgency, check out this roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center.
2026-08-07 01:00:56
A 26-year-old Canadian man once described as one of the most consequential cybercrime threat actors of 2024 has pleaded guilty to computer fraud and conspiracy to hack and extort more than 165 organizations that used the cloud provider Snowflake. Connor Riley Moucka, of Kitchener, Ontario, also admitted to stealing call and text history records of more than 100 million AT&T customers.
A surveillance photo of Connor Riley Moucka, a.k.a. “Judische” and “Waifu,” dated Oct 21, 2024, 9 days before Moucka’s arrest. This image was included in an affidavit filed by an investigator with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
The U.S. Justice Department said between February and October 2024, Moucka and co-conspirators used stolen login credentials to steal cloud-hosted data belonging to at least 165 customers of a U.S.-based software-as-a-service company.
The hackers targeted stolen credentials for Snowflake customer accounts that did not enforce multi-factor authentication, and extorted or attempted to extort a host of well-known companies, including TicketMaster, Lending Tree, Advance Auto Parts and Neiman Marcus. Snowflake responded to the data thefts by increasing password complexity requirements and enforcing multi-factor authentication.
Moucka adopted new nicknames frequently — sometimes operating multiple identities concurrently — but two of his best-known monikers were “Judische” and “Waifu.” Judische’s admitted role in the Snowflake data thefts was first documented by KrebsOnSecurity in a September 2024 story about the overlap between Western, English-speaking cybercriminals and extremist groups that harass and extort minors into harming themselves or others.
That September 2024 story identified Judische as a software engineer from Ontario who has been involved in numerous data breaches and voice phishing attacks against U.S. companies since at least 2020. A little more than a month later, Canadian authorities arrested Moucka on a provisional warrant from the United States.
The government says Moucka and others used their unauthorized access to steal billions of sensitive customer records and download terabytes of information, “including individuals’ non-content call and text history records, banking and other financial information, payroll records, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) registration numbers, driver’s license numbers, passport numbers, social security numbers and other personally identifiable information. They then extorted victims by threatening to publish data online.”
Moucka also threatened and harassed government officials and security researchers who were helping to track him down. The Justice Department said the conspirators made over $2.5 million in ransom payments, and that in at least one instance, Moucka re-extorted a victim with threats of further disclosure of the victim’s stolen data.
“Moucka used the stolen data of a government officer and members of a then-former government officer’s immediate family in this re-extortion attempt,” reads a statement from the Justice Department.
One of Moucka’s admitted co-conspirators is Cameron “Kiberphant0m” Wagenius, a U.S. Army soldier who pleaded guilty in July 2025 to extorting AT&T and Verizon for their customer account data. Less than a month before Wagenius’s arrest, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive into Kiberphant0m’s various Telegram and Discord identities over the years, revealing how the owner of the accounts told others they were in the Army and stationed in South Korea.
One of several selfies on the Facebook page of Cameron Wagenius.
Kiberphant0m also re-extorted victims. Immediately following Moucka’s arrest, 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 schematics allegedly stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).
Wagenius is set to be sentenced on September 3, 2026. The government says he faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for conspiracy to commit wire fraud, a maximum penalty of five years in prison for extortion in relation to computer fraud, and a mandatory two-year sentence consecutive to any other prison time for aggravated identity theft.
The third alleged co-conspirator is John Erin Binns, 26, an elusive American man who fled the United States after being indicted for his admitted role in a 2021 breach at T-Mobile that exposed the personal information of at least 76 million customers.
Sources close to the investigation said Binns, also known as “IRDev” and “IntelSecrets,” was until recently incarcerated in a Turkish prison, but that he has since been released and has resurfaced online. Those sources said Binns also recently obtained Turkish citizenship, and under Turkish law a citizen cannot be extradited to a foreign country.
An image of a passport that Binns shared in an email to KrebsOnSecurity in Feb. 2023.
Moucka pleaded guilty to four criminal counts, including computer fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy. He is slated to be sentenced on Oct. 27 and faces a mandatory minimum penalty of two years in prison on the aggravated identity theft count, as well as a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison on the remaining counts. Ultimately, it will be up the federal judge how much time Moucka actually serves for his extensive cybercriminal rap sheet.
For an interview with Moucka prior to his arrest and a deeper look at Binns, see our original report on Moucka’s arrest.
2026-07-31 00:49:00
Security experts have been sounding the alarm for years about the risks of using generic TV boxes that promise unlimited content streaming for a one-time fee, warning that they secretly rent the user’s Internet connection out to strangers. But a groundbreaking new analysis finds these devices also routinely spoof themselves as mobile phones clicking ads on AI-generated websites as part of a sprawling operation that seeks to defraud online merchants and advertising networks.
