U.S., U.K. Sanction 7 Men Tied to Trickbot Hacking Group

Authorities in the United States and United Kingdom today levied financial sanctions against seven men accused of operating "Trickbot," a cybercrime-as-a-service platform based in Russia that has enabled countless ransomware attacks and bank account takeovers since its debut in 2016. The U.S...

Finland’s Most-Wanted Hacker Nabbed in France

Julius "Zeekill" Kivimäki, a 25-year-old Finnish man charged with extorting a local online psychotherapy practice and leaking therapy notes for more than 22,000 patients online, was arrested this week in France. A notorious hacker convicted of perpetrating tens of thousands of cybercrimes, Kivimä...

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...

Customer Care Giant TTEC Hit By Ransomware

TTEC, NASDAQ: TTEC, a company used by some of the worlds largest brands to help manage customer support and sales online and over the phone, is dealing with disruptions from a network security incident resulting from a ransomware attack, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. While many companies have been...

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...

‘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...

Phishing for Apples, Bobbing for Links

Anyone searching for a primer on how to spot clever phishing links need look no further than those targeting customers of Apple, whose brand by many measures remains among the most-targeted. Past stories here have examined how scammers working with organized gangs try to phish iCloud credentials...

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...

Whistleblower: DOGE Siphoned NLRB Case Data

A security architect with the National Labor Relations Board NLRB alleges that employees from Elon Musk 's Department of Government Efficiency DOGE transferred gigabytes of sensitive data from agency case files in early March, using short-lived accounts configured to leave few traces of network...

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...

Russian FSB Counterintelligence Chief Gets 9 Years in Cybercrime Bribery Scheme

The head of counterintelligence for a division of the Russian Federal Security Service FSB was sentenced last week to nine years in a penal colony for accepting a USD $1.7 million bribe to ignore the activities of a prolific Russian cybercrime group that hacked thousands of e-commerce websites. T...

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...

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...

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...

Identity Thieves Bypassed Experian Security to View Credit Reports

Identity thieves have been exploiting a glaring security weakness in the website of Experian, one of the big three consumer credit reporting bureaus. Normally, Experian requires that those seeking a copy of their credit report successfully answer several multiple choice questions about their...

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...

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...

Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in Plain Text for Years

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by thousands of Facebook employees -- in some cases going back to 2012, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Facebook says an ongoing investigation has so far found no indication that employees have...

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...

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...

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...

Oops: DanaBot Malware Devs Infected Their Own PCs

The U.S. government today unsealed criminal charges against 16 individuals accused of operating and selling DanaBot , a prolific strain of information-stealing malware that has been sold on Russian cybercrime forums since 2018. The FBI says a newer version of DanaBot was used for espionage, and...

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...

Six Charged in Mass Takedown of DDoS-for-Hire Sites

The U.S. Department of Justice DOJ today seized four-dozen domains that sold "booter" or "stresser" services -- businesses that make it easy and cheap for even non-technical users to launch powerful Distributed Denial of Service DDoS attacks designed knock targets offline. The DOJ also charged si...

Massive Losses Define Epidemic of ‘Pig Butchering’

U.S. state and federal investigators are being inundated with reports from people whove lost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in connection with a complex investment scam known as "pig butchering," wherein people are lured by flirtatious strangers online into investing in cryptocurren...

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...

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...

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...

COVID-19 ‘Breach Bubble’ Waiting to Pop?

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it harder for banks to trace the source of payment card data stolen from smaller, hacked online merchants. On the plus side, months of quarantine have massively decreased demand for account information that thieves buy and use to create physical counterfeit credit...

Canadian Police Charge Operator of Hacked Password Service Leakedsource.com

Canadian authorities have arrested and charged a 27-year-old Ontario man for allegedly selling billions of stolen passwords online through the now-defunct service Leakedsource.com. The now-defunct Leakedsource service. On Dec. 22, 2017, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police RCMP charged Jordan Evan...

Equifax Hackers Stole Info on 693,665 UK Residents

Equifax Inc. said today an investigation into information stolen in the epic data breach the company disclosed on Sept. 7 revealed that intruders took a file containing 15.2 million UK records. The company says it is now working to inform 693,665 U.K. consumers whose data was stolen in the attack...

