“This eruption of violence had been brewing for years, through successive economic collapses, pandemics, and the utter dysfunction that had become American life.” An exclusive excerpt from 2054: A Novel.

2054, Part VI: Standoff at Arlington

Plus: China’s Volt Typhoon hackers lurked in US systems for years, the Biden administration’s crackdown on spyware vendors ramps up, and a new pro-Beijing disinformation campaign gets exposed.

Documents exclusively obtained by WIRED reveal that AI surveillance software tracked thousands of people using the London Underground to detect crime or unsafe situations. The machine learning software scoured live CCTV footage to spot aggressive behavior, weapons being brandished, and people dodging fares. The documents also detail errors made during the trial—for instance, mistakenly identifying children walking with their parents as fare evaders.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, cryptocurrency tracing firm Chainalysis published a report finding ransomware payments in 2023 reached over $1.1 billion, the highest annual total ever recorded. The record-breaking sum of extorted funds was due to two things: the high number of ransomware attacks and the amount of money that hackers were demanding from victims, many of whom were targeted specifically for their ability to pay and their inability to sustain a prolonged disruption of services.

A tech company, notorious for keeping websites with far-right and other extreme content online, was bought last year by a secretive company whose business is to help set up businesses, often in ways that keep details of those companies secret, WIRED reported on Thursday. Registered Agents Inc.’s acquisition of Epik may allow the shadowy company to provide its customers with another layer of anonymity.

For the past month, senior security reporter Matt Burgess has been transitioning away from using passwords to log in to his hundreds of online accounts. Instead, he’s using passkeys, a more secure form of authentication that uses generated codes stored on your device to log in to websites and apps using a biometric identifier like a fingerprint, face scan, or PIN. When it works, it’s seamless and secure. When it doesn’t, it’s a mess.

WhatsApp is developing a feature to allow its users to message across apps, all while maintaining its secure end-to-end encryption. In theory, the move would allow users to chat with people on WhatsApp using apps like Signal or Telegram. It’s unclear which companies, if any, will link their services with WhatsApp.

And there’s more. Each week, we highlight the news we didn’t cover in-depth ourselves. Click on the headlines below to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

Hackers have, in the real world, caused blackouts, set fire to a steel mill, and released worms that took down medical record systems in hospitals across the US and the UK. So it hardly seems necessary to invent new nightmares about them taking over our toothbrushes.

Yet, when the Swiss newspaper _Aargauer Zeitung_ published a story that cybercriminals had infected 3 million internet-connected toothbrushes with malware, then used them to launch a cyberattack that downed a website for four hours and caused millions of dollars in damage, the tale was somehow irresistible. This week, news outlets around the world picked up the story, which quoted the cybersecurity firm Fortinet as its source, spinning it out as the perfect illustration of how hackers can exploit the most mundane technology for epic malevolence. “This example, which seems like a Hollywood scenario, actually happened,” the Swiss newspaper wrote.

Except, of course, it didn’t. Cybersecurity professionals quickly started to point out that the story was unsupported by any evidence—and was somewhat absurd on its face. (Even the Mirai botnet, which knocked out its targets with record-breaking tsunamis of junk traffic and eventually broke a large fraction of the internet, infected only 650,000 internet-connected devices at its peak.)

Fortinet belatedly sought to correct the record, writing in public statements that “it appears that due to translations the narrative on this topic has been stretched to the point where hypothetical and actual scenarios are blurred.” But the _Aargauer Zeitung_ pointed the finger back at Fortinet, noting in a follow-up story that Fortinet provided exact details of the dental doomsday it described as real, and that the company even reviewed the text of the article prior to publication. Regardless of who’s to blame, at least this cyber urban legend has inspired some solid meme content.

Back to more factual cyber doomsday headlines: The US Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency this week warned in a report that China’s hacker group known as Volt Typhoon had quietly maintained access to some US critical infrastructure networks for as long as half a decade. The report included detailed descriptions of the intrusion and persistence techniques used by the group, which has distinguished itself as perhaps China’s most aggressive state-sponsored hacking force. Volt Typhoon’s broad penetration of US electric grids, transportation networks, and other critical infrastructure has raised alarms among US federal agencies since as early as May of last year, when those agencies began to warn that the group appeared to be laying the groundwork for cyberwar-style attacks in the midst of any future conflict. Now it’s clear that those warnings came only years after the hackers’ sabotage preparations were well underway.

