Checkout Skimmers Powered by Chip Cards

Easily the most sophisticated skimming devices made for hacking terminals at retail self-checkout lanes are a new breed of PIN pad overlay combined with a flexible, paper-thin device that fits inside the terminals chip reader slot. What enables these skimmers to be so slim? They draw their power...

The Web’s Bot Containment Unit Needs Your Help

Anyone who's seen the 1984 hit movie Ghostbusters likely recalls the pivotal scene where a government bureaucrat orders the shutdown of the ghost containment unit, effectively unleashing a pent-up phantom menace on New York City. Now, something similar is in danger of happening in cyberspace:...

French Firms Rocked by Kasbah Hacker?

A large number of French critical infrastructure firms were hacked as part of an extended malware campaign that appears to have been orchestrated by at least one attacker based in Morocco, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. An individual thought to be involved has earned accolades from the likes of...

Zyxel 0day Affects its Firewall Products, Too

On Monday, networking hardware maker Zyxel released security updates to plug a critical security hole in its network attached storage NAS devices that is being actively exploited by crooks who specialize in deploying ransomware. Today, Zyxel acknowledged the same flaw is present in many of its...

U.S. Charges 4 Chinese Military Officers in 2017 Equifax Hack

The U.S. Justice Department today unsealed indictments against four Chinese officers of the People's Liberation Army PLA accused of perpetrating the 2017 hack against consumer credit bureau Equifax that led to the theft of personal data on nearly 150 million Americans. DOJ officials said the four...

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...

Expert: IoT Botnets the Work of a ‘Vast Minority’

In December 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice announced indictments and guilty pleas by three men in the United States responsible for creating and using Mirai, a malware strain that enslaves poorly-secured "Internet of Things" or IoT devices like security cameras and digital video recorders f...

Website Glitch Let Me Overstock My Coinbase

Coinbase and Overstock.com just fixed a serious glitch that allowed Overstock customers to buy any item at a tiny fraction of the listed price. Potentially more punishing, the flaw let anyone paying with bitcoin reap many times the authorized bitcoin refund amount on any canceled Overstock orders...

Skyrocketing Bitcoin Fees Hit Carders in Wallet

Critics of unregulated virtual currencies like Bitcoin have long argued that the core utility of these payment systems lies in facilitating illicit commerce, such as buying drugs or stolen credit cards and identities. But recent spikes in the price of Bitcoin -- and the fees associated with movin...

Beware of Hurricane Harvey Relief Scams

U.S. federal agencies are warning citizens anxious to donate money for those victimized by Hurricane Harvey to be especially wary of scam artists. In years past we've seen shameless fraudsters stand up fake charities and other bogus relief efforts in a bid to capitalize on public concern over an...

Beware of Security by Press Release

On Wednesday, the security industry once again witnessed an all-too-familiar cycle: I call it "security by press release." It goes a bit like this: A security firm releases a report claiming to have unearthed a major flaw in a competitor's product; members of the trade press uncritically republis...

Got Robocalled? Don’t Get Mad; Get Busy.

Several times a week my cell phone receives the telephonic equivalent of spam: A robocall. On each occasion the call seems to come from a local number, but when I answer there is that telltale pause followed by an automated voice pitching some product or service. So when I heard from a reader who...

Global ‘Wana’ Ransomware Outbreak Earned Perpetrators $26,000 So Far

As thousands of organizations work to contain and clean up the mess from this week's devastating Wana ransomware attack, the fraudsters responsible for releasing the digital contagion are no doubt counting their earnings and congratulating themselves on a job well done. But according to a review ...

SSA.GOV To Require Stronger Authentication

The U.S. Social Security Administration will soon require Americans to use stronger authentication when accessing their accounts at ssa.gov. As part of the change, SSA will require all users to enter a username and password in addition to a one-time security code sent their email or phone. In thi...

Who Wrote the ALPHV/BlackCat Ransomware Strain?

In December 2021, researchers discovered a new ransomware-as-a-service named ALPHV a.k.a. "BlackCat", considered to be the first professional cybercrime group to create and use a ransomware strain written in the Rust programming language. In this post, well explore some of the clues left behind b...

Man Robbed of 16 Bitcoin Sues Young Thieves’ Parents

In 2018, Andrew Schober was digitally mugged for approximately $1 million worth of bitcoin. After several years of working with investigators, Schober says hes confident he has located two young men in the United Kingdom responsible for using a clever piece of digital clipboard-stealing malware t...

Justice Dept. Claws Back $2.3M Paid by Colonial Pipeline to Ransomware Gang

The U.S. Department of Justice said today it has recovered $2.3 million worth of Bitcoin that Colonial Pipeline paid to ransomware extortionists last month. The funds had been sent to DarkSide, a ransomware-as-a-service syndicate that disbanded after a May 14 farewell message to affiliates saying...

