Arrest, Seizures Tied to Netwalker Ransomware

U.S. and Bulgarian authorities this week seized the darkweb site used by the NetWalker ransomware cybercrime group to publish data stolen from its victims. In connection with the seizure, a Canadian national suspected of extorting more than $27 million through the spreading of NetWalker was charg...

Who’s Behind Monday’s 14-State 911 Outage?

Emergency 911 systems were down for more than an hour on Monday in towns and cities across 14 U.S. states. The outages led many news outlets to speculate the problem was related to Microsofts Azure web services platform, which also was struggling with a widespread outage at the time. However,...

Porn Clip Disrupts Virtual Court Hearing for Alleged Twitter Hacker

Perhaps fittingly, a Web-streamed court hearing for the 17-year-old alleged mastermind of the July 15 mass hack against Twitter was cut short this morning after mischief makers injected a pornographic video clip into the proceeding. 17-year-old Graham Clark of Tampa, Fla. was among those charged ...

Here’s Why Credit Card Fraud is Still a Thing

Most of the civilized world years ago shifted to requiring computer chips in payment cards that make it far more expensive and difficult for thieves to clone and use them for fraud. One notable exception is the United States, which is still lurching toward this goal. Heres a look at the havoc tha...

Booter Boss Busted By Bacon Pizza Buy

A Pennsylvania man who operated one of the Internet's longest-running online attack-for-hire or "booter" services was sentenced to five years probation today. While the young man's punishment was heavily tempered by his current poor health, the defendant's dietary choices may have contributed to...

Ransomware Bites Dental Data Backup Firm

PerCSoft, a Wisconsin-based company that manages a remote data backup service relied upon by hundreds of dental offices across the country, is struggling to restore access to client systems after falling victim to a ransomware attack. West Allis, Wis.-based PerCSoft is a cloud management provider...

Facebook Security Bug Affects 90M Users

Facebook said today some 90 million of its users may get forcibly logged out of their accounts after the company fixed a rather glaring security vulnerability in its Web site that may have let attackers hijack user profiles. In a short blog post published this afternoon, Facebook said hackers hav...

File Your Taxes Before Scammers Do It For You

Today, Jan. 29, is officially the first day of the 2018 tax-filing season, also known as the day fraudsters start requesting phony tax refunds in the names of identity theft victims. Want to minimize the chances of getting hit by tax refund fraud this year? File your taxes before the bad guys can...

Equifax Reopens Salary Lookup Service

Equifax has re-opened a Web site that lets anyone look up the salary history of a large portion of the American workforce using little more than a person's Social Security number and their date of birth. The big-three credit bureau took the site down just hours after I wrote about it on Oct. 8, a...

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...

Emergency Fix for Windows Anti-Malware Flaw Leads May’s Patch Tuesday

Adobe and Microsoft both issued updates today to fix critical security vulnerabilities in their software. Microsoft actually released an emergency update on Monday just hours ahead of today's regularly scheduled "Patch Tuesday" the 2nd Tuesday of each month to fix a dangerous flaw present in most...

Six 0-Days Lead Microsoft’s August 2024 Patch Push

Microsoft today released updates to fix at least 90 security vulnerabilities in Windows and related software, including a whopping six zero-day flaws that are already being actively exploited by attackers. Image: Shutterstock. This months bundle of update joy from Redmond includes patches for...

Alleged Boss of ‘Scattered Spider’ Hacking Group Arrested

A 22-year-old man from the United Kingdom arrested this week in Spain is allegedly the ringleader of Scattered Spider, a cybercrime group suspected of hacking into Twilio, LastPass, DoorDash, Mailchimp, and nearly 130 other organizations over the past two years. The Spanish daily Murcia Today...

The Rise of One-Time Password Interception Bots

In February, KrebsOnSecurity wrote about a novel cybercrime service that helped attackers intercept the one-time passwords OTPs that many websites require as a second authentication factor in addition to passwords. That service quickly went offline, but new research reveals a number of competitor...

Indictment, Lawsuits Revive Trump-Alfa Bank Story

In October 2016, media outlets reported that data collected by some of the worlds most renowned cybersecurity experts had identified frequent and unexplained communications between an email server used by the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, one of Russias largest financial institutions. Those...

IRS to Make ID Protection PIN Open to All

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service IRS said this week that beginning in 2021 it will allow all taxpayers to apply for an identity protection personal identification number IP PIN, a single-use code designed to block identity thieves from falsely claiming a tax refund in your name. Currently, IP PI...

Two Charged in SIM Swapping, Vishing Scams

Two young men from the eastern United States have been hit with identity theft and conspiracy charges for allegedly stealing bitcoin and social media accounts by tricking employees at wireless phone companies into giving away credentials needed to remotely access and modify customer account...

