Pre-Installed Android App Impacts Millions with Slew of Malicious Activity

A pre-installed Android application on Alcatel smartphones has been found surreptitiously siphoning off geolocation data, email addresses and phone identification numbers and sending the data to a server in China. Analysts with Upstream’s Secure-D platform said that the app, Weather Forecast—Worl...

FBI Denies Service to 15 DDoS-for-Hire Sites, Charges Operators

The Justice Department has taken 15 internet domains associated with DDoS-for-hire services offline, and has filed charges against three defendants who allegedly ran them. DDoS for hire or DDoS-as-a-service operations make it simple for any layperson to carry out DDoS attacks, flooding targets wi...

Julian Assange Charges, Japan's Top Cybersecurity Official, and More Security News This Week

Safer browsing, more bitcoin scams, and the rest of the week's top security news...

Secret Charges Against Julian Assange Revealed Due to "Cut-Paste" Error

Has Wikileaks founder Julian Assange officially been charged with any unspecified criminal offense in the United States? — YES United States prosecutors have accidentally revealed the existence of criminal charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in a recently unsealed court filing in an...

Secret Charges Against Julian Assange Revealed Due to "Cut-Paste" Error

Has Wikileaks founder Julian Assange officially been charged with any unspecified criminal offense in the United States? — YES United States prosecutors have accidentally revealed the existence of criminal charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in a recently unsealed court filing in an...

'DerpTroll' Faces 10 Years in Prison for DDoSing Gaming Sites as a Teen

After a short but disruptive career knocking popular online gaming sites offline for sport, Austin Thompson, a.k.a. “DerpTroll,” has pleaded guilty to hacking charges. He faces a maximum penalty of 10 years prison and a $250,000 fine. Thompson, a 23-year-old Utah resident, made his plea on Tuesda...

U.S. Secret Service Warns ID Thieves are Abusing USPS’s Mail Scanning Service

A year ago, KrebsOnSecurity warned that "Informed Delivery," a new offering from the U.S. Postal Service USPS that lets residents view scanned images of all incoming mail, was likely to be abused by identity thieves and other fraudsters unless the USPS beefed up security around the program and ma...

Accused CIA Leaker Faces New Charges of Leaking Information From Prison

Joshua Adam Schulte , a 30-year-old former CIA computer programmer who was indicted over four months ago for masterminding the largest leak of classified information in the agency's history, has now been issued three new charges. The news comes just hours after Schulte wrote a letter to the feder...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Falsely Labeled as Octopus

Two New Yorkers have been charged with importing squid from Peru and then reselling it as octopus. Yet another problem that a blockchain-enabled supply-chain system won't solve. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read ...

Teacher linked to Celebgate hacking scandal facing 7 years in prison

By Uzair Amir Former Lee Davis High School, Virginia teacher Christopher Brannan set to plead guilty to the federal charges of hacking into the computers of Celebrities including Emma Watson and non-celebrities leading to their private data in the Celebgate hacking scandal. 31 years old Christoph...

Voice Phishing Scams Are Getting More Clever

Most of us have been trained to be wary of clicking on links and attachments that arrive in emails unexpected, but it's easy to forget scam artists are constantly dreaming up innovations that put a new shine on old-fashioned telephone-based phishing scams. Think you're too smart to fall for one?...

Ecuador to Withdraw Asylum for Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange

After protecting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for almost six years, Ecuador is now planning to withdraw its political asylum, probably next week, and eject him from its London embassy—eventually would turn him over to the British authorities. Lenín Moreno, the newly-elected President of...

21-Year-Old Woman Charged With Hacking Selena Gomez's Email Account

A 21-year-old New Jersey woman has been charged with hacking into the email accounts of pop star and actress Selena Gomez, stealing her personal photos, and then leaked them to the Internet. Susan Atrach of Ridgefield Park was charged Thursday with 11 felony counts—five counts of identity theft,...

Ex-CIA employee charged with leaking 'Vault 7' hacking tools to Wikileaks

A 29-year-old former CIA computer programmer who was charged with possession of child pornography last year has now been charged with masterminding the largest leak of classified information in the agency's history. Joshua Adam Schulte , who once created malware for both the CIA and NSA to break...

WannaCry Kill Switch Hero Faces New Charges, But Code Evals Say Little

A fresh FBI charge against Marcus Hutchins has led to the Kronos banking trojan and the UPAS Kit backdoor being linked in the news over the past week. However, a fresh analysis this week shows that, at least on a code level, the similarities and differences between the two are far from conclusive...

Japanese police to charge scammers with crypto mining without consent

By Waqas The investigators believe that the case involving crypto mining is This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Japanese police to charge scammers with crypto mining without consent...

Marcus Hutchins, WannaCry-killer, hit with four new charges by the FBI

Marcus Hutchins, the British malware analyst who helped stop global Wannacry menace, is now facing four new charges related to malware he allegedly created and promoted it online to steal financial information. Hutchins, the 24-year-old better known as MalwareTech, was arrested by the FBI last ye...

Two Romanian Hackers Extradited to the U.S. Over $18 Million Vishing Scam

Two Romanian hackers have been extradited to the United States to face 31 criminal charges including computer fraud and abuse, wire fraud conspiracy, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. Described as "international computer hackers" by the United States Department of Justice, Teodor Laurent...

Russian Scientists Arrested for Using Nuclear Weapon Facility to Mine Bitcoins

Two days ago when infosec bods claimed to have uncovered what's believed to be the first case of a SCADA network a water utility infected with cryptocurrency-mining malware, a batch of journalists accused other authors of making fear-mongering headlines, taunting that the next headline could be...

Yikes! Three armed men tried to rob a Bitcoin Exchange in Canada

As many non-tech savvy people think that Bitcoin looks like a Gold coin as illustrated in many stock images, perhaps these robbers also planned to rob a cryptocurrency exchange thinking that way. All jokes apart, we saw one such attempt on Tuesday morning, when three men armed with handguns enter...