Transcription Service Leaked Medical Records

MEDantex, a Kansas-based company that provides medical transcription services for hospitals, clinics and private physicians, took down its customer Web portal last week after being notified by KrebsOnSecurity that it was leaking sensitive patient medical records -- apparently for thousands of...

Panerabread.com Leaks Millions of Customer Records

Panerabread.com, the Web site for the American chain of bakery-cafe fast casual restaurants by the same name, leaked millions of customer records -- including names, email and physical addresses, birthdays and the last four digits of the customer's credit card number -- for at least eight months...

Would You Have Spotted This Skimmer?

When you realize how easy it is for thieves to compromise an ATM or credit card terminal with skimming devices, it's difficult not to inspect or even pull on these machines when you're forced to use them personally -- half expecting something will come detached. For those unfamiliar with the...

Name+DOB+SSN=FAFSA Data Gold Mine

KrebsOnSecurity has sought to call attention to online services which expose sensitive consumer data if the user knows a handful of static details about a person that are broadly for sale in the cybercrime underground, such as name, date of birth, and Social Security Number. Perhaps the most...

USPS ‘Informed Delivery’ Is Stalker’s Dream

A free new service from the U.S. Postal Service that provides scanned images of incoming mail before it is slated to arrive at its destination address is raising eyebrows among security experts who worry about the service's potential for misuse by private investigators, identity thieves, stalkers...

Breach at Sabre Corp.’s Hospitality Unit

Breaches involving major players in the hospitality industry continue to pile up. Today, travel industry giant Sabre Corp. disclosed what could be a significant breach of payment and customer data tied to bookings processed through a reservations system that serves more than 32,000 hotels and oth...

xAI Dev Leaks API Key for Private SpaceX, Tesla LLMs

An employee at Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI leaked a private key on GitHub that for the past two months could have allowed anyone to query private xAI large language models LLMs which appear to have been custom made for working with internal data from Musk's companies, includin...

Feds Seize LockBit Ransomware Websites, Offer Decryption Tools, Troll Affiliates

U.S. and U.K. authorities have seized the darknet websites run by LockBit, a prolific and destructive ransomware group that has claimed more than 2,000 victims worldwide and extorted over $120 million in payments. Instead of listing data stolen from ransomware victims who didnt pay, LockBits vict...

Russian Reshipping Service ‘SWAT USA Drop’ Exposed

The login page for the criminal reshipping service SWAT USA Drop. One of the largest cybercrime services for laundering stolen merchandise was hacked recently, exposing its internal operations, finances and organizational structure. Heres a closer look at the Russia-based SWAT USA Drop Service,...

Experts Fear Crooks are Cracking Keys Stolen in LastPass Breach

In November 2022, the password manager service LastPass disclosed a breach in which hackers stole password vaults containing both encrypted and plaintext data for more than 25 million users. Since then, a steady trickle of six-figure cryptocurrency heists targeting security-conscious people...

Hacked Ring Cams Used to Record Swatting Victims

Photo: BrandonKleinPhoto / Shutterstock.com Two U.S. men have been charged with hacking into the Ring home security cameras of a dozen random people and then "swatting" them -- falsely reporting a violent incident at the targets address to trick local police into responding with force. Prosecutor...

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...

Canada Charges Its “Most Prolific Cybercriminal”

A 31-year-old Canadian man has been arrested and charged with fraud in connection with numerous ransomware attacks against businesses, government agencies and private citizens throughout Canada and the United States. Canadian authorities describe him as "the most prolific cybercriminal weve...

Body Found in Canada Identified as Neo-Nazi Spam King

The body of a man found shot inside a burned out vehicle in Canada three years ago has been identified as that of Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a prolific spammer and neo-Nazi who led a failed anti-government march on Washington, D.C. in 1999, according to news reports. Homicide detectives said they...

Who is Tech Investor John Bernard?

John Bernard, the subject of a story here last week about a self-proclaimed millionaire investor who has bilked countless tech startups, appears to be a pseudonym for John Clifton Davies, a U.K. man who absconded from justice before being convicted on multiple counts of fraud in 2015. Prior to hi...

Confessions of an ID Theft Kingpin, Part I

At the height of his cybercriminal career, the hacker known as "Hieupc" was earning $125,000 a month running a bustling identity theft service that siphoned consumer dossiers from some of the worlds top data brokers. That is, until his greed and ambition played straight into an elaborate snare se...

Voice Phishers Targeting Corporate VPNs

The COVID-19 epidemic has brought a wave of email phishing attacks that try to trick work-at-home employees into giving away credentials needed to remotely access their employers networks. But one increasingly brazen group of crooks is taking your standard phishing attack to the next level,...

Ransomware Gangs Don’t Need PR Help

We've seen an ugly trend recently of tech news stories and cybersecurity firms trumpeting claims of ransomware attacks on companies large and small, apparently based on little more than the say-so of the ransomware gangs themselves. Such coverage is potentially quite harmful and plays deftly into...