The Biden administration announced that it will restrict the visas of foreign sellers of commercial spyware, potentially preventing executives or associates of those surveillance firms from traveling to the US. The new regulation is part of the White House’s slow tightening of the screws on spyware seller firms like NSO Group, Cytrox, Intellexa, and Candiru, after an earlier move to place those firms on a Commerce Department trade blocklist and prevent US government agencies from buying those hacking firms’ tools. On the day of the announcement, Google released its own detailed report on alleged commercial spyware vendors, calling out a dozen of the companies by name and offering policy recommendations for protecting users.

Citizen Lab this week exposed a vast network of Chinese websites posing as local news sites across the globe, all used to post pro-Beijing disinformation and propaganda. The 123 sites, targeting audiences in more than 30 countries in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, mixed innocuous commercial and cut-and-pasted content with anti-Western conspiracy theories, such as allegations of human experimentation carried out by the United States in Southeast Asia, and targeted attacks on critics of the Chinese government. While the visibility and impact of the influence operation has been “negligible,” according to Citizen Lab, it’s another sign of China’s growing efforts to wield disinformation as a soft power tactic.

How 3 Million ‘Hacked’ Toothbrushes Became a Cyber Urban Legend

Apple macOS users are the target of a new Rust-based backdoor that has been operating under the radar since November 2023.
The backdoor, codenamed RustDoor by Bitdefender, has been found to impersonate an update for Microsoft Visual Studio and target both Intel and Arm architectures.
The exact initial access pathway used to propagate the implant is currently not known, although

macOS Malware / Cyber Threat

Apple macOS users are the target of a new Rust-based backdoor that has been operating under the radar since November 2023.

The backdoor, codenamed **RustDoor** by Bitdefender, has been found to impersonate an update for Microsoft Visual Studio and target both Intel and Arm architectures.

The exact initial access pathway used to propagate the implant is currently not known, although it's said to be distributed as FAT binaries that contain Mach-O files.

Multiple variants of the malware with minor modifications have been detected to date, likely indicating active development. The earliest sample of RustDoor dates back to November 2, 2023.

It comes with a wide range of commands that allow it to gather and upload files, and harvest information about the compromised endpoint.

Some versions also include configurations with details about what data to collect, the list of targeted extensions and directories, and the directories to exclude.

The captured information is then exfiltrated to a command-and-control (C2) server.

The Romanian cybersecurity firm said the malware is likely linked to prominent ransomware families like Black Basta and BlackCat owing to overlaps in C2 infrastructure.

"ALPHV/BlackCat is a ransomware family (also written in Rust), that first made its appearance in November 2021, and that has pioneered the public leaks business model," security researcher Andrei Lapusneau said.

In December 2023, the U.S. government announced that it took down the BlackCat ransomware operation and released a decryption tool that more than 500 affected victims can use to regain access to files locked by the malware.

Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter __ and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post.

Alert: New Stealthy "RustDoor" Backdoor Targeting Apple macOS Devices

Red Hat Security Advisory 2024-0760-03 - An update for the container-tools:3.0 module is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 Advanced Mission Critical Update Support, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 Telecommunications Update Service, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 Update Services for SAP Solutions.

    The following advisory data is extracted from:https://access.redhat.com/security/data/csaf/v2/advisories/2024/rhsa-2024_0760.jsonRed Hat officially shut down their mailing list notifications October 10, 2023.  Due to this, Packet Storm has recreated the below data as a reference point to raise awareness.  It must be noted that due to an inability to easily track revision updates without crawling Red Hat's archive, these advisories are single notifications and we strongly suggest that you visit the Red Hat provided links to ensure you have the latest information available if the subject matter listed pertains to your environment.- Packet Storm Staff====================================================================Red Hat Security AdvisorySynopsis:           Important: container-tools:3.0 security updateAdvisory ID:        RHSA-2024:0760-03Product:            Red Hat Enterprise LinuxAdvisory URL:       https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2024:0760Issue date:         2024-02-09Revision:           03CVE Names:          CVE-2024-21626====================================================================Summary: An update for the container-tools:3.0 module is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 Advanced Mission Critical Update Support, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 Telecommunications Update Service, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 Update Services for SAP Solutions.Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impact of Important. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available for each vulnerability from the CVE link(s) in the References section.Description:The container-tools module contains tools for working with containers, notably podman, buildah, skopeo, and runc.Security Fix(es):* runc: file descriptor leak (CVE-2024-21626)For more details about the security issue(s), including the impact, a CVSS score, acknowledgments, and other related information, refer to the CVE page(s) listed in the References section.Solution:https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258CVEs:CVE-2024-21626References:https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#importanthttps://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/RHSB-2024-001https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2258725

Red Hat Security Advisory 2024-0760-03

Red Hat Security Advisory 2024-0758-03 - An update for the container-tools:2.0 module is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 Advanced Update Support, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 Telecommunications Update Service, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 Update Services for SAP Solutions.