Experian API Exposed Credit Scores of Most Americans

Big-three consumer credit bureau Experian just fixed a weakness with a partner website that let anyone look up the credit score of tens of millions of Americans just by supplying their name and mailing address, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Experian says it has plugged the data leak, but the...

ParkMobile Breach Exposes License Plate Data, Mobile Numbers of 21M Users

Someone is selling account information for 21 million customers of ParkMobile, a mobile parking app thats popular in North America. The stolen data includes customer email addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, license plate numbers, hashed passwords and mailing addresses. KrebsOnSecurity firs...

Bluetooth Overlay Skimmer That Blocks Chip

As a total sucker for anything skimming-related, I was interested to hear from a reader working security for a retail chain in the United States who recently found Bluetooth-enabled skimming devices placed over top of payment card terminals at several stores. Interestingly, these skimmers...

Tech Support Scam Uses Child Porn Warning

A new email scam is making the rounds, warning recipients that someone using their Internet address has been caught viewing child pornography. The message claims to have been sent from Microsoft Support, and says the recipient's Windows license will be suspended unless they call an "MS Support"...

Ransomware Bites 400 Veterinary Hospitals

National Veterinary Associates NVA, a California company that owns more than 700 animal care facilities around the globe, is still working to recover from a ransomware attack late last month that affected more than half of those properties, separating many veterinary practices from their patient...

What’s Behind the Wolters Kluwer Tax Outage?

Early in the afternoon on Friday, May, 3, I asked a friend to relay a message to his security contact at CCH, the cloud-based tax division of the global information services firm Wolters Kluwer in the Netherlands. The message was that the same file directories containing new versions of CCH's...

Mobile Giants: Please Don’t Share the Where

Your mobile phone is giving away your approximate location all day long. This isn't exactly a secret: It has to share this data with your mobile provider constantly to provide better call quality and to route any emergency 911 calls straight to your location. But now, the major mobile providers i...

Fund Targets Victims Scammed Via Western Union

If you, a friend or loved one lost money in a scam involving Western Union, some or all of those funds may be recoverable thanks to a more than half-billion dollar program set up by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. In January 2017, Englewood, Colo.-based Western Union settled a case with the FT...

Exclusive: Dutch Cops on AlphaBay ‘Refugees’

Following today's breaking news about U.S. and international authorities taking down the competing Dark Web drug bazaars AlphaBay and Hansa Market, KrebsOnSecurity caught up with the Dutch investigators who took over Hansa on June 20, 2017. When U.S. authorities shuttered AlphaBay on July 5, poli...

Credit Card Breach at Buckle Stores

The Buckle Inc., a clothier that operates more than 450 stores in 44 U.S. states, disclosed Friday that its retail locations were hit by malicious software designed to steal customer credit card data. The disclosure came hours after KrebsOnSecurity contacted the company regarding reports from...

Patch Tuesday, May 2026 Edition

Artificial intelligence platforms may be just as susceptible to social engineering as human beings, but they are proving remarkably good at finding security vulnerabilities in human-made computer code. That reality is on full display this month with some of the more widely-used software makers --...

Who Got Arrested in the Raid on the XSS Crime Forum?

On July 22, 2025, the European police agency Europol said a long-running investigation led by the French Police resulted in the arrest of a 38-year-old administrator of XSS, a Russian-language cybercrime forum with more than 50,000 members. The action has triggered an ongoing frenzy of speculatio...

Patch Tuesday, May 2025 Edition

Microsoft on Tuesday released software updates to fix at least 70 vulnerabilities in Windows and related products, including five zero-day flaws that are already seeing active exploitation. Adding to the sense of urgency with this month's patch batch from Redmond are fixes for two other weaknesse...

Highlights from the New U.S. Cybersecurity Strategy

The Biden administration today issued its vision for beefing up the nations collective cybersecurity posture, including calls for legislation establishing liability for software products and services that are sold with little regard for security. The White Houses new national cybersecurity strate...

A Deep Dive Into the Residential Proxy Service ‘911’

The 911 service as it exists today. For the past seven years, an online service known as 911 has sold access to hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Windows computers daily, allowing customers to route their Internet traffic through PCs in virtually any country or city around the globe -- but...

500M Avira Antivirus Users Introduced to Cryptomining

Many readers were surprised to learn recently that the popular Norton 360 antivirus suite now ships with a program which lets customers make money mining virtual currency. But Norton 360 isnt alone in this dubious endeavor: Avira antivirus -- which has built a base of 500 million users worldwide...

