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When Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas issued a vaguely worded decree purportedly revoking the PA’s infamous “pay for slay” system, the European Commission called it a “significant political development” that “signals the Palestinian Authority’s commitment to implement far-reaching reforms.” Since then, Palestinian officials have assured the Arab world that the terror payments aren’t going anywhere.

The man overseeing the allegedly reformed system is Raed Abu al-Humus, the Free Beacon‘s Andrew Tobin reports from Jerusalem. He spent 10 years in prison alongside Nasser Abu Hamid, the late founder of Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Abu al-Humus has praised his jailmate as a “masked lion” and “inspiration” to the “Palestinian youth.” Now, he’s leading Abbas’s Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs.

Abu al-Humus replaces Qadura Fares, another convicted terrorist whom Abbas fired in a move that seemingly demonstrated his seriousness about reforming “pay for slay.”

“Just hours after his appointment,” Tobin reports, the commission “published a photograph of Abu al-Humus smiling alongside two arch-terrorists, Ahmed Barghouti and Mohammed Aradeh, whom Israel recently released to Cairo as part of a hostage-ceasefire deal with Hamas.” Both were serving life sentences.

“The photo is among a number of early signs that Abbas will once again disappoint international donors who expect him to end ‘pay for slay,'” Tobin writes. “Qatar’s Al-Sharq newspaper quoted unnamed senior Palestinian officials last Wednesday as saying the terrorism payments would continue ‘without any reduction.'”

Read more: Meet the Terrorist Overseeing Abbas’s ‘Reformed’ Payment System for Terrorist

Young, Gifted & Green is an “environmental justice” nonprofit that works with “Black and Latinx leaders” to end what it calls “environmental racism.” The Biden administration tapped its CEO, LaTricea Adams, to serve on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, which Joe Biden created via executive order to address “racial inequity” in climate change.

Adams kept busy while serving on the council. In December, as Biden and his “antiracist” climate council eyed the exit doors, the EPA announced that it had selected Young, Gifted & Green to receive a $20 million taxpayer-funded grant under its Environmental and Climate Justice Community Change Program. Internal EPA documents reviewed by our Thomas Catenacci list Adams as the sole applicant for the grant. And while the council Adams served on advised the White House, it was formally considered a part of the EPA.

Adams served on that council from March 2021 through the end of the administration. “It remains unclear the extent to which Adams, in her role on the Environmental Justice Advisory Council, advised the EPA on its grantmaking activity or implementation of the Community Change program,” writes Catenacci. “But the revelation adds further weight to questions about the Biden administration’s process for doling out grants and whether the administration played favorites when it came to such programs.”

Federal officials “are generally expected to avoid even the appearance of impropriety when carrying out their duties.” Groups whose leaders served on Biden’s Environmental Justice Advisory Council, though, “were the recipients of EPA grants totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Read more: Biden Environmental Justice Adviser Received Millions in Taxpayer Funds After Personally Applying For EPA Grant

It’s been nearly 10 years since Joy Reid’s homophobic and anti-Semitic blog posts resurfaced, and Reid still hasn’t found the “hackers” who allegedly “planted” the bigoted screeds on her site. But she’s about to have a lot more time to look.

Reid got the ax at MSNBC, our Andrew Stiles reports, with the final episode of her show The ReidOut set to air sometime this week. Replacing her is a trio of MSNBC weekend anchors: former Kamala Harris adviser Symone Sanders, so-called Republican Michael Steele, and Alicia Menendez, the daughter of Democrat and convicted felon Bob Menendez. MSNBC is reportedly interested in hiring Politico reporter and self-described “walking Beyoncé encyclopedia” Eugene Daniels to fill their weekend slot.

Reid was known for delivering insightful analysis that connected with working-class Americans, like her insistence that Kamala Harris waged a “flawlessly run” campaign because she earned an endorsement from Queen Latifah, who “never endorses anyone.” In 2020, she expressed shock when a Latino congressman suggested “Latinx” was not a “preferred term” for actual Latinos.

“These insightful remarks persuaded MSNBC to give Reid an annual salary believed to be in the range of $3 million,” writes Stiles. “Network executives clearly valued her cerebral reporting and ‘in-depth interviews with politicians and other newsmakers,’ according to the New York Times. In November, for instance, Reid interviewed a Yale psychologist who argued Democrats were ‘entitled’ to shun their Trump-supporting family members because it ‘may be essential for your mental health.'”

