US Government Sites Give Bad Security Advice

Many U.S. government Web sites now carry a message prominently at the top of their home pages meant to help visitors better distinguish between official U.S. government properties and phishing pages. Unfortunately, part of that message is misleading and may help perpetuate a popular...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Estonian Tied to 13 Ransomware Attacks Gets 66 Months in Prison

An Estonian man was sentenced today to more than five years in a U.S. prison for his role in at least 13 ransomware attacks that caused losses of approximately $53 million. Prosecutors say the accused also enjoyed a lengthy career of "cashing out" access to hacked bank accounts worldwide. Maksim...

Apple AirTag Bug Enables ‘Good Samaritan’ Attack

The new $30 AirTag tracking device from Apple has a feature that allows anyone who finds one of these tiny location beacons to scan it with a mobile phone and discover its owners phone number if the AirTag has been set to lost mode. But according to new research, this same feature can be abused t...

How Cyber Safe is Your Drinking Water Supply?

Amid multiple recent reports of hackers breaking into and tampering with drinking water treatment systems comes a new industry survey with some sobering findings: A majority of the 52,000 separate drinking water systems in the United States still havent inventoried some or any of their informatio...

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...

Due Diligence That Money Can’t Buy

Most of us automatically put our guard up when someone we dont know promises something too good to be true. But when the too-good-to-be-true thing starts as our idea, sometimes that instinct fails to kick in. Heres the story of how companies searching for investors to believe in their ideas can r...

Sendgrid Under Siege from Hacked Accounts

Email service provider Sendgrid is grappling with an unusually large number of customer accounts whose passwords have been cracked, sold to spammers, and abused for sending phishing and email malware attacks. Sendgrids parent company Twilio says it is working on a plan to require multi-factor...

Why & Where You Should Plant Your Flag

Several stories here have highlighted the importance of creating accounts online tied to your various identity, financial and communications services before identity thieves do it for you. This post examines some of the key places where everyone should plant their virtual flags. As KrebsOnSecurit...

‘BlueLeaks’ Exposes Files from Hundreds of Police Departments

Hundreds of thousands of potentially sensitive files from police departments across the United States were leaked online last week. The collection, dubbed "BlueLeaks" and made searchable online, stems from a security breach at a Texas web design and hosting company that maintains a number of stat...

Privnotes.com Is Phishing Bitcoin from Users of Private Messaging Service Privnote.com

For the past year, a site called Privnotes.com has been impersonating Privnote.com, a legitimate, free service that offers private, encrypted messages which self-destruct automatically after they are read. Until recently, I couldn't quite work out what Privnotes was up to, but today it became...

How to Fight Mobile Number Port-out Scams

T-Mobile, AT&T and other mobile carriers are reminding customers to take advantage of free services that can block identity thieves from easily "porting" your mobile number out to another provider, which allows crooks to intercept your calls and messages while your phone goes dark. Tips for...

KrebsOnSecurity Hit With Near-Record 6.3 Tbps DDoS

KrebsOnSecurity last week was hit by a near record distributed denial-of-service DDoS attack that clocked in at more than 6.3 terabits of data per second a terabit is one trillion bits of data. The brief attack appears to have been a test run for a massive new Internet of Things IoT botnet capabl...

The Not-so-True People-Search Network from China

Its not unusual for the data brokers behind people-search websites to use pseudonyms in their day-to-day lives you would, too. Some of these personal data purveyors even try to reinvent their online identities in a bid to hide their conflicts of interest. But its not every day you run across a...

BlackCat Ransomware Group Implodes After Apparent $22M Payment by Change Healthcare

There are indications that U.S. healthcare giant Change Healthcare has made a $22 million extortion payment to the infamous BlackCat ransomware group a.k.a. "ALPHV" as the company struggles to bring services back online amid a cyberattack that has disrupted prescription drug services nationwide f...

A Retrospective on the 2015 Ashley Madison Breach

Its been seven years since the online cheating site AshleyMadison.com was hacked and highly sensitive data about its users posted online. The leak led to the public shaming and extortion of many Ashley Madison users, and to at least two suicides. To date, little is publicly known about the...

