After a series of setbacks, the notorious Black Basta ransomware gang went underground. Researchers are bracing for its probable return in a new form.

The pecking order of ransomware gangs is always shifting and evolving, with the most aggressive and reckless groups netting big payouts from vulnerable targets—but often ultimately flaming out. Russian-speaking group Black Basta is the latest example of the trend having stalled out in recent months due to takedowns by law enforcement and a damaging leak. But after some quiet weeks, researchers warn that, far from being dead and gone, the actors involved with Black Basta will reemerge in other cybercriminal groups—or potentially already have—to start the cycle once again.

Since appearing in April 2022, Black Basta has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in payments targeting an array of corporate victims in health care, critical infrastructure, and other high-stakes industries. The group uses double extortion to pressure targets into paying a ransom—stealing data and threatening to leak it while also encrypting a target’s systems to hold them hostage. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned last year that Black Basta had gone on a spree targeting more than 500 organizations in North America, Europe, and Australia.

A major international law enforcement takedown in 2023 of the “Qakbot” botnet hindered Black Basta’s operations, though. And, this February, a major leak of the group’s internal data—including chat logs and operational information—rocked the group. Since then, it has gone dormant. Researchers warn, though, that the criminals behind Black Basta are already on the move and are almost certain to stage a resurgence.

“We haven’t seen the leaders of Black Basta regroup, but they’re going to continue to work, they’re going to continue to operate,” says Allan Liska, a threat intelligence analyst focused on ransomware at the security firm Recorded Future. “There’s still too much money in it not to. And ransomware actors are creatures of habit just like anyone.”

The leak revealed details about Black Basta’s malware and technical capabilities, its internal squabbles, and clues about the identity of the actors behind the group, particularly its main administrator. The exposed data was from what might be considered Black Basta’s heyday, September 2023 to September 2024. During this period, the group didn’t shy away from the possibility of causing harm with its breaches. A particularly aggressive attack last year on the St. Louis–based health care network Ascension, for example, reportedly caused disruptions in care, including rerouted ambulances.

Black Basta struggled to maintain its momentum, though, after the 2023 Qakbot takedown, known as Operation Duck Hunt.

“It was a huge blow to them, and they were trying to get back on their feet—use other botnets, work on a custom botnet, but that didn’t really work, and ultimately their infection rate was declining,” says Yelisey Bohuslavskiy, chief research officer of the threat-intelligence firm RedSense. “They had fewer targets and were getting into fewer networks. They were still dangerous, but there was this feeling that there was deterioration going on.”

Even in this decline, there was evidence that Black Basta was trying to mount a resurgence. In addition to exploring new malware, the gang started focusing on compromising targets through social engineering and influence campaigns, particularly spam email operations and tech support scams. But after the leak, Bohuslavskiy says, members began moving to other groups and have already been buoying their new gangs.

Like any industry, the Russian cybercriminal landscape is full of people who have worked together or competed against one another for years. Black Basta was able to establish itself so quickly because many of its members were involved with previous cybercriminal operations, including the longtime cybercriminal gang Conti. Conti is a well-known group because of another internal leak incident in 2022 that exposed its inner workings and ties to the Kremlin. After Conti’s demise, researchers tracked its members as they dispersed and started new hacking groups, including Black Basta.

While Black Basta is not unique in its tactics and methods, researchers say that the group is noteworthy for its technical skills and depth of cybercriminal experience, which allowed it to push the envelope on the approaches a ransomware group can take.

“The people behind Black Basta have been in a lot of networks and have a lot of experience,” Recorder Future’s Liska says. “They aren’t the most prolific group but I think they are one of the more dangerous groups because they are so skilled.”

February’s leaks revealed, for example, that Black Basta developed a tool for automatically infiltrating network devices like routers that had easily-guessable passwords. Automating a tool to guess passwords is not a groundbreaking capability, but it is the type of project that many ransomware groups wouldn’t think to take on themselves or have the capacity to develop in-house.

In a report last week analyzing the leaked Black Basta communications, researchers from the security firm Trustwave wrote, “The messages show how members exhibit remarkable autonomy and creativity, adapting quickly to evolving security landscapes.”

The Black Basta leak is a cache of 200,000 messages and other data apparently taken from the group’s Matrix chat server, bestflowers247.online, by user “ExploitWhispers.” The trove includes the text of the group’s communications plus time stamps, sender and recipient details, and other metadata. The identity and motivation of “ExploitWhispers” is unknown, but they claimed to have leaked the data because Black Basta had allegedly attacked Russian banks, violating the unwritten rule that cybercriminals can operate in Russia with impunity so long as they do not attack Russian organizations.

While the exposure that came with the leaks was a death knell for Black Basta as a group, it is more likely to be a setback than a permanent defeat for its members.

“We haven’t seen the leaders of Black Basta regroup, but they’re going to continue to work, they’re going to continue to operate,” Recorded Future’s Liska says. “There’s still too much money in it not to. And ransomware actors are creatures of habit just like anyone.”

RedSense’s Bohuslavskiy adds that he has already seen signs of Black Basta members cropping up in other active gangs, including “BlackSuit,” “INC,” “Lynx,” “Cactus,” and “Nokoyawa.”

“Now that Black Basta is done, a lot of the people have migrated, and there are a number of other ransomware groups that are getting infusions of Black Basta talent,” Bohuslavskiy says.

Black Basta: The Fallen Ransomware Gang That Lives On

An email sent by the Department of Homeland Security instructs people in the US on a temporary legal status to leave the country. But who the email actually applies to—and who actually received it—is far from clear.

The United States Department of Homeland Security sent an email this week informing people living in the US on a temporary legal status that their "parole" has been revoked and instructed them to leave the country "immediately." However, the email was also addressed to at least one US citizen, an immigration attorney from Massachusetts. And it remains unclear who must abide by the email's instructions—or why the apparent revocation of legal immigration status was delivered via email at all.

The email informs the recipient that “DHS is now exercising its discretion to terminate your parole,” which it says will go into effect “7 days from the date of this notice.” The email appears to be similar, if not identical, to messages received by users of CBP One, an app developed during the Biden administration that allows non-citizens from certain countries to schedule appointments at US points of entry in an effort to seek asylum. A spokesperson for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) tells WIRED, however, that the email was sent more broadly.

“CBP has issued notices terminating parole for individuals who do not have lawful status to remain,” says CBP assistant commissioner for public affairs Hilton Beckham. “This process is not limited to CBP One users and does not currently apply to those paroled under programs such as U4U and OAW.”

U4U refers to Uniting for Ukraine, a program launched under the Biden administration to allow for expedited immigration to the US for Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war against its neighboring country. Former President Joe Biden began OAW, or Operation Allies Welcome, in 2021 following the US military’s exit from Afghanistan to allow for the safe resettling of “vulnerable Afghans, including those who worked alongside us in Afghanistan for the past two decades,” according to DHS.

The email itself does not identify these or any other exemptions, nor does it make clear to whom it applies beyond the recipient. Beckham also confirmed that the email was sent to whatever email address the agency had associated with the intended target, leading to confusion for at least one immigration attorney.

“Some personal news: the Department of Homeland Security has given me, an immigration lawyer born in Newton, Massachusetts, seven days to leave the US,” wrote Nicole Micheroni, a partner at  Cameron Micheroni & Silvia LLC, in a post on Bluesky on Friday night. “Does anyone know if you can get Italian citizenship through great-grandparents?”

Micheroni tells WIRED that she first thought the email was intended for one of her clients, but she quickly noticed that it was only addressed to her.

