Sizing Up The Scourge of Credential Stuffing

Last year, 2.3 billion credentials were stolen from 51 different organizations, including Ancestry.com, Imgur and Virgin America. Where do all those user names go? In Shape Security’s second annual Credential Spill Report, it found that billions of stolen digital IDs are contributing to an epidem...

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,...

A week in security (July 9 – July 15)

Last week, we talked about domestic abuse fuelled by IoT, doing threat intel programs right, blocking ICO fraud, and man-in-the-middle attacks. We also explained why we block shady ad blockers and provided tips to online shoppers for Prime Day. Other news: Reports revealed that low-end Android...

Deceased Patient Data Being Sold on Dark Web

It is no shocker medical records are a prime target for cybercriminals. But less intuitive is the market for medical records of the deceased on the dark web. We took a closer look at the reason behind this strange trend. Here is what we found. First off, despite best efforts, stolen medical recor...

A week in security (June 25 – July 1)

Last week on Labs, we looked at comment moderation duties, Viagra spam on a news-making restaurant's website, and how to manage your child's online presence for Internet safety month. We also looked at a set of big breaches and leaks, as well as malware threats with a World Cup vibe. Other news...

Rewards Points Targeted by Teens in Hack of 500K Accounts

A pair of Russian teens have been arrested for infiltrating more than a half-million online accounts, in particular targeting services that offer rewards points. Russian authorities at the Ministry of Internal Affairs said in an announcement Wednesday that the duo came to their attention in late...

Security Bulletin: OpenSSL Heartbleed Vulnerability and Impact to Algo and OpenPages Products

Abstract The Heartbleed Bug is a serious vulnerability in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library. This weakness allows stealing the information protected, under normal conditions, by the SSL/TLS encryption used to secure the Internet. SSL/TLS provides communication security and privac...

How attackers are abusing high-profile users and executives

Email is the prime communication channel for businesses and their employees worldwide. In fact, last year saw more than 269 billion emails sent per day, and Radicati Group researchers predict that by 2021, this number will rise to more than 319 billion. With so much critical and sensitive...

FBI’s BEC Crackdown Leads To 74 Arrests Globally

The FBI announced Monday the results of a major crackdown on scammers behind business email compromise BEC campaigns that resulted in 74 arrests and the retrieval of millions of dollars. Several U.S. federal authorities and police from other countries were involved in Operation WireWire, a...

Feds Arrest 74 Email Fraudsters Involved in Nigerian BEC Scams

The United States Department of Justice announced Monday the arrest of 74 email fraudsters across three continents in a global crackdown on a large-scale business email compromise BEC scheme. The arrest was the result of a six-month-long operation dubbed "Operation Wire Wire " that involved the U...

A week in security (May 28 – June 3)

Last week on Labs, we talked about the significance of SEO poisoning in the world of search marketing, blackmail attempts against financial institutions in Canada, voice command flaws in smart assistants, survey and potential phishing scams on Instagram, and the latest changes in Office 365. We...

Botnet Operators Team Up To Leverage IcedID, Trickbot Trojans

The botnet operators behind two infamous banking trojans have banded together to gouge victims of cash in a tricky collaborative scheme. Flashpoint analysts, who highlighted the collaboration in a Wednesday report, said that the operators behind the IcedID and TrickBot trojans appear to be...

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...

Kidnapping Fraud

Fake kidnapping fraud: "Most commonly we have unsolicited calls to potential victims in Australia, purporting to represent the people in authority in China and suggesting to intending victims here they have been involved in some sort of offence in China or elsewhere, for which they're being held...

A week in security (May 21 – May 27)

Last week we told you about a Mac cryptominer using XMRig, an overview of Dreamcast related scams, part 1 of decoding Emotet, and what to do about bad coding habits that die hard. We also published the results of our second CrackMe contest. Other news How a pioneer of machine learning became one ...

2018 Fraud World Cup

There are only two weeks to go before the start of the massive soccer event — FIFA World Cup. This championship has already attracted the attention of millions worldwide, including a fair few cybercriminals. Long before kick-off, email accounts began bulging with soccer-related spam, and scammers...

Latin American ‘Biñeros’ Bond Over Fraudulent Purchase Scheme

A type of card-not-present fraud is spreading throughout the Latin American underground, uniting groups of malefactors in a communal effort to perpetrate it as widely and as often as possible. Cybercriminals in the region are making use of problems in the validation process for bank identificatio...

Maliciously Changing Someone's Address

Someone changed the address of UPS corporate headquarters to his own apartment in Chicago. The company discovered it three months later. The problem, of course, is that in the US there isn't any authentication of change-of-address submissions: According to the Postal Service, nearly 37 million...

Detecting Cloned Cards at the ATM, Register

Much of the fraud involving counterfeit credit, ATM debit and retail gift cards relies on the ability of thieves to use cheap, widely available hardware to encode stolen data onto any card's magnetic stripe. But new research suggests retailers and ATM operators could reliably detect counterfeit...

Airline Ticket Fraud

New research: "Leaving on a jet plane: the trade in fraudulently obtained airline tickets:" Abstract: Every day, hundreds of people fly on airline tickets that have been obtained fraudulently. This crime script analysis provides an overview of the trade in these tickets, drawing on interviews wit...