The Internet is Held Together With Spit & Baling Wire

A visualization of the Internet made using network routing data. Image: Barrett Lyon, opte.org. Imagine being able to disconnect or redirect Internet traffic destined for some of the worlds biggest companies -- just by spoofing an email. This is the nature of a threat vector recently removed by a...

FBI Raids Chinese Point-of-Sale Giant PAX Technology

U.S. federal investigators today raided the Florida offices of PAX Technology, a Chinese provider of point-of-sale devices used by millions of businesses and retailers globally. KrebsOnSecurity has learned the raid is tied to reports that PAXs systems may have been involved in cyberattacks on U.S...

Is Your Chip Card Secure? Much Depends on Where You Bank

Chip-based credit and debit cards are designed to make it infeasible for skimming devices or malware to clone your card when you pay for something by dipping the chip instead of swiping the stripe. But a recent series of malware attacks on U.S.-based merchants suggest thieves are exploiting...

Breaches at NetworkSolutions, Register.com, and Web.com

Top domain name registrars NetworkSolutions.com, Register.com and Web.com are asking customers to reset their passwords after discovering an intrusion in August 2019 in which customer account information was accessed. A notice to customers at notice.web.com. "On October 16, 2019, Web.com determin...

Further Down the Trello Rabbit Hole

Last month's story about organizations exposing passwords and other sensitive data via collaborative online spaces at Trello.com only scratched the surface of the problem. A deeper dive suggests a large number of government agencies, marketing firms, healthcare organizations and IT support...

Think You’ve Got Your Credit Freezes Covered? Think Again.

I spent a few days last week speaking at and attending a conference on responding to identity theft. The forum was held in Florida, one of the major epicenters for identity fraud complaints in United States. One gripe I heard from several presenters was that identity thieves increasingly are...

Should SaaS Companies Publish Customers Lists?

A few weeks back, HR and financial management firm Workday.com sent a security advisory to customers warning that crooks were sending targeted malware phishing attacks at customers. At the same time, Workday is publishing on its site a list of more than 800 companies that use its services, making...

New 0-Day Attacks Linked to China’s ‘Volt Typhoon’

Malicious hackers are exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Versa Director, a software product used by many Internet and IT service providers. Researchers believe the activity is linked to Volt Typhoon, a Chinese cyber espionage group focused on infiltrating critical U.S. networks and laying the...

Don’t Let Zombie Zoom Links Drag You Down

Many organizations -- including quite a few Fortune 500 firms -- have exposed web links that allow anyone to initiate a Zoom video conference meeting as a valid employee. These company-specific Zoom links, which include a permanent user ID number and an embedded passcode, can work indefinitely an...

Kroll Employee SIM-Swapped for Crypto Investor Data

Security consulting giant Kroll disclosed today that a SIM-swapping attack against one of its employees led to the theft of user information for multiple cryptocurrency platforms that are relying on Kroll services in their ongoing bankruptcy proceedings. And there are indications that fraudsters...

Diligere, Equity-Invest Are New Firms of U.K. Con Man

John Clifton Davies, a convicted fraudster estimated to have bilked dozens of technology startups out of more than $30 million through phony investment schemes, has a brand new pair of scam companies that are busy dashing startup dreams: A fake investment firm called Equity-Invest.ch, and...

How Malicious Android Apps Slip Into Disguise

Researchers say mobile malware purveyors have been abusing a bug in the Google Android platform that lets them sneak malicious code into mobile apps and evade security scanning tools. Google says it has updated its app malware detection mechanisms in response to the new research. At issue is a...

Leaked Chats Show LAPSUS$ Stole T-Mobile Source Code

KrebsOnSecurity recently reviewed a copy of the private chat messages between members of the LAPSUS$ cybercrime group in the week leading up to the arrest of its most active members last month. The logs show LAPSUS$ breached T-Mobile multiple times in March, stealing source code for a range of...

Wanted: Disgruntled Employees to Deploy Ransomware

Criminal hackers will try almost anything to get inside a profitable enterprise and secure a million-dollar payday from a ransomware infection. Apparently now that includes emailing employees directly and asking them to unleash the malware inside their employers network in exchange for a percenta...