FEMA IT Specialist Charged in ID Theft, Tax Refund Fraud Conspiracy

An information technology specialist at the Federal Emergency Management Agency FEMA was arrested this week on suspicion of hacking into the human resource databases of University of Pittsburgh Medical Center UPMC in 2014, stealing personal data on more than 65,000 UPMC employees, and selling the...

A Year Later, Cybercrime Groups Still Rampant on Facebook

Almost exactly one year ago, KrebsOnSecurity reported that a mere two hours of searching revealed more than 100 Facebook groups with some 300,000 members openly advertising services to support all types of cybercrime, including spam, credit card fraud and identity theft. Facebook responded by...

Will the Real Joker’s Stash Come Forward?

For as long as scam artists have been around so too have opportunistic thieves who specialize in ripping off other scam artists. This is the story about a group of Pakistani Web site designers who apparently have made an impressive living impersonating some of the most popular and well known...

Ayuda! (Help!) Equifax Has My Data!

Equifax last week disclosed a historic breach involving Social Security numbers and other sensitive data on as many as 143 million Americans. The company said the breach also impacted an undisclosed number of people in Canada and the United Kingdom. But the official list of victim countries may n...

$10M Is Yours If You Can Get This Guy to Leave Russia

The U.S. government this week put a $10 million bounty on a Russian man who for the past 18 years operated Try2Check, one of the cybercrime undergrounds most trusted services for checking the validity of stolen credit card data. U.S. authorities say 43-year-old Denis Kulkovs card-checking service...

3CX Breach Was a Double Supply Chain Compromise

We learned some remarkable new details this week about the recent supply-chain attack on VoIP software provider 3CX. The lengthy, complex intrusion has all the makings of a cyberpunk spy novel: North Korean hackers using legions of fake executive accounts on LinkedIn to lure people into opening...

How 1-Time Passcodes Became a Corporate Liability

Phishers are enjoying remarkable success using text messages to steal remote access credentials and one-time passcodes from employees at some of the worlds largest technology companies and customer support firms. A recent spate of SMS phishing attacks from one cybercriminal group has spawned a...

When Your Smart ID Card Reader Comes With Malware

Millions of U.S. government employees and contractors have been issued a secure smart ID card that enables physical access to buildings and controlled spaces, and provides access to government computer networks and systems at the cardholders appropriate security level. But many government employe...

Gift Card Gang Extracts Cash From 100k Inboxes Daily

Some of the most successful and lucrative online scams employ a "low-and-slow" approach -- avoiding detection or interference from researchers and law enforcement agencies by stealing small bits of cash from many people over an extended period. Heres the story of a cybercrime group that compromis...

Ransom Gangs Emailing Victim Customers for Leverage

Some of the top ransomware gangs are deploying a new pressure tactic to push more victim organizations into paying an extortion demand: Emailing the victims customers and partners directly, warning that their data will be leaked to the dark web unless they can convince the victim firm to pay up...

SolarWinds Hack Could Affect 18K Customers

The still-unfolding breach at network management software firm SolarWinds may have resulted in malicious code being pushed to nearly 18,000 customers, the company said in a legal filing on Monday. Meanwhile, Microsoft should soon have some idea which and how many SolarWinds customers were affecte...

REvil Ransomware Gang Starts Auctioning Victim Data

The criminal group behind the REvil ransomware enterprise has begun auctioning off sensitive data stolen from companies hit by its malicious software. The move marks an escalation in tactics aimed at coercing victims to pay up -- and publicly shaming those who don't. But it may also signal that...

Annual Protest to ‘Fight Krebs’ Raises €150K+

In 2018, KrebsOnSecurity unmasked the creators of Coinhive -- a now-defunct cryptocurrency mining service that was being massively abused by cybercriminals -- as the administrators of a popular German language image-hosting forum. In protest of that story, forum members donated hundreds of...

FBI Arrests Alleged Owner of Deer.io, a Top Broker of Stolen Accounts

FBI officials last week arrested a Russian computer security researcher on suspicion of operating deer.io, a vast marketplace for buying and selling stolen account credentials for thousands of popular online services and stores. Kirill V. Firsov was arrested Mar. 7 after arriving at New York's Jo...

DDoS-for-Hire Boss Gets 13 Months Jail Time

A 21-year-old Illinois man was sentenced last week to 13 months in prison for running multiple DDoS-for-hire services that launched millions of attacks over several years. This individual's sentencing comes more than five years after KrebsOnSecurity interviewed both the defendant and his father a...

Are Your Google Groups Leaking Data?

Google is reminding organizations to review how much of their Google Groups mailing lists should be public and indexed by Google.com. The notice was prompted in part by a review that KrebsOnSecurity undertook with several researchers who've been busy cataloging thousands of companies that are usi...

