NASA will host a live Twitch event to highlight the ongoing Moon Mascot Challenge, which invites the public to design a zero gravity indicator for the agency’s Artemis II crewed test flight around the Moon. Viewers will have the opportunity to provide real-time input to an artist who will create an example of a zero gravity indicator during the livestream. 

Zero gravity indicators are small, plush items carried aboard spacecraft to provide a visual indication of when the crew reaches space.

The event will begin at 3 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, May 13, on the agency’s official Twitch channel:

https://www.twitch.tv/nasa

The contest invites global creators of all ages to submit design ideas for a zero gravity indicator that will fly aboard the agency’s Artemis II test flight, the first crewed mission under NASA’s Artemis campaign.

Up to 25 finalists, including entries from a K-12 student division, will be selected. The Artemis II crew will choose one design that NASA’s Thermal Blanket Lab will fabricate to fly alongside the crew in the Orion spacecraft.

During this Twitch event, NASA experts will discuss the Moon Mascot Challenge while the artist incorporates live audience feedback into a sample design. Although the design example will not be eligible for the contest, it will demonstrate how challenge participants can develop their own zero gravity indicator designs. The example will be shared on the @NASAArtemis social media accounts following the Twitch event.

The Artemis II test flight will take NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen on a 10-day journey around the Moon and back. The mission is another step toward missions on the lunar surface to help the agency prepare for future human missions to Mars.

To learn more about NASA’s missions, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov

-end-

Rachel Kraft
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
rachel.h.kraft@nasa.gov

A team from South Dakota State University, with their project titled “Soil Testing and Plant Leaf Extraction Drone” took first place at the 2025 NASA Gateways to Blue Skies Competition, which challenged student teams to research aviation solutions to support U.S. agriculture.

The winning project proposed a drone-based soil and tissue sampling process that would automate a typically labor-intensive farming task. The South Dakota State team competed among eight finalists at the 2025 Blue Skies Forum May 20-21 in Palmdale, California, near NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center. Subject matter experts from NASA and industry served as judges.

“This competition challenges students to think creatively, explore new possibilities, and confront the emerging issues and opportunity spaces solvable through aviation platforms,” said Steven Holz, assistant project manager for University Innovation with NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate and Blue Skies judge and co-chair. “They bring imaginative ideas, interesting insights, and an impressive level of dedication. It’s always an honor to work with the next generation of innovators participating in our competition.”

The winning team members were awarded an opportunity to intern during the 2025-26 academic year at any of four aeronautics-focused NASA centers — Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, or Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California.  

“It’s been super-rewarding for our team to see how far we’ve come, especially with all these other amazing projects that we were competing against,” said Nathan Kuehl, team lead at South Dakota State University. “It wouldn’t have been possible without our graduate advisor, Allea Klauenberg, and advisor, Todd Lechter. We want to thank everybody that made this experience possible.”

Other awards included: 

• Second Place — University of Tulsa, CattleLog Cattle Management System
• Best Technical Paper — Boston University, PLAANT: Precision Land Analysis and Aerial Nitrogen Treatment

Sponsored by NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, this year’s competition asked teams of university students to research new or improved aviation solutions to support agriculture that could be applied by 2035 or sooner. The goal of the competition, titled AgAir: Aviation Solutions for Agriculture, was to enhance production, efficiency, sustainability, and resilience to extreme weather. 

At the forum, finalist teams presented concepts of aviation systems that could help the agriculture industry.Students had the opportunity to meet with NASA and industry experts, tour NASA Armstrong, and gain insight into the agency’s aviation mission.

U.S. agriculture provides food, fuel, and fiber to the nation and the world. However, the industry faces significant challenges. NASA Aeronautics is committed to supporting commercial, industrial, and governmental partners in advancing aviation systems to modernize agricultural capabilities.  

The Gateways to Blue Skies competition is sponsored by NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate’s University Innovation Project and is managed by the National Institute of Aerospace.

