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The holiday season compresses risk into a short, high-stakes window. Systems run hot, teams run lean, and attackers time automated campaigns to get maximum return. Multiple industry threat reports show that bot-driven fraud, credential stuffing and account takeover attempts intensify around peak shopping events, especially the weeks around Black Friday and Christmas. Why holiday peaks
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Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of two new Android malware families dubbed FvncBot and SeedSnatcher, as another upgraded version of ClayRat has been spotted in the wild. The findings come from Intel 471, CYFIRMA, and Zimperium, respectively. FvncBot, which masquerades as a security app developed by mBank, targets mobile banking users in Poland. What’s notable about the malware
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A critical security flaw in the Sneeit Framework plugin for WordPress is being actively exploited in the wild, per data from Wordfence. The remote code execution vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-6389 (CVSS score: 9.8), which affects all versions of the plugin prior to and including 8.3. It has been patched in version 8.4, released on August 5, 2025. The plugin has more than 1,700 active
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SIMI VALLEY, California.—The White House has greenlit a plan to design and build a frigate domestically as part of its proposed “Golden Fleet,” Navy Secretary John Phelan announced at the Reagan National Defense Forum on Saturday.
President Donald Trump “has signed off on what we are calling the Golden Fleet…We will continue to build ships that are the cornerstones of the fleet—carriers, destroyers, amphibs, submarines. But we need new ships and we need modern ships,” Phelan said, referring to a conversation with the president, defense secretary, and White House budget director last week.
“We will be building a frigate. It will be based on an American design. It is something we can build that we think, actually, will be done before the old Constellation.”
The announcement comes just over a week after Phelan canceled the U.S. Constellation-class frigate program, which was years behind schedule. The navy secretary was scant on details but hinted there was more to come on the “big, beautiful ship.”
Earlier in the day, OMB Director Russell Vought said the decision to axe the program was driven by delays that grew from 15 percent during the first Trump administration to 85 percent during Trump’s second term. To turn that around, the government will have to “do things differently,” he said.
“It's not just market demand; it's execution at these companies to be able to make their contracts and stay on time. And we have a massive backlog. We have many programs that are overrun and this team is currently fixing them. But it's going to require doing things differently to be able to crack that cycle,” he said.
Moving fast is the new normal
The Navy is pushing decisively into unmanned maritime systems with a funding infusion from budget reconciliation. And for Phelan, that means prototyping, testing and producing quickly.
“The Navy basically had a little bit over 200 different unmanned tests going on across nine [program executive offices]. We've consolidated it down to one,” Phelan told reporters. “We've eliminated layers that allow us to test faster, iterate quicker, and get things contracted—which is what we were able to do here with Saronic at this particular junction.”
The Navy surreptitiously bought an undisclosed number of small, 24-foot drone boats as part of a $392 million rapid acquisition contract with Saronic earlier this year—and it’s likely to serve as a blueprint for future buys, Phelan told reporters Saturday.
The Navy used an other transaction agreement through the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit for a prototype and awarded a production contract less than a year later. Some $200 million was immediately put on contract to jumpstart production. Phelan declined to say how many watercraft were ordered. DefenseScoop first reported on the contract’s existence.
Saronic can make about 2,000 of the Corsair vessels in its Austin, Texas, facility each year, CEO Dino Mavrookas told reporters Saturday.
Phelan, who vowed to speed up Navy contracting and spend less, said the drone boat deal was an example of how that might happen.
“This is exactly the kind of rapid prototyping discipline, scaling and responsible stewardship we need to maintain naval dominance as we transition to a hybrid manned-unmanned fleet. It proves that when new entrants bring credible capability to the table, the Department of the Navy will be a fast, serious and repeat customer,” he said.
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The Iranian hacking group known as MuddyWater has been observed leveraging a new backdoor dubbed UDPGangster that uses the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) for command-and-control (C2) purposes. The cyber espionage activity targeted users in Turkey, Israel, and Azerbaijan, according to a report from Fortinet FortiGuard Labs. “This malware enables remote control of compromised systems by allowing
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SIMI VALLEY, California—Last summer’s $156 billion one-time boost for defense spending through the reconciliation bill is likely “only just the beginning,” the defense secretary said on Saturday.“The President has said, and continues to say, he's committed to rebuilding the military, and that requires spending, and substantial spending,” Pete Hegseth said during his keynote address at the Reagan National Defense Forum Saturday. “Just this week, and I was with some of you, was there in the Oval [Office] having these very discussions about FY26 and FY27. And all I can say today is the President is committed to ensuring that our services, our great companies, our industries, have what is needed.”
That funding, he said, will be key to “supercharging” the defense industry—one of the Pentagon’s four “lines of effort,” along with homeland defense, pushing allies to increase defense spending, and deterring China without engaging in conflict.