“Reid’s sway at MSNBC was such that the network didn’t even bother to figure out what really happened to Reid’s old blog after internet sleuths uncovered a series of bigoted posts in 2017. Reid accused ‘hackers’ of having ‘accessed and manipulated’ her blog to post hateful content—targeting gays, Jews, and Muslims—that was ‘fabricated.’ She urged the FBI to investigate. The results of the alleged investigation were never released, but Reid was promoted to a full-time host in 2020.”

Away from the Beacon:

• Benjamin Netanyahu halted the release of Palestinian prisoners over Hamas’s “humiliating” hostage handovers, including the recent display in which the terror group brought detained hostages to a ceremony where other captives were freed. Netanyahu said he won’t change course until Israeli hostages are released “without the humiliating ceremonies,” something Hamas showed it is capable of on Saturday, when it quietly released Arab-Israeli Hisham al-Sayed away from the propaganda display. The White House supports the move.
• Kamala Harris received an NAACP award over the weekend and managed to deliver a speech without saying anything at all. “Some see the flames on our horizons, the rising waters in our cities, the shadows gathering over our democracy, and ask, ‘What do we do now?'” she said. “But we know exactly what to do.” We do?
• Barnard College expelled two students who stormed an Israeli history class and targeted Jewish students with anti-Semitic flyers. Who knew administrators had the power to do that?
• Fifty-seven percent of voters say Trump is doing a better job than Biden as president, a number driven by the “hugely popular” policies of closing the border, cutting waste, and “resetting merit as the prime hiring and contracting principle,” according to a Stagwell poll that drops today.

The post A Convicted Terrorist Oversees Abbas’s ‘Reformed’ Pay for Slay System. Plus, How a Biden ‘Environmental Justice’ Adviser Raked in Taxpayer Dollars. appeared first on .

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Chris Christie’s flight from Detroit landed in Newark, N.J., on Thursday and was one of the unlucky arrivals without a dedicated gate assignment. Tired and cranky, the former New Jersey Governor lumbered onto a bus ferrying passengers back to the terminal, where the woman seated beside him started unpacking the unpredictable state of politics, particularly President Donald Trump’s chaotic first few weeks back in power.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

“She said, ‘You know, he’s really shaking things up, and maybe some of that will turn out OK,’” Christie recalled two days later at the Principles First Summit, a confab of traditionalist Republicans trying to chart their way through the next four years of Trumpism. “At that moment, when I’m at the end of my travel day, my Sicilian instinct is to grab her by the shoulders and go, ‘Are you kidding me?’”

But Christie, who ran against Trump for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, ran afoul of his mercurial nature, and subsequently found himself exiled, listened politely before offering a self-aware question to her: “What about everything you’ve seen about him for the last 10 years leads you to believe that it might turn out OK?”

In Christie’s telling, the woman in question said it was important for anyone in the presidency to succeed. Christie, uncharacteristically, was prepared to let the chat end there, but not his parable for an audience of hard-core NeverTrumpers, disaffected Republicans, and more than a few self-identified Democrats looking for answers in this charged period.

“There’s going to come a moment where that woman, I believe in my heart, is going to say, ‘Yeah, no, this is not OK anymore,’” Christie said. “But we all get there at a different pace.”

And then the former prosecutor summed up the ethos for that sold-out thinkfest held a few blocks from the White House back in Trump’s control.

“To the extent that we try to force that pace because we can’t stand it anymore, we run the risk of lengthening it, not shortening it,” he said. “And a lot of damage could be done.”

Welcome to the latest iteration of the Conservative Resistance. They are angry, they are motivated, and they are altogether at a loss at what to do with those feelings. This year’s Principles First summit, it’s fifth, offered its usual blend of anti-Trump fervor and pragmatic posturing about how to reclaim a Republican Party and conservative movement with which they once comfortably identified. On the same day that Trump regaled the more boisterous crowd just across the river at CPAC with his tales of political retribution, several hundred activists and insiders gathered in downtown D.C. to make sense of their current impotence.

In the room, much of the rhetoric came off as scorching and inspired, as if a solution to the ongoing dismantling of much of the federal government were just over the horizon. Beyond the basement ballroom, though, it sure seemed lukewarm. It was a wait-it-out strategy that, frankly, is not entirely dissimilar to the approach Democrats are taking on their side of the observation deck. The path forward in no way matched the appetite for immediate action. It felt, at times, like being promised a decadent five-course meal and realizing later you had been served a rice cake.