“I don't feel like I'm actually going to be deported in seven days, but it's concerning that this is the level of care they're using to send these out,” Micheroni says. She adds that it’s possible that the DHS email was “intended for one of my clients or somebody else,” as it’s not uncommon for immigrants in the US to list their attorneys as the point of contact.

The Trump administration has sought to revoke the parole of some 532,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans who entered the US under a Biden-era humanitarian parole program. While it moved to subject them to expedited deportation effective April 24, on Thursday a federal judge in Boston said she would issue a protective order blocking that attempt. However, CBP's Beckham says people covered by the order did not receive the email, which stipulates that it does not apply to people who “have otherwise obtained a lawful basis to remain” in the US.

“Thursday’s order pertains to the CHNV program, a categorical parole that was not sent termination notices,” Beckham says. “Aliens from those countries who did not enter through the CHNV program may have been subject to the termination notices.”

Attorney Lauren Regan, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Civil Liberties Defense Center, tells WIRED that the lack of clarity about whether the revocation of temporary parole applies to the recipient of the email is likely causing fear and confusion among many immigrants, especially those without access to adequate legal guidance.

“So many people don’t have a lawyer, or their lawyer has 6,000 clients,” Regan says, which “completely overloads” the attorneys who often provide pro bono legal services to immigrants.

“A lot of people that are here on parole status don't know the nuances of immigration law, so they get this email and they don't know if it applies to them,” Micheroni says. “And most of them assume that it does because everything is really scary for people right now.”

It’s also unclear whether the email is related to recent efforts by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). In an April 10 post on X, DOGE claimed that “CBP identified a subset of 6.3k individuals paroled into the United States since 2023 on the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center watchlist or with criminal records. These paroles have since been terminated with immediate effect.”

Beckham did not immediately respond to questions about whether the email was intended for these 6,300 individuals, nor did she answer WIRED’s questions about how many people received the email.

Then there’s the matter of the email being an email at all. Regan says that “it is absolutely not common” for a change in legal immigration status to arrive via email, which typically happens in person or via certified mail. “People would think it’s a phishing email or something not legitimate,” Regan says. Also, the fact that the email does not appear to have been first posted on a government website added to questions about its authenticity.

“Normally if the government is going to change a practice, they would first do it on their websites,” Regan says, adding, “but the fact that this was not on the website first and then sent out as a direct communication is very, very unusual.”

Regan also notes that many immigrants do not have email addresses, and therefore couldn’t receive the communication in the first place.

Even for Micheroni, a US citizen and immigration attorney, the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement practices have made life less stable. The email only made matters worse.

“I have gotten some serious inquiries from my parents or other family members or friends being like, ‘what do I do if you stop answering me or if you disappear? Like, who do you want me to call?’” she says.

“And if people in my life are feeling this way, and this is what I do, I know a lot about it,” Micheroni adds. “I can't imagine what it's like for people that don't fully understand immigration law.”

_Updated at 4 pm ET: Added additional comment from CBP clarifying that Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans who entered the US under the so-called CHNV program did not receive the email._

Homeland Security Email Tells a US Citizen to 'Immediately' Self-Deport

Plus: The Department of Homeland Security begins surveilling immigrants' social media, President Donald Trump targets former CISA director who refuted his claims of 2020 election fraud, and more.

The Israeli spyware maker NSO Group has been on the US Department of Commerce “blacklist” since 2021 over its business of selling targeted hacking tools. But a WIRED investigation has found that the company now appears to be working to stage a comeback in Trump's America, hiring a lobbying firm with the ties to the administration to make its case.

As the White House continues its massive gutting of the United States federal government, remote and hybrid workers have been forced back to the office in a poorly coordinated effort that has left critical employees without necessary resources—even reliable Wi-Fi. And Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) held a “hackathon” in Washington, DC, this week to work on developing a “mega API” that could act as a bridge between software systems for accessing and sharing IRS data more easily.

Meanwhile, new research this week indicates that misconfigured sexual fantasy-focused AI chatbots are leaking users' chats on the open internet—revealing explicit prompts and conversations that in some cases include descriptions of child sexual abuse.

And there's more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories, and stay safe out there.

In a secret December meeting between the US and China, Beijing officials claimed credit for a broad hacking campaign that has compromised US infrastructure and alarmed American officials, according to Wall Street Journal sources. Tensions between the two countries have escalated sharply in recent weeks, because of President Donald Trump's trade war.

In public and private meetings, Chinese officials are typically firm in their denials about any and all accusations of offensive hacking. This makes it all the more unusual that the Chinese delegation specifically confirmed that years of attacks on US water utilities, ports, and other targets are the result of the US's policy support of Taiwan. Security researchers refer to the collective activity as having been perpetrated by the actor “Volt Typhoon.”

Meanwhile, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, along with the FBI and Pentagon’s counterintelligence service, issued an alert this week that China’s intelligence services have been working to recruit current and former US federal employees by posing as private organizations like consulting firms and think tanks to establish connections.

**DHS Is Now Monitoring Immigrants’ Social Media for Antisemitism**

US Citizenship and Immigration Services said on Wednesday that it is starting to monitor immigrants' social media activity for signs of antisemitic activity and “physical harassment of Jewish individuals.” The agency, which operates under the Department of Homeland Security, said that such behavior would be grounds for “denying immigration benefit requests.” The new policy applies to people applying for permanent residence in the US as well as students and other affiliates of “educational institutions linked to antisemitic activity.” The move comes as Immigration and Customs Enforcement has made controversial arrests of pro-Palestinian student activists, including Mahmoud Khalil of Columbia University and Rumeysa Ozturk of Tufts University, over alleged antisemitic activity. Their lawyers deny the allegations.

**Trump Revokes Security Clearance, Orders Investigation of Ex-CISA Director**

President Trump this week ordered a federal investigation into former US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director Chris Krebs. An executive order on Wednesday revoked Krebs’ security clearance and also directed the Department of Homeland Security and the US attorney general to conduct the review. Krebs was fired by Trump in November 2020 during his first term after Krebs publicly refuted Trump’s claims of election fraud during that year's presidential election. The executive order alleges that by debunking false claims about the election while in office, Krebs violated the First Amendment's prohibition on government interference in freedom of expression.

In addition to removing Krebs' clearance, the order also revokes the clearances of anyone who works at Krebs' current employer, the security firm SentinelOne. The company said this week in a statement that it “will actively cooperate in any review of security clearances held by any of our personnel” and emphasized that the order will not result in significant operational disruption, because the company only has a handful of employees with clearances.

**NSA, Cyber Command Officials Cancel RSA Security Conference Appearances**

NSA Cybersecurity Division Director Dave Luber and Cyber Command Executive Director Morgan Adamski will no longer speak at the prominent RSA security conference, scheduled to begin on April 28 in San Francisco. Both appeared at the conference last year. A source told Nextgov/FCW that the cancellations were the result of agency restrictions on nonessential travel. RSA typically features top US national security and cybersecurity officials alongside industry players and researchers. President Trump recently fired General Timothy Haugh, who led both the NSA and US Cyber Command.

China Secretly (and Weirdly) Admits It Hacked US Infrastructure

Some misconfigured AI chatbots are pushing people’s chats to the open web—revealing sexual prompts and conversations that include descriptions of child sexual abuse.

Several AI chatbots designed for fantasy and sexual role-playing conversations are leaking user prompts to the web in almost real time, new research seen by WIRED shows. Some of the leaked data shows people creating conversations detailing child sexual abuse, according to the research.

