Italian Guardia di Finanza has dismantled CINEMAGOAL, an unusual piracy operation whose customers installed an app on their devices that authenticated directly to legitimate Netflix, Disney+, Spotify, Sky, and DAZN. A network of virtual machines in Italy captured fresh authentication and decryption codes from real subscriptions (opened under false identities) every three minutes and redistributed them to subscribers, who streamed at full quality with their real IPs masked. Operation 'Tutto Chiaro' executed 100 searches across Italy, seized servers in France and Germany, and identified about 70 resellers. The first 1,000 subscribers have been fined between €154 and €5,000.
The Dutch Financial Crime Investigation Service (FIOD) has arrested two men and seized 800 servers during raids on data centers in Dronten and Schiphol-Rijk that hosted infrastructure for cyberattacks, disinformation, and influence operations tied to sanctioned Russian and Belarusian entities. The 57-year-old company director and a 39-year-old connectivity provider face charges of indirectly providing economic resources to EU-sanctioned parties. The web hosting company Stark Industries was sanctioned by the EU last May; investigators say its infrastructure was simply transferred to a newly created Dutch company called WorkTitans B.V., trading under THE.Hosting. Mirhosting, which provided physical colocation and connectivity, denies knowingly supporting illegal operations.
A joint operation between French, Dutch and 14 other authorities, coordinated by Europol and Eurojust, has taken down First VPN, a privacy-focused VPN service that was advertised on cybercrime forums as a no-logs option that ignored law enforcement requests. Authorities seized 33 servers across 27 countries, took down the 1vpns.com, 1vpns.net, 1vpns.org domains and the onion mirrors, and questioned a Ukrainian suspect. Investigators infiltrated the infrastructure before takedown and pulled the user database, sharing 506 user identifications and 83 intelligence packages internationally. Europol says the service name turned up in nearly every major cybercrime investigation it has supported in recent years.
Krebs on Security reports that Jacob Butler, the 18-year-old Ottawa resident allegedly known online as 'Dort,' has been arrested and charged in both the US and Canada with running the Kimwolf IoT botnet. KrebsOnSecurity unmasked Butler as the operator on February 28 by tying together his email addresses, forum registrations, and public Telegram and Discord posts. Dort later threatened and swatted researchers including Synthient's Ben Brundage. Ontario Provincial Police executed a search warrant in Ottawa on March 19 and seized devices. Kimwolf competed with Aisuru, JackSkid, and Mossad for the same vulnerable-IoT population. Butler faces up to 10 years if extradited and convicted in the US.
Ukrainian cyberpolice working with US law enforcement have identified an 18-year-old man from Odesa as the suspected operator of an infostealer operation that ran from 2024 through 2025 against customers of a California online retailer. The malware harvested 28,000 customer accounts; the operators used about 5,800 of them to make $721,000 in unauthorized purchases, leaving the retailer with around $250,000 in direct losses including chargebacks. The suspect ran the back-end infrastructure for processing and selling stolen session tokens. Police searched two residences and seized computers, phones, and bank cards. No arrest has been announced yet.
Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit, supported by law enforcement, has disrupted Fox Tempest, a 'malware-signing-as-a-service' offering that abused Azure Artifact Signing (formerly Trusted Signing) to issue legitimate Microsoft-signed certificates for malware. Operators created more than 1,000 certificates and hundreds of Azure tenants using stolen US and Canadian identities, all valid for 72 hours to reduce takedown risk. Microsoft has revoked the certificates, seized the signspace[.]cloud domain, and taken hundreds of supporting VMs offline. The service signed Oyster, Lumma Stealer, Vidar, and ransomware payloads for Rhysida, Akira, INC, Qilin, and BlackByte, used by groups including Vanilla Tempest and Storm-0501.
INTERPOL says a coordinated operation called Ramz, run across 13 Middle East and North Africa countries, has produced 201 arrests, seized 53 servers, and identified 3,867 victims. Algerian authorities took down a phishing-as-a-service operation; Moroccan officials seized hard drives loaded with banking data and phishing kits; and Jordanian police uncovered 15 people running a fraudulent trading platform who turned out to be trafficking victims forced into the work. Group-IB and Team Cymru contributed intelligence on over 5,000 compromised accounts, including some tied to government systems. Participating countries included Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Tunisia, and the UAE.
The FBI Atlanta Field Office and Indonesian authorities have dismantled the W3LL global phishing platform and arrested its alleged developer. W3LL sold a sophisticated phishing kit designed specifically for bypassing multi-factor authentication on Microsoft 365 accounts using adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) techniques. The platform operated as a phishing-as-a-service ecosystem with its own marketplace, support channels, and licensing model, enabling thousands of business email compromise campaigns targeting corporate Microsoft 365 environments. This is described as the first coordinated international law enforcement action against this platform. Group-IB previously estimated W3LL's tools had been used to compromise over 8,000 Microsoft 365 business accounts.
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