The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has announced sanctions against Nobitex, Iran’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, for facilitating payments related to terrorist activities.

Nobitex is believed to have helped evade economic sanctions and also facilitated transactions linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Among the transactions, the U.S. authorities found wallets associated with ransomware threat actors related to the IRGC.

“Nobitex has provided significant support to the regime, processing more than 50 percent of all Iranian digital asset inflows in 2025 and facilitating payments tied to Iran’s terrorist activities, sanctions evasion efforts, and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)-linked transactions, including activity associated with IRGC-affiliated ransomware actors,” the Treasury said.

“Nobitex also helped the Central Bank of Iran access hundreds of millions of dollars in stablecoins used to prop up the plummeting value of the Iranian rial, while enabling regime insiders to access international digital asset exchanges and evade sanctions across multiple jurisdictions.”

OFAC also designated specific individuals identified as Nobitex executives and founders, including chairman Amir Hossein Rad, CEO Seyed Ali Khoee, co-founder Seyed Mohammad Ali Aghamir Mohammad Ali, and blockchain lead Seyed Mohammad Aghamir Mohammad Ali.

The action, which is part of the U.S. government’s “Economic Fury” campaign, also targeted three other Iranian cryptocurrency exchanges, namely Wallex, Bitpin, and Ramzinex.

Additional information from blockchain intelligence firm Chainalysis shows that the Iranian cryptocurrency ecosystem received nearly $7.8 billion in 2025.

The company estimates that addresses associated with the IRGC accounted for over 50% of the value received by the Iranian crypto ecosystem in Q4 2025.

Nobitex processed more than half of Iranian crypto inflows, while Wallex and Bitpin accounted for 12% and 10%, respectively.

From a practical perspective, the sanctions mean that any property or assets of the designated entities and individuals that fall under U.S. jurisdiction are frozen, and U.S. persons are prohibited from doing any business with them.

At the same time, the sanctions create international pressure, as U.S. allies and companies based in foreign countries are reluctant to take risks and continue dealing with the designated parties.

In June 2025, the pro-Israel “Predatory Sparrow” hacking group claimed to have breached Nobitex, stealing digital assets worth roughly $90 million, and leaving politically-tinted messages behind.

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The npm package looked legitimate. It had an active GitHub repository, steady development history, and roughly 29,000 weekly downloads. For developers using OpenAI Codex, it offered exactly what it advertised: a remote web UI for the AI coding tool.

But for the past month, every invocation of codexui-android has also been silently reading the contents of the user’s Codex authentication file and shipping it to an attacker-controlled server. The stolen data includes access tokens, refresh tokens, ID tokens, and account IDs, everything needed to impersonate the developer indefinitely.

“The refresh_token doesn’t expire,” Aikido Security researcher Charlie Eriksen wrote. “An attacker holding it can silently impersonate you indefinitely.”

How it worked

The attack was unusually sophisticated for an npm supply chain compromise. Unlike typical supply chain attacks that rely on typosquatting or disposable packages, codexui-android was a functional tool under active development. Its GitHub repository remained clean. The malicious code existed only in the npm build.

The package extracts the contents of Codex’s ~/.codex/auth.json file, a plaintext credential cache created whenever a user logs in via the Codex app, CLI, or IDE extension. It then sends those credentials to sentry.anyclaw[.]store, a server name chosen to mimic Sentry, the legitimate error-tracking platform.

The nefarious functionality was introduced approximately a month after the package was first published, a common tactic for building user trust before deploying a payload. WHOIS records show the exfiltration domain was registered on 12 April 2026, just two days after the first package version (0.1.72) was uploaded to npm. The malicious code appeared from version 0.1.82 onward.

The same attack, from the Play Store

The npm package was not the only delivery vector. Aikido found that an Android application called OpenClaw Codex Claude AI Agent, published by a developer named BrutalStrike, was running the same npm package inside a PRoot sandbox on users’ devices. The app had accumulated more than 50,000 downloads on Google Play.