Pedro Falé is a threat researcher with the security firm Bitsight. Falé told KrebsOnSecurity he was able to peer inside a vast and complex ad fraud network by registering an expired domain name that was used to coordinate fake ad clicks across a particularly popular brand of these streaming devices known as H96.
An H96 TV streaming device currently advertised for sale on Amazon.
Falé said the domain he scooped up was previously used for telemetry, periodically collecting full hardware information and the entire list of installed apps from tens of thousands of H96 streaming sticks plugged into television sets around the globe. But upon inspecting the traffic being funneled to the domain, he discovered nearly all of the TV boxes transmitting data claimed to be mobile phone models from a variety of manufacturers, including Samsung, Vivo, Huawei, and Xiaomi.
“We noticed something was wildly wrong,” Falé said. “Multiple devices reporting to this factory Android TV Box backdoor were ‘phones.'”
Image: Bitsight.
The researcher found all of the devices reported having the same two apps installed, and that those apps were made by a company called Zhejiang Fengwo IoT Technology Ltd, an entity founded in 2019 in mainland China which operates an ad-publishing portfolio under the name Fengwo Group. Further investigation into the Fengwo Group revealed it has registered multiple patents that match the inner workings of these apps.
“Bitsight TRACE identified several Hong Kong, Singapore, and single person ‘legal’ shell identities used to collect the monetization and traced the operation back to a mainland China company known as Zhejiang Fengwo IoT Technology Co., Ltd, which operates under the Fengwo Group,” Falé wrote in a report released today about their findings.
Falé said an analysis of the apps shows they help to coordinate an ad fraud network that uses these H96 devices as a captive traffic source to click on ads at AI-generated websites operated by the Fengwo Group.
Bitsight discovered the websites contain machine-generated news articles and graphics across a range of categories, including finance, health, education, gaming, music and food blogs. But they also found none of those sites displayed ads unless the device visiting the page matched the spoofed mobile profile of these H96 devices.
The domain for the Fengwo Group — fwgcloud[.]com — claims the company is “redefining the boundaries of human-AI interaction,” and that it has created more than 120,000 “AI digital humans” available to rent for everything from emotional companionship to 24/7 customer service and creative design.
The homepage for fwgcloud dot com.
Falé said the Fengwo Group’s domain shared its SSL certificate data with other domains associated with the apps found on H96 devices, specifically the phone spoofing mechanism. He noted the domain also has an internal wiki platform that directly ties the Fengwo Group to a proprietary implementation of a Google-built visual programming language called Blockly, which was originally designed to help kids learn how to write software.
According to Bitsight, the Fengwo Group’s employees use Blockly to build the sham websites, allowing low-skilled operators to drag blocks of code together in their Blockly editor — without any need to understand what the underlying code blocks do or how they work.
The Blockly homepage.
“An operator can drag blocks together in their Blockly editor, to define each fraud routine, given a task type,” reads Bitsight’s report. “Once the routine is saved, it gets exported as JavaScript and uploaded to the S3 buckets. An operator doesn’t need as much understanding of the underlying technicalities, as it is all set in place for ease of use.”
Bitsight even found one of the Fengwo Group app developers mentioning exactly these advantages, noting the developer remarked that “only a small number of highly-skilled developers are needed to build the template execution-unit images,” and that “developers who create execution units from those templates have significantly lower technical requirements, greatly reducing the company’s operating costs.”
Falé said if a user’s H96 streaming stick is selected for a specific fraud task, it will be pushed the appropriate Blockly module according to the task desired, which can include silently launching a web browser, visiting websites, browsing pages, managing tabs, and clicking on ads.
To ensure the TV boxes masquerading as mobile phones can reliably click on ads displayed via the AI-generated websites, the Fengwo group “fuses three vision and reasoning systems into a single interface,” allowing the bots to correctly identify an ad on the webpage and navigate the site much like a human would, the Bitsight report observed.
Examples of ad landing pages linked to the Fengwo Group. Image: Bitsight.
Bitsight found the H96 devices were either relaying residential proxy traffic or participating in ad fraud, but never both at the same time. In fact, they concluded that when these TV boxes detect an HDMI signal from an attached television — indicating the user intends to stream video content — the box is usually functioning as a residential proxy. When the TV is off, it switches back to waiting for ad fraud jobs.
Falé said he believes the TV boxes are set up this way because its ad fraud activities are far more resource intensive and could interfere with the device’s stated purpose — streaming video content over the Internet.
Despite repeated warnings from the FBI and security industry leaders about the security and privacy risks of using these streaming devices, major e-commerce providers like Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg and others continue to sell hundreds of different models and brands that bundle unofficial versions of Google’s Android operating system and are frequently marketed (via online influencers) as a way to access a broad array of streaming services and live broadcasts without a subscription.
Image: fbi.gov.
