Tech
Treasury sanctions Russian zero-day broker accused of buying exploits stolen from US defense contractor
The U.S. government announced on Tuesday sanctions against two companies that acquire and resell zero-day exploits, as well as sanctioning their founders and their associates.
Officials with the U.S. Treasury told TechCrunch that the government was imposing sanctions against the brokers of zero-days — security vulnerabilities in software that are unknown to its developer but can be abused to hack people — as they pose a threat to U.S. national security, foreign policy, and economy.
The first sanctioned company is Operation Zero, a Russian firm that launched in 2021. The company made headlines in 2023 when it announced that it was offering up to $20 million for zero-days in Android devices and iPhones, and later announced that it was offering up to $4 million for zero-days in Telegram. The company claims to work exclusively with the Russian government and local organizations.
The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) said that Operation Zero’s customers “could use the tools to launch ransomware attacks or engage in other malign activities.”
The Treasury said it’s also sanctioning the company’s founder, Sergey Zelenyuk, who officials accused of selling exploits to foreign intelligence agencies and who say he sought to develop spyware and hacking technologies. The Treasury said Zelenyuk engaged in recruiting hackers and developing relationships with foreign intelligence agencies through social media. (Operation Zero has accounts on both X and Telegram.)
According to the Treasury, Operation Zero acquired “at least eight proprietary cyber tools, which were created for the exclusive use of the U.S. government and select allies and which were stolen from a U.S. company,” and then “sold those stolen tools to at least one unauthorized user.”
The Treasury said that the sanctions against Operation Zero and Zelenyuk coincide with an FBI investigation into Peter Williams, who worked for U.S. defense contractor L3Harris. In October, Williams pleaded guilty to selling at least eight of the company’s exploits to an unspecified Russian broker.
The Treasury now says that the broker was Operation Zero, something that the government had not previously confirmed.
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Williams was the general manager at Trenchant, which develops hacking and surveillance tools for the U.S. government and some of its top intelligence partners, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom — the so-called alliance of Five Eyes countries.
The Treasury did not respond to a series of questions related to today’s sanctions.
Along with taking action against Zelenyuk, the U.S. Treasury is sanctioning an affiliate company based in the United Arab Emirates called Special Technology Services, as well as Zelenyuk’s assistant, Marina Evgenyevna Vasanovich, and two people associated with the company, Azizjon Makhmudovich Mamashoyev and Oleg Vyacheslavovich Kucherov, who have allegedly worked with Operation Zero.
Operation Zero, Special Technology Services, and Zelenyuk are being sanctioned in parallel under a 2022 federal law that allows the U.S. government to impose sanctions on someone who committed “significant thefts of trade secrets,” per the Treasury.
The Treasury says Kucherov, a Russian national, is suspected of being a member of the prolific ransomware gang TrickBot, whose alleged members were previously sanctioned by the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
Mamashoyev is allegedly the founder of Advance Security Solutions, another zero-day broker based in the UAE, which was also sanctioned today.
Advance Security Solutions launched last year, offering up to $20 million for zero-days that could help hack into any type of smartphone with a text message. The broker also offered high-paying bounties for hacking tools in popular software and hardware like Android devices, iPhones, Windows, and Chrome.
Operation Zero and Zelenyuk did not respond to a request for comment. Kucherov, Mamashoyev, and Vasanovich could not be immediately reached for comment.
When contacted by TechCrunch, a person operating an Advance Security Solutions’ chat account claimed without evidence that Mamashoyev is not the founder of the company.
Tech
Cathie Wood’s ARK makes its first lead investment in startup Lucra — and it isn’t AI
ARK Invest Venture Fund has made its first-ever lead investment in an early-stage startup called Lucra, firm founder Cathie Wood told TechCrunch.
“We feel pretty excited about it,” Wood (pictured above) said in the recent interview regarding the investment in the startup.
Lucra developed a software platform that reimagines corporate loyalty programs into interactive, esports-like events such as tournaments where customers can play each other, even betting or winning cash or company giveaways. The startup said its customers include Five Iron Golf, Chess Kings, and Dave & Buster’s.
Lucra announced on Wednesday that it raised a $20 million Series B, led by the ARK fund, with participation from Alumni Ventures, Astralis Capital, Harlo Equity Partners, Simplex Ventures, SeventySix Capital, and WTI.
There are a few reasons why the famed financial company has never led a startup deal before. For one, the ARK Invest Venture Fund is not a typical VC fund. It’s an SEC-regulated interval fund (also known as a closed-end mutual fund), meaning anyone can invest in it, for as little as $500. However, it is not traded on a public exchange, so investors cannot sell shares at will. They can sell limited shares on specific dates, quarterly.
Wood also noted that the person running the fund, director of research Nick Grous, “is a tough sell,” leaving startups with the difficult task of getting him excited enough to advocate to lead a deal.
What’s even wilder is that ARK was particularly gun-shy about this sort of business because it got burned after investing in a somewhat similar company a few years ago.
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“We had actually owned a company called Skillz, which kind of operated in this space,” Grous said. “It didn’t work out well for us and many other investors.”
Skillz was a once-hot public company that later became mired in troubles and lawsuits. The big difference, the investor said, is that Lucra is a B2B platform, selling interactive esports as a loyalty program, rather than trying to license and run games directly to consumers.