A second BrutalStrike app, simply called Codex, had over 10,000 downloads and contained the same exfiltration chain. Because neither app pinned a specific npm package version, they automatically pulled whatever was currently published, meaning the malicious code was delivered to mobile users the moment it went live.

The combined attack surface, roughly 29,000 weekly npm downloads plus more than 60,000 mobile installations, makes this one of the more significant credential-theft campaigns to target the AI developer tooling ecosystem.

The author’s shifting story

The npm account behind the package belongs to “friuns,” identified by Aikido as Igor Levochkin. When confronted on GitHub, the author initially claimed to have lost access to the npm account, then edited the response to say they were “currently investigating this issue internally.”

Levochkin said no credential data was shared with third parties, but did not explain why the exfiltration code was inserted only into the npm build, or why access to users’ Codex tokens was needed in the first place. The X profile linked to the account includes the domain anyclaw[.]store, the same domain to which the stolen tokens were sent.

A growing pattern

The attack arrives in a period of escalating threats to AI developer tooling. Last month, a poisoned VS Code extension breached GitHub’s own internal repositories, exfiltrating 3,800 repos after an employee installed the malicious package. That attack, attributed to the group TeamPCP, harvested credentials from 1Password vaults, Claude Code configurations, and AWS.

The lesson from both incidents is the same. As AI coding tools become essential infrastructure, the authentication tokens they generate, and often store in plaintext, are becoming high-value targets. OpenAI’s own documentation warns developers to treat ~/.codex/auth.json like a password. The codexui-android campaign is a demonstration of what happens when that advice goes unheeded, and when the tools developers trust are designed to exploit that trust.

Aikido has also separately reported that deleted Google API keys remain live for up to 23 minutes after revocation, a window attackers can exploit to access user data and Gemini conversations. Google has since classified the issue as a P0 bug. The finding underscores a broader problem: credential revocation in cloud environments is rarely as instant as defenders assume.

The return is higher than the $1.5bn that was estimated when the quantum company filed for its IPO a little more than three weeks ago.

Quantum computing company Quantinuum has raised $1.68bn in its US initial public offering (IPO), with 28m class A common stock shares to begin trading for $60 each on the Nasdaq Global Market today (4 June).

The return is higher than was estimated after the US company filed for its IPO a little more than three weeks ago, when reports suggested that an offering could raise more than $1.5bn for the Honeywell International-backed Quantinuum and value it at as much as $20bn.

Bloomberg reported that the offering, which was increased from an anticipated 26.5m shares and priced above its marketed range of between $53 and $55 per share, values the company at $15.6bn.

Quantinuum said it had granted underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 4.2m shares of its class A common stock “to cover over-allotments at the initial public offering price, less underwriting discounts and commissions”. JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley are acting as “joint lead active book-running managers” for the IPO.

Quantinuum is one of seven quantum computing companies and two quantum foundries in the US to be recently allocated a share of $2bn in federal incentives under the CHIPS and Science Act after it signed a letter of intent for $100m to fabricate low-loss integrated photonics and specialised optical components tuned to trapped-ion critical wavelengths.

The company plans to partner with GlobalFoundries for critical semiconductor components and Monarch Quantum for integrated photonics.

The UK-founded, Colorado-based Quantinuum produces full-stack quantum platforms with commercially deployed systems. Its products are used by businesses across sectors including pharmaceuticals, materials science, financial services and governments, according to the company, which has multiple sites in the US, as well as a presence in the UK, Germany, Japan, Qatar and Singapore.

A recent McKinsey report found that quantum computing could create as much as $2.7trn in economic value by 2035. It said that quantum companies generated more than $1bn in revenue in 2025 – a number which could compound to as much as $4.4bn by 2028.

Last week, computing giant IBM said it would invest $10bn in the quantum field over the next five years.

In Europe this week, French quantum start-up Quobly raised €115m in Series A funding, while Finnish quantum player IQM upsized its ‘private investment in public equity’ financing to more than $146m ahead of a planned SPAC merger and US stock market listing.

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