    The following advisory data is extracted from:https://access.redhat.com/security/data/csaf/v2/advisories/2024/rhsa-2024_0758.jsonRed Hat officially shut down their mailing list notifications October 10, 2023.  Due to this, Packet Storm has recreated the below data as a reference point to raise awareness.  It must be noted that due to an inability to easily track revision updates without crawling Red Hat's archive, these advisories are single notifications and we strongly suggest that you visit the Red Hat provided links to ensure you have the latest information available if the subject matter listed pertains to your environment.- Packet Storm Staff====================================================================Red Hat Security AdvisorySynopsis:           Important: container-tools:2.0 security updateAdvisory ID:        RHSA-2024:0758-03Product:            Red Hat Enterprise LinuxAdvisory URL:       https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2024:0758Issue date:         2024-02-09Revision:           03CVE Names:          CVE-2024-21626====================================================================Summary: An update for the container-tools:2.0 module is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 Advanced Update Support, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 Telecommunications Update Service, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 Update Services for SAP Solutions.Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impact of Important. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available for each vulnerability from the CVE link(s) in the References section.Description:The container-tools module contains tools for working with containers, notably podman, buildah, skopeo, and runc.Security Fix(es):* runc: file descriptor leak (CVE-2024-21626)For more details about the security issue(s), including the impact, a CVSS score, acknowledgments, and other related information, refer to the CVE page(s) listed in the References section.Solution:https://access.redhat.com/articles/11258CVEs:CVE-2024-21626References:https://access.redhat.com/security/updates/classification/#importanthttps://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/RHSB-2024-001https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2258725

Red Hat Security Advisory 2024-0758-03

“Had this all been contrived? Had his life become a game in which everyone knew the rules but him?” An exclusive excerpt from 2054: A Novel.

2054, Part V: From Tokyo With Love

Known for doing business with far-right extremist websites, Epik has been acquired by a company that specializes in helping businesses keep their operations secret.

A technology company that has been essential in keeping far-right and extremist websites online was acquired last year by a firm that operates an empire of shell companies across the United States, according to people familiar with the deal.

Epik.com has been for years the go-to domain registrar for websites that other companies refuse to do business with. Sites dedicated to white nationalism, QAnon conspiracy theories, and harassing transgender people were all welcomed by Epik. Now, it appears that Epik’s new owner may abandon the extremist fringe and shift its customer base toward companies seeking to operate in the shadows.

Rob Monster, a born-again Christian who founded Epik in 2009, had been key in keeping many of the most extreme websites online. He often went to great lengths to personally defend the sites and extolled the virtues of free speech. Epik was sold to new ownership last year after the company unraveled amid allegations of gross financial mismanagement.

An accounting firm hired by Epik to conduct a forensic investigation alleged that Monster had misappropriated more than $3.5 million, according to an internal preliminary report obtained by WIRED. More than $1.5 million was attributed to Monster personally withdrawing funds from the company. Nearly $2 million of Epik funds was used in Kingdom Ventures, Monsters’ venture capital firm, according to the report.

Monster didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.

The buyer of Epik’s domain registrar business was a brand-new company that had been incorporated in Wyoming weeks before the sale was completed last summer: Epik LLC. The owner of Epik LLC, according to two people familiar with the deal, is Registered Agents Inc. The company confirmed its ownership in a press release late Friday night.

Registered Agents Inc. and its subsidiary companies claim to have offices in every state and Washington, DC. Its services allow companies to operate anonymously in a jurisdiction of its choosing. Registered Agents Inc. says it provides services to over 1 million companies.

The founder and owner of Registered Agents, according to two people familiar with the company, is a man named Dan Keen. In an email, a lawyer for Registered Agents Inc. says Keen is not the owner nor an employee of Registered Agents Inc. or Epik, and that he acted as a consultant in the acquisition.

Keen is intensely private, according to multiple people who have worked with him who requested anonymity to discuss details of the deal. “He has made it his mission in life to be invisible,” said one. “He’s someone who likes to operate in the shadows,” claims another. Keen is a serial entrepreneur who previously ran a lawn care and tree-trimming business, according to public records.

Keen has no website or social media pages. Emails sent by Keen don’t include a signature. Attempts to reach Keen for comment led to a reply from Bryce Myrvang, a lawyer for Registered Agents Inc.

Using a registered agent to incorporate a business allows the owner to shield who actually owns it. A registered agent will act as an official point of contact for a company, receiving legal notices and mail, and filing incorporation documents with the state. In Wyoming alone, Registered Agents Inc. represents around 50,000 companies, according to the Wyoming secretary of state.

