Bitcoin Bomb Scare Associated with Sextortion Scammers

This blog was written by Jaeson Schultz. Organizations across the country are on edge today after a flurry of phony bomb threats hit several public entities Thursday, such as universities, schools and news outlets, among others. The attackers distributed malicious emails claiming to have placed...

Spammed Bomb Threat Hoax Demands Bitcoin

A new email extortion scam is making the rounds, threatening that someone has planted bombs within the recipient's building that will be detonated unless a hefty bitcoin ransom is paid by the end of the business day. Sources at multiple U.S. based financial institutions reported receiving the...

U.S. Military Members Catfished and Hooked for Thousands of Dollars

A sextortion ring that aimed “catfish” efforts at U.S. military service members has been uncovered. The scam bilked 442 service members from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps out of more than $560,000. An 11-month investigation, dubbed “Operation Surprise Party” and carried out by the...

Feds charge 2 Iranian hackers behind SamSam ransomware attacks

By Waqas The United States Department of Justice has charged two Iranian nationals with allegedly developing and using SamSam ransomware against their targets in the United States and Canada to carry out computer hacking and extortion scheme from Iran. Both Mohammad Mehdi Shah Mansouri, 27 and...

U.S Charges Two Iranian Hackers for SamSam Ransomware Attacks

The Department of Justice announced Wednesday charges against two Iranian nationals for their involvement in creating and deploying the notorious SamSam ransomware. The alleged hackers, Faramarz Shahi Savandi, 34, and Mohammad Mehdi Shah, 27, have been charged on several counts of computer hackin...

Adult Website Hack Exposes 1.2M ‘Wife Lover’ Fans

The database underlying an erotica site known as Wife Lovers has been hacked, making off with user information protected only by a simple-to-crack, outdated hashing technique known as the DEScrypt algorithm. Over the weekend, it came to light that Wife Lovers and seven sister sites, all similarly...

19-Year-Old Hacker Arrested Over Making Hoax School and Flight Bomb Threats

British police have arrested a 19-year-old teen who is an alleged member of Apophis Squad cybercriminal group responsible for making hoax bomb threats to thousands of schools and airlines; and DDoSing ProtonMail and Tutanota secure email services. George Duke-Cohan was arrested in his bedroom at...

This Week in Security News: Facebook and Faxploits

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, Facebook removed 652 fake accounts originating from Russia and Iran. Also, Microsoft identified and removed fake internet domains that...

How Digital Extortion Impacts Today’s Enterprises

By now, many enterprise decision-makers are familiar with the concept of digital extortion, particularly in the form of ransomware. These encryption-based attacks lock users out of their sensitive and valuable data, applications and operating systems. Attackers demand a ransom in the form of...

The Year Targeted Phishing Went Mainstream

A story published here on July 12 about a new sextortion-based phishing scheme that invokes a real password used by each recipient has become the most-read piece on KrebsOnSecurity since this site launched in 2009. And with good reason -- sex sells the second most-read piece here was my 2015 scoo...

SamSam Ransomware Attacks Extorted Nearly $6 Million

Ransomware has become a multimillion-dollar black market business for cybercriminals, and SamSam being a great example. New research revealed that the SamSam ransomware had extorted nearly $6 million from its victims since December 2015, when the cyber gang behind the ransomware started...

CoinVault Ransomware Authors Sentenced to 240 Hours of Community Service

Almost three years after the arrest of two young Dutch brothers, who pleaded guilty to their involvement in creating and distributing CoinVault ransomware malware, a district court in Rotterdam today sentenced them to 240 hours of community service. In 2015, the two suspects — Melvin 25-year-old...

Reasonably Clever Extortion E-mail Based on Password Theft

Imagine you've gotten your hands on a file of e-mail addresses and passwords. You want to monetize it, but the site it's for isn't very valuable. How do you use it? You convince the owners of the password to send you money. I recently saw a spam e-mail that ties the password to a porn site. The...

Coinvault, the court case

Today, after almost 3 years of waiting, it was finally the day of the trial. In the Netherlands, where the whole case took place, the hearings are open to the public. Meaning anyone who is interested can visit. And it was quite busy. Because besides the suspects, their lawyers, the judges and the...

WannaCry Extortion Fraud Reemerges

Extortion emails that threaten recipients with a WannaCry infection if they don’t pay up are making the rounds in the UK and elsewhere. The activity prompted an alert Friday from the City of London’s Action Fraud unit, which said at the time that police had already received almost 300 reports in...

Google to Fix Location Data Leak in Google Home, Chromecast

Google in the coming weeks is expected to fix a location privacy leak in two of its most popular consumer products. New research shows that Web sites can run a simple script in the background that collects precise location data on people who have a Google Home or Chromecast device installed...

Fraudsters Claim To Hack Two Canadian Banks

UPDATE Two Canadian banks have reported that they may be targets of a hack, after bad actors claimed that they electronically accessed personal and account information of a combined 90,000 customers. The attackers have asked for a ransom of 1 Ripple XMR from each, which translates to around $1...

FBI: Cyber-Fraud Losses Rise to Reach $1.4B

About 301,580 consumers reported cyber-fraud and malware attacks to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center IC3 last year – with reported losses exceeding a whopping $1.4 billion. The year’s haul of reports brings the overall total of complaints since the IC3 began recording such things to 4...

Uber Tightens Bug Bounty Extortion Policies

Uber is tightening policies around its bug-bounty program after a 2016 data breach exposed deep flaws in its policies around handling extortion. The ride-sharing company has updated its program to include clarity around the boundaries between research versus blackmail. The changes come after a 20...

iPhone crackers GrayShift become victim of extortion after code Leak

By Waqas GrayKey's code snippets recently appeared online and an unknown party was This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: iPhone crackers GrayShift become victim of extortion after code Leak...