This Week in Security News: Toll Fraud & Small Business Struggles

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, learn why telecommunications fraud has turned into a multi-billion euro criminal industry. Also, understand what cybersecurity struggles sma...

The Feds Just Hit Notorious Swatter Tyler Barriss With 46 New Charges. He Intends to Plead Guilty

Prosecutors in California have filed 46 new counts against Tyler Barriss for bomb threats, fraud, and swatting incidents nationwide. He’s angling to get the case transferred to Kansas and intends to plead guilty...

Android Ad-Fraud Scheme

BuzzFeed is reporting on a scheme where fraudsters buy legitimate Android apps, track users' behavior in order to mimic it in a way that evades bot detectors, and then uses bots to perpetuate an ad-fraud scheme. After being provided with a list of the apps and websites connected to the scheme,...

Phishing for knowledge

When we talk about phishing, top of mind are fake banking sites, payment systems, as well as mail and other globally popular services. However, cybercriminals have their fingers in far more pies than that. Unobviously, perhaps, students and university faculties are also in the line of fire. The...

FTC Promotes International Charity Fraud Awareness Week

The Federal Trade Commission FTC has released an announcement promoting the first International Charity Fraud Awareness Week ICFAW. FTC, the National Association of State Charities Officials, and state and international partners coordinated this effort to raise awareness about donating wisely to...

Nameles - Open Source Entropy Based Invalid Traffic Detection And Pre-Bid Filtering

Nameles provides an easy to deploy, scalable IVT detection and filtering solution that is proven to detect at a high level of accuracy ad fraud and other types of invalid traffic such as web scraping. For a high level overview you might want to check out the website If you have any questions or...

Virus Bulletin 2018: Exposing the Social Media Fraud Ecosystem

MONTREAL — While troll farms, influence campaigns and Twitter bots that spread disinformation have all become high-profile and negative aspects of the social-media universe, new research shows that there is actually a rich and complex supply chain behind these efforts. “Social-media fraud is...

Don’t ever use a VPN without paying attention to these five things

By John Mason Ryan Lin was just recently sentenced to 17 years in prison. He was sentenced for committing a range of crimes including cyberstalking, computer fraud and abuse, aggravated identity theft, and distribution of child pornography. These are all serious crimes that I in no way support or...

Detecting Credit Card Skimmers

Interesting research paper: "Fear the Reaper: Characterization and Fast Detection of Card Skimmers": Abstract: Payment card fraud results in billions of dollars in losses annually. Adversaries increasingly acquire card data using skimmers, which are attached to legitimate payment devices includin...

No Data is an Island: One Infosec Pro’s Experience As a Consumer Involved in a Data Breach

British Airways BA was hit by a major breach that resulted in a loss of customer records. I was notified promptly by BA. I thought their public response was timely. By the way, this breach was announced while I was about to board a BA flight to Heathrow. My credit card was used to purchase my...

Chaturbate: Reflected XSS on secure.chaturbate.com

The hacker found that an external asset used for fraud detection on secure.chaturbate.com was not sanitizing input parameters and could be used for reflected XSS. This external asset was removed...

Operator of VirusTotal Like Malware-Scanning Service Jailed for 14 Years

A Latvian hacker behind the development and operation of counter antivirus service "Scan4You" has finally been sentenced to 14 years in prison. 37-year-old Ruslans Bondars, described as a Latvian "non-citizen" or "citizen of the former USSR who had been residing in Riga, Latvia," was found guilty...

Credit Freezes are Free: Let the Ice Age Begin

It is now free in every U.S. state to freeze and unfreeze your credit file and that of your dependents, a process that blocks identity thieves and others from looking at private details in your consumer credit history. If you've been holding out because you're not particularly worried about ID...

Rise of Credential Stuffing in Asia Pacific and Japan.

The rise of credential stuffing attacks globally is made possible by the tendency of customers' re-using the same credentials across different websites and attackers' easy access to stolen credential lists. Credential stuffing attacks is the result of attackers using stolen credentials username a...

Thousands of Breached Websites Turn Up On MagBo Black Market

A newly-discovered underground marketplace has been peddling access to more than 3,000 breached websites, catering to hackers hungry for valuable data and the ability to launch a range of attacks on unsuspecting site visitors. Advertisements for the Russian-speaking marketplace called MagBo were...

Mirai Botnet Authors Avoid Jail Time

Citing "extraordinary cooperation" with the government, a court in Alaska on Tuesday sentenced three men to probation, community service and fines for their admitted roles in authoring and using "Mirai," a potent malware strain used in countless attacks designed to knock Web sites offline --...

A week in security (September 10 – 16)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we assessed the security of a portable router, identified ways to waste a scammer's time, named the many faces of omnichannel fraud, questioned the security of 2FAs, profiled a massive tech support scam operation, and exposed a new HMRC phishing campaign. Other...

Russian Hacker Pleads Guilty to Operating Kelihos Botnet

The Russian man who was accused of operating the infamous Kelihos botnet has finally pleaded guilty in a U.S. federal court. Peter Yuryevich Levashov , 38, of St. Petersburg, Russia, pleaded guilty on Wednesday in U.S. federal court in Connecticut to computer crime, wire fraud, conspiracy and...

The many faces of omnichannel fraud

The rise of new technologies, social networks, and other means of online communication have brought about compelling changes in industries across the board. For example, in retail, organizations use digital tools such as websites, email, and apps to reach out to their current and potential client...

Threatlist: Email Attacks Surge, Targeting Execs

There was a 36 percent increase in email attacks against businesses between the first and second quarters of 2018, with retail, healthcare and government experiencing the most business email compromise BEC attempts, according to a new report. Several trends emerged in the analysis period, includi...