Latest Reporting & Analysis
Cybercrime reporting and analysis from Countervail.
Coverage includes breach response, fraud tactics, public-sector risk, adversary behavior, cyber policy, and the decisions that shape real-world digital harm.
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A breach at TeamUpdraft put about 400,000 WordPress sites in range, and the same pattern reaches everyone with accounts and apps. Here is a 30-minute plan to hold fewer keys and shrink your exposure.
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Scammers are posing as Seattle City Light and threatening to cut off power unless a customer pays right away. Here is how the script works, what the process really looks like, and how to break it.
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A Missouri woman lost more than $7,000 to a pop-up and a caller claiming to be from the FTC. Here is how the script works and how to break it.
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Lose money to a scam, and someone may soon appear with an irresistible offer: a way to get it back. On July 20, 2026, the F.B.I. warned that criminals were impersonating the bureau and its Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3, to target people who had already been defrauded. Nearly everyone who reported the approach…
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Oct 2, 2026 · Joanna Wiggum Overview Financially motivated crime and state-directed hacking share people, tools and infrastructure, and the line defenders used to draw between them is no longer helpful in the on-going cyberwar. Governments tolerate, task, fund or buy from criminals. Criminals sell access, labor and stolen data to governments. In several cases…
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Scammers are working Pierce County’s public jail booking log, calling families within the hour and posing as public defenders to collect $500 to $1,500 for a release that never happens. Verify any attorney independently before you pay.
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A friend handed me her iPhone last week with the specific exhaustion of a person losing an argument to an object. A calendar event would not go away. It was titled “⚠️ Action Required: Permanent data loss Warning!” — warning emoji included, because these people do not believe in subtlety — and it claimed to…
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This week Cambodia hosted an international summit on shutting down the scam compounds operating inside its own borders. Around twenty countries sent delegations, Interpol and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime co-sponsored, and a senior FBI official shared the agenda with China’s vice minister of public security. The scammers themselves declined to attend. To…
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LinkedIn is the only dating app where someone slides into your DMs by complimenting your “inspiring leadership journey.” I’ve spent twenty years studying adversarial tactics, and I have to hand it to the Linkedin scammers: they’ve figured out that the easiest place to run a romance scam is the one platform where everyone is already…
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Every so often, cybercrime hands us a story so absurd the lesson practically teaches itself. This is one of them. Over the weekend, the extortion crew ShinyHunters hijacked the dark-web leak site of the ransomware gang Cl0p, the very page Cl0p uses to name and shame its victims into paying. Anyone who wandered over expecting…
About Countervail
Countervail is a veteran-owned, Washington State licensed private investigation agency that helps individuals, businesses, and nonprofits prevent and recover from fraud, scams, ransomware, and other cyber threats. Threat Insights is written by founder and agency principal Joanna Wiggum, a U.S. Air Force veteran and former big tech and enterprise security leader at Microsoft and Oracle, to show how today’s crimes actually work and what to do about them.