The hackers behind devastating ransomware attacks are often just ego-driven, short-tempered coders who are willing to scam everyone, including each other, experts tell Axios.

Why it matters: Organizations facing a ransomware attack tend to believe they're up against organized criminal masterminds.

What they're saying: "Most criminals are fragile, but the cyber ones are the most self-centered, the most egotistical," James Turgal, a former FBI agent, tells Axios.

• "'There's no honor among thieves,'" Turgal adds. "That old saying is absolutely consistent with the modern-day cybercriminal."

Driving the news: Insurance billing tool Change Healthcare has entered its third week of service disruptions following a ransomware attack on Feb. 21.

• But this week, the ransomware gang behind the attack self-imploded while trying to scam its members out of their share of Change Healthcare's reported $22 million ransom payment.
• After a freelance hacker posted on a dark web forum that they hadn't received their payment, ALPHV (also known as BlackCat) claimed it had been seized by law enforcement and forced to shut down.
• However, law enforcement agencies have said they actually didn't take the group down — again.
• Change Healthcare has not commented on whether it paid a ransom.

The big picture: Cybercriminals have long been willing to scam one another and rat each other out to get ahead.

• A 2022 report from Sophos found that cybercriminals on three dark web forums lost at least $2.5 million to scams in the course of a year.
• REvil, a now-defunct ransomware group, reportedly cheated its own freelance hackers out of payments in 2021.
• Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, a member of the Conti ransomware gang leaked a trove of internal files about the group's inner workings.

Zoom out: Entry-level hackers have become more valuable in the last five years as the ransomware-as-a-service model has taken over the criminal underground, says Turgal, who is now vice president of cyber risk at Optiv.

• These hackers can lease out a ransomware developer's malware to use in their own attacks, and everyone splits whatever victim payments come in.
• "They are a much younger demographic," Turgal says. "They're a 20-something who has been coding all their life ... and that totally feeds their egos."
• But this splintering between ransomware operators and these freelance hackers has prompted constant in-fighting on dark web forums, Kurtis Minder, CEO of ransomware negotiation firm GroupSense, tells Axios.

Between the lines: Victims still think they're up against a far savvier adversary when facing a ransomware attack, Minder says.

• "The unfortunate story is that you don't have to be a cyber genius" to conduct a ransomware attack, he says.
• This perception can prompt victims to pay millions of dollars, with the hope that gangs will unlock their systems and delete any stolen data.
• Even after victims pay up, hackers don't always delete stolen information — as seen in the evidence uncovered in a recent law enforcement takedown of the LockBit gang.

Yes, but: If ransomware gangs keep refusing to delete data and unlock systems, eventually victim companies might learn and stop paying them, Christopher Budd, head of Sophos' X-Ops team, tells Axios.

• Getting to that point will likely take "a series of catalyzing moments," he adds.
• "You have to shake people out of the five stages of grief, you have to shake them out of denial and get them moving forward," Budd says.

Members of Congress are being flooded with calls from angry constituents after TikTok launched a campaign warning its users that the Chinese-owned app was at risk of being shut down in the U.S., Axios' Zachary Basu and Maria Curi report.

Why it matters: A key House committee voted unanimously Thursday to advance bipartisan legislation that would force ByteDance — TikTok's Chinese parent company — to divest its ownership of the app within 165 days.

State of play: The highly unusual 50-0 vote in the House Energy and Commerce Committee — which unveiled the bill three days ago alongside the China Select Committee — reflected some of the anger among members about TikTok's pressure campaign.

• House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said Thursday he would "absolutely" put the bill on the House floor.
• The White House indicated that President Joe Biden would sign the bill, injecting new urgency — and aggression — into TikTok's campaign to counter the yearslong efforts to address the app's national security risks.

Zoom in: The flood of calls to congressional offices, which began Wednesday night, was triggered by a notice on the TikTok app warning users of a "total ban" that would "damage millions of businesses, destroy the livelihoods of countless creators across the country, and deny artists an audience."