OneLogin: Breach Exposed Ability to Decrypt Data

OneLogin, an online service that lets users manage logins to sites and apps from a single platform, says it has suffered a security breach in which customer data was compromised, including the ability to decrypt encrypted data. Headquartered in San Francisco, OneLogin provides single sign-on and...

Private Eye Allegedly Used Leaky Goverment Tool in Bid to Find Tax Data on Trump

In March 2017, KrebsOnSecurity warned that thieves who perpetrate tax refund fraud with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service were leveraging a widely-used online student loan tool to find critical data on consumers that allows them to claim huge refunds with the IRS in someone else's name. This week...

Funding Expires for Key Cyber Vulnerability Database

A critical resource that cybersecurity professionals worldwide rely on to identify, mitigate and fix security vulnerabilities in software and hardware is in danger of breaking down. The federally funded, non-profit research and development organization MITRE warned today that its contract to...

Microsoft: 6 Zero-Days in March 2025 Patch Tuesday

Microsoft today issued more than 50 security updates for its various Windows operating systems, including fixes for a whopping six zero-day vulnerabilities that are already seeing active exploitation. Two of the zero-day flaws include CVE-2025-24991 and CVE-2025-24993, both vulnerabilities in NTF...

Why CISA is Warning CISOs About a Breach at Sisense

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA said today it is investigating a breach at business intelligence company Sisense, whose products are designed to allow companies to view the status of multiple third-party online services in a single dashboard. CISA urged all Sisense...

Fake Lawsuit Threat Exposes Privnote Phishing Sites

A cybercrook who has been setting up websites that mimic the self-destructing message service privnote.com accidentally exposed the breadth of their operations recently when they threatened to sue a software company. The disclosure revealed a profitable network of phishing sites that behave and...

Canadian Man Stuck in Triangle of E-Commerce Fraud

A Canadian man who says hes been falsely charged with orchestrating a complex e-commerce scam is seeking to clear his name. His case appears to involve "triangulation fraud," which occurs when a consumer purchases something online -- from a seller on Amazon or eBay, for example -- but the seller...

NJ Man Hired Online to Firebomb, Shoot at Homes Gets 13 Years in Prison

A 22-year-old New Jersey man has been sentenced to more than 13 years in prison for participating in a firebombing and a shooting at homes in Pennsylvania last year. Patrick McGovern-Allen was the subject of a Sept. 4, 2022 story here about the emergence of "violence-as-a-service" offerings, wher...

Who and What is Behind the Malware Proxy Service SocksEscort?

Researchers this month uncovered a two-year-old Linux-based remote access trojan dubbed AVrecon that enslaves Internet routers into botnet that bilks online advertisers and performs password-spraying attacks. Now new findings reveal that AVrecon is the malware engine behind a 12-year-old service...

Experian Glitch Exposing Credit Files Lasted 47 Days

On Dec. 23, 2022, KrebsOnSecurity alerted big-three consumer credit reporting bureau Experian that identity thieves had worked out how to bypass its security and access any consumers full credit report -- armed with nothing more than a persons name, address, date of birth, and Social Security...

Conti Ransomware Group Diaries, Part III: Weaponry

Part I of this series examined newly-leaked internal chats from the Conti ransomware group, and how the crime gang dealt with its own internal breaches. Part II explored what its like to be an employee of Contis sprawling organization. Todays Part III looks at how Conti abused popular commercial...

How Coinbase Phishers Steal One-Time Passwords

A recent phishing campaign targeting Coinbase users shows thieves are getting smarter about phishing one-time passwords OTPs needed to complete the login process. It also shows that phishers are attempting to sign up for new Coinbase accounts by the millions as part of an effort to identify email...

Malicious Domain in SolarWinds Hack Turned into ‘Killswitch’

A key malicious domain name used to control potentially thousands of computer systems compromised via the months-long breach at network monitoring software vendor SolarWinds was commandeered by security experts and used as a "killswitch" designed to turn the sprawling cybercrime operation against...

The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

Some of the worlds largest Internet firms have taken steps to crack down on disinformation spread by QAnon conspiracy theorists and the hate-filled anonymous message board 8chan. But according to a California-based security researcher, those seeking to de-platform these communities may have...