In addition to enlisting the user’s TV box in ad fraud networks, these off-brand streaming devices almost universally come with residential proxy software pre-installed. This software rents the user’s Internet address out to anonymous paying customers, who run the gamut from aggressive content scraping firms to ticket scalpers and outright cybercriminals.
What’s more, because these generic (and generally dirt cheap) TV boxes are all horribly insecure by default and bereft of any kind of authentication, installing one on your home or office network only invites further mischief. In January, the proxy tracking service Synthient documented how multiple botnets had rapidly enslaved millions of TV boxes using a complex interplay of security vulnerabilities in both the residential proxy software and the streaming devices themselves.
Bitsight said it tracked approximately 38,000 TV boxes globally phoning home to the expired Fengwo Group domain, and based on that number the report estimates this ad fraud network brings in revenues of close to $50,000 a day (not counting substantial revenue from the residential proxy side of the business). However, Falé emphasized that these estimates are highly conservative and based on telemetry from just one of the Fengwo Group’s core (but older) domains.
As for the Fengwo Group’s claim to have 120,000 “digital humans” at their disposal, Bitsight’s report concludes it could be just a clever marketing scheme and/or a way to avoid drawing suspicion to the company’s operations.
“Historically, when dealing with proxy services or DDoS, we sometimes see these websites undertake inconspicuous facades, so as not to advertise their DDoS capability or botnet size,” Falé wrote in the report. “This could also be the case here.”
If the Fengwo Group truly does have tens of thousands of “AI humans” at its beck and call, it does not appear to have dedicated any of them to fielding inquiries from its own website. KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from the Fengwo Group by emailing the contact address listed on the company’s homepage, but the request bounced back with the reply, “Your message couldn’t be delivered to postmaster@fwgcloud[.]com. Their inbox is full, or it’s getting too much mail right now.”
As Bitsight’s analysis shows, when it comes to TV boxes and streaming sticks, it’s best to stick to name brands from reputable manufacturers, and then to be sparing and careful with any apps you choose to install on the device — as many of those can bundle residential proxy software as well. Google says consumers can confirm whether or not a device is built with the official Android TV OS and Play Protect certification by following these instructions.
Additionally, Synthient maintains a running list of IoT devices that have been known to ship to consumers with residential proxy software and other malicious apps pre-installed. Careful readers will notice Synthient’s list includes other IoT devices apart from streaming sticks and boxes: As the FBI has warned, residential proxy software has also been found in other popular consumer IoT devices from random brands, particularly digital photo frames.
2026-07-22 09:10:38
The home appliance giant LG Electronics USA said this week it plans to suspend any apps built for its smart TVs that turn one’s television into an always-on residential proxy node. The move comes less than a month after researchers found that more than 42 percent of games and other apps available for download on LG’s webOS store allow unknown third-parties to route their Internet traffic through a user’s TV.
Proxy SDK prevalence among smart TV apps for LG (webOS) and Samsung (Tizen OS) televisions. Image: Spur.us.
On July 2, we featured research by the security firm Spur that examined the prevalence of residential proxy software development kits (SDKs) in smart TV apps. Spur found more than 42 percent of apps available for download on LG smart TVs include SDKs that turn one’s television in a proxy node indefinitely, and that more than a quarter of the apps made for Samsung’s Tizen operating system had similar residential proxy components.
Responding to questions about Spur’s research, LG Senior Vice President John Taylor told KrebsOnSecurity the company was working with app developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform. Developers that fail to comply, he said, will find their apps suspended.
“A residential proxy network is not an intended use for LG smart TVs, and LG Electronics is working with developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform,” Taylor said. “If this option is not removed, these apps will be suspended.”
Taylor said LG is committed to keeping residential proxy networks out of its smart TV apps going forward, and that the company’s review of those apps is “well underway now.”
“As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance platform quality and the user experience, LG will continue to strengthen our evaluation process for developer-submitted apps, including those that incorporate residential proxy SDKs,” Taylor wrote in an emailed statement.
App makers looking for ways to monetize their creations can turn to residential proxy providers, which pay developers to include SDKs that turn the user’s device into a residential proxy node that is rented to paying customers. In the case of LG and Samsung smart TVs, Spur found residential proxy SDKs bundled with everything from simple games like Pac-Man to screensavers and file utilities.
A Pac-Man smart TV app from Bright Data offers users the choice between viewing ads in the game or agreeing to allow their TV to serve as a residential proxy node. Image: Spur.us.
Spur’s report found the residential proxy network Bright Data accounted for a majority of proxy SDKs across both Samsung and LG smart TVs. In a statement shared with KrebsOnSecurity, Bright Data said its network is built on consent and responsibility and operates by LG and Samsung terms.
“Every peer opts in through a dedicated screen and receives value in return; every customer is vetted, and our practices have now undergone a second independent audit by PwC,” the statement reads. “We remain committed to an open, transparent internet where legitimate businesses, researchers, and institutions can responsibly access data that lives in the public domain.”