Conversations with generative AI chatbots are near instantaneous—you type a prompt and the AI responds. If the systems are configured improperly, however, this can lead to chats being exposed. In March, researchers at the security firm UpGuard discovered around 400 exposed AI systems while scanning the web looking for misconfigurations. Of these, 117 IP addresses are leaking prompts. The vast majority of these appeared to be test setups, while others contained generic prompts relating to educational quizzes or nonsensitive information, says Greg Pollock, director of research and insights at UpGuard. “There were a handful that stood out as very different from the others,” Pollock says.

Three of these were running-role playing scenarios where people can talk to a variety of predefined AI “characters”—for instance, one personality called Neva is described as a 21-year-old woman who lives in a college dorm room with three other women and is “shy and often looks sad.” Two of the role-playing setups were overtly sexual. “It’s basically all being used for some sort of sexually explicit role play,” Pollock says of the exposed prompts. “Some of the scenarios involve sex with children.”

Over a period of 24 hours, UpGuard collected prompts exposed by the AI systems to analyze the data and try to pin down the source of the leak. Pollock says the company collected new data every minute, amassing around 1,000 leaked prompts, including those in English, Russia, French, German, and Spanish.

It was not possible to identify which websites or services are leaking the data, Pollock says, adding it is likely from small instances of AI models being used, possibly by individuals rather than companies. No usernames or personal information of people sending prompts were included in the data, Pollock says.

Across the 952 messages gathered by UpGuard—likely just a glimpse of how the models are being used—there were 108 narratives or role-play scenarios, UpGuard’s research says. Five of these scenarios involved children, Pollock adds, including those as young as 7.

“LLMs are being used to mass-produce and then lower the barrier to entry to interacting with fantasies of child sexual abuse,” Pollock says. “There's clearly absolutely no regulation happening for this, and it seems to be a huge mismatch between the realities of how this technology is being used very actively and what the regulation would be targeted at.”

WIRED last week reported that a South Korea–based image generator was being used to create AI-generated child abuse and exposed thousands of images in an open database. The company behind the website shut the generator down after being approached by WIRED. Child-protection groups around the world say AI-generated child sexual abuse material, which is illegal in many countries, is growing quickly and making it harder to do their jobs. The UK’s anti-child-abuse charity has also called for new laws against generative AI chatbots that “simulate the offence of sexual communication with a child.”

All of the 400 exposed AI systems found by UpGuard have one thing in common: They use the open source AI framework called llama.cpp. This software allows people to relatively easily deploy open source AI models on their own systems or servers. However, if it is not set up properly, it can inadvertently expose prompts that are being sent. As companies and organizations of all sizes deploy AI, properly configuring the systems and infrastructure being used is crucial to prevent leaks.

Rapid improvements to generative AI over the past three years have led to an explosion in AI companions and systems that appear more “human.” For instance, Meta has experimented with AI characters that people can chat with on WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger. Generally, companion websites and apps allow people to have free-flowing conversations with AI characters—portraying characters with customizable personalities or as public figures such as celebrities.

People have found friendship and support from their conversations with AI—and not all of them encourage romantic or sexual scenarios. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, people have fallen in love with their AI characters, and dozens of AI girlfriend and boyfriend services have popped up in recent years.

Claire Boine, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Washington University School of Law and affiliate of the Cordell Institute, says millions of people, including adults and adolescents, are using general AI companion apps. “We do know that many people develop some emotional bond with the chatbots,” says Boine, who has published research on the subject. “People being emotionally bonded with their AI companions, for instance, make them more likely to disclose personal or intimate information.”

However, Boine says, there is often a power imbalance in becoming emotionally attached to an AI created by a corporate entity. “Sometimes people engage with those chats in the first place to develop that type of relationship,” Boine says. “But then I feel like once they've developed it, they can't really opt out that easily.”

As the AI companion industry has grown, some of these services lack content moderation and other controls. Character AI, which is backed by Google, is being sued after a teenager from Florida died by suicide after allegedly becoming obsessed with one of its chatbots. (Character AI has increased its safety tools over time.) Separately, users of the generative AI tool Replika were upended when the company made changes to its personalities.

Aside from individual companions, there are also role-playing and fantasy companion services—each with thousands of personas people can speak with—that place the user as a character in a scenario. Some of these can be highly sexualized and provide NSFW chats. They can use anime characters, some of which appear young, with some sites claiming they allow “uncensored” conversations.

“We stress test these things and continue to be very surprised by what these platforms are allowed to say and do with seemingly no regulation or limitation,” says Adam Dodge, the founder of Endtab (Ending Technology-Enabled Abuse). “This is not even remotely on people’s radar yet.” Dodge says these technologies are opening up a new era of online pornography, which can in turn introduce new societal problems as the technology continues to mature and improve. “Passive users are now active participants with unprecedented control over the digital bodies and likenesses of women and girls,” he says of some sites.

While UpGuard’s Pollock could not directly connect the leaked data from the role-playing chats to a single website, he did see signs that indicated character names or scenarios could have been uploaded to multiple companion websites that allow user input. Data seen by WIRED shows that the scenarios and characters in the leaked prompts are hundreds of words long, detailed, and complex.

“This is a never-ending, text-based role-play conversation between Josh and the described characters,” one of the system prompts says. It adds that all the characters are over 18 and that, in addition to “Josh,” there are two sisters who live next door to the character. The characters’ personalities, bodies, and sexual preferences are described in the prompt. The characters should “react naturally based on their personality, relationships, and the scene” while providing “engaging responses” and “maintain a slow-burn approach during intimate moments,” the prompt says.

“When you go to those sites, there are hundreds of thousands of these characters, most of which involve pretty intense sexual situations,” Pollock says, adding the text based communication mimics online and messaging group chats. “You can write whatever sexual scenarios you want, but this is truly a new thing where you have the appearance of interacting with them in almost exactly the same way you interact with a lot of people.” In other words, they’re designed to be engaging and to encourage more conversation.

That can lead to situations where people may overshare and create risks. “If people are disclosing things they’ve never told anyone to these platforms and it leaks, that is the Everest of privacy violations,” Dodge says. “That’s an order of magnitude we've never seen before and would make really good leverage to sextort someone.”

Sex-Fantasy Chatbots Are Leaking a Constant Stream of Explicit Messages

The Israeli spyware maker, still on the US Commerce Department’s “blacklist,” has hired a new lobbying firm with direct ties to the Trump administration, a WIRED investigation has found.

Shortly after Donald Trump declared victory in November, NSO Group cofounder and majority owner Omri Lavie rushed to X to congratulate him, speaking of a “new chapter where the world goes back to common sense,” while accusing the outgoing Biden administration of being “weak.” In another tweet, he gushed in Hebrew that Republicans “won in every category: the presidency, Congress, Senate, and the popular vote.”

Lavie’s enthusiasm is understandable. His company—frequently associated with alleged human rights abuses, most recently in February when journalists in Serbia were targeted with its Pegasus spyware—had a significant stake in a Trump victory, with the hopes of regaining the ability to freely do business with US entities. In a comment to Amnesty International, NSO stated, in part, that its “commitment to maintain the highest standard of ethical conduct as well as confidentiality towards our customers is paramount and is consistent with industry norms and our legal obligations.”

The Israeli spyware vendor has been on the US Commerce Department’s “blacklist” for more than three years, meaning it cannot do business with US companies without specific government approval. NSO Group poured at least $1.8 million into an aggressive pre-election lobbying effort, focusing primarily on Republican senators and representatives, with some meetings occurring as often as eight times. Yet the company remains on the Entity List.

Now, with a new occupant in the White House, NSO Group appears to be shifting its political strategy.

The company seems to have either terminated or altered its engagement with several of its previous lobbying consultancies in Washington—some of which were closely aligned with the Democrats—and has started working with a key new lobbying partner: the Vogel Group.