“We received a historic boost in funding last year, and believe that is only just the beginning,” Hegseth said, alluding to the $156 billion boost from budget reconciliation on top of the DOD’s proposed budget for 2026. “We need a revived defense industrial base. We need those capabilities. We need them yesterday. And so, resource-wise, I think this room will be encouraged by what we'll see soon—but I don't want to get too ahead.”
U.S. defense spending has risen in recent years from $812.1 billion in fiscal year 2017 to $870.7 billion in fiscal year 2021 to $895.2 billion in 2025, according to a Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis. But defense hawks argue that inflation tempers any real growth in national security spending.
Hegseth added that budget and resource concerns are “what keeps me up,” along with military operations.
His comments come just days after the White House released its National Security Strategy, which put some emphasis on defense production.
“We want the world’s most robust industrial base. American national power depends on a strong industrial sector capable of meeting both peacetime and wartime production demands,” the document states. “That requires not only direct defense industrial production capacity but also defense-related production capacity.”
Some analysts had noted that the one-time reconciliation boost could lead the Pentagon to launch programs that would be unsustainable without further spending.
The White House is considering asking for a second reconciliation bill next year, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought said Saturday at the event.
The reconciliation funding, much of which is marked for use during 2026, “allowed us to get all of these priorities—Golden Dome, shipbuilding, nuclear modernization—in a mandatory account that now has certainty. So, that's not subject to the highs and lows of the appropriations process,” Vought said. “Have we made a decision yet on another reconciliation bill? No, we have not. We will make sure that we continue to grow. There will not be a hole there. But I think it is a paradigm shift that we're excited about.”
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Over 30 security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in various artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) that combine prompt injection primitives with legitimate features to achieve data exfiltration and remote code execution. The security shortcomings have been collectively named IDEsaster by security researcher Ari Marzouk (MaccariTA), who discovered them
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A Little Sunshine, Alexander Korsukov, Alexey Pokatilo, AW Tech Limited, Awesome Technologies, Brian Mellor, CLS Research LTD, Filip Perkon, Geekly Solutions Ltd, Livingston Research, Marina Butina, NatInfoSec, North Data, OK Marketing LTD, Olekszij Pokatilo, Proglobal Solutions LTD, Russia’s War on Ukraine, Russian Business Week, Russian Diplomatic Online Club, Synergy, Synergy University, Tweetsquad, Two Sigma Solutions LTD, Vadim Lobov, VLS Research LTDA sprawling academic cheating network turbocharged by Google Ads that has generated nearly $25 million in revenue has curious ties to a Kremlin-connected oligarch whose Russian university builds drones for Russia’s war against Ukraine.
The Nerdify homepage.
The link between essay mills and Russian attack drones might seem improbable, but understanding it begins with a simple question: How does a human-intensive academic cheating service stay relevant in an era when students can simply ask AI to write their term papers? The answer – recasting the business as an AI company – is just the latest chapter in a story of many rebrands that link the operation to Russia’s largest private university.
Search in Google for any terms related to academic cheating services — e.g., “help with exam online” or “term paper online” — and you’re likely to encounter websites with the words “nerd” or “geek” in them, such as thenerdify[.]com and geekly-hub[.]com. With a simple request sent via text message, you can hire their tutors to help with any assignment.
These nerdy and geeky-branded websites frequently cite their “honor code,” which emphasizes they do not condone academic cheating, will not write your term papers for you, and will only offer support and advice for customers. But according to This Isn’t Fine, a Substack blog about contract cheating and essay mills, the Nerdify brand of websites will happily ignore that mantra.
“We tested the quick SMS for a price quote,” wrote This Isn’t Fine author Joseph Thibault. “The honor code references and platitudes apparently stop at the website. Within three minutes, we confirmed that a full three-page, plagiarism- and AI-free MLA formatted Argumentative essay could be ours for the low price of $141.”
A screenshot from Joseph Thibault’s Substack post shows him purchasing a 3-page paper with the Nerdify service.
Google prohibits ads that “enable dishonest behavior.” Yet, a sprawling global essay and homework cheating network run under the Nerdy brands has quietly bought its way to the top of Google searches – booking revenues of almost $25 million through a maze of companies in Cyprus, Malta and Hong Kong, while pitching “tutoring” that delivers finished work that students can turn in.
When one Nerdy-related Google Ads account got shut down, the group behind the company would form a new entity with a front-person (typically a young Ukrainian woman), start a new ads account along with a new website and domain name (usually with “nerdy” in the brand), and resume running Google ads for the same set of keywords.