Dark humor and worries about democracy’s nadir frequently intersected in the basement of the J.W. Marriott. When former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales mused that maybe “Congress will say enough is enough,” the ballroom giggled with skepticism. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson similarly drew laughs when he suggested Congress will assert its check over the presidency: “I’m optimistic that they will at the right time. And it may be very, very soon.”

Yet former Rep. Joe Walsh, a Tea Party founder from Illinois, said no one should count on the group he once counted himself a member to do their jobs: “Forget about Republicans in Congress. They’re done.”

Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban was similarly dismissive of those who thought wailing about Trump tearing down democracy would get the public on their side. “How’d that work in the campaign?” he needled.

The gathering seemed simultaneously poisoned by pessimism and laden with pleas to give Trump time to reveal himself as a true threat to All Things American. The job of harnessing that outrage, the argument went, will get easier once Trump inevitably hands his critics a full dossier of second-term over-reach. As one introducer ticked through Trump’s foreign policy changes so far, he seemed out of breath by the end of the partial list. “That was in one month,” he said. “There are 47 months left.”

But talk of waiting things out was constantly in tension with what many saw as an urgent moment in history that demanded action.

“This is the collapse of an American ideal, American ideology, the American view of the world,” said Tom Nichols, a retired academic who now writes for The Atlantic. 

To his right on stage, one of the most recognized democracy advocates, chess grandmaster and Russian dissident Garry Kasparov, offered a polite correction. “We are not watching the collapse of the American ideal. We are watching the betrayal of the American ideal,” Kasparov said. “We are living in the middle of the coup.”

As the day’s sessions neared its end, Sarah Longwell, a political strategist and publisher of The Bulwark, deadpanned, “This has been a long day and is terrifying,” before calling the President “a fabulist, a liar, and a bad person.” No one really objected to the verdict, but it was not apparent what to do with it. 

(Before the Summit closed out on Sunday, organizers announced they had received “a credible bomb threat” from someone claiming to be Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, forcing a temporary evacuation. Tarrio reportedly denied any involvement.)

While adopting a resigned wait-it-out slouch, a running thread at the summit came down to a simple but actionable question: At what point has the United States entered into a constitutional crisis? Trump has been musing that he was not subject to court rulings, might serve a third term, and could start annexing the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland. 

Gonzales, who served as President George W. Bush’s top lawyer and ran his Justice Department, but endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris last year, said he is waiting to see if Trump ignores an inevitable setback from the courts. “Until that happens, we don’t have a constitutional crisis,” Gonzales said. Added Hutchinson, a former U.S. attorney: “We’re not there yet.” And Christie, another former U.S. attorney, said he, too, is concerned about the looming crisis, but warned that the language is being too casually bandied about.

“I think we use this ‘constitutional crisis’ thing much too liberally,” Christie said. “What we’re doing is cheating, because when we really do have the constitutional crisis, half the country is going to go…” He then uttered a verbal shrug that could possibly be transcribed as “meh.”

In the room, folks nodded along with a dour expectation that they too were going to be using that rhetoric at some point. It may just be as premature as it is inevitable. Patience is far from sexy, but it may be the best strategy to allow for Trump to trip over traps of his own making. Yet those most committed to restoring traditional conservative footing in the GOP are anxious to do more than stand by at this specific moment. 

“The resistance will rise,” said Bill Kristol, a self-described hawk who served as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle. “But will it rise quickly enough?” In the crowd, there were visible shaking of heads.

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In the final weeks of the Biden administration, the Environmental Protection Agency awarded a lucrative environmental justice grant to a left-wing nonprofit whose CEO—LaTricea Adams—personally applied for the taxpayer funding while simultaneously serving as a member of a top White House advisory council.

The Biden EPA announced in December that it selected Young, Gifted & Green to receive a $20 million grant under its so-called Environmental and Climate Justice Community Change Program—the largest grant allowed under the program. The EPA dished out 105 grants—including the grant to Adams’s Tennessee-based group—totaling $1.6 billion as part of the program after receiving 2,801 applications from groups nationwide, according to internal agency documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

The EPA documents also show that Adams was listed as the individual applicant for the grant, which she applied for on behalf of Young, Gifted & Green in late September. Adams personally submitted the application while serving as a member of former president Joe Biden’s Environmental Justice Advisory Council, which was housed at the EPA. She served on the council from March 2021 through the end of the Biden administration.

