What Hackers Talk about When They Talk about AI: Early-Stage Diffusion of a Cybercrime Innovation

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence AI is raising concerns about its potential to transform cybercrime. Beyond empowering novice offenders, AI stands to intensify the scale and sophistication of attacks by seasoned cybercriminals. This paper examines the evolving relationship between...

The $17 Billion Wake-Up Call: Securing Crypto in the Age of AI Scams

AI-driven crypto scams surge as cybercrime hits $17B, with deepfakes, fraud kits, and industrial social engineering reshaping digital asset threats and defenses...

New Cybercrime Group 0APT Accused of Faking Hundreds of Breach Claims

Researchers reveal the new 0APT cyber group is fabricating attacks on large organisations. Learn how they use fake data to trick companies into paying...

ICYMI: Experts on Experts – Season One Roundup

In 2025, we launched Experts on Experts: Commanding Perspectives as a pilot video series designed to spotlight the ideas shaping cybersecurity, directly from the people driving them. Over five episodes, Rapid7 leaders shared short, candid conversations on topics like agentic AI, MDR ROI,...

Badges, Bytes and Blackmail

Behind the scenes of law enforcement in cyber: what do we know about caught cybercriminals? What brought them in, where do they come from and what was their function in the crimescape? Introduction: One view on the scattered fight against cybercrime The growing sophistication and diversification ...

ThreatsDay Bulletin: New RCEs, Darknet Busts, Kernel Bugs & 25+ More Stories

This week's updates show how small changes can create real problems. Not loud incidents, but quiet shifts that are easy to miss until they add up. The kind that affects systems people rely on every day. Many of the stories point to the same trend: familiar tools being used in unexpected ways...

Google Disrupts IPIDEA — One of the World's Largest Residential Proxy Networks

Google on Wednesday announced that it worked together with other partners to disrupt IPIDEA, which it described as one of the largest residential proxy networks in the world. To that end, the company said it took legal action to take down dozens of domains used to control devices and proxy traffi...

Russian Cybercrime Platform RAMP Forum Seized by FBI

US authorities have seized the RAMP cybercrime forum, taking down both its clearnet and dark web domains in a major hit to the ransomware infrastructure...

CISA: Bulletproof Defense: Mitigating Risks from Bulletproof Hosting Providers V2

CISA, in collaboration with the U.S. National Security Agency, U.S. Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center, U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, and international partners, have released the guide Bulletproof Defense: Mitigating Risks from Bulletproof Hosting Providers to help internet service...

Black Basta Ransomware Leader Added to EU Most Wanted and INTERPOL Red Notice

Ukrainian and German law enforcement authorities have identified two Ukrainians suspected of working for the Russia-linked ransomware-as-a-service RaaS group Black Basta. In addition, the group's alleged leader, a 35-year-old Russian national named Oleg Evgenievich Nefedov Нефедов Олег Евгеньевич...

Operation Endgame: Dutch Police Arrest Alleged AVCheck Operator

Dutch police arrest the alleged AVCheck operator at Schiphol as part of Operation Endgame, a global effort targeting malware services and cybercrime...

Microsoft Legal Action Disrupts RedVDS Cybercrime Infrastructure Used for Online Fraud

Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it has taken a "coordinated legal action" in the U.S. and the U.K. to disrupt a cybercrime subscription service called RedVDS that has allegedly fueled millions in fraud losses. The effort, per the tech giant, is part of a broader law enforcement effort in...

Inside RedVDS: How a single virtual desktop provider fueled worldwide cybercriminal operations

Over the past year, Microsoft Threat Intelligence observed the proliferation of RedVDS, a virtual dedicated server VDS provider used by multiple financially motivated threat actors to commit business email compromise BEC, mass phishing, account takeover, and financial fraud. Microsoft’s...

How Cybercrime Markets Launder Breach Proceeds and What Security Teams Miss

Explore how cybercrime markets turn stolen data into laundered funds using dollar‑pegged assets, mixers and exchanges-and why tracking BTC USDT price and stablecoin flows now matters for security, fraud and AML teams...

Europol Raids Disrupt Black Axe Cybercrime Ring in Spain

Authorities caught 34 members of the notorious Black Axe gang in Spain known for stealing millions of Euros through online romance scams and email fraud...

INTERPOL Arrests 574 in Africa; Ukrainian Ransomware Affiliate Pleads Guilty

A law enforcement operation coordinated by INTERPOL has led to the recovery of $3 million and the arrest of 574 suspects by authorities from 19 countries, amidst a continued crackdown on cybercrime networks in Africa. The coordinated effort, named Operation Sentinel, took place between October 27...

Cybersecurity Policy Adoption in South Africa: Does Public Trust Matter?

This study examines how public perception influences the implementation and adoption of cybersecurity frameworks in South Africa. Using the PRISMA methodology, a systematic literature review was conducted across reputable scholarly databases, yielding 34 relevant sources aligned with predefined...

BEACON: A Unified Behavioral-Tactical Framework for Explainable Cybercrime Analysis with Large Language Models

Cybercrime increasingly exploits human cognitive biases in addition to technical vulnerabilities, yet most existing analytical frameworks focus primarily on operational aspects and overlook psychological manipulation. This paper proposes BEACON, a unified dual-dimension framework that integrates...

Banking System Stability: A Global Analysis of Cybercrime Laws

We examine the role of cybercrime legislation around the world in shaping the stability of the banking system. We compile a novel dataset covering the enactment of cybercrime legislation in 132 developed and developing countries to empirically test this research question. We find that the enactme...

It’s not personal, it’s just business

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. This week, we explore how advances in agentic AI are rapidly transforming the cyber crime business. Agentic AI programming gives AI agents autonomy, allowing them to interact with external systems to collect information, make decisio...