Welcome to the Threat Context Monthly blog series where we provide a comprehensive roundup of the most relevant cybersecurity news and threat information from KrakenLabs, Outpost24’s cyber threat intelligence team. Here’s what you need to know from April about EncryptHub, EncryptRAT, and the Media Land leak.

With the pace of growth in financial services accelerating, fintech is, in real terms, the new normal, not the new disruptor. Cloud technology has fueled this revolution, equipping companies with tools that can be scaled quickly in response to customer demands and market needs, and enabling cost savings that can be passed on to these customers.

Ransomware has evolved from a distant “I hope it doesn’t happen to us” threat to an insidious, worldwide crisis. Among the sectors most affected is manufacturing, which has found itself more and more in attackers’ crosshairs. Manufacturing has long viewed itself as immune to digital crime, but ransomware attackers have belied this belief.

Originally Published May 15th 2024 Updated April 29th 2025 On May 15, 2024, the FBI and DOJ, working alongside international partners like the NCA and New Zealand Police, took control of one of the major dark web forums, BreachForums. This action came shortly after a significant data leak from the Europol portal surfaced on the forum. The site was then relaunched by ShinyHunters, but now appears to be offline again. Several copies/potential successors have emerged. See our analysis below.

In the summer of 2024, a Russian ransomware gang launched an attack on a UK pathology services provider. However, the group didn’t just encrypt the organization’s data and demand a ransom. It exfiltrated data from more than 300 million patient interactions with the National Health Service (NHS), and when the victim organization refused to pay the hefty ransom, the group released all the stolen data on the dark web.

Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are the command center of an organization’s frontline cybersecurity defenses — responsible for monitoring threats, prioritizing alerts, and orchestrating remediation. However, today’s SOCs are facing an existential crisis: an overwhelming volume of increasingly complex and sophisticated threats combined with a shortage of skilled analysts.

Black Friday is retail’s biggest moment—and retail IT’s biggest challenge. Spikes in traffic, strained systems, and the constant fear of outages turn what should be a commercial win into an operational war room. For many retailers, it’s a time of sleepless nights, emergency vendor calls, and systems pushed to their breaking point. But it doesn’t have to be this way.