The National Institute of Aerospace has made available a livestream of the competition, as well as information about the finalists and their projects, and details about the 2025 competition.

the Apostle Paul uses the term "mystery" (mysterion in Greek) to refer to divine truths that were previously hidden but have now been revealed through Christ and the Gospel.

First thing to notice is if you are a bad typist, it will retype your question. And its response is base on its interpretation of your question.

The next few post will demostrate how words are king when interpretting scripture. Using AI, every word is parsed abd the results are based on those words. This is the second post in this series.

Yes, 1 Corinthians 15:51-52 in the King James Version (KJV) is often associated with the concept of the "rapture," though the term "rapture" itself is not explicitly used in the Bible.

At Preview Day, you will get the chance to visit with professors, get insight from our leaders, see our campus, and get questions answered about our cohorts, classes, and more.

Of the whole twenty years of my printed sermons, I can honestly say that this has been my aim— rightly to divide the word of truth.

s Paul's epistle's our guiding light of Christ Love in this Dispensation of Grace? GROK answer was well stated and worth all to read.

Romans is the single greatest Book in God's Word. I use both CSV and KJV. This book is full first in the Bible. When one reads Romans it is key to see first who Paul is - An Apostle by Grace

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Scotus kicked the Biden and the EPA back to beginning #Wetlands Thank God for SCOTUS. In 2006 this subdivision was created by the previous owner. In 2007 Obama slapped by supreme court rewrote the EPA law so they could steel any adjacent property to wetlands. They took 50% of every lot including my current established

And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent;

The discription of Sacketts Property is so similar to Property I own. Thank You Sacketts. Thank-You SCOtUS

Another Red Line. Biden has no Red Line and his DOJ is no better.

And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent;

The U.S. government today imposed economic sanctions on Funnull Technology Inc., a Philippines-based company that provides computer infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of websites involved in virtual currency investment scams known as “pig butchering.” In January 2025, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how Funnull was being used as a content delivery network that catered to cybercriminals seeking to route their traffic through U.S.-based cloud providers.

“Americans lose billions of dollars annually to these cyber scams, with revenues generated from these crimes rising to record levels in 2024,” reads a statement from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which sanctioned Funnull and its 40-year-old Chinese administrator Liu Lizhi. “Funnull has directly facilitated several of these schemes, resulting in over $200 million in U.S. victim-reported losses.”

The Treasury Department said Funnull’s operations are linked to the majority of virtual currency investment scam websites reported to the FBI. The agency said Funnull directly facilitated pig butchering and other schemes that resulted in more than $200 million in financial losses by Americans.

Pig butchering is a rampant form of fraud wherein people are lured by flirtatious strangers online into investing in fraudulent cryptocurrency trading platforms. Victims are coached to invest more and more money into what appears to be an extremely profitable trading platform, only to find their money is gone when they wish to cash out.

The scammers often insist that investors pay additional “taxes” on their crypto “earnings” before they can see their invested funds again (spoiler: they never do), and a shocking number of people have lost six figures or more through these pig butchering scams.

KrebsOnSecurity’s January story on Funnull was based on research from the security firm Silent Push, which discovered in October 2024 that a vast number of domains hosted via Funnull were promoting gambling sites that bore the logo of the Suncity Group, a Chinese entity named in a 2024 UN report (PDF) for laundering millions of dollars for the North Korean state-sponsored hacking group Lazarus.

Silent Push found Funnull was a criminal content delivery network (CDN) that carried a great deal of traffic tied to scam websites, funneling the traffic through a dizzying chain of auto-generated domain names and U.S.-based cloud providers before redirecting to malicious or phishous websites. The FBI has released a technical writeup (PDF) of the infrastructure used to manage the malicious Funnull domains between October 2023 and April 2025.

Silent Push revisited Funnull’s infrastructure in January 2025 and found Funnull was still using many of the same Amazon and Microsoft cloud Internet addresses identified as malicious in its October report. Both Amazon and Microsoft pledged to rid their networks of Funnull’s presence following that story, but according to Silent Push’s Zach Edwards only one of those companies has followed through.