Simple Banking Security Tip: Verbal Passwords

There was a time when I was content to let my bank authenticate me over the phone by asking for some personal identifiers SSN/DOB that are broadly for sale in the cybercrime underground. At some point, however, I decided this wasn't acceptable for institutions that held significant chunks of our...

MolinaHealthcare.com Exposed Patient Records

Earlier this month, KrebsOnSecurity featured a story about a basic security flaw in the Web site of medical diagnostics firm True Health Group that let anyone who was logged in to the site view all other patient records. In that story I mentioned True Health was one of three major healthcare...

The Backstory Behind Carder Kingpin Roman Seleznev’s Record 27 Year Prison Sentence

Roman Seleznev, a 32-year-old Russian cybercriminal and prolific credit card thief, was sentenced Friday to 27 years in federal prison. That is a record punishment for hacking violations in the United States and by all accounts one designed to send a message to criminal hackers everywhere. But a...

Web Hacking Service ‘Araneida’ Tied to Turkish IT Firm

Cybercriminals are selling hundreds of thousands of credential sets stolen with the help of a cracked version of Acunetix , a powerful commercial web app vulnerability scanner, new research finds. The cracked software is being resold as a cloud-based attack tool by at least two different services...

.US Harbors Prolific Malicious Link Shortening Service

The top-level domain for the United States -- .US -- is home to thousands of newly-registered domains tied to a malicious link shortening service that facilitates malware and phishing scams, new research suggests. The findings come close on the heels of a report that identified .US domains as amo...

LeakedSource Owner Quit Ashley Madison a Month Before 2015 Hack

This is Part III in a series on research conducted for a recent Hulu documentary on the 2015 hack of marital infidelity website AshleyMadison.com. In 2019, a Canadian company called Defiant Tech Inc. pleaded guilty to running LeakedSource.com, a service that sold access to billions of passwords a...

Fake Investor John Bernard Sinks Norwegian Green Shipping Dreams

Several articles here have delved into the history of John Bernard, the pseudonym used by a fake billionaire technology investor who tricked dozens of startups into giving him tens of millions of dollars. Bernards latest victim -- a Norwegian company hoping to build a fleet of environmentally...

Payment Processing Giant TSYS: Ransomware Incident “Immaterial” to Company

Payment card processing giant TSYS suffered a ransomware attack earlier this month. Since then reams of data stolen from the company have been posted online, with the attackers promising to publish more in the coming days. But the company says the malware did not jeopardize card data, and that th...

Medical Debt Collection Firm R1 RCM Hit in Ransomware Attack

R1 RCM Inc. NASDAQ:RCM, one of the nations largest medical debt collection companies, has been hit in a ransomware attack. Formerly known as Accretive Health Inc., Chicago-based R1 RCM brought in revenues of $1.18 billion in 2019. The company has more than 19,000 employees and contracts with at...

Business ID Theft Soars Amid COVID Closures

Identity thieves who specialize in running up unauthorized lines of credit in the names of small businesses are having a field day with all of the closures and economic uncertainty wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. This story is about the victims of a particularly...

E-Verify’s “SSN Lock” is Nothing of the Sort

One of the most-read advice columns on this site is a 2018 piece called "Plant Your Flag, Mark Your Territory," which tried to impress upon readers the importance of creating accounts at websites like those at the Social Security Administration, the IRS and others before crooks do it for you. A k...

Florence, Ala. Hit By Ransomware 12 Days After Being Alerted by KrebsOnSecurity

In late May, KrebsOnSecurity alerted numerous officials in Florence, Ala. that their information technology systems had been infiltrated by hackers who specialize in deploying ransomware. Nevertheless, on Friday, June 5, the intruders sprang their attack, deploying ransomware and demanding nearly...

Europe’s Largest Private Hospital Operator Fresenius Hit by Ransomware

Fresenius, Europe's largest private hospital operator and a major provider of dialysis products and services that are in such high demand thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, has been hit in a ransomware cyber attack on its technology systems. The company said the incident has limited some of its...

Sipping from the Coronavirus Domain Firehose

Security experts are poring over thousands of new Coronavirus-themed domain names registered each day, but this often manual effort struggles to keep pace with the flood of domains invoking the virus to promote malware and phishing sites, as well as non-existent healthcare products and charities...

Russians Shut Down Huge Card Fraud Ring

Federal investigators in Russia have charged at least 25 people accused of operating a sprawling international credit card theft ring. Cybersecurity experts say the raid included the charging of a major carding kingpin thought to be tied to dozens of carding shops and to some of the bigger data...

Secret Service Warns of Surge in ATM ‘Wiretapping’ Attacks

The U.S. Secret Service is warning financial institutions about a recent uptick in a form of ATM skimming that involves cutting cupcake-sized holes in a cash machine and then using a combination of magnets and medical devices to siphon customer account data directly from the card reader inside th...