Cybercriminal Twins Caught After They Forgot to Turn Off Microsoft Teams Recording

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The world of cybersecurity is full of surprising twists and turns, as evidenced by the recent guilty pleas of two brothers, Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter. The 34-year-old siblings had been fired from their jobs at federal contractor Opexus due to their criminal records, which included multiple hacking and wire fraud charges. But what they didn't realize was that their Microsoft Teams meeting, in which they were informed of their termination, was still recording.

The brothers' revenge campaign, which involved destroying 96 government databases, was meticulously planned and executed over several hours. And, unfortunately for them, it was all captured on the same Teams recording that they had failed to turn off. The detailed conversation, which was transcribed in a court document, revealed the brothers' careful planning, with Sohaib asking his brother, "Still connected?

Still on the VPN?" and Muneeb responding with, "Delete all their databases?" Their employer had made the decision to terminate the two brothers after discovering their criminal records, which included multiple hacking and wire fraud charges for crimes as petty as stealing airline miles. Muneeb has since tried to recant his guilty plea in handwritten notes to the judge. In other cybersecurity news, Instructure, the company behind educational software Canvas, has reached a deal with hackers calling themselves ShinyHunters, who had disrupted Canvas across thousands of US schools and posted ransom messages on victims' screens.

The company claims that the data stolen by the hackers, including records of 275 million students, has been returned and destroyed. Meanwhile, the alleged administrator of the now-defunct dark web market Dream Market has been tracked down and charged. Owe Martin Andresen was arrested during a raid on his home and two other locations earlier this month.

US and German prosecutors say he made millions of dollars from Dream Market's commissions, some of which was laundered through gold bars he allegedly bought from a company in Atlanta. Other notable news includes OpenAI disclosing that two of its employees were impacted by a supply chain attack on an open source project called TanStack, and Findem, a major American data broker, admitting to hiding its data-deletion page from Google for three years.