Daily Briefing for 03.13.26

Top stories.

• Europol and Interpol announce counter-cybercrime operations. 
• Google issues patches for two Chrome zero-days.
• US Justice Department charges a third ransomware negotiator for partnering with criminals.

Europol and Interpol announce counter-cybercrime operations.

Europol has launched "Operation Lightning" to dismantle the criminal proxy service "SocksEscort," which had allegedly compromised more than 369,000 routers and IoT devices around the world. Law enforcement seized dozens of domains and servers located in seven countries, and the US froze $3.5 million worth of cryptocurrency. The operation was conducted alongside Eurojust and law enforcement agencies from Austria, France, the Netherlands, and the United States.

Separately, Interpol announced the takedown of 45,000 malicious IP addresses and servers alongside 94 arrests in the third wave of Operation Synergia, a counter-cybercrime initiative that began in 2023. Operation Synergia III involved law enforcement from 72 countries, with 40 of the arrests taking place in Bangladesh. Interpol stated, "Preliminary investigations led to a series of coordinated actions by national authorities, including raids on key locations and the disruption of malicious cyber activities. In total 212 electronic devices and servers were seized." 110 individuals remain under investigation.

Google issues patches for two Chrome zero-days.

Google has issued emergency patches to fix two high-severity Chrome zero-days that are being actively exploited, BleepingComputer reports. CVE-2026-3909 is an out-of-bounds write flaw in Skia in Google Chrome that allows a remote attacker to perform out-of-bounds memory access via a crafted HTML page. CVE-2026-3910 is an "[i]nappropriate implementation in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 146.0.7680.75 allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code inside a sandbox via a crafted HTML page."

US Justice Department charges a third ransomware negotiator for partnering with criminals.

The US Justice Department has charged a 41-year-old Florida man, Angelo Martino, for allegedly partnering with the BlackCat ransomware group while he was working as a ransomware negotiator for incident response firm DigitalMint, CyberScoop reports. Prosecutors say Martino provided the criminals with inside information during negotiations in order to maximize the ransom payout.

Martino is accused of acting alongside accomplices Kevin Tyler Martin (another former DigitalMint employee) and Ryan Goldberg (a former Sygnia incident response manager), both of whom have already pleaded guilty, BleepingComputer notes. DigitalMint and Sygnia are not accused of any wrongdoing, and fired the employees after learning of the Justice Department's investigation.