Edwards said Silent Push no longer sees Microsoft Internet addresses showing up in Funnull’s infrastructure, while Amazon continues to struggle with removing Funnull servers, including one that appears to have first materialized in 2023.

“Amazon is doing a terrible job — every day since they made those claims to you and us in our public blog they have had IPs still mapped to Funnull, including some that have stayed mapped for inexplicable periods of time,” Edwards said.

Amazon said its Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosting platform actively counters abuse attempts.

“We have stopped hundreds of attempts this year related to this group and we are looking into the information you shared earlier today,” reads a statement shared by Amazon. “If anyone suspects that AWS resources are being used for abusive activity, they can report it to AWS Trust & Safety using the report abuse form here.”

U.S. based cloud providers remain an attractive home base for cybercriminal organizations because many organizations will not be overly aggressive in blocking traffic from U.S.-based cloud networks, as doing so can result in blocking access to many legitimate web destinations that are also on that same shared network segment or host.

What’s more, funneling their bad traffic so that it appears to be coming out of U.S. cloud Internet providers allows cybercriminals to connect to websites from web addresses that are geographically close(r) to their targets and victims (to sidestep location-based security controls by your bank, for example).

Funnull is not the only cybercriminal infrastructure-as-a-service provider that was sanctioned this month: On May 20, 2025, the European Union imposed sanctions on Stark Industries Solutions, an ISP that materialized at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and has been used as a global proxy network that conceals the true source of cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns against enemies of Russia.

In May 2024, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive on Stark Industries Solutions that found much of the malicious traffic traversing Stark’s network (e.g. vulnerability scanning and password brute force attacks) was being bounced through U.S.-based cloud providers. My reporting showed how deeply Stark had penetrated U.S. ISPs, and that its co-founder for many years sold “bulletproof” hosting services that told Russian cybercrime forum customers they would proudly ignore any abuse complaints or police inquiries.

That story examined the history of Stark’s co-founders, Moldovan brothers Ivan and Yuri Neculiti, who each denied past involvement in cybercrime or any current involvement in assisting Russian disinformation efforts or cyberattacks. Nevertheless, the EU sanctioned both brothers as well.

The EU said Stark and the Neculti brothers “enabled various Russian state-sponsored and state-affiliated actors to conduct destabilising activities including coordinated information manipulation and interference and cyber-attacks against the Union and third countries by providing services intended to hide these activities from European law enforcement and security agencies.”

Authorities in Pakistan have arrested 21 individuals accused of operating “Heartsender,” a once popular spam and malware dissemination service that operated for more than a decade. The main clientele for HeartSender were organized crime groups that tried to trick victim companies into making payments to a third party, and its alleged proprietors were publicly identified by KrebsOnSecurity in 2021 after they inadvertently infected their computers with malware.

A report from the Pakistani media outlet Dawn states that authorities there arrested 21 people alleged to have operated Heartsender, a spam delivery service whose homepage openly advertised phishing kits targeting users of various Internet companies, including Microsoft 365, Yahoo, AOL, Intuit, iCloud and ID.me. Pakistan’s National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) reportedly conducted raids in Lahore’s Bahria Town and Multan on May 15 and 16.

The NCCIA told reporters the group’s tools were connected to more than $50m in losses in the United States alone, with European authorities investigating 63 additional cases.

“This wasn’t just a scam operation – it was essentially a cybercrime university that empowered fraudsters globally,” NCCIA Director Abdul Ghaffar said at a press briefing.

In January 2025, the FBI and the Dutch Police seized the technical infrastructure for the cybercrime service, which was marketed under the brands Heartsender, Fudpage and Fudtools (and many other “fud” variations). The “fud” bit stands for “Fully Un-Detectable,” and it refers to cybercrime resources that will evade detection by security tools like antivirus software or anti-spam appliances.

