cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45350334

#Thousands of consumer routers hacked by Russia’s military

##End-of-life routers in homes and small offices hacked in 120 countries.

The Russian military is once again hacking home and small office routers in widespread operations that send unwitting users to sites that harvest passwords and credential tokens for use in espionage campaigns, researchers said Tuesday.

An estimated 18,000 to 40,000 consumer routers, mostly those made by MikroTik and TP-Link, located in 120 countries, were wrangled into infrastructure belonging to APT28, an advanced threat group that’s part of Russia’s military intelligence agency known as the GRU, researchers from Lumen Technologies’ Black Lotus Labs said. The threat group has operated for at least two decades and is behind dozens of high-profile hacks targeting governments worldwide. APT28 is also tracked under names including Pawn Storm, Sofacy Group, Sednit, Tsar Team, Forest Blizzard, and STRONTIUM.

###Technical sophistication, tried-and-true techniques

A small number of routers were used as proxies to connect to a much larger number of other routers belonging to foreign ministries, law enforcement, and government agencies that APT28 wanted to spy on. The group then used its control of routers to change DNS lookups for select websites, including, Microsoft said, domains for the company’s 365 service.

“Known for blending cutting-edge tools such as the large language model (LLM) ‘LAMEHUG’ with proven, longstanding techniques, Forest Blizzard consistently evolves its tactics to stay ahead of defenders,” Black Lotus researchers wrote. “Their previous and current campaigns highlight both their technological sophistication and their willingness to revisit classic attack methods even after public exposure, underscoring the ongoing risk posed by this actor to organizations worldwide.”

To hijack the routers, the attackers exploited older models that hadn’t been patched against known security vulnerabilities. They then changed DNS settings for select domains and used the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol to propagate them to router-connected workstations. When connected devices visited the selected domains, their connections were proxied through malicious servers before reaching their intended destination.

These adversary-in-the-middle servers used self-signed certificates. When the end user clicked through browser warnings, the servers captured all traffic passing through them. Among other things, they collected OAuth tokens and other credentials set after users, unaware their connections were being tapped, completed multifactor authentication.

The operation began in May 2025 on a limited number of devices. Then, in August, Britain’s National Cyber Security Center released an alert that documented a malware campaign a threat group was using to “intercept and exfiltrate Microsoft Office account credentials and tokens.” The following day, the threat group rapidly stepped up the router hijacking, an activity it continued to ramp up in the coming months.

Over a four-week period starting on December 12, Black Lotus observed more than 290,000 distinct IP addresses sending at least one DNS request to the malicious APT28 DNS resolver. “This suggested that as one capability was disclosed, the actor immediately shifted to another to continue acquiring authentication material,” company researchers wrote.

Black Lotus described the methodology this way:

1. DNS changes were then propagated to the workstations on the adjacent LAN via Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP).
2. The actor operated a DNS server to behave like a typical recursive resolver, but when a targeted Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) was queried, it was configured to provide a record back containing its own IP address instead of the correct address. The only interventions were triggered by domains associated with authentication-related services. If any other domain was requested, traffic passed directly through.
3. The actor ran a proxy service as the AitM that the end user was directed to via DNS. The only sign of this attack would be a pop-up warning about connecting to an untrusted source because of the “break and inspect.”
4. If warnings were present and ignored or clicked through, the actor proxied requests to the legitimate services, collecting the data at the midpoint and collecting data associated with the targeted account by passing the valid OAuth token. This allowed the actor to break and inspect traffic and access authentication material such as Oauth tokens after completing the multifactor challenge.

APT28 has a history of hacking routers. In 2018, researchers discovered 500,000 of the devices, mostly located in the US, were infected with malware tracked as VPNFilter. In 2024, the US Justice Department caught the group doing it again.

The easiest way for people to know if their router has been compromised in the operation is to review the current DNS settings to see if they list unrecognized servers. Users should also check event logs for any unrecognized changes to DNS server settings. People should also strongly consider replacing end-of-life routers with ones that receive regular security updates. People should never click through browser alerts warning of untrusted TLS certificates.

– Dan Goodin Senior Security Editor

Finally a $1,500 robotic lamp that folds your shirts.

Here's my beautiful unemployed-for-too-long-have-no-money-dont-care-about-looks lab :)

Hey it's more than good enough to run all this ¯_(ツ)_/¯

The U.S. demanded Wednesday that Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz after the Islamic Republic closed the waterway in response to Israeli attacks against the Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon. Iran’s move cast doubt over whether an already precarious ceasefire to end more than a month of war would hold.

The United States and Iran both claimed victory after reaching the agreement, and world leaders expressed relief, even as more drones and missiles hit Iran and Gulf Arab countries. Israel intensified its attacks in Lebanon, hitting several commercial and residential areas in Beirut without warning. At least 112 people were killed and hundreds were wounded in one of the deadliest days in the latest Israel-Hezbollah war.

The fresh violence threatened to scuttle what U.S. Vice President JD Vance called a “fragile” deal.

