TheMoon Rises Again, With a Botnet-as-a-Service Threat

TheMoon, an IoT botnet targeting home routers and modems, is entering a new phase, as it were: It has added a previously undocumented module that allows it to be sold as-a-service to other malicious actors. This has already had significant real-world consequences, according to CenturyLink Threat...

Police Shut Down xDedic – An Online Market for Cyber Criminals

In an international operation involving law enforcement authorities from the U.S. and several European countries, feds have shut down an online underground marketplace and arrested three suspects in Ukraine. Dubbed xDedic, the illegal online marketplace let cybercriminals buy, sell or rent out...

Three Charged for Working With Serial Swatter

The U.S. Justice Department has filed criminal charges against three U.S. men accused of swatting, or making hoax reports of bomb threats or murders in a bid to trigger a heavily armed police response to a target's address. Investigators say the men, aged 19 to 23, all carried out the attacks wit...

Razy Malware Attacks Browser Extensions to Steal Cryptocurrency

UPDATE A Windows malware dubbed “Razy” has been uncovered that sports a toolbox of cryptocurrency theft and fraud tools. Razy works by weaponizing browser extensions in order to perpetrate a range of online scams on unwitting victims. According to researchers at Kaspersky Lab, the trojan targets...

Malware in Ad-Based Images Targets Mac Users

A massive adware campaign has so far impacted up to a million Mac users, using a tricky steganography technique to hide malware in image files. Researchers at Confiant and Malwarebytes said the attacks have been running since Jan. 11, using ads on the web and steganography to spread; steganograph...

Alleged Russian Hacker Pleads Not Guilty After Extradition to United States

A Russian hacker indicted by a United States court for his involvement in online ad fraud schemes that defrauded multiple American companies out of tens of millions of dollars pleaded not guilty on Friday in a courtroom in Brooklyn, New York. Aleksandr Zhukov , 38, was arrested in November last...

Alleged Russian Hacker Pleads Not Guilty After Extradition to United States

A Russian hacker indicted by a United States court for his involvement in online ad fraud schemes that defrauded multiple American companies out of tens of millions of dollars pleaded not guilty on Friday in a courtroom in Brooklyn, New York. Aleksandr Zhukov, 38, was arrested in November last ye...

Two Hackers Charged with Hacking SEC System in Stock-Trading Scheme

The U.S. authorities have charged two Ukrainian hackers for hacking into the Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR filing system and stealing sensitive market-moving reports of companies before their public release. EDGAR, or Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval, is an online...

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...

Secret Service: Theft Rings Turn to Fuze Cards

Street thieves who specialize in cashing out stolen credit and debit cards increasingly are hedging their chances of getting caught carrying multiple counterfeit cards by relying on Fuze Cards, a smartcard technology that allows users to store dozens of cards on a single device, the U.S. Secret...

Tech Support Scams: What are They and How do I Stay Safe?

If you read this blog regularly you’re no doubt aware that cyber-criminals are a determined bunch, with a large range of tools and tactics at their disposal to rob you of your identity and hard-earned cash. Tech support scams TSS are an increasingly popular way for them to do just this. In 2017,...

Shipping operators, what you need to know about phishing and CEO fraud

Maybe second only to ransomware, the most likely type of attack a shipping operator will experience will be a phishing scam. Usually this will be carried out by email, or social media, or even messaging apps. It will likely include a link to what seems a plausible website, and/or have an...

Podcast: Beware These Top Security Threats in 2019

While 2018 was a whirlwind of serious threats, newly-evolving malware and high-profile data breaches, 2019 has already started with a bang. Between two newly disclosed data breaches and a hack of hundreds of German politicians‘ personal information exploding to the forefront last week, the securi...

Massive Ad Fraud Scheme Relied on BGP Hijacking

This is a really interesting story of an ad fraud scheme that relied on hijacking the Border Gateway Protocol: Members of 3ve pronounced "eve" used their large reservoir of trusted IP addresses to conceal a fraud that otherwise would have been easy for advertisers to detect. The scheme employed a...

Serial Swatter and Stalker Mir Islam Arrested for Allegedly Dumping Body in River

A 22-year-old man convicted of cyberstalking and carrying out numerous bomb threats and swatting attacks -- including a 2013 swatting incident at my home -- was arrested Sunday morning in the Philippines after allegedly helping his best friend dump the body of a housemate into a local river...

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...

PCI Announces Coming Qualified PIN Assessor (QPA) Program

Second only to protecting sensitive credit card account information, safeguarding the cardholders personal identification number PIN is one of the most important tasks for prevention of card-present fraud in retail and banking. With the continued movement toward chip-and-PIN EMV the technology...

Yes, Chromebooks can and do get infected

As a Mac malware specialist, I've seen more than my share of folks saying "Macs don't get viruses" over the years. I've seen and experienced first-hand that this isn't true—even on iOS, where despite having tight, built-in security, iPhones are still capable of getting infected by rare malware. I...

A week in security (December 10 – 16)

Last week on Labs, we took a look at some new Mac malware, a collection of various scraped data dumps, the protection of power grids, and how bad actors are using SMB vulnerabilities. Other cybersecurity news Millions affected by Facebook photo API bug: An issue granted third-party apps more acce...

App Security and PCI; Are you ready for the audit?

As most people know, merchants, financial institutions and anybody else who is involved in processing credit cards are subject to the PCI DSS compliance to reduce fraud and cybersecurity risks. This affects both brick-n-mortar stores and banks as well as card-not-present CNP transactions that...