Founded by Alex Vogel, who served as chief counsel to former Senate majority leader Bill Frist, the Vogel Group is providing NSO Group with “strategic advisory on cybersecurity policy matters,” according to lobbying disclosure documents filed on March 10.

The Vogel Group’s connection to the Trump administration includes areas of key interest to NSO Group. One of the Israeli spyware vendor’s new lobbyists, Jonathan Fahey, joined Vogel’s Washington, DC, office as a principal on January 29 and served in various roles during Trump's first term, including acting director and acting principal legal adviser at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, and general counsel to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy—all three relevant departments for a company selling surveillance technology.

Another Vogel Group staffer, Hayden Jewett, is listed in disclosure records as assigned to lobby on behalf of NSO group. Jewett served as a congressional staff liaison to President Trump’s 2016 inauguration, facilitating coordination between congressional offices and the inaugural committee.

Law firm Holtzman Vogel—of which Alex Vogel is a partner—was founded by his wife, Jill Holtzman Vogel, a former Virginia state senator, a former chief counsel of the Republican National Committee (RNC), and a current principal at the Vogel Group. The firm has reportedly worked for the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee and received in 2024 over $9.3 million in reported payments, with significant political funding from Republican organizations.

Holtzman Vogel also represented former Metropolitan Police Department lieutenant Andrew Zabavsky, who was pardoned by Trump in January 2025 for his conviction for obstruction of justice related to the investigation into the death of 20-year-old Karon Hylton-Brown, a case that sparked protests ahead of the 2020 US election.

Bill McGinley, a principal at the Vogel Group and former assistant to the president and cabinet secretary during Trump’s first term, left the lobbying firm after Trump appointed him to White House counsel on November 12. He was then reassigned as counsel to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on December 4, only to leave on January 23.

“Lobbyists and advisers who have passed through the revolving door, having worked in the previous Trump White House or for the campaign, as well as those who are big campaign donors have a unique ability to bend the ear of the new administration,” says Dan Auble, a senior researcher at the nonprofit OpenSecrets, which tracks US political spending. “That access is very valuable.”

NSO Group spokesperson Gil Lainer declined to comment on the scope of the contract with the Vogel Group when asked by WIRED. The Vogel Group did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

**Closing the Circle**

NSO Group’s recent lobbying efforts appear to have mainly focused on Republican lawmakers, more than executive branch power players, particularly as the Biden administration had been engaged in a crackdown on commercial spyware. The company previously worked with several lobbying contractors, with whom it appears to have either terminated or altered its registrations.

These include its registrations under Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) with Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP and Chartwell Strategy Group, as well as registrations under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) with law firms Paul Hastings LLP and Steptoe LLP. Pillsbury previously engaged Chartwell Strategy Group to provide NSO Group with “strategic communications counsel.” Chartwell Strategy Group has now, for the first time, registered under the LDA as a lobbyist for NSO Group, while the only current active registration of NSO Group under FARA is with Paul Hastings LLP.

Lobbyists representing foreign commercial interests—if their work is not intended to benefit a foreign government or political party—can be exempt from FARA and instead register under the LDA, which has no requirement to report specific meetings and is, overall, far less transparent than FARA.

Much of the public knowledge about NSO Group’s lobbying efforts came from FARA filings. Since both the Vogel Group and Chartwell Strategy Group are now registered under the LDA, it will now be more difficult to monitor their lobbying efforts.

Examining NSO Group's past and present consultants reveals numerous individuals who, one way or another, have been associated with the Trump administration. These people are not all lobbyists, but they do have direct connections to Trump world. They include David Tamasi, managing director at Chartwell Strategy and DC chairman of Trump’s 2016 joint fundraising committee, who bundled more than $500,000 for Trump’s campaign and the RNC in 2020, and at least $15,000 in 2024. His firm, a key player in NSO Group’s lobbying, had been actively preparing clients for Trump’s return.

Other NSO-connected figures also have close Trump ties: Bryan Lanza, a partner at Mercury Public Affairs, which consulted for the company from 2020 to 2021, is a veteran Trump ally; Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, was paid nearly $100,000 by NSO Group’s parent firms, according to the The Washington Post, and was recently appointed by Trump to a West Point advisory board; Jeff Miller, who raised millions for Trump, received $170,000 from an NSO-linked company and was spotted at Trump’s 2024 election night event at Mar-a-Lago; and Rod Rosenstein, Trump’s former deputy attorney general, represented NSO Group in a lawsuit and previously helped justify Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey.

Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, Chartwell Strategy Group, Paul Hastings LLP, and Steptoe LLP did not reply to WIRED’s request for comment. Nor did Flynn, Miller, or Rosenstein. Tamasi did not respond in time for publication.

**What Counts as a Win**

As of early March—before Vogel Group’s registration as a lobbyist for NSO Group—there had been no indication that the Trump administration intended to remove the company from the Entity List, according to a source familiar with the administration’s moves regarding spyware, who asked not to be named in order to discuss confidential matters. However, recent comments by NSO Group’s Lavie soft-peddled the impact of the Entity List on the company’s ability to operate in the US.

“\[The Americans\], when they say ‘blacklist,’ it sounds much more dramatic to me than it actually is,” Lavie claimed during an interview in Hebrew on an Israeli podcast following Trump’s election. He added: “You can still do business in the United States; it is definitely not a barrier for us to sell in the US.”

“In practice, we are on the list of Commerce, and what this does for us from a regulatory perspective, it simply forces American companies—if we want to buy technology from them—to ask for permission to sell us the technology. That's all,” Lavie said.

​​Lobbying efforts can target different parts of the US government. By lobbying the executive branch (the president and agencies), lobbyists can influence how laws are enforced rather than what the laws say. In contrast, when lobbying Congress, the focus is on passing, blocking, or amending laws by influencing legislators.

For example, for a company to be removed from the Entity List, it must go through a lengthy administrative process that includes a review by an interagency committee composed of representatives from the departments of Commerce, State, and Defense, among others. Although Congress could theoretically influence this process, it is not directly involved.

During the presidential transition period, NSO Group mainly focused on Congress and reached out to at least 10 Republican senators, representatives, and their staff, before beginning its outreach with the incoming administration. On February 2, the company shared its annual transparency report with Trump’s new deputy national security adviser, Alex Wong.

The Vogel Group could play a key role in supporting NSO Group if it attempts to engage with the new executive branch, including the president’s executive office, the National Security Council, and the State, Justice, and Commerce Departments, among other relevant agencies. Such engagement might aim not only at addressing NSO Group’s placement on the Entity List, but also at challenging the spyware-related visa restrictions imposed by the previous administration. In addition, the firm could potentially assist in efforts to roll back Executive Order 14093, signed by President Joe Biden, which continues to restrict the US government’s use of commercial spyware.

Asked whether the Trump administration intends to uphold the EO, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declined to comment.

“Much is at stake if the US revokes Executive Order 14093, an order that sets standards on US acquisition of spyware, as access to the US market, and US purchasing power, are great tools in shaping the global scope and scale of the market for spyware,” says Jen Roberts, the Atlantic Council’s associate director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative and coauthor of a recent major report on the commercial spyware industry. Roberts also highlighted the need to better regulate US outbound investment into such technologies.

**Watching for Signs**

During Trump's first term, the FBI secretly acquired the Pegasus spyware for limited testing in 2019 and seriously contemplated its operational deployment; while during the final months of the administration in 2020, the US initiated a deal that financed the purchase of the Israeli spyware for Colombian security forces, according to the Colombian ambassador to the US and reported by Drop Site News. (The deal was finalized in 2021, after Trump left office.) In an official statement, NSO Group confirmed its dealings with Colombia but denied claims that the software was purchased irregularly. The New York Times also reported that in 2018 the CIA had purchased Pegasus for the government of Djibouti to conduct counterterrorism operations, while the Secret Service held discussions with NSO Group the same year.