It's Lemmyvision time again! Here's a post about it.

TL;DR: we pick a song released after 1 Jan 2025 to submit and then everyone votes!

This is the post for ideas, so please everyone get your ideas in and then we will do a vote later on which to enter.

They allow one song per language so we can submit one in English and one in Māori if we want to.

Recent reporting from the Financial Times reveals it was President Trump, not the Iranian government, who was begging for a ceasefire.

FT reports that the Trump administration had been privately pushing for a ceasefire for weeks to alleviate the economic strain caused by Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, and depending on Pakistan for mediation. Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir was communicating with Iranian officials, special envoy Steve Witkoff, Vice President JD Vance, and Trump himself even after the president threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization on Tuesday.

According to the five people familiar with the diplomatic back channel, Trump had been asking for a ceasefire since as early as March 21, when he first threatened to bomb Iran’s power plants.

This contradicts virtually everything the Trump administration has claimed about Iran—that Trump’s constant bombings and threats of extinction caused a wounded, demoralized Iranian regime to limp to the negotiating table, desperate for a deal with the U.S.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) says it will deliver a "regret-inducing response" if Israeli strikes on Lebanon don't stop immediately, state media reports

Israel and the US say Lebanon is not included in a two-week ceasefire deal with Iran. PM Benjamin Netanyahu says today Israel delivered "the greatest blow" to Hezbollah since the start of its ground operation in Lebanon

Psy-op campaigns, selective leaks, exclusive reporter access: Soldiers and journalists reveal how the IDF Spokesperson's Unit controls public discourse and promotes Israel's narrative abroad.

Dario Sanchez, 32, shared in interviews with KERA News his perspective on the charges he's facing related to a shooting that occurred outside the Prairieland Detention Center on July 4, 2025. Sanchez was not at the shooting but has been arrested three times in connection.

Related story about another Prairieland defendant: https://www.texasobserver.org/antifa-scare-prairieland-19-trial-ice-detention/

The 19th and final defendant, Lucy Fowlkes, was arrested in January and charged with two counts of hindering prosecution of terrorism. She is alleged to have helped delete messages and remove people from group chats. Prosecutors allege that the deleted messages contained evidence of planning the incident and planning to help Song evade arrest and “by extension, [to] hinder prosecution of terrorism.”

Here is the actual criminal complaint for Lucy Fowlkes: https://prairielanddefendants.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/980161192-Lucy-Fowlkes-Criminal-Complaint.pdf

Her messages giving instructions on how to delete messages are used as evidence of her charges.

Here is a relevant excerpt from the arrest warrant affidavit for another Prairieland defendant Janette Goering, written by Johnson County detective William J. Reilly:

1. Kent and Sharp indicated the arrangement to meet at the Murphy’s USA was conducted via signal chats. Signal is an end-to-end encrypted chat commonly used with intent to mitigate digital footprint and have conversations that have the ability to be deleted and unrecoverable. I know based on my training and experience the individuals who utilize end-to-end encrypted chats to be engaged in criminal activity, whether it be a conspiracy to commit a criminal offense or sharing of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

Here is the actual arrest warrant affidavit for Janette Goering (the quote is from page 7, paragraph 10 of the PDF): https://prairielanddefendants.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Goering/2025-10-21/-/_Search/_Warrant/Affidavit//_J./_Goering/_OCR.pdf

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/45652102

from +972’s Sunday Recap
+972Magazine [published in Israel]
April 5, 2026

For the past month, Iddo Elam has been gathering with fellow Israeli radical left activists in Tel Aviv’s Habima Square to protest the war with Iran. As dissent spreads to the political center and these anti-war demonstrations expand, demonstrators face violent crackdowns by Israeli police — while opposition lawmakers are still nowhere to be seen. Also:

• 'They already shoot us for no reason. Now they have a death penalty'
• Israeli leaders are condemning settler attacks. It’s a smokescreen
• Fifty years on, does Land Day still matter for Palestinians in Israel?
• Less Jesus, more Genghis Khan: How Netanyahu sees Israel's place in the world

Her name? Aroma!

Iranian state media is reporting that Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israeli attacks on Lebanon, which have continued today.

Israel has said a ceasefire struck between the U.S. and Iran late yesterday doesn't include its war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, where it launched its largest co-ordinated strike in the war to date.The Lebanese Health Ministry said 112 people have been killed today.

Most stranded oil and gas tankers remained inside the Persian Gulf.

I have a OnePlus5T that runs PostmarketOS (console, no GUI). I use pmbootstrap to flash the image and it serves me well for the most part. To make the internet connection more stable, I wish to connect the phone to the router using an Ethernet adapter.

I have borrowed a Porttonics Ethernet 8in1 adapter and works well on other stock android phones. I can use ethernet nicely and surf sites on those phones

I seem to be unable to do this with Postmarket OS. Based on what i have read, I think the kernel needs to be tweaked so it can connect and work with the router. Does anyone know how to do this?

(This is my second post on this topic. Apologies).