FBI, CISA Echo Warnings on ‘Vishing’ Threat

The Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA on Thursday issued a joint alert to warn about the growing threat from voice phishing or "vishing" attacks targeting companies. The advisory came less than 24 hours after KrebsOnSecurity publishe...

Phish of GoDaddy Employee Jeopardized Escrow.com, Among Others

A spear-phishing attack this week hooked a customer service employee at GoDaddy.com, the world's largest domain name registrar, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The incident gave the phisher the ability to view and modify key customer records, access that was used to change domain settings for a...

Wawa Breach May Have Compromised More Than 30 Million Payment Cards

In late December 2019, fuel and convenience store chain Wawa Inc. said a nine-month-long breach of its payment card processing systems may have led to the theft of card data from customers who visited any of its 850 locations nationwide. Now, fraud experts say the first batch of card data stolen...

Inside ‘Evil Corp,’ a $100M Cybercrime Menace

The U.S. Justice Department this month offered a $5 million bounty for information leading to the arrest and conviction of a Russian man indicted for allegedly orchestrating a vast, international cybercrime network that called itself "Evil Corp" and stole roughly $100 million from businesses and...

Hidden Cam Above Bluetooth Pump Skimmer

Tiny hidden spy cameras are a common sight at ATMs that have been tampered with by crooks who specialize in retrofitting the machines with card skimmers. But until this past week I'd never heard of hidden cameras being used at gas pumps in tandem with Bluetooth-based card skimming devices...

Hackers Breached Virginia Bank Twice in Eight Months, Stole $2.4M

Hackers used phishing emails to break into a Virginia bank in two separate cyber intrusions over an eight-month period, making off with more than $2.4 million total. Now the financial institution is suing its insurance provider for refusing to fully cover the losses. According to a lawsuit filed...

AT&T, Sprint, Verizon to Stop Sharing Customer Location Data With Third Parties

In the wake of a scandal involving third-party companies leaking or selling precise, real-time location data on virtually all Americans who own a mobile phone, the four major wireless carriers have responded to requests from a U.S. senator for more details about how the carriers are managing acce...

Equifax Credit Assistance Site Served Spyware

Big-three consumer credit bureau Equifax says it has removed third-party code from its credit report assistance Web site that prompted visitors to download spyware disguised as an update for Adobe's Flash Player software. Image: Randy-abrams.blogspot.com On Wednesday, security expert and blogger...

Patch Tuesday, December 2024 Edition

Microsoft today released updates to plug at least 70 security holes in Windows and Windows software, including one vulnerability that is already being exploited in active attacks. The zero-day seeing exploitation involves CVE-2024-49138, a security weakness in the Windows Common Log File System...

Lamborghini Carjackers Lured by $243M Cyberheist

The parents of a 19-year-old Connecticut honors student accused of taking part in a $243 million cryptocurrency heist in August were carjacked a week later -- while out house-hunting in a brand new Lamborghini. Prosecutors say the couple was beaten and briefly kidnapped by six young men who...

Incognito Darknet Market Mass-Extorts Buyers, Sellers

Borrowing from the playbook of ransomware purveyors, the darknet narcotics bazaar Incognito Market has begun extorting all of its vendors and buyers, threatening to publish cryptocurrency transaction and chat records of users who refuse to pay a fee ranging from $100 to $20,000. The bold mass...

It Might Be Our Data, But It’s Not Our Breach

Image: Shutterstock. A cybersecurity firm says it has intercepted a large, unique stolen data set containing the names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, Social Security Numbers and dates of birth on nearly 23 million Americans. The firms analysis of the data suggests it corresponds to...

First American Financial Pays Farcical $500K Fine

In May 2019, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that the website of mortgage settlement giant First American Financial Corp. NYSE:FAF was leaking more than 800 million documents -- many containing sensitive financial data -- related to real estate transactions dating back 16 years. This week, the U.S...

Phish Leads to Breach at Calif. State Controller

A phishing attack last week gave attackers access to email and files at the California State Controllers Office SCO, an agency responsible for handling more than $100 billion in public funds each year. The phishers had access for more than 24 hours, and sources tell KrebsOnSecurity the intruders...

Owners of DDoS-for-Hire Service vDOS Get 6 Months Community Service

The co-owners of vDOS, a now-defunct service that for four years helped paying customers launch more than two million distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks that knocked countless Internet users and websites offline, each have been sentenced to six months of community service by an Israeli...

Coronavirus Widens the Money Mule Pool

With many people being laid off or working from home thanks to the Coronavirus pandemic, cybercrooks are almost certain to have more than their usual share of recruitable "money mules" -- people who get roped into money laundering schemes under the pretense of a work-at-home job offer. Here's the...