It remains unclear the extent to which Adams, in her role on the Environmental Justice Advisory Council, advised the EPA on its grantmaking activity or implementation of the Community Change Program. Young, Gifted & Green did not respond to requests for comment.

But the revelation adds further weight to questions about the Biden administration’s process for doling out grants and whether the administration played favorites when it came to such programs. Federal officials are generally expected to avoid even the appearance of impropriety when carrying out their duties.

The Free Beacon previously reported that groups whose leaders served on Biden’s Environmental Justice Advisory Council were the recipients of EPA grants totaling hundreds of millions of dollars during the previous administration. The Young, Gifted & Green grant, though, represents the only known instance in which a council member personally applied for the funding their group ultimately received from the EPA.

The Trump administration has taken aim at both environmental justice programs as part of its energy agenda. It has also initiated audits of climate spending executed under the Biden administration as part of its efforts to cut government waste and abuse.

“The deep ties between the Biden-Harris administration, their donors, advisers, and grant recipients are a staggering wake-up call,” EPA administrator Lee Zeldin told the Free Beacon in a statement. “There will be zero tolerance for waste or abuse at EPA under the Trump administration.”

“Being a good steward of American hard-earned tax dollars to protect human health and the environment is my top priority, not following the corrupt example of those who funneled funds through kickbacks and pass throughs to far-left activists,” Zeldin said.

The EPA’s billion-dollar Environmental and Climate Justice Community Change Program was created by the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act, which Biden signed into law in August 2022. The purpose of the initiative is to fund local efforts to fight climate change in ways that “benefit disadvantaged communities.”

Young, Gifted & Green said it would use its $20 million grant to finance energy efficiency upgrades in 150 low-income homes in Memphis, Tenn., and support small businesses that seek to install solar panels or replace gas appliances with electric alternatives. The group added that it would construct new greenspaces.

The size of the EPA grant dwarfs the amount of money Young, Gifted & Green had previously handled. Since it registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2020, the group has reported a total revenue of $2.7 million, about 14 percent the size of its EPA grant, according to tax filings reviewed by the Free Beacon.

“These shocking revelations solidify the Biden administration’s legacy as the most corrupt in modern history,” Tom Jones, the executive director of right-leaning watchdog group the American Accountability Foundation, told the Free Beacon.

“While everyday Americans suffered under Bidenflation, rampant cronyism flourished—a disgrace that demands full investigation and accountability and proves once again the necessity for all these grants to be impounded by the Office of Management and Budget immediately,” Jones continued. “The American people deserve nothing less.”

Daren Bakst, the director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, argued that Zeldin should consider investigating the full extent of the Biden administration’s environmental justice initiatives. He said the case involving Young, Gifted & Green could expose deeper issues with how the Biden administration approached such programs.

“The entire Environmental and Climate Justice Program should be in his sights,” Bakst told the Free Beacon. “As part of this, the EPA should ensure that grant recipients were eligible for the money.”

“It is quite possible that White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council members can be leaders of organizations receiving the grants,” he said. “But this would be yet again another example of the problems with the Inflation Reduction Act and how the Biden EPA implemented the programs.”

The post Biden Environmental Justice Adviser Received Millions in Taxpayer Funds After Personally Applying For EPA Grant appeared first on .

Northwestern University’s mandatory anti-discrimination training relies on unverified data from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) that inflate Islamophobic attacks, giving the false impression that those attacks vastly outpace anti-Semitic hate crimes. The training also questions anti-Zionism’s ties to Jew-hatred and explicitly addresses “anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian biases,” but it doesn’t do the same for anti-Israeli or anti-Zionist sentiment.

All Northwestern students, faculty, and staff across all departments, must watch the nearly 20-minute video training, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, and is part of a 3-hour online course created by the university.

“Reports from Northwestern University faculty and staff suggest that its so-called anti-discrimination training does the opposite of what it claims,” Coalition Against Antisemitism at Northwestern president Michael Teplitsky told the Free Beacon. “Instead of fostering genuine inclusion, it selectively elevates certain perspectives while excluding Israeli students from the conversation—despite these students facing some of the most severe harassment and intimidation on U.S. college campuses.”

