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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...
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...
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...
This Service Helps Malware Authors Fix Flaws in their Code
Almost daily now there is news about flaws in commercial software that lead to computers getting hacked and seeded with malware. But the reality is most malicious software also has its share of security holes that open the door for security researchers or ne'er-do-wells to liberate or else seize...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
It’s Still Easy for Anyone to Become You at Experian
In the summer of 2022, KrebsOnSecurity documented the plight of several readers who had their accounts at big-three consumer credit reporting bureau Experian hijacked after identity thieves simply re-registered the accounts using a different email address. Sixteen months later, Experian clearly h...
Meet the Brains Behind the Malware-Friendly AI Chat Service ‘WormGPT’
WormGPT, a private new chatbot service advertised as a way to use Artificial Intelligence AI to write malicious software without all the pesky prohibitions on such activity enforced by the likes of ChatGPT and Google Bard, has started adding restrictions of its own on how the service can be used...
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...
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...
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...
International Action Targets Emotet Crimeware
Authorities across Europe on Tuesday said theyd seized control over Emotet, a prolific malware strain and cybercrime-as-service operation. Investigators say the action could help quarantine more than a million Microsoft Windows systems currently compromised with malware tied to Emotet infections...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Karma Catches Up to Global Phishing Service 16Shop
Youve probably never heard of "16Shop," but theres a good chance someone using it has tried to phish you. A 16Shop phishing page spoofing Apple and targeting Japanese users. Image: Akamai.com. The international police organization INTERPOL said last week it had shuttered the notorious 16Shop, a...
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...
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...
Ransomware Group Debuts Searchable Victim Data
Cybercrime groups that specialize in stealing corporate data and demanding a ransom not to publish it have tried countless approaches to shaming their victims into paying. The latest innovation in ratcheting up the heat comes from the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware group, which has traditionally...
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...
Russia Sanctions May Spark Escalating Cyber Conflict
President Biden joined European leaders this week in enacting economic sanctions against Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine. The West has promised tougher sanctions are coming, but experts warn these will almost certainly trigger a Russian retaliation against America and its allies,...
Tech CEO Pleads to Wire Fraud in IP Address Scheme
The CEO of a South Carolina technology firm has pleaded guilty to 20 counts of wire fraud in connection with an elaborate network of phony companies set up to obtain more than 735,000 Internet Protocol IP addresses from the nonprofit organization that leases the digital real estate to entities in...
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...
All Aboard the Pequod!
Like countless others, I frittered away the better part of Jan. 6 doomscrolling and watching television coverage of the horrifying events unfolding in our nations capital, where a mob of President Trump supporters and QAnon conspiracy theorists was incited to lay siege to the U.S. Capitol. For...
Patch Tuesday, Good Riddance 2020 Edition
Microsoft today issued its final batch of security updates for Windows PCs in 2020, ending the year with a relatively light patch load. Nine of the 58 security vulnerabilities addressed this month earned Microsofts most-dire "critical" label, meaning they can be abused by malware or miscreants to...
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...
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...
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...
LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps
The home appliance giant LG Electronics USA said this week it plans to suspend any apps built for its smart TVs that turn one's television into an always-on residential proxy node. The move comes less than a month after researchers found that more than 42 percent of games and other apps available...
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...
Breachforums Boss to Pay $700k in Healthcare Breach
In what experts are calling a novel legal outcome, the 22-year-old former administrator of the cybercrime community Breachforums will forfeit nearly $700,000 to settle a civil lawsuit from a health insurance company whose customer data was posted for sale on the forum in 2023. Conor Brian...
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...
How to Lose a Fortune with Just One Bad Click
Image: Shutterstock, iHaMoo. Adam Griffin is still in disbelief over how quickly he was robbed of nearly $500,000 in cryptocurrencies. A scammer called using a real Google phone number to warn his Gmail account was being hacked, sent email security alerts directly from google.com, and ultimately...
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...
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...
Many Public Salesforce Sites are Leaking Private Data
A shocking number of organizations -- including banks and healthcare providers -- are leaking private and sensitive information from their public Salesforce Community websites, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The data exposures all stem from a misconfiguration in Salesforce Community that allows an...
Happy 13th Birthday, KrebsOnSecurity!
KrebsOnSecurity turns 13 years old today. Thats a crazy long time for an independent media outlet these days, but then again Im bound to keep doing this as long as they keep letting me. Heck, Ive been doing this so long I briefly forgot which birthday this was! Thanks to your readership and...
The Joys of Owning an ‘OG’ Email Account
When you own a short email address at a popular email provider, you are bound to get gobs of spam, and more than a few alerts about random people trying to seize control over the account. If your account name is short and desirable enough, this kind of activity can make the account less reliable...
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...
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...