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...

Serial Swatter “SWAuTistic” Bragged He Hit 100 Schools, 10 Homes

The individual who allegedly made a fake emergency call to Kansas police last week that summoned them to shoot and kill an unarmed local man has claimed credit for raising dozens of these dangerous false alarms -- calling in bogus hostage situations and bomb threats at roughly 100 schools and at...

Equifax Breach: Setting the Record Straight

Bloomberg published a story this week citing three unnamed sources who told the publication that Equifax experienced a breach earlier this year which predated the intrusion that the big-three credit bureau announced on Sept. 7. To be clear, this earlier breach at Equifax is not a new finding and...

Alleged ‘Scattered Spider’ Member Extradited to U.S.

A 23-year-old Scottish man thought to be a member of the prolific Scattered Spider cybercrime group was extradited last week from Spain to the United States, where he is facing charges of wire fraud, conspiracy and identity theft. U.S. prosecutors allege Tyler Robert Buchanan and co-conspirators...

A Close Up Look at the Consumer Data Broker Radaris

If you live in the United States, the data broker Radaris likely knows a great deal about you, and they are happy to sell what they know to anyone. But how much do we know about Radaris? Publicly available data indicates that in addition to running a dizzying array of people-search websites, the...

‘Snatch’ Ransom Group Exposes Visitor IP Addresses

The victim shaming site operated by the Snatch ransomware group is leaking data about its true online location and internal operations, as well as the Internet addresses of its visitors, KrebsOnSecurity has found. The leaked data suggest that Snatch is one of several ransomware groups using paid...

Who’s Behind the 8Base Ransomware Website?

The victim shaming website operated by the cybercriminals behind 8Base -- currently one of the more active ransomware groups -- was until earlier today leaking quite a bit of information that the crime group probably did not intend to be made public. The leaked data suggests that at least some of...

Top Zeus Botnet Suspect “Tank” Arrested in Geneva

Vyacheslav "Tank" Penchukov, the accused 40-year-old Ukrainian leader of a prolific cybercriminal group that stole tens of millions of dollars from small to mid-sized businesses in the United States and Europe, has been arrested in Switzerland, according to multiple sources. Wanted Ukrainian...

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...

How Cyber Sleuths Cracked an ATM Shimmer Gang

In 2015, police departments worldwide started finding ATMs compromised with advanced new "shimming" devices made to steal data from chip card transactions. Authorities in the United States and abroad had seized many of these shimmers, but for years couldnt decrypt the data on the devices. This is...

How Does One Get Hired by a Top Cybercrime Gang?

The U.S. Department of Justice DOJ last week announced the arrest of a 55-year-old Latvian woman whos alleged to have worked as a programmer for Trickbot, a malware-as-a-service platform responsible for infecting millions of computers and seeding many of those systems with ransomware. Just how di...

Trump Fires Security Chief Christopher Krebs

President Trump on Tuesday fired his top election security official Christopher Krebs no relation. The dismissal came via Twitter two weeks to the day after Trump lost an election he baselessly claims was stolen by widespread voting fraud. Chris Krebs. Image: CISA. Krebs, 43, is a former Microsof...

FBI, DHS, HHS Warn of Imminent, Credible Ransomware Threat Against U.S. Hospitals

On Monday, Oct. 26, KrebsOnSecurity began following up on a tip from a reliable source that an aggressive Russian cybercriminal gang known for deploying ransomware was preparing to disrupt information technology systems at hundreds of hospitals, clinics and medical care facilities across the Unit...

Google Mending Another Crack in Widevine

For the second time in as many years, Google is working to fix a weakness in its Widevine digital rights management DRM technology used by online streaming sites like Disney, Hulu and Netflix to prevent their content from being pirated. The latest cracks in Widevine concern the encryption...

COVID-19 Has United Cybersecurity Experts, But Will That Unity Survive the Pandemic?

The Coronavirus has prompted thousands of information security professionals to volunteer their skills in upstart collaborative efforts aimed at frustrating cybercriminals who are seeking to exploit the crisis for financial gain. Whether it's helping hospitals avoid becoming the next ransomware...

Security Breach Disrupts Fintech Firm Finastra

Finastra, a company that provides a range of technology solutions to banks worldwide, said today it was shutting down key systems in response to a security breach discovered this morning. The company's public statement and notice to customers does not mention the cause of the outage, but their...

Russian Cybercrime Boss Burkov Pleads Guilty

Aleksei Burkov, an ultra-connected Russian hacker once described as "an asset of supreme importance" to Moscow, has pleaded guilty in a U.S. court to running a site that sold stolen payment card data and to administering a highly secretive crime forum that counted among its members some of the mo...