“This omission is not an oversight; it reflects Northwestern’s ongoing pattern of sidelining Jewish concerns in response to activist pressure,” he added.

The training relies on separate datasets to show anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim hate crimes. For anti-Semitic attacks, it cites official FBI data. But for Muslim attacks, the training showed unverified figures from CAIR—without citing the source.

As a result, the training falsely suggests there were five times more incidents against Muslims than Jews.

Citing FBI data, the video notes that anti-Semitic hate crimes rose 63 percent from 2022 to 2023, though it didn’t include the bureau’s raw figures—an increase from 1,122 to 1,832.

Had Northwestern consistently used that dataset, it would have shown that anti-Muslim and anti-Arab hate crimes had a much smaller rise and far fewer incidents. According to the FBI data, anti-Muslim hate crimes increased from 158 to 236 and anti-Arab hate crimes increased from 92 to 123.

Instead, Northwestern’s training pointed to CAIR data, which simply aggregate self-reported complaints.

“By one account, there was a 56 percent increase from 2022, with 8,061 complaints reported nationwide in 2023,” a voiceover says, referencing a CAIR report almost verbatim. “It has been noted that this is even higher than what occurred during the travel ban imposed by a presidential executive order in 2017.”

CAIR has a long history of anti-Semitism, which has been underscored since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Two days after the assault, CAIR accused Israel of provoking the attack through “apartheid policies.” Weeks later, CAIR executive director Nihad Awad said he was “happy to see” Hamas kill Jews. In 1993, Awad participated in a secret meeting that was wiretapped by the FBI. During that gathering, participants reportedly discussed ways to support Hamas.

Northwestern spokesman Jon Yates ignored the Free Beacon‘s question about why the university used different datasets and relied on CAIR’s figures. Instead, he defended the training in a statement.

“Our required training for faculty and staff, which was released in December, comprehensively covers antisemitism, anti-Zionism and anti-Jewish hate, diving deep into the history, common tropes and pervasiveness of such hate today,” Yates said. “Our required training for students, released this week, was developed by the Jewish United Fund and covers the same topics, and is a permanent and annual training.”

Northwestern’s training was revamped as recently as last December to include “components on overcoming antisemitic, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian biases,” according to a December 17 email obtained by the Free Beacon. Still, it appears unbalanced.

In the “overcoming anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian biases” section, the training provides specific examples of discrimination, including “verbal or online harassment,” “physical attacks and profiling,” and “everyday interactions such as inappropriate comments or actions.” The section addressing anti-Semitism, however, offers no comparable examples of discrimination specifically targeting Jews.

And while the training does discuss anti-Zionism, it receives less attention than anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian biases—and with qualifications. Anti-Israel sentiment is barely mentioned at all.

The video opens with a voiceover stating that “current affairs have brought anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian biases to the fore”—but the introduction makes no mention of anti-Zionism or anti-Israeli discrimination. It then divides into two sections: “Overcoming Anti-Semitism” and “Overcoming Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Biases.”

When the video begins to discuss protections for pro-Zionists toward the end of the anti-Semitism section, it casts doubt on the movement’s ties to Jew-hatred.

“There’s heated debate about the distinction between anti-Zionism, opposition to the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish state, and anti-Semitism,” the voiceover says. “Some scholars and members of Jewish communities hold that opposition to Zionism is not anti-Semitic. Others say that anti-Zionism can and often does take anti-Semitic forms. Accordingly, at Northwestern, students, staff and faculty cannot be excluded from activities or spaces because they are Jewish or pro-Zionist.”

Harvard University, meanwhile, settled a lawsuit with Jewish students last month by agreeing to issue guidance that includes Zionists as a protected class under its non-discrimination policy, stating that targeting them could lead to disciplinary action. It also adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism. That definition, which Northwestern has not adopted, states that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” is a form of anti-Semitism.

Earlier this month, the Department of Education opened a probe into “widespread antisemitic harassment” at Northwestern and four other universities following Hamas’s attack. During anti-Israel protests at Northwestern last year, demonstrators defaced the Star of David and chanted that Jews should “go back to Germany,” among other anti-Semitic incidents.

Northwestern’s training video also goes out of its way to highlight modern-day “Palestinian territories” when describing Jews’ origins.