The FBI says transnational organized crime groups that purchased these services primarily used them to run business email compromise (BEC) schemes, wherein the cybercrime actors tricked victim companies into making payments to a third party.

Dawn reported that those arrested included Rameez Shahzad, the alleged ringleader of the Heartsender cybercrime business, which most recently operated under the Pakistani front company WeCodeSolutions. Mr. Shahzad was named and pictured in a 2021 KrebsOnSecurity story about a series of remarkable operational security mistakes that exposed their identities and Facebook pages showing employees posing for group photos and socializing at work-related outings.

Prior to folding their operations behind WeCodeSolutions, Shahzad and others arrested this month operated as a web hosting group calling itself The Manipulaters. KrebsOnSecurity first wrote about The Manipulaters in May 2015, mainly because their ads at the time were blanketing a number of popular cybercrime forums, and because they were fairly open and brazen about what they were doing — even who they were in real life.

Sometime in 2019, The Manipulaters failed to renew their core domain name — manipulaters[.]com — the same one tied to so many of the company’s business operations. That domain was quickly scooped up by Scylla Intel, a cyber intelligence firm that specializes in connecting cybercriminals to their real-life identities. Soon after, Scylla started receiving large amounts of email correspondence intended for the group’s owners.

In 2024, DomainTools.com found the web-hosted version of Heartsender leaked an extraordinary amount of user information to unauthenticated users, including customer credentials and email records from Heartsender employees. DomainTools says the malware infections on Manipulaters PCs exposed “vast swaths of account-related data along with an outline of the group’s membership, operations, and position in the broader underground economy.”

Shahzad allegedly used the alias “Saim Raza,” an identity which has contacted KrebsOnSecurity multiple times over the past decade with demands to remove stories published about the group. The Saim Raza identity most recently contacted this author in November 2024, asserting they had quit the cybercrime industry and turned over a new leaf after a brush with the Pakistani police.

The arrested suspects include Rameez Shahzad, Muhammad Aslam (Rameez’s father), Atif Hussain, Muhammad Umar Irshad, Yasir Ali, Syed Saim Ali Shah, Muhammad Nowsherwan, Burhanul Haq, Adnan Munawar, Abdul Moiz, Hussnain Haider, Bilal Ahmad, Dilbar Hussain, Muhammad Adeel Akram, Awais Rasool, Usama Farooq, Usama Mehmood and Hamad Nawaz.

The U.S. government today unsealed criminal charges against 16 individuals accused of operating and selling DanaBot, a prolific strain of information-stealing malware that has been sold on Russian cybercrime forums since 2018. The FBI says a newer version of DanaBot was used for espionage, and that many of the defendants exposed their real-life identities after accidentally infecting their own systems with the malware.

Initially spotted in May 2018 by researchers at the email security firm Proofpoint, DanaBot is a malware-as-a-service platform that specializes in credential theft and banking fraud.

Today, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed a criminal complaint and indictment from 2022, which said the FBI identified at least 40 affiliates who were paying between $3,000 and $4,000 a month for access to the information stealer platform.

The government says the malware infected more than 300,000 systems globally, causing estimated losses of more than $50 million. The ringleaders of the DanaBot conspiracy are named as Aleksandr Stepanov, 39, a.k.a. “JimmBee,” and Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin, 34, a.k.a. “Onix”, both of Novosibirsk, Russia. Kalinkin is an IT engineer for the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. His Facebook profile name is “Maffiozi.”

According to the FBI, there were at least two major versions of DanaBot; the first was sold between 2018 and June 2020, when the malware stopped being offered on Russian cybercrime forums. The government alleges that the second version of DanaBot — emerging in January 2021 — was provided to co-conspirators for use in targeting military, diplomatic and non-governmental organization computers in several countries, including the United States, Belarus, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Russia.

“Unindicted co-conspirators would use the Espionage Variant to compromise computers around the world and steal sensitive diplomatic communications, credentials, and other data from these targeted victims,” reads a grand jury indictment dated Sept. 20, 2022. “This stolen data included financial transactions by diplomatic staff, correspondence concerning day-to-day diplomatic activity, as well as summaries of a particular country’s interactions with the United States.”

