Twin Brothers Plead Guilty to Charges Involving 96 Federal Databases After Contractor Termination

Muneeb Akhter and Sohaib Akhter, 34-year-old twin brothers employed at the federal contractor Opexus, pleaded guilty to charges that they destroyed 96 government databases. Opexus terminated the pair after discovering their prior criminal records, which included hacking and wire fraud charges. Muneeb Akhter has since tried to recant his guilty plea in handwritten notes to the judge.

The firing took place during a Microsoft Teams meeting that lasted only a few minutes. The brothers failed to close the meeting, which continued recording their subsequent conversation. In the recorded exchange, Sohaib Akhter asked Muneeb Akhter, "Still connected?

Separately, Instructure reached an agreement with the hackers known as ShinyHunters. U.S. schools. ShinyHunters posted ransom messages on victims' screens during the Canvas incident and claimed to have stolen records of 275 million students.

Instructure stated that data stolen by ShinyHunters had been returned to Instructure, destroyed on the hackers’ systems, and that no customers would be further extorted. The company did not explicitly state whether it paid a ransom to ShinyHunters. Wired reported the resolution of the Canvas ransomware debacle.

Owe Martin Andresen was arrested during a raid on his home and two other locations earlier this month. U.S. and German prosecutors identified him as the alleged administrator of Dream Market. The dark-web marketplace launched in 2013 and voluntarily shut down in 2019.

U.S. and German prosecutors say Owe Martin Andresen made millions of dollars from Dream Market’s commissions. Some of those proceeds were laundered through gold bars bought from a company in Atlanta.

The arrest may conclude one of the longest-running dark-web drug investigations. OpenAI disclosed that two of its employees were impacted by a supply chain attack on the open source project TanStack. The company observed unauthorized access and credential-focused exfiltration activity in a limited subset of internal code repositories.

OpenAI did not find evidence that user data was accessed or that its production systems were compromised in the TanStack incident. The TanStack hijacking formed part of a larger attack on open source packages that embedded malware to steal Git credentials, GitHub Action tokens, SSH keys, and Claude Code configs. OpenAI is requiring that all macOS users update their OpenAI apps by June 12.

Wired reported the supply-chain compromise affecting the artificial-intelligence company. Findem told Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee that a former employee had embedded “no index” code on the company’s website preventing consumers from finding its opt-out controls via Google search.

The company removed the “no index” code on the day Senator Maggie Hassan published a February report calling out the company.

During the three years the opt-out page was de-indexed, only 679 people visited it according to Findem. Senator Maggie Hassan sent investigative requests to Comscore, Findem, IQVIA Digital, Telesign, and 6Sense Insights last August. Findem was the only recipient that did not respond before the report and related coverage appeared.

The episode highlighted tactics used by data brokers to limit visibility of consumer data controls.