T-Mobile: Breach Exposed SSN/DOB of 40M+ People

T-Mobile is warning that a data breach has exposed the names, date of birth, Social Security number and drivers license/ID information of more than 40 million current, former or prospective customers who applied for credit with the company. The acknowledgment came less than 48 hours after million...

Don’t Wanna Pay Ransom Gangs? Test Your Backups.

Browse the comments on virtually any story about a ransomware attack and you will almost surely encounter the view that the victim organization could have avoided paying their extortionists if only theyd had proper data backups. But the ugly truth is there are many non-obvious reasons why victims...

Payroll/HR Giant PrismHR Hit by Ransomware?

PrismHR, a company that sells technology used by other firms to help more than 80,000 small businesses manage payroll, benefits, and human resources, has suffered what appears to be an ongoing ransomware attack that is disrupting many of its services. Hopkinton, Mass.-based PrismHR handles...

Ubiquiti: Change Your Password, Enable 2FA

Ubiquiti, a major vendor of cloud-enabled Internet of Things IoT devices such as routers, network video recorders, security cameras and access control systems, is urging customers to change their passwords and enable multi-factor authentication. The company says an incident at a third-party cloud...

Hacked Data Broker Accounts Fueled Phony COVID Loans, Unemployment Claims

A group of thieves thought to be responsible for collecting millions in fraudulent small business loans and unemployment insurance benefits from COVID-19 economic relief efforts gathered personal data on people and businesses they were impersonating by leveraging several compromised accounts at a...

Breached Data Indexer ‘Data Viper’ Hacked

Data Viper, a security startup that provides access to some 15 billion usernames, passwords and other information exposed in more than 8,000 website breaches, has itself been hacked and its user database posted online. The hackers also claim they are selling on the dark web roughly 2 billion...

Career Choice Tip: Cybercrime is Mostly Boring

When law enforcement agencies tout their latest cybercriminal arrest, the defendant is often cast as a bravado outlaw engaged in sophisticated, lucrative, even exciting activity. But new research suggests that as cybercrime has become dominated by pay-for-service offerings, the vast majority of...

Would You Have Fallen for This Phone Scam?

You may have heard that today's phone fraudsters like to use caller ID spoofing services to make their scam calls seem more believable. But you probably didn't know that these fraudsters also can use caller ID spoofing to trick your bank into giving up information about recent transactions on you...

When in Doubt: Hang Up, Look Up, & Call Back

Many security-conscious people probably think they'd never fall for a phone-based phishing scam. But if your response to such a scam involves anything other than hanging up and calling back the entity that claims to be calling, you may be in for a rude awakening. Here's how one security and...

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...

Who and What Is Coinhive?

Multiple security firms recently identified cryptocurrency mining service Coinhive as the top malicious threat to Web users, thanks to the tendency for Coinhive's computer code to be used on hacked Web sites to steal the processing power of its visitors' devices. This post looks at how Coinhive...

Chronicle: A Meteor Aimed At Planet Threat Intel?

Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, said today it is in the process of rolling out a new service designed to help companies more quickly make sense of and act on the mountains of threat data produced each day by cybersecurity tools. Countless organizations rely on a hodgepodge of securit...

Fraudsters Exploited Lax Security at Equifax’s TALX Payroll Division

Identity thieves who specialize in tax refund fraud had big help this past tax year from Equifax, one of the nation's largest consumer data brokers and credit bureaus. The trouble stems from TALX, an Equifax subsidiary that provides online payroll, HR and tax services. Equifax says crooks were ab...

Accused ‘Raccoon’ Malware Developer Fled Ukraine After Russian Invasion

A 26-year-old Ukrainian man is awaiting extradition from The Netherlands to the United States on charges that he acted as a core developer for Raccoon, a popular "malware-as-a-service" offering that helped paying customers steal passwords and financial data from millions of cybercrime victims...

Sounding the Alarm on Emergency Alert System Flaws

The Department of Homeland Security DHS is urging states and localities to beef up security around proprietary devices that connect to the Emergency Alert System -- a national public warning system used to deliver important emergency information, such as severe weather and AMBER alerts. The DHS...

Investment Scammer John Davies Reinvents Himself?

John Bernard, a pseudonym used by a convicted thief and con artist named John Clifton Davies who’s fleeced dozens of technology startups out of an estimated $30 million, appears to have reinvented himself again after being exposed in a recent investigative series published here. Sources tell...

Task Force Seeks to Disrupt Ransomware Payments

Some of the worlds top tech firms are backing a new industry task force focused on disrupting cybercriminal ransomware gangs by limiting their ability to get paid, and targeting the individuals and finances of the organized thieves behind these crimes. In a 81-page report delivered to the Biden...