The indictment says the FBI in 2022 seized servers used by the DanaBot authors to control their malware, as well as the servers that stored stolen victim data. The government said the server data also show numerous instances in which the DanaBot defendants infected their own PCs, resulting in their credential data being uploaded to stolen data repositories that were seized by the feds.

“In some cases, such self-infections appeared to be deliberately done in order to test, analyze, or improve the malware,” the criminal complaint reads. “In other cases, the infections seemed to be inadvertent – one of the hazards of committing cybercrime is that criminals will sometimes infect themselves with their own malware by mistake.”

A statement from the DOJ says that as part of today’s operation, agents with the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) seized the DanaBot control servers, including dozens of virtual servers hosted in the United States. The government says it is now working with industry partners to notify DanaBot victims and help remediate infections. The statement credits a number of security firms with providing assistance to the government, including ESET, Flashpoint, Google, Intel 471, Lumen, PayPal, Proofpoint, Team CYMRU, and ZScaler.

It’s not unheard of for financially-oriented malicious software to be repurposed for espionage. A variant of the ZeuS Trojan, which was used in countless online banking attacks against companies in the United States and Europe between 2007 and at least 2015, was for a time diverted to espionage tasks by its author.

As detailed in this 2015 story, the author of the ZeuS trojan created a custom version of the malware to serve purely as a spying machine, which scoured infected systems in Ukraine for specific keywords in emails and documents that would likely only be found in classified documents.

The public charging of the 16 DanaBot defendants comes a day after Microsoft joined a slew of tech companies in disrupting the IT infrastructure for another malware-as-a-service offering — Lumma Stealer, which is likewise offered to affiliates under tiered subscription prices ranging from $250 to $1,000 per month. Separately, Microsoft filed a civil lawsuit to seize control over 2,300 domain names used by Lumma Stealer and its affiliates.

Further reading:

Danabot: Analyzing a Fallen Empire

ZScaler blog: DanaBot Launches DDoS Attack Against the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense

Flashpoint: Operation Endgame DanaBot Malware

Team CYMRU: Inside DanaBot’s Infrastructure: In Support of Operation Endgame II

March 2022 criminal complaint v. Artem Aleksandrovich Kalinkin

September 2022 grand jury indictment naming the 16 defendants

KrebsOnSecurity last week was hit by a near record distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that clocked in at more than 6.3 terabits of data per second (a terabit is one trillion bits of data). The brief attack appears to have been a test run for a massive new Internet of Things (IoT) botnet capable of launching crippling digital assaults that few web destinations can withstand. Read on for more about the botnet, the attack, and the apparent creator of this global menace.

For reference, the 6.3 Tbps attack last week was ten times the size of the assault launched against this site in 2016 by the Mirai IoT botnet, which held KrebsOnSecurity offline for nearly four days. The 2016 assault was so large that Akamai – which was providing pro-bono DDoS protection for KrebsOnSecurity at the time — asked me to leave their service because the attack was causing problems for their paying customers.

Since the Mirai attack, KrebsOnSecurity.com has been behind the protection of Project Shield, a free DDoS defense service that Google provides to websites offering news, human rights, and election-related content. Google Security Engineer Damian Menscher told KrebsOnSecurity the May 12 attack was the largest Google has ever handled. In terms of sheer size, it is second only to a very similar attack that Cloudflare mitigated and wrote about in April.

After comparing notes with Cloudflare, Menscher said the botnet that launched both attacks bears the fingerprints of Aisuru, a digital siege machine that first surfaced less than a year ago. Menscher said the attack on KrebsOnSecurity lasted less than a minute, hurling large UDP data packets at random ports at a rate of approximately 585 million data packets per second.

“It was the type of attack normally designed to overwhelm network links,” Menscher said, referring to the throughput connections between and among various Internet service providers (ISPs). “For most companies, this size of attack would kill them.”