The access and influence NSO Group could attain through lobbying efforts by companies like the Vogel Group and Chartwell Strategy Group could lead to a more favorable political environment and, in turn, potentially increase business opportunities under a second Trump administration—something very hard for outsiders to measure, given the opaque nature of government procurement of surveillance technologies.

In the coming weeks and months, NSO Group’s interactions with US government officials, facilitated by its lobbying, will be critical in achieving such a favorable political environment. Caroline Glick, an adviser to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has also been recently lobbying the Trump White House—among others—on the matter of “request\[ing\] to check for options for lifting sanctions on Israeli technology companies,” according to reports in the Israeli media.

Experts closely monitoring the commercial spyware industry are raising the alarm about the prospect of NSO Group regaining business under Trump—further exacerbated by new reports that the company has been simultaneously pushing its interests on the international stage through the so-called Pall Mall Process, a UK- and France-led initiative to regulate such technologies.

“NSO has become a toxic brand that is widely associated not just with human rights abuses but also with national security threats to US, UK, France, and other countries,” says Natalia Krapiva, senior tech-legal counsel at civil-liberties-focused nonprofit Access Now.

Lainer, the NSO Group spokesperson, tells WIRED that the company “complies with all laws and regulations and sells only to vetted intelligence and law enforcement agencies, which use these technologies daily to prevent crime and terror attacks.” Lainer adds that NSO “has initiated and implemented the industry’s leading compliance and human rights program, which protects against misuse by government entities and investigates all credible claims of misuse”

Ultimately, the current administration will have the final say on how the US regulates NSO Group.

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who has actively worked to address concerns related to surveillance and spyware, tells WIRED that “the Biden Administration blacklisted NSO” because its tool was used to “maliciously targeting journalists, human rights workers, and even US government officials around the world on behalf of foreign dictators and making all Americans less safe.”

“If Donald Trump puts the NSO Group back in business,” Wyden adds, “he'll be directly responsible for opening up new threats to our national security and enabling atrocities by foreign dictators.”

Spyware Maker NSO Group Is Paving a Path Back Into Trump’s America

Plus: Another DOGE operative allegedly has a history in the hacking world, and Donald Trump’s national security adviser apparently had way more Signal chats than previously known.

The biggest news this week is inarguably the Trump administration’s baffling tariffs, which have rattled the global economy, impacting everything from the US tech industry to literal penguins, leaving most of the world wondering what comes next. But if you’re looking for a mystery that doesn’t feel quite so, well, _existential_, look no further than Indiana University.

On March 18, the FBI raided the homes of Xiaofeng Wang, a data privacy professor and researcher who worked at the IU for more than 20 years. The same day, according to a termination email viewed by WIRED, Wang was fired from his job, and people soon noticed that he and his wife seemed to have disappeared.

A WIRED investigation found that the university was looking into whether Wang received unreported research funding from China prior to his position being terminated. IU also removed from its website Wang’s profile as well as the profile of his wife, Nianli Ma, who worked as a library systems analyst. An attorney for Wang and Ma say they are “safe,” and Wang has reportedly taken a position at a university in Singapore. As of earlier this week, the couple’s attorney was unaware of any charges against either of them.

The large language models behind generative AI tools may be black boxes, but one company’s leaky server has provided some accidental insight into how people are using these tools. The short answer? It’s not great. Security researcher Jeremiah Fowler discovered an unsecured database with more than 95,000 records linked to South Korea-based image-generation tool GeNomis. The records contained prompts for creating images, as well as some images themselves, which included de-aged pictures of celebrities like Ariana Grande and Beyoncé made to look like children, and what appeared to be AI-generated child sexual abuse material. The GeNomis website went offline hours after WIRED reached out for comment.

And that’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories, and stay safe out there.

The Trump administration has reportedly fired the director of the National Security Agency at the urging of far-right activist Laura Loomer. According to multiple reports, Loomer brought to an Oval Office meeting on Wednesday a list of about a dozen officials she claimed were insufficiently loyal to President Donald Trump. Among them were General Timothy Haugh—who led both the NSA and US Cyber Command—and his civilian deputy, Wendy Noble, who has reportedly also been removed from her post.

According to CNN, Loomer specifically targeted Haugh, arguing for his removal because he had been selected by Mark Milley, the former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman. Milley, who publicly clashed with Trump, was quoted in a book by journalist Bob Woodward calling the former president “fascist to the core.” In a post on X, Loomer claimed that Haugh and Noble “have been disloyal to President Trump. That is why they have been fired.”

Haugh’s and Noble’s reported dismissals came just hours after several National Security Council staffers were also forced out following the Oval Office meeting that included Loomer.

Speaking aboard Air Force One on Thursday, Trump confirmed the NSC dismissals and acknowledged Loomer’s role in advising him. “She makes recommendations … and sometimes I listen to those recommendations … I listen to everybody and then I make a decision,” he said.

Loomer, who has promoted conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks and espoused anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric, has become an increasingly vocal presence within Trump’s political orbit. In recent weeks, she has publicly attacked members of Trump’s own team, accusing them of undermining his agenda. “Laura Loomer is a very good patriot,” Trump said on Thursday. “She is a very strong person.”

****DOGE Operative Linked to Alleged Hacking Past****

On Monday, Reuters reported that an operative from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) assigned to the US Justice Department was previously a hacker who ran websites distributing pirated ebooks and software. According to a Reuters review of domain registration data and archived pages from the Wayback Machine, one such site, fkn-pwnd.com, featured the slogan “Fucking Up Servers!” alongside a crude sketch of a penis.

Christopher Stanley, a 33-year-old engineer who has worked at both Musk's social media company X and space company SpaceX, is a senior adviser in the deputy attorney general's office, according to a former Justice Department official and a staff directory listing reviewed by Reuters. Starting about 10 years before joining SpaceX, Stanley allegedly ran several online forums that covered software piracy, video game cheats, and hacking. Reuters reports that he used various pseudonyms on those sites, including eNkrypt and Reneg4d3. The fkn-pwnd.com site, launched in 2006, would have been created when Stanley was in high school.

The Reuters report follows inquiries into another DOGE technologist, Edward Coristine, who worked briefly for a firm known for hiring reformed hackers, a WIRED investigation found.

****Waltz’s Team Allegedly Had at Least 20 Signal Group Chats****

Last week, The Atlantic exposed a staggering operational security failure when it reported that someone using the Signal account belong to national security adviser Mike Waltz accidentally invited the publication’s editor-in-chief to a private Signal group chat discussing a covert bombing operation in Yemen. Now, Politico reports that Waltz’s team has routinely used Signal chats—on a far broader scale than previously known—to coordinate official work on sensitive issues including Ukraine, China, Gaza, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe.

Sources who spoke to Politico on the condition of anonymity say they were directly involved in or had knowledge of at least 20 such group chats. While none of the four individuals could confirm whether classified information was shared, all said the discussions regularly included sensitive national security details. In the wake of these revelations, Waltz and other US government officials have also come under scrutiny for leaving their Venmo accounts public and reportedly using personal Gmail addresses for government business.

On Thursday, the Pentagon’s acting inspector general announced a review of defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of the encrypted Signal app to share plans for operations against the Houthis in Yemen.

NSA Chief Ousted Amid Trump Loyalty Firing Spree

A lawyer for Xiaofeng Wang and his wife says they are “safe” after FBI searches of their homes and Wang’s sudden dismissal from Indiana University, where he taught for over 20 years.