For example, a company that uses Registered Agents Inc. to set up shop in Wyoming would have its address listed as 30 N. Gould Sreet, a squat one-story building in the town of Sheridan.

A local paper in Wyoming, _The Sheridan Press_, reported in August 2021 that scam business had been linked to the 30 N. Gould Street address, where more than 20 registered agent firms claim to have their offices. An editor's note added after publication stated, “It remains completely legal for registered agents to do what they’re doing under Wyoming Statute.”

A 2022 investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found that “oligarchs, criminals and online scammers” have used registered agents to operate in the United States and shield their true identity.

Registered Agents Inc.’s acquisition of Epik allows the company to extend its offerings to the internet, providing its customers another layer of anonymity for their websites.

“This most recent acquisition provided an opportunity to expand our business offerings to include a business email address, a domain name, and open source website hosting at a reasonable cost,” Myrvang tells WIRED. “Registered Agents Inc. now has the capability to establish an entire business identity for its customers in less than 10 minutes.”

Clues about changes within Epik first emerged in January, when the company terminated its relationship with Kiwi Farms, a notorious trolling site whose users are dedicated to perpetuating never-ending drama and misery. In a series of bizarre and now deleted tweets, Epik claimed it suspended Kiwi Farms in response to a US court order and that the site hosted child sexual abuse material. In response, the Kiwi Farms administrator began crowdfunding money for a defamation lawsuit against Epik.

“You specialize in defamation, revenge porn, harassment, and hate speech and you want to sue us? We will expose all your and your users dirty secrets and they will be permanent public records,” the EpikLLC X account replied. “The judgment we will win against you will follow you the rest of your life.”

It was as if a new set of trolls with an entirely different worldview had taken over Epik.

“Alright all Whiny, Beta Snowflakes. Our DEI hires of the month canceled #Kiwifarms,” another post from EpikLLC read. “We don't like hate speech, porn, or doxxing. #JoeBiden will fix it! 2024!”

Some of the tweets trolling Epik were later deleted. “If such comments and or interactions on X were found to be offensive, Epik LLC formally apologizes to those individuals and or company,” Myrvang, the company's lawyer, says. “Further, the appropriate action has been taken internally in relation to the comments made on X.”

It’s unclear if Epik’s new owners singled out Kiwi Farms or if it has booted other sites from its service. “Epik.com’s Terms of Service has been updated to maintain compliance with all regulatory requirements,” Myrvang says.

When asked if the company has stopped working with other customers, Myrvang says, “Epik LLC will suspend and or terminate relationships with any company and or individual who violates its Terms of Services.”

In late 2022, Epik customers began reporting that they were suddenly unable to withdraw money from Masterbucks, Epik’s payment platform, which facilitated buying and selling pricey domain names. One customer, Luigi Marruso, posted on the domain name forum NamePros claiming that Epik was holding onto $1.5 million of its money. In an email to WIRED, Marruso says he still hasn’t been paid back.

Another customer, Matthew Adkisson, sued Epik and Monster, claiming they had mismanaged or embezzled $327,000 from him as he sought to purchase nourish.com. Epik later settled with Adkisson.

Claims like Adkisson’s began to pile up on forums for professionals in the domain name business (known as “domainers”), and Epik was in serious financial jeopardy.

Epik’s customers, fearing the worst, rushed to get their money back from the company. Epik even had outstanding debts with ICANN, the nonprofit that serves as a global administrator for the internet, according to legal filings.

“They were using customer funds to fund its operations. People started asking for those customer funds back, and they couldn't pay them,” says Andrew Allemann, a journalist who covered the fiasco for Domain Name Wire. “There was a run on the bank, and the money wasn’t there.”

In September 2022, a new CEO was installed at Epik in an attempt to stem the bleeding and settle the company’s debts. Epik, once valued by an investor at around $150 million was sold for around $5 million dollars in June 2023, according to a purchase agreement released as an exhibit in the Adkisson lawsuit. Much of the $5 million purchase price was allocated to paying off some of Epik’s debts. It’s unclear if the terms of the final deal match the one released as part of the lawsuit, but a source familiar with the acquisition says it was generally similar.

The rest of the debt was left with Monster. Just how much Monster owes former customers and vendors is unknown. Two former Epik customers told WIRED they’re still waiting to be paid back $38,000 and $20,000, respectively.

_Updated: 2/8/2024, 2:35 pm ET: Added additional comment from a Registered Agents Inc. spokesperson regarding Dan Keen's relationship with the company._

Epik, the Far-Right's Favorite Web Host, Has a Shadowy New Owner

Passkeys are here to replace passwords. When they work, it’s a seamless vision of the future. But don’t ditch your old logins just yet.