The Aisuru botnet comprises a globally-dispersed collection of hacked IoT devices, including routers, digital video recorders and other systems that are commandeered via default passwords or software vulnerabilities. As documented by researchers at QiAnXin XLab, the botnet was first identified in an August 2024 attack on a large gaming platform.

Aisuru reportedly went quiet after that exposure, only to reappear in November with even more firepower and software exploits. In a January 2025 report, XLab found the new and improved Aisuru (a.k.a. “Airashi“) had incorporated a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability in Cambium Networks cnPilot routers.

NOT FORKING AROUND

The people behind the Aisuru botnet have been peddling access to their DDoS machine in public Telegram chat channels that are closely monitored by multiple security firms. In August 2024, the botnet was rented out in subscription tiers ranging from $150 per day to $600 per week, offering attacks of up to two terabits per second.

“You may not attack any measurement walls, healthcare facilities, schools or government sites,” read a notice posted on Telegram by the Aisuru botnet owners in August 2024.

Interested parties were told to contact the Telegram handle “@yfork” to purchase a subscription. The account @yfork previously used the nickname “Forky,” an identity that has been posting to public DDoS-focused Telegram channels since 2021.

According to the FBI, Forky’s DDoS-for-hire domains have been seized in multiple law enforcement operations over the years. Last year, Forky said on Telegram he was selling the domain stresser[.]best, which saw its servers seized by the FBI in 2022 as part of an ongoing international law enforcement effort aimed at diminishing the supply of and demand for DDoS-for-hire services.

“The operator of this service, who calls himself ‘Forky,’ operates a Telegram channel to advertise features and communicate with current and prospective DDoS customers,” reads an FBI seizure warrant (PDF) issued for stresser[.]best. The FBI warrant stated that on the same day the seizures were announced, Forky posted a link to a story on this blog that detailed the domain seizure operation, adding the comment, “We are buying our new domains right now.”

Approximately ten hours later, Forky posted again, including a screenshot of the stresser[.]best user dashboard, instructing customers to use their saved passwords for the old website on the new one.

A review of Forky’s posts to public Telegram channels — as indexed by the cyber intelligence firms Unit 221B and Flashpoint — reveals a 21-year-old individual who claims to reside in Brazil [full disclosure: Flashpoint is currently an advertiser on this blog].

Since late 2022, Forky’s posts have frequently promoted a DDoS mitigation company and ISP that he operates called botshield[.]io. The Botshield website is connected to a business entity registered in the United Kingdom called Botshield LTD, which lists a 21-year-old woman from Sao Paulo, Brazil as the director. Internet routing records indicate Botshield (AS213613) currently controls several hundred Internet addresses that were allocated to the company earlier this year.

Domaintools.com reports that botshield[.]io was registered in July 2022 to a Kaike Southier Leite in Sao Paulo. A LinkedIn profile by the same name says this individual is a network specialist from Brazil who works in “the planning and implementation of robust network infrastructures, with a focus on security, DDoS mitigation, colocation and cloud server services.”

MEET FORKY

In his posts to public Telegram chat channels, Forky has hardly attempted to conceal his whereabouts or identity. In countless chat conversations indexed by Unit 221B, Forky could be seen talking about everyday life in Brazil, often remarking on the extremely low or high prices in Brazil for a range of goods, from computer and networking gear to narcotics and food.

Reached via Telegram, Forky claimed he was “not involved in this type of illegal actions for years now,” and that the project had been taken over by other unspecified developers. Forky initially told KrebsOnSecurity he had been out of the botnet scene for years, only to concede this wasn’t true when presented with public posts on Telegram from late last year that clearly showed otherwise.

Forky denied being involved in the attack on KrebsOnSecurity, but acknowledged that he helped to develop and market the Aisuru botnet. Forky claims he is now merely a staff member for the Aisuru botnet team, and that he stopped running the botnet roughly two months ago after starting a family. Forky also said the woman named as director of Botshield is related to him.