Bright Data and other proxy providers named in Spur’s report all say they follow rigorous know-your-customer processes to validate legitimate uses of their services, which is often heavily tied to content-scraping activities by said customers. The proxy companies also say they incorporate technological countermeasures to prevent proxy service customers from being able to interact with and control other devices on the proxy user’s local network.
Spur argues the problem is not that residential proxy networks exist, but rather that they are being embedded at scale in devices that most consumers do not think of as computers and are not equipped to audit.
“A one-time consent prompt buried in a TV app is not a substitute for meaningful transparency, ongoing control, and platform oversight,” Spur’s Trevor Sutter wrote. “The risk is amplified when consent comes from individuals within the household who use the device but shouldn’t give consent, such as minors.”
LG’s announcement that it is culling residential proxy SDKs from its app store is welcome news, but the company recently came under fire for another questionable partnership: Pimping McAfee security products via software drivers included in its high-end LCD monitors.
Earlier this week, the Youtube channel Gamers Nexus showed that certain LG LCD monitors will automatically install an app that promotes paid McAfee antivirus subscriptions, and that the app arrives through Windows Update without an approval prompt.
Update, July 22, 1:06 p.m. ET: Added statement from Bright Data.
2026-07-15 03:22:42
Microsoft Corp. today released software updates to plug at least 570 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, almost triple the number of vulnerabilities the software giant fixed in its record-smashing Patch Tuesday release last month. Microsoft attributed the burgeoning patch counts to vulnerability discoveries aided by artificial intelligence.
Nearly 60 of the bugs quashed in July’s Patch Tuesday earned a “critical” severity rating, meaning miscreants or malware could use them to seize remote control over a Windows device with little or no help from the user. Microsoft also addressed three zero-day flaws, including two that are already being exploited in the wild.
Two of the zero-day weaknesses allow an attacker to elevate their user rights on a Windows system, as do approximately 250 other elevation of privilege flaws fixed this month; they include CVE-2026-56155 — an Active Directory Federation Services bug — and CVE-2026-56164, a Microsoft Sharepoint vulnerability.
CVE-2026-50661 is a security feature bypass in Windows BitLocker that could allow attackers to gain access to encrypted data if they have physical access to the device. Microsoft said this bug has been detailed publicly, but that it is not aware of any active exploitation.
In a blog post on July 9, Microsoft Executive Vice President Pavan Davuluri wrote that Windows users will notice “a higher volume of security updates included in each security release” as a result of AI aiding in the discovery of vulnerabilities.
“The pace of vulnerability discovery is changing with advances in AI making it possible to find more issues, faster, across more code, with new mechanisms that can accelerate both discovery and analysis,” Davuluri wrote.
Jack Bicer, director of vulnerability research at Action1, called attention to CVE-2026-48561, a remote code execution flaw in Microsoft Copilot (with a 9.6 CVSS threat score) that allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code over the network. Microsoft says an attacker could exploit this bug by hosting a malicious website that causes Microsoft Edge for Android to automatically send crafted prompts to Copilot when a user visits the site.
As AI advances the state of vulnerability discovery and remediation, it is also making it easier for attackers to quickly devise working exploits for known software flaws. Microsoft has long labeled security bugs using its “exploitability index,” which is Redmond’s best guess as to how likely it is that attackers will be able to figure out a reliable way to exploit a given vulnerability.
But Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, argues that Microsoft’s exploitability index needs to do a better job of shifting with the machine speed of discovery. For example, Microsoft originally gave this month’s SharePoint zero-day an exploitability rating of “less likely,” although the flaw was added to CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list on July 1.
“Anthropic’s Red Team’s own findings for known vulnerabilities (n-days) revealed how fragile this system has become, with its Mythos Preview model being able to produce proof-of-concept exploits for 13 of 14 vulnerabilities that were rated ‘Exploitation Less Likely’ or ‘Exploitation Unlikely,'” Narang said. “What this means is that our way of looking at Patch Tuesday has changed, because the exploitability index is centered around humans, not AI tools, and as these tools continue to improve, defense needs to improve alongside it.”
Chris Goettl at Ivanti observed that the record patch numbers from Microsoft come as a number of other major software makers are increasing their patch cadence, including Adobe which announced today it is moving to twice-monthly security bulletins published on the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of each month (Adobe also cited AI for accelerating their patch cycles). Cisco, Mozilla and Oracle also are shipping updates more frequently, while Google’s patch batches in June 2026 totaled more than 900 security fixes, Goettl noted.
Backing up your Windows system and/or data is always a good idea before applying operating system updates. Given the volume of patches addressed this month it may be wise for end users to wait a few days before applying these fixes. It’s not uncommon for security patches to introduce system stability issues, and those chances probably increase quite a bit with the gigantic patch count released today.
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