A multi-state, multi-million dollar investigation dubbed Operation Teller-to-Telegram just concluded with the arrest of several individuals who allegedly engaged in a bank fraud scheme that targeted the elderly.

In a statement, the office of the Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier says that eight individuals behind an $8.8 million bank fraud ring are now facing RICO charges, criminal use of personal information and other serious felonies. 

The fraud operation involved three bank employees in Maryland, identified as Barbara Frazee, Camala Shafer, and Antonio Penn, who allegedly sold and shared the account information of senior customers using the encrypted mobile messaging app Telegram.

The other perpetrators used the victims’ names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and bank account information to drain savings, then transferred the stolen funds to accounts that they opened.

Says Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd,

“This wasn’t some small-time scam, this was a well-organized fraud ring stealing millions from innocent victims across the country. They thought they could hide behind mobile apps and fake accounts, but we found them, and we’ll continue to go after anyone who targets hardworking people’s life savings. Racketeering is a serious crime, and we will pursue as many felonies as possible against each one of these suspects.”

Frazee, Shafer and Penn are now facing charges along with their alleged co-conspirators: Okeroghene Akushe, Michael Nevarez, Roshado Durrant, Hassan Phillips and Kevin Clayton.

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Cybercriminals are attempting to extort education workers after a hack left their sensitive personal data at risk.

Early this year, an investigation from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike determined that PowerSchool – which operates a widely-used Student Information System (SIS) – witnessed a data breach affecting millions of US school kids.

PowerSchool’s SIS software helps schools track students’ attendance, grades, addresses and oftentimes very specific personal information like Social Security numbers or health history.

PowerSchool disclosed that “current and former students and educators” had their names, contact details, dates of birth, limited medical alert information, Social Security numbers and “other related information” compromised.

Months later, state school leaders and employees from at least 20 North Carolina school systems have reported that hackers have attempted to extort them via threatening emails.

The NBC-affiliated WRAL News reports that the extortion attempt asks for a payment in cryptocurrency in exchange for keeping the victims’ data secret.

While PowerSchool says that the threat has been contained, cybersecurity expert Doug Levin said to “take that with a grain of salt.”

Says Levin,

“We also always encourage literally everyone, whether you’ve been caught up in this incident or not, to just freeze their credit records at the credit reporting agencies… It is a simple step that you can take to provide some measure of protection against financial fraud against yourself, should your information ever get exposed in a data breach like this one…

Incidents have been happening more frequently. They’ve been more sophisticated. They have also been more significant in terms of their impact, whether you’re talking about money or amounts, or the sensitivity of data that has been released.

And one of the things that school systems are doing now is also looking and asking questions of all of their vendors and third parties they do business with, like PowerSchool. There is certainly a trend right now that school systems are beginning to ask many more questions of their vendors and partners to ensure that they have strong cybersecurity in place, while school systems as well are shoring up their cybersecurity practices.”

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The messaging app used by some members of the Trump administration and the US government has been hacked, according to a new report.

404 Media reports that a hacker stole customer data from TeleMessage, an Israeli software company that provides modified versions of messaging apps like Signal.

The US government reportedly uses modified apps to archive messages.

A Reuters photo last week revealed that Michael Waltz, the recently ousted national security adviser, was using TeleMessage to communicate with colleagues during a Trump administration cabinet meeting.

Trump said last week on Truth Social that he plans to nominate Waltz to serve as the US ambassador to the United Nations. The former national security adviser fell into hot water earlier this year for accidentally adding a journalist to a sensitive Signal chat about war plans between top Trump administration figures.

The identity of the hacker remains unknown, but 404 Media viewed the hacked material that was anonymously provided. The hacker also anonymously noted that the hack took 15-20 minutes and “wasn’t much effort at all.”

The hacker didn’t access Waltz’s messages specifically, but the thief did access data related to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the crypto exchange Coinbase, as well as other financial institutions. A screenshot shows that the hacker was able to access a TeleMessage panel that lists the names, phone numbers and email addresses of CPB employees.

The screenshot also shows an option to select 747 entries, suggesting that the attacker has access to the data of hundreds of US government employees.

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The chief executive of Coinbase says that the crypto exchange is planning to hire 1,000 new employees in the US this year.

In a new thread on the social media platform X, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says the firm is going on a hiring spree after hearing what regulators had to say about the digital assets industry at the White House Crypto Summit.

According to Armstrong, President Donald Trump’s signing of an executive order last week to create a strategic Bitcoin (BTC) and crypto reserve will lead to an economic boom for the US, one that Coinbase plans to be ready for.

“President Trump has breathed life back into the crypto industry. Coinbase is planning to hire about 1,000 people here in the United States this year as a direct result of his actions… These policies really matter. This is also the most pro-crypto Congress we’ve ever seen as well…

We’re going to see if we can get some legislation passed as the next step. There’s already stablecoin legislation being drafted in the House and the Senate, there’s market structure legislation that will help clarify which of these crypto assets are commodities, securities, payment tokens or something else like artwork.

And I think we can get the strategic Bitcoin reserve that got announced [earlier] codified into law.”

Last week, Trump named Bitcoin, Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), XRP (XRP) and Cardano (ADA) as potential reserve assets, causing the markets to briefly rally.

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is notifying employees whose data was stolen from the company’s Office 365 email environment by Russian state-sponsored hackers in a May 2023 cyberattack.

According to filings with Attorney General offices in New Hampshire and Massachusets, HPE started sending the breach notification letters last month to at least 16 people who had their driver’s licenses, credit card numbers, and Social Security numbers stolen.

“HPE’s forensic investigation determined that certain individuals’ personal information may have been subject to unauthorized access,” the company says in the letters. “On January 29, 2025, HPE began providing notice of this event to impacted individuals, in accordance with applicable law.”

When asked to share the number of employees affected by this data breach, an HPE spokesperson said it was “a limited group of HPE team member mailboxes that were accessed, and only the information contained in those mailboxes was involved.”

The group behind the attack, Cozy Bear (also known as Midnight Blizzard, APT29, and Nobelium), is believed to be part of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and has also been linked to other high-profile breaches, including the infamous 2020 SolarWinds supply chain attack.

The HPE breach incident was first disclosed in an SEC filing on January 29, 2024, when the company said it was notified on December 12 that suspected Russian hackers breached its cloud-based Office 365 email environment in May 2023 using a compromised account.

“We determined that this nation-state actor accessed and exfiltrated data beginning in May 2023 from a small percentage of HPE mailboxes belonging to individuals in our cybersecurity, go-to-market, business segments, and other functions. We believe the nation-state actor is Midnight Blizzard, also known as Cozy Bear,” HPE told BleeingComputer at the time.

“The accessed data is limited to information contained in the users’ mailboxes. We continue to investigate and will make appropriate notifications as required.”

Sharepoint server breached by the same hackers

In the SEC filing, HPE added that the Office 365 incident was likely related to another May 2023 breach, when threat actors accessed the company’s SharePoint server and stole files.

Days before HPE’s disclosure, Microsoft also warned that Cozy Bear hackers stole data from corporate email accounts and source code repositories. They first breached Microsoft’s network in November 2024 in a password spray attack to access a legacy non-production test tenant account.

HPE was previously breached in 2018 when Chinese malicious actors hacked into its network and used that access to breach its customers’ devices.

In 2021, it also disclosed that the data repos for its Aruba Central network monitoring platform had been compromised, allowing a threat actor to access information about monitored devices and their locations.

More recently, in February 2024 and January 2025, the company started investigating other potential security breaches after a threat actor using the IntelBroker handle claimed to have stolen HPE credentials, source code, and other sensitive information.