Forky offered equivocal, evasive responses to a number of questions about the Aisuru botnet and his business endeavors. But on one point he was crystal clear:

“I have zero fear about you, the FBI, or Interpol,” Forky said, asserting that he is now almost entirely focused on their hosting business — Botshield.

Forky declined to discuss the makeup of his ISP’s clientele, or to clarify whether Botshield was more of a hosting provider or a DDoS mitigation firm. However, Forky has posted on Telegram about Botshield successfully mitigating large DDoS attacks launched against other DDoS-for-hire services.

DomainTools finds the same Sao Paulo street address in the registration records for botshield[.]io was used to register several other domains, including cant-mitigate[.]us. The email address in the WHOIS records for that domain is forkcontato@gmail.com, which DomainTools says was used to register the domain for the now-defunct DDoS-for-hire service stresser[.]us, one of the domains seized in the FBI’s 2023 crackdown.

On May 8, 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the seizure of stresser[.]us, along with a dozen other domains offering DDoS services. The DOJ said ten of the 13 domains were reincarnations of services that were seized during a prior sweep in December, which targeted 48 top stresser services (also known as “booters”).

Forky claimed he could find out who attacked my site with Aisuru. But when pressed a day later on the question, Forky said he’d come up empty-handed.

“I tried to ask around, all the big guys are not retarded enough to attack you,” Forky explained in an interview on Telegram. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. But you are welcome to write the story and try to put the blame on me.”

THE GHOST OF MIRAI

The 6.3 Tbps attack last week caused no visible disruption to this site, in part because it was so brief — lasting approximately 45 seconds. DDoS attacks of such magnitude and brevity typically are produced when botnet operators wish to test or demonstrate their firepower for the benefit of potential buyers. Indeed, Google’s Menscher said it is likely that both the May 12 attack and the slightly larger 6.5 Tbps attack against Cloudflare last month were simply tests of the same botnet’s capabilities.

In many ways, the threat posed by the Aisuru/Airashi botnet is reminiscent of Mirai, an innovative IoT malware strain that emerged in the summer of 2016 and successfully out-competed virtually all other IoT malware strains in existence at the time.

As first revealed by KrebsOnSecurity in January 2017, the Mirai authors were two U.S. men who co-ran a DDoS mitigation service — even as they were selling far more lucrative DDoS-for-hire services using the most powerful botnet on the planet.

Less than a week after the Mirai botnet was used in a days-long DDoS against KrebsOnSecurity, the Mirai authors published the source code to their botnet so that they would not be the only ones in possession of it in the event of their arrest by federal investigators.

Ironically, the leaking of the Mirai source is precisely what led to the eventual unmasking and arrest of the Mirai authors, who went on to serve probation sentences that required them to consult with FBI investigators on DDoS investigations. But that leak also rapidly led to the creation of dozens of Mirai botnet clones, many of which were harnessed to fuel their own powerful DDoS-for-hire services.

Menscher told KrebsOnSecurity that as counterintuitive as it may sound, the Internet as a whole would probably be better off if the source code for Aisuru became public knowledge. After all, he said, the people behind Aisuru are in constant competition with other IoT botnet operators who are all striving to commandeer a finite number of vulnerable IoT devices globally.

Such a development would almost certainly cause a proliferation of Aisuru botnet clones, he said, but at least then the overall firepower from each individual botnet would be greatly diminished — or at least within range of the mitigation capabilities of most DDoS protection providers.

Barring a source code leak, Menscher said, it would be nice if someone published the full list of software exploits being used by the Aisuru operators to grow their botnet so quickly.

“Part of the reason Mirai was so dangerous was that it effectively took out competing botnets,” he said. “This attack somehow managed to compromise all these boxes that nobody else knows about. Ideally, we’d want to see that fragmented out, so that no [individual botnet operator] controls too much.”