Before the official faculty profiles of renowned Indiana University, Bloomington (IU) data privacy professor Xiaofeng Wang and his wife disappeared and the FBI raided two of the couple’s homes last week, the school is said to have been reviewing for months whether the professor received unreported research funding from China, WIRED has learned.

Indiana University contacted Wang in December to ask about a 2017-2018 grant in China that listed Wang as a researcher, according to an unsigned statement that appears to be written by a Purdue University professor and long-time collaborator of Wang seen by WIRED. The statement says that the author believed IU was concerned that Wang allegedly failed to properly disclose the funding to the university and in applications for US federal research grants.

The statement has been circulating among cybersecurity and privacy scholars at universities around the world in recent days and was sent to WIRED by three separate sources. It claims that Wang had explained the funding situation to IU, then was told in February that the school would continue looking into the matter.

Alex Tanford, a professor emeritus at Indiana University and the IU Bloomington Chapter president of the American Association of University Professors, says Wang reached out to him and said that he had been accused of alleged research misconduct. Tanford says he provided Wang guidance as a member of the faculty board of review. IU did not answer WIRED’s questions regarding any probes into Wang.

“The charge seemed trivial—that he had failed to properly disclose who was principal investigator on a grant application and had not fully listed all his coauthors on an article,” Tanford tells WIRED of the allegations. He says Wang wanted to know if the university had the right to lock him out of his office and computer, as he was in the middle of ongoing research.

Research papers Wang published between 2017 and 2018 list funding from places like the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the US Army Research Office, Google, and Samsung, according to a WIRED review of his publications from the time period.

Wang regularly collaborated with researchers at the Institute of Information Engineering (IIE) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a government-funded cybersecurity research lab. In papers, Wang and his coauthors disclosed that the IIE scholars received funding from sources such as the National Natural Science Foundation of China, but that Wang was being supported by US grants. It’s not uncommon for professors at US institutions to collaborate with researchers in China, and there's no public evidence to suggest that the arrangements were improper.

According to the unsigned statement’s title and metadata, it appears to have been authored by Ninghui Li, a computer science professor at Purdue who has collaborated on research with Wang since at least 2006. The pair also serve together on the board of the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit, and Control (SIGSAC), which aims “to develop the information security profession by sponsoring high quality research conferences and workshops,” according to the Association for Computer Machinery’s website. Li did not respond to emailed requests for comment nor a voicemail left on his office phone.

Jason Covert, one of attorneys representing Xiaofeng Wang and his wife, Nianli Ma, a library systems analyst whose employee profile was also removed by Indiana University, tells WIRED that Wang and Ma are both “safe” and that neither of them have been arrested. Their legal team is not currently aware of any pending criminal charges against them, and while the couple’s attorneys have viewed a search warrant from the Department of Justice, Covert says they have not received a copy of the affidavit establishing probable cause.

Wang is considered among the top researchers in the field of privacy, data security, and biometric privacy, and his sudden disappearance came as a shock to many of his academic peers. Wang joined IU in 2004 and is the lead principal investigator of the multidisciplinary Center for Distributed Confidential Computing, which he established in 2022 with an almost $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), according to a since-deleted bio on IU’s website. As part of his application for the NSF funding and other US federal research grants, Wang would have been required to disclose other grants he already received or were currently pending review.

On March 28, the FBI searched two home addresses associated with Wang. The same day, IU also reportedly terminated Wang’s job via an email sent by provost Rahul Shrivastav, which WIRED obtained and was first reported by The Indiana Daily Student. The email also said it was understood that Wang had recently accepted a position with a university in Singapore, a detail also repeated in the statement attributed to Li.

The statement says Wang planned to start at the unnamed Singaporean university on June 1, 2025, and requested a leave of absence from Indiana University in early March. But IU responded by “putting him on administrative leave, removing his IU homepage, and disabling his IU email address,” it claims.

Wang’s new job offer “would be irrelevant in any event because it is for \[the\] next academic year and would not justify firing him,” Tanford says. Terminating his employment via an email was a violation of university policy, Tanford claims, which prohibits firing a tenured professor without cause, and requires a 10-day notice and a hearing before a faculty board of review, if requested by the staff member. “The faculty is deeply concerned. If the administration can fire a tenured professor without due process and in violation of a policy approved by our trustees, none of us is safe,” he says.

Reached for comment, an IU spokesperson declined to answer detailed questions from WIRED about prior communications between the university and Wang and the school’s decision to fire him.

“Indiana University was recently made aware of a federal investigation of an Indiana University faculty member,” university spokesperson Mark Bode tells WIRED in an emailed statement. “At the direction of the FBI, Indiana University will not make any public comments regarding this investigation. In accordance with Indiana University practices, Indiana University will also not make any public comments regarding the status of this individual.”

The FBI has so far not commented on the reason for its activities surrounding Wang’s properties. In a statement sent to WIRED, Indianapolis-based spokesperson Chris Bavender says, “The FBI conducted court authorized law enforcement activity at homes in Carmel and Bloomington, Indiana last Friday. We have no further comment at this time.”

WIRED could not immediately reach Wang or Ma for comment directly, but Covert, their attorney, provided a statement on their behalf.

“Prof. Wang and Ms. Ma are thankful for the outpouring of support they have received from colleagues at Indiana University and their peers across the academic community,” the statement reads. “They look forward to clearing their names and resuming their successful careers at the conclusion of this investigation.”

To many in the academic research community, the events surrounding Wang and another Chinese-born scholar in Florida who was fired recently are reminiscent of the China Initiative, a US Department of Justice campaign launched under the first Trump administration to combat cybercrime and economic espionage. Critics accused the program of unfairly targeting Chinese-born researchers and broader Asian-immigrant and Asian-American academic communities.

The DOJ abandoned the program under the Biden administration in 2022 after it lost or withdrew charges in a number of associated cases. At the time, a top DOJ official said it had “helped give rise to a harmful perception” that there are lower standards for prosecuting conduct related to China, and people with ties to the country are treated differently. But several congressional efforts have since sought to resurrect the program or start similar law enforcement campaigns, including a 2023 bill that passed the House but not the Senate last year.

“We, like many other organizations and individuals, have broad concerns that the end of the \[China Initiative\] is just in name but does not reflect a change in fact and substance,” Jeremy Wu, the coorganizer of APA Justice, a nonprofit organization that advocates against racial profiling, said in a March webinar at the Michigan State University. Wu declined WIRED’s request to comment on the events surrounding Wang.

Matthew Green, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who specializes in cryptography and cryptographic engineering says that, while he doesn’t know Wang personally, he is troubled by how secretive Indiana University has been about the circumstances that led to his alleged firing. “This is not normal behavior by a university,” Green tells WIRED.

Green says he worries that cases like Wang’s could make young engineers from China think twice about studying at American universities, and even motivate talented researchers who have lived in the US for decades to instead consider working abroad. “We may lose a huge amount of expertise,” Green says.

Cybersecurity Professor Faced China-Funding Inquiry Before Disappearing, Sources Say

Xiaofeng Wang, a longtime computer science professor at Indiana University, has disappeared along with his wife, and their profiles on the school's website were wiped ahead of recent FBI raids.

A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer, Indiana University, and had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why.

Xiaofeng Wang has a long list of prestigious titles. He was the associate dean for research at Indiana University's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a tenured professor at Indiana University at Bloomington. According to his employer, he has served as principal investigator on research projects totaling nearly $23 million over his 21 years there.

He has also coauthored scores of academic papers on a diverse range of research fields, including cryptography, systems security, and data privacy, including the protection of human genomic data. I have personally spoken to him on three occasions for articles here, here, and here.

