REvil Ransom Arrest, $6M Seizure, and $10M Reward

The U.S. Department of Justice today announced the arrest of Ukrainian man accused of deploying ransomware on behalf of the REvil ransomware gang, a Russian-speaking cybercriminal collective that has extorted hundreds of millions from victim organizations. The DOJ also said it had seized $6.1...

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...

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...

How Cybercriminals are Weathering COVID-19

In many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a boon to cybercriminals: With unprecedented numbers of people working from home and anxious for news about the virus outbreak, it's hard to imagine a more target-rich environment for phishers, scammers and malware purveyors. In addition, many crooks a...

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...

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...

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...

Aisuru Botnet Shifts from DDoS to Residential Proxies

Aisuru , the botnet responsible for a series of record-smashing distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks this year, recently was overhauled to support a more low-key, lucrative and sustainable business: Renting hundreds of thousands of infected Internet of Things IoT devices to proxy services...

Bulletproof Host Stark Industries Evades EU Sanctions

In May 2025, the European Union levied financial sanctions on the owners ofStark Industries Solutions Ltd. , a bulletproof hosting provider that materialized two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine and quickly became a top source of Kremlin-linked cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns. But ne...

Proxy Services Feast on Ukraine’s IP Address Exodus

Image: Mark Rademaker, via Shutterstock. Ukraine has seen nearly one-fifth of its Internet space come under Russian control or sold to Internet address brokers since February 2022, a new study finds. The analysis indicates large chunks of Ukrainian Internet address space are now in the hands of...

Pakistan Arrests 21 in ‘Heartsender’ Malware Service

Authorities in Pakistan have arrested 21 individuals accused of operating "Heartsender ," a once popular spam and malware dissemination service that operated for more than a decade. The main clientele for HeartSender were organized crime groups that tried to trick victim companies into making...

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...

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...

Treasury Sanctions Creators of 911 S5 Proxy Botnet

The U.S. Department of the Treasury today unveiled sanctions against three Chinese nationals for allegedly operating 911 S5, an online anonymity service that for many years was the easiest and cheapest way to route ones Web traffic through malware-infected computers around the globe...

Crickets from Chirp Systems in Smart Lock Key Leak

The U.S. government is warning that "smart locks" securing entry to an estimated 50,000 dwellings nationwide contain hard-coded credentials that can be used to remotely open any of the locks. The locks maker Chirp Systems remains unresponsive, even though it was first notified about the critical...

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...

Ubiquiti Developer Charged With Extortion, Causing 2020 “Breach”

In January 2021, technology vendor Ubiquiti Inc. NYSE:UI disclosed that a breach at a third party cloud provider had exposed customer account credentials. In March, a Ubiquiti employee warned that the company had drastically understated the scope of the incident, and that the third-party cloud...

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...

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...

Bomb Threat, DDoS Purveyor Gets Eight Years

A 22-year-old North Carolina man has been sentenced to nearly eight years in prison for conducting bomb threats against thousands of schools in the U.S. and United Kingdom, running a service that launched distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks, and for possessing sexually explicit images of...

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...

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...

Patch Tuesday, June 2025 Edition

Microsoft today released security updates to fix at least 67 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and software. Redmond warns that one of the flaws is already under active attack, and that software blueprints showing how to exploit a pervasive Windows bug patched this month are now...

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...

The Not-So-Secret Network Access Broker x999xx

Most accomplished cybercriminals go out of their way to separate their real names from their hacker handles. But among certain old-school Russian hackers it is not uncommon to find major players who have done little to prevent people from figuring out who they are in real life. A case study in th...

How Did Authorities Identify the Alleged Lockbit Boss?

Last week, the United States joined the U.K. and Australia in sanctioning and charging a Russian man named Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev as the leader of the infamous LockBit ransomware group. LockBits leader "LockBitSupp" claims the feds named the wrong guy, saying the charges dont explain how they...

New Leak Shows Business Side of China’s APT Menace

A new data leak that appears to have come from one of Chinas top private cybersecurity firms provides a rare glimpse into the commercial side of Chinas many state-sponsored hacking groups. Experts say the leak illustrates how Chinese government agencies increasingly are contracting out foreign...

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...

U.K. Cyber Thug “PlugwalkJoe” Gets 5 Years in Prison

Joseph James "PlugwalkJoe" OConnor, a 24-year-old from the United Kingdom who earned his 15 minutes of fame by participating in the July 2020 hack of Twitter, has been sentenced to five years in a U.S. prison. That may seem like harsh punishment for a brief and very public cyber joy ride. But...

Russian Hacker “Wazawaka” Indicted for Ransomware

A Russian man identified by KrebsOnSecurity in January 2022 as a prolific and vocal member of several top ransomware groups was the subject of two indictments unsealed by the Justice Department today. U.S. prosecutors say Mikhail Pavolovich Matveev, a.k.a. "Wazawaka" and "Boriselcin" worked with...

PayPal Phishing Scam Uses Invoices Sent Via PayPal

Scammers are using invoices sent through PayPal.com to trick recipients into calling a number to dispute a pending charge. The missives -- which come from Paypal.com and include a link at Paypal.com that displays an invoice for the supposed transaction -- state that the users account is about to ...

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...

Happy 12th Birthday, KrebsOnSecurity.com!

KrebsOnSecurity.com celebrates its 12th anniversary today! Maybe "celebrate" is too indelicate a word for a year wracked by the global pandemics of COVID-19 and ransomware. Especially since stories about both have helped to grow the audience here tremendously in 2021. But this sites birthday also...

NY Man Pleads Guilty in $20 Million SIM Swap Theft

A 24-year-old New York man who bragged about helping to steal more than $20 million worth of cryptocurrency from a technology executive has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Nicholas Truglia was part of a group alleged to have stolen more than $100 million from cryptocurrency...

Security Blueprints of Many Companies Leaked in Hack of Swedish Firm Gunnebo

In March 2020, KrebsOnSecurity alerted Swedish security giant Gunnebo Group that hackers had broken into its network and sold the access to a criminal group which specializes in deploying ransomware. In August, Gunnebo said it had successfully thwarted a ransomware attack, but this week it emerge...

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...

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...

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...

‘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...

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...

Patch Tuesday, April 2025 Edition

Microsoft today released updates to plug at least 121 security holes in its Windows operating systems and software, including one vulnerability that is already being exploited in the wild. Eleven of those flaws earned Microsoft's most-dire "critical" rating, meaning malware or malcontents could...

Cyber Forensic Expert in 2,000+ Cases Faces FBI Probe

A Minnesota cybersecurity and computer forensics expert whose testimony has featured in thousands of courtroom trials over the past 30 years is facing questions about his credentials and an inquiry from the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI. Legal experts say the inquiry could be grounds to...

Crooks Steal Phone, SMS Records for Nearly All AT&T Customers

AT&T Corp. disclosed today that a new data breach has exposed phone call and text message records for roughly 110 million people -- nearly all of its customers. AT&T said it delayed disclosing the incident in response to "national security and public safety concerns," noting that some of the...

Recent ‘MFA Bombing’ Attacks Targeting Apple Users

Several Apple customers recently reported being targeted in elaborate phishing attacks that involve what appears to be a bug in Apples password reset feature. In this scenario, a targets Apple devices are forced to display dozens of system-level prompts that prevent the devices from being used...

Alleged Extortioner of Psychotherapy Patients Faces Trial

Prosecutors in Finland this week commenced their criminal trial against Julius Kivimäki, a 26-year-old Finnish man charged with extorting a once popular and now-bankrupt online psychotherapy practice and thousands of its patients. In a 2,200-page report, Finnish authorities laid out how they...