As the underground industry of crypto investment scams has grown into one of the world's most lucrative forms of cybercrime, the secondary market of money launderers for those scammers has grown to match it. Amid that black market, one such Chinese-language service on the messaging platform Telegram blossomed into an all-purpose underground bazaar: It has offered not only cash-out services to scammers but also money laundering for North Korean hackers, stolen data, targeted harassment-for-hire, and even what appears to be sex trafficking. And somehow, it's all overseen by a company legally registered in the United States.

According to new research released today by crypto-tracing firm Elliptic, a company called Xinbi Guarantee has since 2022 facilitated no less than $8.4 billion in transactions via its Telegram-based marketplace prior to Telegram’s actions in recent days to remove its accounts from the platform. Money stolen from scam victims likely represents the “vast majority” of that sum, according to Elliptic's cofounder Tom Robinson. Yet even as the market serves Chinese-speaking scammers, it also boasts on the top of its website—in Mandarin—that it's registered in Colorado.

“Xinbi Guarantee has served as a giant, purportedly US-incorporated illicit online marketplace for online scams that primarily offers money laundering services,” says Robinson. He adds, though, that Elliptic has also found a remarkable variety of other criminal offerings on the market: child-bearing surrogacy and egg donors, harassment services that offer to threaten or throw feces at any chosen victim, and even sex workers in their teens who are likely trafficking victims.

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Apple’s AirPlay feature enables iPhones and MacBooks to seamlessly play music or show photos and videos on other Apple devices or third-party speakers and TVs that integrate the protocol. Now newly uncovered security flaws in AirPlay mean that those same wireless connections could allow hackers to move within a network just as easily, spreading malicious code from one infected device to another. Apple products are known for regularly receiving fixes, but given how rarely some smart-home devices are patched, it’s likely that these wirelessly enabled footholds for malware, across many of the hundreds of models of AirPlay-enabled devices, will persist for years to come.

On Tuesday, researchers from the cybersecurity firm Oligo revealed what they’re calling AirBorne, a collection of vulnerabilities affecting AirPlay, Apple’s proprietary radio-based protocol for local wireless communication. Bugs in Apple’s AirPlay software development kit (SDK) for third-party devices would allow hackers to hijack gadgets like speakers, receivers, set-top boxes, or smart TVs if they’re on the same Wi-Fi network as the hacker’s machine. Another set of AirBorne vulnerabilities would have allowed hackers to exploit AirPlay-enabled Apple devices too, Apple told Oligo, though these bugs have been patched in updates over the last several months, and Apple tells WIRED that those bugs could have only been exploited when users changed default AirPlay settings.

Those Apple devices aside, Oligo’s chief technology officer and cofounder, Gal Elbaz, estimates that potentially vulnerable third-party AirPlay-enabled devices number in the tens of millions. “Because AirPlay is supported in such a wide variety of devices, there are a lot that will take years to patch—or they will never be patched,” Elbaz says. “And it's all because of vulnerabilities in one piece of software that affects everything.”

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About a year ago, security researcher Sam Curry bought his mother a Subaru, on the condition that, at some point in the near future, she let him hack it.

It took Curry until last November, when he was home for Thanksgiving, to begin examining the 2023 Impreza's Internet-connected features and start looking for ways to exploit them. Sure enough, he and a researcher working with him online, Shubham Shah, soon discovered vulnerabilities in a Subaru web portal that let them hijack the ability to unlock the car, honk its horn, and start its ignition, reassigning control of those features to any phone or computer they chose.

Most disturbing for Curry, though, was that they found they could also track the Subaru's location—not merely where it was at the moment but also where it had been for the entire year that his mother had owned it. The map of the car’s whereabouts was so accurate and detailed, Curry says, that he was able to see her doctor visits, the homes of the friends she visited, even which exact parking space his mother parked in every time she went to church.

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