****“None of This Is in Any Way Normal”****

In recent weeks, Wang's email account, phone number, and profile page at the Luddy School were quietly erased by his employer. Over the same time, Indiana University also removed a profile for his wife, Nianli Ma, who was listed as a lead systems analyst and programmer at the university's Library Technologies division.

As reported by The Bloomingtonian and later the The Herald-Times in Bloomington, a small fleet of unmarked cars driven by government agents descended on the Bloomington home of Wang and Ma on Friday. They spent most of the day going in and out of the house and occasionally transferred boxes from their vehicles. TV station WTHR, meanwhile, reported that a second home owned by Wang and Ma, located in Carmel, Indiana, was also searched. The station said that both a resident and an attorney for the resident were on scene during at least part of the search.

Attempts to locate Wang and Ma have so far been unsuccessful. An Indiana University spokesman didn't answer emailed questions asking if the couple was still employed by the university and why their profile pages, email addresses, and phone numbers had been removed. The spokesman provided the contact information for a spokeswoman at the FBI's field office in Indianapolis. In an email, the spokeswoman wrote: “The FBI conducted court authorized law enforcement activity at homes in Bloomington and Carmel Friday. We have no further comment at this time.”

Searches of federal court dockets turned up no documents related to Wang, Ma, or any searches of their residences. The FBI spokeswoman didn't answer questions seeking which US district court issued the warrant and when, and whether either Wang or Ma is being detained by authorities. Justice Department representatives didn't return an email seeking the same information. An email sent to a personal email address belonging to Wang went unanswered at the time this post went live. Their resident status (e.g., US citizens or green card holders) is currently unknown.

Fellow researchers took to social media over the weekend to register their concern over the series of events.

“None of this is in any way normal,” Matthew Green, a professor specializing in cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Mastodon. He continued: “Has anyone been in contact? I hear he’s been missing for two weeks and his students can’t reach him. How does this not get noticed for two weeks???”

In the same thread, Matt Blaze, a McDevitt professor of computer science and law at Georgetown University, said, “It's hard to imagine what reason there could be for the university to scrub its website as if he never worked there. And while there's a process for removing tenured faculty, it takes more than an afternoon to do it.”

Local news outlets reported the agents spent several hours moving boxes in an out of the residences. WTHR provided the following details about the raid on the Carmel home:

_Neighbors say the agents announced "FBI, come out!" over a megaphone._

_A woman came out of the house holding a phone. A video from a neighbor shows an agent taking that phone from her. She was then questioned in the driveway before agents began searching the home, collecting evidence and taking photos._

_A car was pulled out of the garage slightly to allow investigators to access the attic._

_The woman left the house before 13News arrived. She returned just after noon accompanied by a lawyer. The group of 10 or so investigators left a few minutes later._

_The FBI would not say what they were looking for or who is under investigation. A bureau spokesperson issued a statement: “I can confirm we conducted court-authorized activity at the address in Carmel today. We have no further comment at this time.”_

_Investigators were at the house for about four hours before leaving with several boxes of evidence. 13News rang the doorbell when the agents were gone. A lawyer representing the family who answered the door told us they're not sure yet what the investigation is about._

This post will be updated if new details become available. Anyone with firsthand knowledge of events involving Wang, Ma, or the investigation into either is encouraged to contact me, preferably over Signal at DanArs.82. The email address is: dan.goodin@arstechnica.com.

_This story originally appeared on_ _Ars Technica._

Cybersecurity Professor Mysteriously Disappears as FBI Raids His Homes

An unsecured database used by a generative AI app revealed prompts and tens of thousands of explicit images—some of which are likely illegal. The company deleted its websites after WIRED reached out.

Tens of thousands of explicit AI-generated images, including AI-generated child sexual abuse material, were left open and accessible to anyone on the internet, according to new research seen by WIRED. An open database belonging to an AI image-generation firm contained more than 95,000 records, including some prompt data and images of celebrities such as Ariana Grande, the Kardashians, and Beyoncé de-aged to look like children.

The exposed database, which was discovered by security researcher Jeremiah Fowler, who shared details of the leak with WIRED, is linked to South Korea–based website GenNomis. The website and its parent company, AI-Nomis, hosted a number of image generation and chatbot tools for people to use. More than 45 GB of data, mostly made up of AI images, was left in the open.

The exposed data provides a glimpse at how AI image-generation tools can be weaponized to create deeply harmful and likely nonconsensual sexual content of adults and child sexual abuse material (CSAM). In recent years, dozens of “deepfake” and “nudify” websites, bots, and apps have mushroomed and caused thousands of women and girls to be targeted with damaging imagery and videos. This has come alongside a spike in AI-generated CSAM.

“The big thing is just how dangerous this is,” Fowler says of the data exposure. “Looking at it as a security researcher, looking at it as a parent, it’s terrifying. And it's terrifying how easy it is to create that content.”

Fowler discovered the open cache of files—the database was not password protected or encrypted—in early March and quickly reported it to GenNomis and AI-Nomis, pointing out that it contained AI CSAM. GenNomis quickly closed off the database, Fowler says, but it did not respond or contact him about the findings.

Neither GenNomis nor AI-Nomis responded to multiple requests for comment from WIRED. However, hours after WIRED contacted the organizations, websites for both companies appeared to be shut down, with the GenNomis website now returning a 404 error page.

“This example also shows—yet again—the disturbing extent to which there is a market for AI that enables such abusive images to be generated,” says Clare McGlynn, a law professor at Durham University in the UK who specializes in online- and image-based abuse. “This should remind us that the creation, possession, and distribution of CSAM is not rare, and attributable to warped individuals.”

Before it was wiped, GenNomis listed multiple different AI tools on its homepage. These included an image generator allowing people to enter prompts of images they want to create, or upload an image and include a prompt to alter it. There was also a face-swapping tool, a background remover, plus an option to turn videos into images.

“The most disturbing thing, obviously, was the child explicit images and seeing ones that were clearly celebrities reimagined as children,” Fowler says. The researcher explains that there were also AI-generated images of fully clothed young girls. He says in those instances, it is unclear whether the faces used are completely AI-generated or based on real images.

As well as CSAM, Fowler says, there were AI-generated pornographic images of adults in the database plus potential “face-swap” images. Among the files, he observed what appeared to be photographs of real people, which were likely used to create “explicit nude or sexual AI-generated images,” he says. “So they were taking real pictures of people and swapping their faces on there,” he claims of some generated images.

When it was live, the GenNomis website allowed explicit AI adult imagery. Many of the images featured on its homepage, and an AI “models” section included sexualized images of women—some were “photorealistic” while others were fully AI-generated or in animated styles. It also included a “NSFW” gallery and “marketplace” where users could share imagery and potentially sell albums of AI-generated photos. The website’s tagline said people could “generate unrestricted” images and videos; a previous version of the site from 2024 said “uncensored images” could be created.

GenNomis’ user policies stated that only “respectful content” is allowed, saying “explicit violence” and hate speech is prohibited. “Child pornography and any other illegal activities are strictly prohibited on GenNomis,” its community guidelines read, saying accounts posting prohibited content would be terminated. (Researchers, victims advocates, journalists, tech companies, and more have largely phased out the phrase “child pornography,” in favor of CSAM, over the last decade).

It is unclear to what extent GenNomis used any moderation tools or systems to prevent or prohibit the creation of AI-generated CSAM. Some users posted to its “community” page last year that they could not generate images of people having sex and that their prompts were blocked for non-sexual “dark humor.” Another account posted on the community page that the “NSFW” content should be addressed, as it “might be looked upon by the feds.”

“If I was able to see those images with nothing more than the URL, that shows me that they're not taking all the necessary steps to block that content,” Fowler alleges of the database.