• After asking users to enter their ZIP code, TikTok then directed them to call their representative in Congress to let them "know what TikTok means to you and tell them to vote NO."
• "Phones are completely bogged down hearing from students, young adults, adults, and business owners who are all concerned at the option of losing their access to the platform," a senior GOP aide told Axios' Juliegrace Brufke.

Zoom out: The authors of the bill responded furiously to what they called a "massive propaganda campaign," emphasizing that TikTok would not be banned if ByteDance divested its ownership.

• "TikTok is characterizing it as an outright ban, which is of course an outright lie," House China Select Committee Chairman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) told reporters.
• "So bad we turned phones off …. Which means we could miss calls from constituents who actually need urgent help with something," a senior Democratic aide added.

The big picture: The bill marks the latest effort in what has become one of Washington's longest-running tech dramas, which began in August 2020 when then-President Donald Trump ordered ByteDance to sell TikTok.

Read the rest.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) will start providing more hands-on support to open-source software developers as they work to better secure their projects, the agency first told Axios.

Why it matters: Open-source projects are the foundation of most major software running today — but they're often riddled with easy-to-hack bugs because developers lack the resources to properly update and maintain their projects.

• Cash-strapped nonprofits run several widely used open-source projects, including the Python and Ruby programming languages and the Linux operating system.

Driving the news: CISA hosted a two-day, invite-only summit this week with leaders in the open-source software community and other federal officials.

• During the private event, the agency also ran what's likely the first tabletop exercise to assess how well the government and the open-source community would respond to a cyberattack targeting one of its projects.

Zoom in: During the summit, CISA and a handful of package repositories — online forums where developers upload and share the applications they've built using these open-source languages — unveiled initiatives to help secure open-source projects.

• CISA is working on a new communication channel where open-source software developers can share threat intelligence and ask the agency for assistance during an incident.
• The Rust Foundation is developing new public key infrastructure for its repository, which will help ensure that the code developers are uploading isn't malicious and is coming from legitimate users.
• The npm registry, which manages the JavaScript programming language, is requiring project maintainers to enroll in multifactor authentication and is rolling out a tool to generate "software bills of materials," which provide a recipe list of what code and other elements are in a project.
• Additional repositories — including the Python Software Foundation, Packagist, Composer and Maven Central — are pursuing similar projects and are also rolling out tools to help detect and report malware and other security vulnerabilities.

The big picture: A recent Harvard Business School and University of Toronto report found that the demand-side economic value generated from open-source software is about $8.8 trillion each year.

Read the rest.

@ D.C.

🤖 The Department of Justice indicted a former Google software engineer on charges of stealing AI technology secrets on behalf of two Chinese companies. (Axios)

🏗️ A previously unreported congressional investigation found suspicious communications equipment on Chinese-built cargo cranes located at U.S. ports — fueling concerns in the Biden administration about maritime cybersecurity. (Wall Street Journal)

👀 Two years after President Joe Biden teased a new executive order to address identity theft, the order has yet to materialize. (Nextgov/FCW)

@ Industry

💰 CrowdStrike is acquiring Israeli cloud security company Flow Security for an undisclosed sum. (SecurityWeek)

📲 Meta-owned services WhatsApp and Messenger are now interoperable with encrypted messaging service Signal's protocol to comply with the European Union's Digital Markets Act. (TechCrunch)

💪🏼 Apple, Okta, Craig Newmark Philanthropies and others have funded a set of new grants to organizations fighting the mercenary spyware industry. (Axios)

@ Hackers and hacks

🙃 An unidentified state-backed hacking group is exploiting a critical security flaw in the ConnectWise ScreenConnect remote desktop tool, researchers say. (Cybersecurity Dive)

🏥 The Rhysida ransomware gang claims it has sold data stolen from a Chicago-based children's hospital. (The Record)

💊 Cybercriminals are doxxing and phishing doctors so they can break into online prescription portals and order oxycodone, Adderall, codeine and other controlled substances to sell on the dark web. (404 Media)

Friendly reminder that not all black cats are bad, despite what the BlackCat ransomware gang makes you believe.

• Just ask Lola, who most definitely is not perching over me, demanding pets and unwavering attention right now ... 👀