Using passkeys likely means having a different mindset from how you think about passwords. There’s nothing to remember when you log in, and you have to use something else to store your passkeys. Passkeys can be stored in Apple’s, Google’s or Microsoft’s password manager systems; your browser; a dedicated password manager; or on a physical security key. I created a Google passkey on one USB key, and all I need to do to sign in is, essentially, plug it in. (All of the devices I use professionally and personally are Apple, meaning I haven’t tested passkeys between my iPhone and a Windows laptop, for instance.)

“The technology is mature, the front ends are still nascent,” Shikiar from the FIDO Alliance says. Over the past year, the FIDO alliance has also been working on user experience guidelines, he says, making it more straightforward for people to sign up and use passkeys across systems. Gary Orenstein, the chief customer officer of password manager Bitwarden, says there are multiple groups involved in the creation and rollout of passkeys, so transitioning to a world where everything is seamless takes coordination. “The standards are at one level, user expectations are at a different level,” he says. “The vendor implementations are at a third level, and they’re merging, but it takes time.”

Being able to save a passkey on essentially any device makes them more useful and means you aren’t locked in to Google’s, Microsoft’s, or Apple’s ecosystems. However, where you save a passkey is going to take some remembering. When setting up one passkey, I was asked by my password manager, browser, and the device operating system whether I wanted to save my passkey with each of them. Picking one spot and sticking to it is probably the best option.

Most of my work is done on my laptop—and it's rare that I download new apps or log out of apps on my phone—so I have been saving the majority of my passkeys in Bitwarden, which costs me $10 a year for a premium account alongside my hundreds of passwords. It works like this: When logging in to my Amazon account, I enter my username, and then Bitwarden’s browser extension pops up asking whether I want to log in with my passkey for Amazon. I press confirm, and I am logged in. It also offers the option to use my device or a hardware key to log in, and if I select one of these options, it looks for passkeys stored on my laptop.

However, as mentioned, Bitwarden doesn’t currently offer passkeys on mobile, meaning that to get the mobile-first Coinbase integration to work, I ended up saving that passkey to iCloud’s Keychain instead. Orenstein, from Bitwarden, says that making passkeys work on mobile is a priority for Bitwarden and more support should be rolling out in the coming months. The company has seen a “fantastic” adoption of passkeys so far, he says, but acknowledges people will have to get used to the change. “You still need an awareness about where it is,” Orenstein says. “I think, over time, as an industry, we can reduce the need for that awareness, hopefully to zero.”

The Password’s Long Goodbye

You may not have set up any passkeys yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Tech companies are starting to make passkeys the default, and more businesses are adopting them. In the past couple of weeks, X has started allowing some people to use passkeys, and WhatsApp is bringing them to iPhones and iPads after previously rolling out passkey support for Android devices.

Leona Lassak, Blase Ur, and Maximilian Golla, three academics from Germany and the US who have researched the adoption of passkeys, say that businesses they’ve interviewed are generally positive about the adoption of passkeys and the extra security it will bring. However, it will likely take some time until the majority of websites, apps, and companies are using passkeys for everything. “I don’t think we will have a big bang in the next few months,” Lassak says. “It’s going to be a slow process, which on the way will then also catch other and smaller entities.”

As a result, passwords will still be around for a while. It’ll be a long time until I have converted my remaining 320-ish accounts to be using passkeys. And for the time being at least, those accounts where I do have passkeys will still have existing passwords that I can fall back on. “Passkeys is having fewer passwords, but not necessarily no passwords,” says Golla.

Experts recommend setting up a few passkeys whenever you come across them on your online accounts, rather than necessarily trying to change them all at once. There are guides to what websites are using passkeys already, and Google, Microsoft, and Apple all have straightforward explanations on how to create passkeys. And there are plenty of benefits to getting started now.

“They are a true password replacement that eliminate the threat of phishing, eliminate the hassle of password resets, and eliminate the liability that service providers have when they’re managing thousands, tens of thousands, or tens of millions, or billions of passwords,” Shikiar says. “It really is an entirely new way of doing user authentication.”

I Stopped Using Passwords. It's Great—and a Total Mess

“The people are in the streets. We can’t ignore them any longer. Really, we have little choice. Either we heal together, or we tear ourselves apart.” An exclusive excerpt from 2054: A Novel.

2054, Part IV: A Nation Divided

“You’d have an incomprehensible level of computational, predictive, analytic, and psychic skill. You’d have the mind of God.” An exclusive excerpt from 2054: A Novel.

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