“Overcoming our initial hurdle, especially given our experience with Skillz, overcoming our reticence, having Nick overcome it, that was our first screen,” Wood said of how this startup convinced her company to write a big check.
In this case, ARK Invest had participated in Lucra’s previous Series A round, and had grown familiar with its business model, its trajectory, and its founder and CEO Dylan Robbins, Grous told TechCrunch.
“We had been in constant communication,” Grous said, adding that his venture-esq fund attempts to have quarterly conference calls with the startups in the portfolio, similar to how public companies report to investors quarterly. ARK mostly works in the public market, offering a slate of publicly traded EFT funds.
Despite already being in the portfolio, Lucra’s founder was grilled numerous times when it came time to buy more shares — first by Grous and then ARK’s investment committee, both he and Wood described.
During those calls, Robbins “had thought about all the things that went wrong” with similar companies like Skillz, as well as with Lucra, and had answers, Wood said. “No matter how many times we went at him, his conviction, there was just no let up,” she described.
It also helped that this company’s financials were promising, it was in an area that ARK knew well, and this was not AI, aka the most hyped, most expensive area these days.
“We’ve been underwriting the sports-betting space, understanding the gamification aspects of entertainment,” Grous said, meaning that the investment firm could “really understand the opportunity here.”
The ARK Invest Venture Fund holds shares of companies like Epic Games, Kalshi, and Discord, for instance. It also holds OpenAI, Anthropic, Replit, Grok, and Perplexity, so it knows the AI scene well.
“We are all over AI, just like everyone else, because it is a massive revolution,” Wood explained. “But in the process, a lot of companies are being neglected.” This means that spotting such potentially neglected companies is “our opportunity because we are doing research in many other areas than AI,” she said.
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Tech
Cosmetics giant Rituals confirms data breach of customer membership records
Netherlands-based cosmetics giant Rituals has confirmed a data breach affecting customers’ personal information after hackers stole reams of data from its membership database.
The company disclosed the breach on Wednesday, according to an email sent to customers that TechCrunch has viewed and verified.
Rituals said it identified an “unauthorized download” of members’ data in April that contained customers’ full name, date of birth, gender, postal and email address, and phone number, as well as their preferred Rituals store and account type.
When reached by TechCrunch, Rituals spokesperson Eline van Malssen said the hacker stole membership data about customers in Europe and the United Kingdom.
TechCrunch has learned that some customers notified by Rituals are based in the United States. The spokesperson confirmed the incident also affects some U.S. customers.
Rituals did not describe the nature of the cyberattack and the company said its investigation was underway to understand how the data breach happened.
The cosmetics giant is the latest retailer to have customer membership data stolen in the past year, following a string of intrusions at U.K. grocery and shopping chain Co-op and Marks & Spencer, among others. Customer records can be attractive targets for hackers who steal the data and extort the company for a ransom in exchange for not publishing the information online.
When reached with questions about the incident, a Rituals spokesperson declined to comment on whether the company received any communication from the hackers, to share a more precise timeline of the breach, or to provide the exact number of affected members, citing unspecified “security reasons.”
According to its website, Rituals has over 41 million customers in its membership database. The retail giant made €2.4 billion euros ($2.8 billion) in revenue in 2025.
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Tech
Rivian R2 production has started despite tornado damage to factory
Rivian has rolled the first customer-ready R2 SUVs off the production line at its factory in Normal, Illinois, just days after it was hit by an EF-1 tornado that tore off part of the roof.
Despite the damage, founder and CEO RJ Scaringe told Bloomberg Television on Wednesday morning that Rivian doesn’t expect any delays to the R2’s rollout, which is crucial to the company’s survival.
“The tornado went through the south end of the plant, and ripped the roof off the building, and knocked down some of the plant as well, and so the last 72 hours have been around the clock,” he said. Scaringe explained that Rivian has had to change how and where it brings some materials into the factory to build the R2.
But “we’re not making any changes to the plan,” he said, referring to the company’s production roadmap.
Scaringe wasn’t asked when Rivian will make the first R2 deliveries during the interview. The company has previously said it will start shipping R2 SUVs before the first half of 2026 comes to an end.
Getting the R2 into production is a major milestone for the company. It’s the first production vehicle Rivian has made that has a chance to reach mass-market customers, as it costs far less than the company’s current R1 EVs. It’s also supposed to help the company finally reach profitability after years of losing money on every vehicle it sold.
The company has big expectations for the R2. Rivian told investors earlier this year that it expects to deliver between 20,000 and 25,000 of the SUVs by the end of 2026. If Rivian achieves that, it would become one of the fastest-scaling new EVs ever launched in the U.S., second only to Tesla’s Model Y.
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That said, Rivian is launching with a version of the R2 that costs nearly $13,000 more than the $45,000 price tag the company spent years promoting. The launch edition R2 starts at $57,990, with a slightly cheaper $53,990 variant coming by the end of this year. Rivian won’t sell an R2 for under $50,000 until the first half of 2027, and a true base model starting at $45,000 won’t hit the market until late 2027.
And that’s if the $45,000 R2 ever arrives at all. When Rivian announced pricing for the SUV in March, the company said the base model price will start “around $45,000” — not “at $45,000” as it had promoted on its website as recently as February.
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