Henry Ajder, a deepfake expert and founder of consultancy Latent Space Advisory, says even if the creation of harmful and illegal content was not permitted by the company, the website’s branding—referencing “unrestricted” image creation and a “NSFW” section—indicated there may be a “clear association with intimate content without safety measures.”

Ajder says he is surprised the English-language website was linked to a South Korean entity. Last year the country was plagued by a nonconsensual deepfake “emergency” that targeted girls, before it took measures to combat the wave of deepfake abuse. Ajder says more pressure needs to be put on all parts of the ecosystem that allows nonconsensual imagery to be generated using AI. “The more of this that we see, the more it forces the question onto legislators, onto tech platforms, onto web hosting companies, onto payment providers. All of the people who in some form or another, knowingly or otherwise—mostly unknowingly—are facilitating and enabling this to happen,” he says.

Fowler says the database also exposed files that appeared to include AI prompts. No user data, such as logins or usernames, were included in exposed data, the researcher says. Screenshots of prompts show the use of words such as “tiny,” “girl,” and references to sexual acts between family members. The prompts also contained sexual acts between celebrities.

“It seems to me that the technology has raced ahead of any of the guidelines or controls,” Fowler says. “From a legal standpoint, we all know that child explicit images are illegal, but that didn’t stop the technology from being able to generate those images.”

As generative AI systems have vastly enhanced how easy it is to create and modify images in the past two years, there has been an explosion of AI-generated CSAM. “Webpages containing AI-generated child sexual abuse material have more than quadrupled since 2023, and the photorealism of this horrific content has also leapt in sophistication, says Derek Ray-Hill, the interim CEO of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a UK-based nonprofit that tackles online CSAM.

The IWF has documented how criminals are increasingly creating AI-generated CSAM and developing the methods they use to create it. “It’s currently just too easy for criminals to use AI to generate and distribute sexually explicit content of children at scale and at speed,” Ray-Hill says.

An AI Image Generator’s Exposed Database Reveals What People Really Used It For

Plus: Alleged Snowflake hacker will be extradited to US, internet restrictions create an information vacuum in Myanmar, and London gets its first permanent face recognition cameras.

After senior Trump administration members mistakenly included The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg in a secret group chat about bombing Houthi targets in Yemen, encrypted messaging app Signal found itself at the center of a storm this week. Some commentators criticized the app, going as far to blame it for the scandal.

But the whole affair that’s dubiously been dubbed “SignalGate” isn’t about Signal at all: Experts say officials shouldn’t invite untrusted contacts into sensitive chats and should only use authorized devices, platforms, and procedures when discussing top-secret military operations. In other words, the people who set up the chat made numerous mistakes, and they had nothing to do with how secure Signal is. In fact, Signal has seen its biggest-ever spike in US downloads as a result of the news.

In other news linked to _that_ Houthi group chat, national security adviser Mike Waltz—an account with the name “Michael Waltz” originally invited Goldberg to the group—left his Venmo account open to public view. As WIRED reported, a “Michael Waltz” Venmo account displayed the names of the adviser’s colleagues and friends, revealing people in Waltz’s wider social network. After WIRED reached out to the White House, the Waltz account hid its friends list. There’s more though: WIRED also discovered other Venmo accounts linked to officials in the Signal chat. Information about who officials associate with could be highly lucrative for foreign spies and hackers.

Elsewhere, we reported on all the ways the White House adopting Elon Musk’s Starlink as an alternative Wi-Fi network could be bad news for network security. There are also early signs in Europe that some companies are going cold on cloud services from Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, as they reassess the risks of dealing with the volatile second Trump administration. And, as crossing the United States border becomes more perilous—for both citizens and visa holders—we updated our guide to keeping your digital privacy intact when you are entering the US.

That’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

**Top US Security Officials’ Passwords and Personal Phone Numbers Discovered Online**

On top of SignalGate and Venmo accounts being left exposed, German news outlet Der Spiegel reported that sensitive personal information linked to several senior Trump administration security officials is easily discoverable online. Reporters from the publication found that mobile phone numbers, email addresses, and “some” passwords for top officials could be found on the internet.

Using people-search engines and information contained in public data breaches, Der Spiegel discovered personal information belonging to Waltz, director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense. “Most of these numbers and email addresses are apparently still in use, with some of them linked to profiles on social media platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn,” the news organization reported. The details were also linked to Dropbox, Microsoft Teams, Signal, and WhatsApp accounts used by the officials.

While millions of people have been caught up in online data breaches and use inadequate privacy settings on their online accounts, high-level government security officials are exposed to a broader and more severe range of online threats, particularly from nation-state hackers, than most people. Officials told the news organization that many of the accounts and personal details were no longer used or had been updated. However, messages Der Spiegel sent to WhatsApp and Signal accounts belonging to Waltz and Gabbard were delivered, the publication reported. Only after they approached the government for comment were some of the accounts restricted.

**Internet Restrictions May Hide Initial Toll of Myanmar Earthquake Damage**

On Friday, a huge 7.7-magnitude earthquake and aftershock hit Myanmar, with widespread damage being reported hundreds of miles away in Thailand. At the time of writing, at least 144 people have been confirmed dead with hundreds of others injured in Myanmar. As the first impacts of the devastating quake started to emerge, The New York Times reported that long-standing and widespread internet restrictions in worn-torn Myanmar were likely making it harder for news of the damage to be understood. Since the country’s military junta took power in 2021, connectivity within Myanmar has been widely disrupted or blocked. For instance in 2023, 13 out of Myanmar’s 14 states faced internet disruptions.

In the wake of the earthquake, more video footage and news could be seen immediately emerging from neighbouring Thailand, experts told the Times. “Compare the coverage of the earthquake in Thailand, where tremors and damage have been extensively reported, posted and documented, to Myanmar, where we still don’t have a clear picture of the extent of the damage and loss and may not for some time,” Joe Freeman from Amnesty International said. The lack of connectivity may also make the recovery and humanitarian efforts harder to coordinate, once again highlighting the vital need for people to have reliable and open access to the internet.

**Alleged Snowflake Hacker Connor Moucka Agrees to US Extradition**

Last summer’s Snowflake hacking spree, where customers of the cloud storage company had their accounts targeted, was likely one of the largest mass data exfiltrations that’s publicly known. Toward the end of 2024, Canadian authorities arrested Alexander “Connor” Moucka, 26, who allegedly used online handles such as “Waifu” and “Judische,” in connection to the hacking activity. This week, Moucka consented to be extradited to the United States to face the alleged charges. According to Cyberscoop, Moucka faces 20 federal charges, including those linked to computer fraud, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. Moucka is not the only person allegedly behind the Snowflake hacking, with John Binns and Cameron Wagenius being named in indictments. It is unclear when Moucka’s extradition will take place.

**London Is Getting Its First Permanent Face Recognition Cameras**

Police forces across the UK have massively increased their use of live face recognition cameras in recent years. Use of the controversial technology has historically been temporary: mounting cameras on top of police vehicles and deploying them for specific events and set periods of time. That’s now set to change with the first permanent face recognition cameras being rolled out in London. The city’s Metropolitan Police are in the process of installing fixed cameras in Croydon, in the south of the city.

“This will mean our use of LFR technology will be far more embedded as a ‘business as usual’ approach rather than relying on the availability of the LFR vans that are in high demand across London,” a police official wrote in a letter seen by The Times of London. Reportedly, the cameras will not be used continuously, only when officers are nearby to monitor potential alerts. However, privacy campaigners fear the move could be further rolled out across the city, leading to a network of permanent face recognition cameras unlike those seen in any other democratic countries.

Source

Wired