“Jews emerged 3,500 years ago in what is today Israel and Palestinian territories as the first practitioners of monotheism, or belief in one god,” the voiceover says.

“Northwestern is already under federal investigation for potential Title VI violations due to its failure to protect Jewish, Zionist, and Israeli students,” Teplitsky said. “If it continues to downplay antisemitism and distort history to fit activist agendas, it risks not only its credibility but also serious consequences at the federal level.”

Northwestern is also providing free legal defense to a group of anti-Israel radicals who orchestrated a blockade at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, highlighting a perceived inconsistency in addressing discriminatory practices on campus.

The post Northwestern University Mandatory Anti-Discrimination Training Pushes Unverified CAIR Data appeared first on .

CYFIRMA researchers discovered that the SpyLend Android malware was downloaded 100,000 times from the official app store Google Play.

CYFIRMA researchers discovered an Android malware, named SpyLend, which was distributed through Google Play as Finance Simplified. The malware targets Indian users with unauthorized loan apps, enabling predatory lending, blackmail, and extortion.

The Finance Simplified app is still available on Google Play at the time of this report’s publication, with downloads doubling to 100,000 in a week. Experts have noted numerous negative reviews, with users reporting blackmail, harassment, and photo manipulation.

The app poses as a financial tool, it lures users with easy loan promises but demands excessive permissions to access contacts, call logs, SMS, photos, and location.

“While marketed as a finance calculator, the app detects the user’s location (India) and displays fake loan applications via WebView instead of providing EMI calculator functionality.” reads the report published by CYFIRMA. “These loan apps are specifically designed to target Indian users.”

The app redirects users to external links for APK downloads, bypassing Google Play security. Once installed, it accesses photos, videos, and contacts, capturing clipboard data to steal sensitive information.

The researchers discovered that the malicious app uses a custom C2 server on Amazon EC2, with an admin panel in English and Chinese, suggesting Chinese-speaking attackers. The malware exploits APIs to access files, contacts, call logs, SMS, and installed apps. Operators behind the threat used stolen data for blackmail and extortion, they were spotted editing victims’ photos into fake nudes to coerce payments.

“The analysis of SpyLend reveals a highly deceptive and dangerous threat targeting Android users. Initially presented as a harmless Finance management application, it downloads a fraud loan app from an external download URL, which once installed, gains extensive permissions to access sensitive data, including files, contacts, call logs, SMS, clipboard content, and even the camera.” concludes the report. “This allows the attackers to extort users by the creation of deepfake photos from the manipulation of files in their photo gallery. The app’s ability to harvest and exploit personal information highlights its severe impact on user privacy and security, demonstrating how malicious actors abuse seemingly legitimate apps to carry out financial fraud and psychological manipulation.”

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, SpyLend Android malware)

Leaked Black Basta chat logs reveal internal conflicts, exposing member details and hacking tools as the gang reportedly falls apart.

An unknown actor, named ExploitWhispers, leaked Matrix chat logs of the Black Basta ransomware gang revealing internal conflicts, and exposing member details and hacking tools as the gang reportedly collapses.

ExploitWhispers first uploaded the chat messages on MEGA, then also uploaded them to Telegram.

The leaked archive includes Black Basta’s internal chat messages from September 18, 2023, to September 28, 2024.

PRODAFT researchers reported that Black Basta has been largely inactive in 2025 due to internal conflicts, ransom scams, and ineffective ransomware. Key members left for other groups, and a major chat log leak on February 11 exposed their operations, allegedly due to attacks on Russian banks.

As part of our continuous monitoring, we’ve observed that BLACKBASTA (Vengeful Mantis) has been mostly inactive since the start of the year due to internal conflicts. Some of its operators scammed victims by collecting ransom payments without providing functional decryptors.…

— PRODAFT (@PRODAFT) February 20, 2025

“BlackBasta’s internal chats just got exposed, proving once again that cybercriminals are their own worst enemies. Keep burning our intelligence sources, we don’t mind.” wrote PRODAFT on X.

“As part of our continuous monitoring, we’ve observed that BLACKBASTA (Vengeful Mantis) has been mostly inactive since the start of the year due to internal conflicts. Some of its operators scammed victims by collecting ransom payments without providing functional decryptors.” added the experts.

