John Z Black
Brunswick, ME • (207) 245-1010 • contact@johnzblack.com
Law Enforcement Had a Good Week: At Least 6 Marketplaces Down, 213 Arrests, and a Historic Conviction
At least six dark web marketplaces dismantled, LeakBase seized, $12M in crypto fraud frozen, and the first Take It Down Act conviction. Law enforcement capabilities are improving. It's worth saying so.
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It Was a Good Week to Be a Federal Prosecutor
Two cybercrime sentences landed in the same week: 81 months for the access broker who sold entry into Yanluowang's victims, and 2 years for the operator of the Mario Kart botnet that extorted more than 70 US companies.
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31.4 Terabits in 35 Seconds: Cloudflare's New Threat Report Shows Attacks Have Gone Industrial
Cloudflare's 2026 threat report documents a record-breaking 31.4 Tbps DDoS attack and reveals that 94% of bot-driven login attempts now bypass MFA by stealing session tokens instead of passwords.
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Mario Kart Got Two Years. The Guy Who Sold the Keys Got Nearly Seven.
Two Russian cybercriminals were sentenced the same week. One ran a botnet that hit 72 US companies and got 2 years. The other sold network access to ransomware crews and got nearly 7. The gap says something real about how DOJ views the ransomware supply chain.
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Russian 'Key Seller' Who Helped Ransomware Gangs Break Into Victims Gets Nearly 7 Years
Aleksei Volkov, a 26-year-old Russian initial access broker for the Yanluowang ransomware gang, was sentenced to 81 months in federal prison and ordered to pay over $9 million in restitution. He made one mistake: he left Russia.
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He Made $8 Million Having Bots Fake-Listen to AI Songs. Real Artists Paid for It.
Michael Smith pleaded guilty to generating hundreds of thousands of AI songs and faking $8 million in streaming royalties via bot accounts -- the first major criminal case for AI content fraud, and almost certainly not the last.
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You Can't Seize the Internet: Iran's Handala Hackers Were Back Online Hours After the FBI Acted
The DOJ seized four Handala domains. Iran's MOIS-backed hackers had new infrastructure up within hours, called the action 'trivial,' and kept operating. That tells you everything about the limits of domain seizures as deterrence.
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Smuggled Silicon: The DOJ Case That Puts AI Export Controls in the Spotlight
Three men charged with smuggling US AI hardware to China represent the first major criminal test of export control law applied to high-performance compute. The era of treating AI export controls as background noise is over.
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Botnet Takedown at Massive Scale: Good News, Short Window
New scale confirmation makes this takedown meaningful, but defenders only win if they use the brief recovery window to harden fast.
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The Insider No One Suspected: DOJ Says a Ransomware "Helper" Was Running the Attack
A ransomware negotiator was secretly feeding BlackCat operators confidential victim data to jack up ransom payments. The DOJ just charged him.
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