Inside a Porn-Pimping Spam Botnet

For several months I've been poking at a decent-sized spam botnet that appears to be used mainly for promoting adult dating sites. Having hit a wall in my research, I decided it might be good to publish what I've unearthed so far to see if this dovetails with any other research out there. In late...

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...

Who Stole 3.6M Tax Records from South Carolina?

For nearly a dozen years, residents of South Carolina have been kept in the dark by state and federal investigators over who was responsible for hacking into the states revenue department in 2012 and stealing tax and bank account information for 3.6 million people. The answer may no longer be a...

‘The Manipulaters’ Improve Phishing, Still Fail at Opsec

Roughly nine years ago, KrebsOnSecurity profiled a Pakistan-based cybercrime group called "The Manipulaters," a sprawling web hosting network of phishing and spam delivery platforms. In January 2024, The Manipulaters pleaded with this author to unpublish previous stories about their work, claimin...

Mozilla Drops Onerep After CEO Admits to Running People-Search Networks

The nonprofit organization that supports the Firefox web browser said today it is winding down its new partnership with Onerep, an identity protection service recently bundled with Firefox that offers to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites. The move comes just days after a report by...

FBI Hacker Dropped Stolen Airbus Data on 9/11

In December 2022, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that a cybercriminal using the handle "USDoD" had infiltrated the FBIs vetted information sharing network InfraGard, and was selling the contact information for all 80,000 members. The FBI responded by reverifying InfraGard members and by seizing t...

Tourists Give Themselves Away by Looking Up. So Do Most Network Intruders.

In large metropolitan areas, tourists are often easy to spot because theyre far more inclined than locals to gaze upward at the surrounding skyscrapers. Security experts say this same tourist dynamic is a dead giveaway in virtually all computer intrusions that lead to devastating attacks like dat...

SEO Expert Hired and Fired By Ashley Madison Turned on Company, Promising Revenge

This is Part II of a story published here last week on reporting that went into a new Hulu documentary series on the 2015 Ashley Madison hack. It was around 9 p.m. on Sunday, July 19, when I received a message through the contact form on KrebsOnSecurity.com that the marital infidelity website...

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...

Anti-Money Laundering Service AMLBot Cleans House

AMLBot, a service that helps businesses avoid transacting with cryptocurrency wallets that have been sanctioned for cybercrime activity, said an investigation published by KrebsOnSecurity last year helped it shut down three dark web services that secretly resold its technology to help cybercrooks...

Breach Exposes Users of Microleaves Proxy Service

Microleaves, a ten-year-old proxy service that lets customers route their web traffic through millions of Microsoft Windows computers, recently fixed a vulnerability in their website that exposed their entire user database. Microleaves claims its proxy software is installed with user consent, but...

Experian, You Have Some Explaining to Do

Twice in the past month KrebsOnSecurity has heard from readers who had their accounts at big-three credit bureau Experian hacked and updated with a new email address that wasnt theirs. In both cases the readers used password managers to select strong, unique passwords for their Experian accounts...

The Link Between AWM Proxy & the Glupteba Botnet

On December 7, 2021, Google announced it was suing two Russian men allegedly responsible for operating the Glupteba botnet, a global malware menace that has infected millions of computers over the past decade. That same day, AWM Proxy -- a 14-year-old anonymity service that rents hacked PCs to...

RaidForums Gets Raided, Alleged Admin Arrested

The U.S. Department of Justice DOJ said today it seized the website and user database for RaidForums, an extremely popular English-language cybercrime forum that sold access to more than 10 billion consumer records stolen in some of the worlds largest data breaches since 2015. The DOJ also charge...

Double-Your-Crypto Scams Share Crypto Scam Host

Online scams that try to separate the unwary from their cryptocurrency are a dime a dozen, but a great many seemingly disparate crypto scam websites tend to rely on the same dodgy infrastructure providers to remain online in the face of massive fraud and abuse complaints from their erstwhile...