Their ransomware is also considered less effective compared to other major groups. Earlier this year, key members left BLACKBASTA to join Cactus (Nurturing Mantis) ransomware or other cybercriminal groups. The internal conflict was driven by “Tramp” (LARVA-18), a known threat actor who operates a spamming network responsible for distributing QBOT. As a key figure within BLACKBASTA, his actions played a major role in the group’s instability.

On February 11, 2025, a major leak exposed BLACKBASTA’s internal Matrix chat logs. The leaker claimed they released the data because the group was targeting Russian banks. This leak closely resembles the previous Conti leaks.”

The leaked Black Basta chat logs reveal insights into the gang’s operations, tactics, and tools. Researchers found they prioritized VPN exploits and maintained a shared victim spreadsheet. One member was identified as a 17-year-old. Messages indicate a blunt, high-pressure work environment.

Researchers from VX-underground analyzed the leaked Black Basta chat logs and reported they reveal insights into their operations, including skepticism towards LockBit, recruitment concerns about Dispossessor ransomware group, and interest in VPN exploits. One member is a 17-year-old. They use social engineering, maintaining a spreadsheet of targets and prioritizing industries like electrical and financial firms. Their workflow includes tricking victims into executing malicious files that connect to a C2 server, enabling ransomware deployment or remote access. A private loader was offered to them for $84,000/month.

Regarding the BlackBasta leaks: we haven’t reviewed them in totality yet. It’s quite a bit of messages in JSON format. It also has some Russian slang which makes it difficult to translate accurately. Thankfully there are some native Russian speakers who have made some interesting…

— vx-underground (@vxunderground) February 21, 2025

The leaked messages from Black Basta convey a direct and harsh tone, with members mocking failures and emphasizing deadlines. Their workflow relies on social engineering to deliver malicious HTA files that connect to their server for payload deployment. Victims typically have 10-12 days to pay the ransom before their stolen data is published.

The researcher Suyesh Prabhugaonkar identified 367 unique Zoom links, domains, and IPs used by Black Basta. The gang exploited weak credentials, unpatched vulnerabilities, and social engineering for initial access. They rotated infrastructure to avoid detection and tested payloads. Key player GG (Trump), likely leader Oleg Nefedov, was involved in delegating tasks, tracking performance, and applying pressure on deadlines, according to Prodaft.

In May 2024, the FBI, CISA, HHS, and MS-ISAC issued a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) regarding the Black Basta ransomware activity as part of the StopRansomware initiative.

Black Basta has targeted at least 12 critical infrastructure sectors, including Healthcare and Public Health. The alert provides Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) and Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) obtained from law enforcement investigations and reports from third-party security firms.

Black Basta ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) has been active since April 2022, it impacted several businesses and critical infrastructure entities across North America, Europe, and Australia. As of May 2024, Black Basta has impacted over 500 organizations worldwide.

“Black Basta is a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) variant, first identified in April 2022. Black Basta affiliates have targeted over 500 private industry and critical infrastructure entities, including healthcare organizations, in North America, Europe, and Australia.” reads the CSA.

In December 2023, Elliptic and Corvus Insurance published a joint research that revealed the group accumulated at least $107 million in Bitcoin ransom payments since early 2022. According to the experts, the ransomware gang has infected over 329 victims, including ABB, Capita, Dish Network, and Rheinmetall. 

The researchers analyzed blockchain transactions, they discovered a clear link between Black Basta and the Conti Group.

In 2022, the Conti gang discontinued its operations, coinciding with the emergence of the Black Basta group in the threat landscape.

The group mainly laundered the illicit funds through the Russian crypto exchange Garantex.

“Black Basta is a Russia-linked ransomware that emerged in early 2022. It has been used to attack more than 329 organizations globally and has grown to become the fourth-most active strain of ransomware by number of victims in 2022-2023.” reads the Elliptic’s report. “Our analysis suggests that Black Basta has received at least $107 million in ransom payments since early 2022, across more than 90 victims. The largest received ransom payment was $9 million, and at least 18 of the ransoms exceeded $1 million. The average ransom payment was $1.2 million.”

Most of the victims are in the manufacturing, engineering and construction, and retail sectors. 61,9% of the victims are in the US, 15.8% in Germany, and 5.9% in Canada.

Some of the victims’ ransom payments were sent by both Conti and Black Basta groups to the gang behind the Qakbot malware.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, ransomware)

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