UK companies belonging to the group that have been shut down by Google Ads since Jan 2025 include:
–Proglobal Solutions LTD (advertised nerdifyit[.]com);
–AW Tech Limited (advertised thenerdify[.]com);
–Geekly Solutions Ltd (advertised geekly-hub[.]com).Currently active Google Ads accounts for the Nerdify brands include:
-OK Marketing LTD (advertising geekly-hub[.]net), formed in the name of Olha Karpenko, a young Ukrainian woman;
–Two Sigma Solutions LTD (advertising litero[.]ai), formed in the name of Olekszij (Alexey) Pokatilo.
Google’s Ads Transparency page for current Nerdify advertiser OK Marketing LTD.
Mr. Pokatilo has been in the essay-writing business since at least 2009, operating a paper-mill enterprise called Livingston Research alongside Alexander Korsukov, who is listed as an owner. According to a lengthy account from a former employee, Livingston Research mainly farmed its writing tasks out to low-cost workers from Kenya, Philippines, Pakistan, Russia and Ukraine.
Pokatilo moved from Ukraine to the United Kingdom in Sept. 2015 and co-founded a company called Awesome Technologies, which pitched itself as a way for people to outsource tasks by sending a text message to the service’s assistants.
The other co-founder of Awesome Technologies is 36-year-old Filip Perkon, a Swedish man living in London who touts himself as a serial entrepreneur and investor. Years before starting Awesome together, Perkon and Pokatilo co-founded a student group called Russian Business Week while the two were classmates at the London School of Economics. According to the Bulgarian investigative journalist Christo Grozev, Perkon’s birth certificate was issued by the Soviet Embassy in Sweden.
Alexey Pokatilo (left) and Filip Perkon at a Facebook event for startups in San Francisco in mid-2015.
Around the time Perkon and Pokatilo launched Awesome Technologies, Perkon was building a social media propaganda tool called the Russian Diplomatic Online Club, which Perkon said would “turbo-charge” Russian messaging online. The club’s newsletter urged subscribers to install in their Twitter accounts a third-party app called Tweetsquad that would retweet Kremlin messaging on the social media platform.
Perkon was praised by the Russian Embassy in London for his efforts: During the contentious Brexit vote that ultimately led to the United Kingdom leaving the European Union, the Russian embassy in London used this spam tweeting tool to auto-retweet the Russian ambassador’s posts from supporters’ accounts.
Neither Mr. Perkon nor Mr. Pokatilo replied to requests for comment.
A review of corporations tied to Mr. Perkon as indexed by the business research service North Data finds he holds or held director positions in several U.K. subsidiaries of Synergy University, Russia’s largest private education provider. Synergy has more than 35,000 students, and sells T-shirts with patriotic slogans such as “Crimea is Ours,” and “The Russian Empire — Reloaded.”
The president of Synergy University is Vadim Lobov, a Kremlin insider whose headquarters on the outskirts of Moscow reportedly features a wall-sized portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the pop-art style of Andy Warhol. For a number of years, Lobov and Perkon co-produced a cross-cultural event in the U.K. called Russian Film Week.
Synergy President Vadim Lobov and Filip Perkon, speaking at a press conference for Russian Film Week, a cross-cultural event in the U.K. co-produced by both men.
Mr. Lobov was one of 11 individuals reportedly hand-picked by the convicted Russian spy Marina Butina to attend the 2017 National Prayer Breakfast held in Washington D.C. just two weeks after President Trump’s first inauguration.
While Synergy University promotes itself as Russia’s largest private educational institution, hundreds of international students tell a different story. Online reviews from students paint a picture of unkept promises: Prospective students from Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and other nations paying thousands in advance fees for promised study visas to Russia, only to have their applications denied with no refunds offered.
“My experience with Synergy University has been nothing short of heartbreaking,” reads one such account. “When I first discovered the school, their representative was extremely responsive and eager to assist. He communicated frequently and made me believe I was in safe hands. However, after paying my hard-earned tuition fees, my visa was denied. It’s been over 9 months since that denial, and despite their promises, I have received no refund whatsoever. My messages are now ignored, and the same representative who once replied instantly no longer responds at all. Synergy University, how can an institution in Europe feel comfortable exploiting the hopes of Africans who trust you with their life savings? This is not just unethical — it’s predatory.”
This pattern repeats across reviews by multilingual students from Pakistan, Nepal, India, and various African nations — all describing the same scheme: Attractive online marketing, promises of easy visa approval, upfront payment requirements, and then silence after visa denials.
Reddit discussions in r/Moscow and r/AskARussian are filled with warnings. “It’s a scam, a diploma mill,” writes one user. “They literally sell exams. There was an investigation on Rossiya-1 television showing students paying to pass tests.”