In what experts are calling a novel legal outcome, the 22-year-old former administrator of the cybercrime community Breachforums will forfeit nearly $700,000 to settle a civil lawsuit from a health insurance company whose customer data was posted for sale on the forum in 2023. Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, a.k.a. “Pompompurin,” is slated for resentencing next month after pleading guilty to access device fraud and possession of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

On January 18, 2023, denizens of Breachforums posted for sale tens of thousands of records — including Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, and phone numbers  — stolen from Nonstop Health, an insurance provider based in Concord, Calif.

Class-action attorneys sued Nonstop Health, which added Fitzpatrick as a third-party defendant to the civil litigation in November 2023, several months after he was arrested by the FBI and criminally charged with access device fraud and CSAM possession. In January 2025, Nonstop agreed to pay $1.5 million to settle the class action.

Jill Fertel is a former prosecutor who runs the cyber litigation practice at Cipriani & Werner, the law firm that represented Nonstop Health. Fertel told KrebsOnSecurity this is the first and only case where a cybercriminal or anyone related to the security incident was actually named in civil litigation.

“Civil plaintiffs are not at all likely to see money seized from threat actors involved in the incident to be made available to people impacted by the breach,” Fertel said. “The best we could do was make this money available to the class, but it’s still incumbent on the members of the class who are impacted to make that claim.”

Mark Rasch is a former federal prosecutor who now represents Unit 221B, a cybersecurity firm based in New York City. Rasch said he doesn’t doubt that the civil settlement involving Fitzpatrick’s criminal activity is a novel legal development.

“It is rare in these civil cases that you know the threat actor involved in the breach, and it’s also rare that you catch them with sufficient resources to be able to pay a claim,” Rasch said.

Despite admitting to possessing more than 600 CSAM images and personally operating Breachforums, Fitzpatrick was sentenced in January 2024 to time served and 20 years of supervised release. Federal prosecutors objected, arguing that his punishment failed to adequately reflect the seriousness of his crimes or serve as a deterrent.

Indeed, the same month he was sentenced Fitzpatrick was rearrested (PDF) for violating the terms of his release, which forbade him from using a computer that didn’t have court-required monitoring software installed.

Federal prosecutors said Fitzpatrick went on Discord following his guilty plea and professed innocence to the very crimes to which he’d pleaded guilty, stating that his plea deal was “so BS” and that he had “wanted to fight it.” The feds said Fitzpatrick also joked with his friends about selling data to foreign governments, exhorting one user to “become a foreign asset to china or russia,” and to “sell government secrets.”

In January 2025, a federal appeals court agreed with the government’s assessment, vacating Fitzpatrick’s sentence and ordering him to be resentenced on June 3, 2025.

Fitzpatrick launched BreachForums in March 2022 to replace RaidForums, a similarly popular crime forum that was infiltrated and shut down by the FBI the previous month. As administrator, his alter ego Pompompurin served as the middleman, personally reviewing all databases for sale on the forum and offering an escrow service to those interested in buying stolen data.

The new site quickly attracted more than 300,000 users, and facilitated the sale of databases stolen from hundreds of hacking victims, including some of the largest consumer data breaches in recent history. In May 2024, a reincarnation of Breachforums was seized by the FBI and international partners. Still more relaunches of the forum occurred after that, with the most recent disruption last month.

As KrebsOnSecurity reported last year in The Dark Nexus Between Harm Groups and The Com, it is increasingly common for federal investigators to find CSAM material when searching devices seized from cybercriminal suspects. While the mere possession of CSAM is a serious federal crime, not all of those caught with CSAM are necessarily creators or distributors of it. Fertel said some cybercriminal communities have been known to require new entrants to share CSAM material as a way of proving that they are not a federal investigator.

“If you’re going to the darkest corners of Internet, that’s how you prove you’re not law enforcement,” Fertel said. “Law enforcement would never share that material. It would be criminal for me as a prosecutor, if I obtained and possessed those types of images.”

Further reading: The settlement between Fitzpatrick and Nonstop (PDF).