Artem Stryzhak was sentenced to 70 months in prison after pleading guilty to using Nefilim ransomware in attacks.

The post Ukrainian Hive and Nefilim Ransomware Affiliate Gets 70 Months in US Prison appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Corey Thuen hires hackers for what he calls ‘the evil bit’ — an adversarial streak he believes is either there or it isn’t.

The post Hacker Conversations: Corey Thuen and the Evil Bit appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Amir Barati, an alleged member of the Mabna Institute, was indicted for targeting universities, private organizations, and government entities in the US and abroad.

The post In Rare Move, Alleged Iranian State Hacker Extradited to US appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Rob Juncker is chief product and technology officer at Mimecast. Is he a hacker? “Unequivocally yes,” he says.

The post Hacker Conversations: Rob Juncker, a Knock at the Door and a Moral Compass appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Pepijn van der Stap was convicted in 2023 for hacking multiple organizations, stealing their data, and extorting them.

The post Dutch Police Arrest Convicted Hacker in ShinyHunters Investigation appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Cameron John Wagenius was sentenced to 70 months in prison for stealing information from the wireless carriers.

The post Prison Sentence for Former US Soldier Who Hacked AT&T and Verizon appeared first on SecurityWeek.

This week on the Lock and Code podcast…

Twenty years ago, a British mathematician named Clive Humby popularized a phrase that came to describe data’s relationship with the entire global economy: “Data is the new oil.”

Pithy as the phrase sounds, it is undeniably true.

Data steers decisions at businesses of every size. Data created entirely new industries built around its capture. And, for a select number of companies, data has produced billions—if not trillions—of dollars in value.

So how is it that, on the dark web, your stolen identity can be purchased for just 95 cents?

That’s what a Malwarebytes researcher found last month after spending 48 hours inside the dark web to investigate cybercrime. Across a variety of forums and directories, he found subscription plans for malware that steals information once implanted on a device. He found guides for deploying social engineering scams. He found people selling their services to build fake websites that trick people into handing over their usernames and passwords. And he found one of the dark web’s most traded commodities—personal data, packaged together about individual people, to help a cybercriminal commit identity fraud.

These packages are called “fullz.” For victims in the United States, a fullz contains a full name, Social Security Number, date of birth, address, and other personal details. That is enough, on its own, for a cybercriminal to potentially open a bogus line of credit, file a fake tax return, access financial accounts, or obtain medical services under someone else’s name.

As we wrote on Malwarebytes Labs:

“For less than the cost of a cup of coffee, a cybercriminal can buy enough information to devastate someone’s financial life.”

It’s the kind of risk that could scare anyone, especially considering the scale behind it. In just the first six months of 2026, Malwarebytes found more than 7,500 compromised data sets on the dark web containing more than 8.4 billion records.

And yet, even today, cybersecurity professionals still get asked why anyone should bother protecting their data.

The public, understandably, are exhausted. With data breaches happening every week—if not every day—cybersecurity can start to feel pointless. With young people unable to build financial security, they start believing that they have nothing worth stealing. And with Big Tech already collecting our every movement, behavior, click, and concern, people understandably feel powerless to fight any kind of data abuse, be it corporate or criminal.

So today’s episode approaches the question from a different direction. This isn’t about why you should protect yourself—plenty of company websites will tell you that, and most of them rely on fear. This is about why hackers want your data in the first place.

Today, on the Lock and Code podcast, host David Ruiz explains how cybercriminals turn a single repeated password into account takeover, how a screenshot of your house from Google Maps became a tool in extortion emails, and why the most benign information about you—an address, an age, one public photo—is often the most useful data a stranger can buy.

Tune in today to listen to the full episode.

Show notes and credits:

Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)

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Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn’t just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.

Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium for Lock and Code listeners.

Thalha Jubair and Owen Flowers were prosecuted over a 2024 cyberattack targeting Transport for London (TfL).

The post Two Scattered Spider Hackers Sentenced to Jail in UK appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Operating as an access broker, the defendant sold unauthorized access to compromised networks to an undercover agent.

The post Jordanian Admits in US Court to Selling Access to 50 Enterprise Networks appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The 44-year-old individual planted remote access malware on a logistics firm’s systems, with help from employees.

The post Dutch Port Hacker Sentenced to Prison appeared first on SecurityWeek.