The Nerdify website’s “About Us” page says the company was co-founded by Pokatilo and an American named Brian Mellor. The latter identity seems to have been fabricated, or at least there is no evidence that a person with this name ever worked at Nerdify.
Rather, it appears that the SMS assistance company co-founded by Messrs. Pokatilo and Perkon (Awesome Technologies) fizzled out shortly after its creation, and that Nerdify soon adopted the process of accepting assignment requests via text message and routing them to freelance writers.
A closer look at an early “About Us” page for Nerdify in The Wayback Machine suggests that Mr. Perkon was the real co-founder of the company: The photo at the top of the page shows four people wearing Nerdify T-shirts seated around a table on a rooftop deck in San Francisco, and the man facing the camera is Perkon.
Filip Perkon, top right, is pictured wearing a Nerdify T-shirt in an archived copy of the company’s About Us page. Image: archive.org.
Where are they now? Pokatilo is currently running a startup called Litero.Ai, which appears to be an AI-based essay writing service. In July 2025, Mr. Pokatilo received pre-seed funding of $800,000 for Litero from an investment program backed by the venture capital firms AltaIR Capital, Yellow Rocks, Smart Partnership Capital, and I2BF Global Ventures.
Meanwhile, Filip Perkon is busy setting up toy rubber duck stores in Miami and in at least three locations in the United Kingdom. These “Duck World” shops market themselves as “the world’s largest duck store.”
This past week, Mr. Lobov was in India with Putin’s entourage on a charm tour with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Although Synergy is billed as an educational institution, a review of the company’s sprawling corporate footprint (via DNS) shows it also is assisting the Russian government in its war against Ukraine.
Synergy University President Vadim Lobov (right) pictured this week in India next to Natalia Popova, a Russian TV presenter known for her close ties to Putin’s family, particularly Putin’s daughter, who works with Popova at the education and culture-focused Innopraktika Foundation.
The website bpla.synergy[.]bot, for instance, says the company is involved in developing combat drones to aid Russian forces and to evade international sanctions on the supply and re-export of high-tech products.
A screenshot from the website of synergy,bot shows the company is actively engaged in building armed drones for the war in Ukraine.
KrebsOnSecurity would like to thank the anonymous researcher NatInfoSec for their assistance in this investigation.
Update, Dec. 8, 10:06 a.m. ET: Mr. Pokatilo responded to requests for comment after the publication of this story. Pokatilo said he has no relation to Synergy nor to Mr. Lobov, and that his work with Mr. Perkon ended with the dissolution of Awesome Technologies.
“I have had no involvement in any of his projects and business activities mentioned in the article and he has no involvement in Litero.ai,” Pokatilo said of Perkon.
Mr. Pokatilo said his new company Litero “does not provide contract cheating services and is built specifically to improve transparency and academic integrity in the age of universal use of AI by students.”
“I am Ukrainian,” he said in an email. “My close friends, colleagues, and some family members continue to live in Ukraine under the ongoing invasion. Any suggestion that I or my company may be connected in any way to Russia’s war efforts is deeply offensive on a personal level and harmful to the reputation of Litero.ai, a company where many team members are Ukrainian.”
Update, Dec. 11, 12:07 p.m. ET: Mr. Perkon responded to requests for comment after the publication of this story. Perkon said the photo of him in a Nerdify T-shirt (see screenshot above) was taken after a startup event in San Francisco, where he volunteered to act as a photo model to help friends with their project.
“I have no business or other relations to Nerdify or any other ventures in that space,” Mr. Perkon said in an email response. “As for Vadim Lobov, I worked for Venture Capital arm at Synergy until 2013 as well as his business school project in the UK, that didn’t get off the ground, so the company related to this was made dormant. Then Synergy kindly provided sponsorship for my Russian Film Week event that I created and ran until 2022 in the U.K., an event that became the biggest independent Russian film festival outside of Russia. Since the start of the Ukraine war in 2022 I closed the festival down.”
“I have had no business with Vadim Lobov since 2021 (the last film festival) and I don’t keep track of his endeavours,” Perkon continued. “As for Alexey Pokatilo, we are university friends. Our business relationship has ended after the concierge service Awesome Technologies didn’t work out, many years ago.”
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The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday formally added a critical security flaw impacting React Server Components (RSC) to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog following reports of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, CVE-2025-55182 (CVSS score: 10.0), relates to a case of remote code execution that could be triggered by an
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A new agentic browser attack targeting Perplexity’s Comet browser that’s capable of turning a seemingly innocuous email into a destructive action that wipes a user’s entire Google Drive contents, findings from Straiker STAR Labs show. The zero-click Google Drive Wiper technique hinges on connecting the browser to services like Gmail and Google Drive to automate routine tasks by granting them
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