Robinhood Hacked | Cyber Mercenary Hacks Google Accounts | FBI Email Breach

Plus: 150 Million Google Users To Get 7 Days’ Notice Before Bold Security Change

There's been much talk about businesses like Israel's NSO Group for providing global governments with powerful surveillance technologies. But there remains an even more secretive, underground market for spyware services.

Take the so-called RocketHack crew, whose activities were uncovered this week by a researcher at cybersecurity company Trend Micro. According to his findings, the Russian-speaking RocketHack crew has, since 2017, been breaking into Google, email and Telegram accounts, as well as PCs and Android phones, of as many as 3,500 individuals.

The targets range from Belarusian presidential candidates to journalists and human right activists. The researcher even found that more than 50 IVF doctors across a few dozen clinics had been targeted, showing how broad the crew's operations had become.

Given RocketHack is one of the lesser-known underground mercenaries, it begs the question: How big is this illicit market for hacking services? And who else has become a victim?

You can read my full story in Forbes here.

If you have any tips on government surveillance or cybercrime, drop me an email on tbrewster@forbes.com or message me on Signal at +447782376697.

The Big Story

The Stories You Have To Read Today

The FBI's fbi.gov domain name was used to send thousands of fake emails about a cybercrime investigation. It was, according to KrebsOnSecurity, a hoax that abused insecure code in an FBI online portal designed to share information with state and local law enforcement authorities.

Robinhood, the online brokerage, announced a hacker had managed to get access to personal information for nearly one-quarter of the company's nearly 20 million users.

The man who was about to become chief executive of NSO Group quit after the US Department of Commerce blacklisted the spyware company.

A surveillance tech company called WiSpear has been fined for breaching data privacy law in Cyprus, after its $9 million spy van was said to have hoovered up metadata of people's mobile phones. I first wrote about the van after visiting it and its creator back in 2019.

Hacking crew Moses Staff has been breaching Israeli organizations, encrypting data and then refusing to negotiate ransoms, their motivation seemingly more political than financial, The Record reports.

Winner Of The Week

Europe held its first in-person Black Hat conference since the start of the pandemic. There was plenty of interesting research going around, such as the study on that cyber mercenary in this newsletter's headline feature.

Loser Of The Week

A man in Utah paid $16,000 in Bitcoin for the murder of two individuals via a dark web hitman site. Though the two targets were not named, they were reportedly wrapped up in a custody battle. They were, thankfully, unharmed. The defendant was traced via his Bitcoin payments and is now facing jail time.