Fintech Startup Offers $500 for Payroll Passwords

How much is your payroll data worth? Probably a lot more than you think. One financial startup thats targeting the gig worker market is offering up to $500 to anyone willing to hand over the payroll account username and password given to them by their employer, plus a regular payment for each mon...

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...

Promising Infusions of Cash, Fake Investor John Bernard Walked Away With $30M

September featured two stories on a phony tech investor named John Bernard, a pseudonym used by a convicted thief named John Clifton Davies whos fleeced dozens of technology companies out of an estimated $30 million with the promise of lucrative investments. Those stories prompted a flood of tips...

When Security Takes a Backseat to Productivity

"We must care as much about securing our systems as we care about running them if we are to make the necessary revolutionary change." -CIA's Wikileaks Task Force. So ends a key section of a report the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency produced in the wake of a mammoth data breach in 2016 that led ...

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...

Sprint Exposed Customer Support Site to Web

Fresh on the heels of a disclosure that Microsoft Corp. leaked internal customer support data to the Internet, mobile provider Sprint has addressed a mix-up in which posts to a private customer support community were exposed to the Web. KrebsOnSecurity recently contacted Sprint to let the company...

Lawmakers Prod FCC to Act on SIM Swapping

Crooks have stolen tens of millions of dollars and other valuable commodities from thousands of consumers via "SIM swapping," a particularly invasive form of fraud that involves tricking a target's mobile carrier into transferring someone's wireless service to a device they control. But the U.S...

Detecting Cloned Cards at the ATM, Register

Much of the fraud involving counterfeit credit, ATM debit and retail gift cards relies on the ability of thieves to use cheap, widely available hardware to encode stolen data onto any card's magnetic stripe. But new research suggests retailers and ATM operators could reliably detect counterfeit...

Anti-Skimmer Detector for Skimmer Scammers

Crooks who make and deploy ATM skimmers are constantly engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with financial institutions, which deploy a variety of technological measures designed to defeat skimming devices. The latest innovation aimed at tipping the scales in favor of skimmer thieves is a small, batte...

Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks

Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested the co-owners of two related Internet hosting companies for operating IT infrastructure used by Russia to carry out cyberattacks, influence operations and disinformation campaigns inside the European Union. The two men were the focus of a 2025...

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...

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...

Phishers Spoof USPS, 12 Other Natl’ Postal Services

The fake USPS phishing page. Recent weeks have seen a sizable uptick in the number of phishing scams targeting U.S. Postal Service USPS customers. Heres a look at an extensive SMS phishing operation that tries to steal personal and financial data by spoofing the USPS, as well as postal services i...

Ask Fitis, the Bear: Real Crooks Sign Their Malware

Code-signing certificates are supposed to help authenticate the identity of software publishers, and provide cryptographic assurance that a signed piece of software has not been altered or tampered with. Both of these qualities make stolen or ill-gotten code-signing certificates attractive to...

KrebsOnSecurity in Upcoming Hulu Series on Ashley Madison Breach

KrebsOnSecurity will likely have a decent amount of screen time in an upcoming Hulu documentary series about the 2015 megabreach at marital infidelity site Ashley Madison. While I cant predict what the producers will do with the video interviews we shot, its fair to say the series will explore...

U.S. Govt. Apps Bundled Russian Code With Ties to Mobile Malware Developer

A recent scoop by Reuters revealed that mobile apps for the U.S. Army and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC were integrating software that sends visitor data to a Russian company called Pushwoosh, which claims to be based in the United States. But that story omitted an important...

LinkedIn Adds Verified Emails, Profile Creation Dates

Responding to a recent surge in AI-generated bot accounts, LinkedIn is rolling out new features that it hopes will help users make more informed decisions about with whom they choose to connect. Many LinkedIn profiles now display a creation date, and the company is expanding its domain validation...

A Closer Look at the LAPSUS$ Data Extortion Group

Microsoft and identity management platform Okta both this week disclosed breaches involving LAPSUS$, a relatively new cybercrime group that specializes in stealing data from big companies and threatening to publish it unless a ransom demand is paid. Heres a closer look at LAPSUS$, and some of the...

Crime Shop Sells Hacked Logins to Other Crime Shops

Up for the "Most Meta Cybercrime Offering" award this year is Accountz Club, a new cybercrime store that sells access to purloined accounts at services built for cybercriminals, including shops peddling stolen payment cards and identities, spamming tools, email and phone bombing services, and tho...

SMS About Bank Fraud as a Pretext for Voice Phishing

Most of us have probably heard the term "smishing" -- which is a portmanteau for traditional phishing scams sent through SMS text messages. Smishing messages usually include a link to a site that spoofs a popular bank and tries to siphon personal information. But increasingly, phishers are turnin...

Microsoft Uses Trademark Law to Disrupt Trickbot Botnet

Microsoft Corp. has executed a coordinated legal sneak attack in a bid to disrupt the malware-as-a-service botnet Trickbot, a global menace that has infected millions of computers and is used to spread ransomware. A court in Virginia granted Microsoft control over many Internet servers Trickbot...

Robocall Legal Advocate Leaks Customer Data

A California company that helps telemarketing firms avoid getting sued for violating a federal law that seeks to curb robocalls has leaked the phone numbers, email addresses and passwords of all its customers, as well as the mobile phone numbers and other data on people who have hired lawyers to ...

Alleged Co-Founder of Garantex Arrested in India

Authorities in India today arrested the alleged co-founder of Garantex , a cryptocurrency exchange sanctioned by the U.S. government in 2022 for facilitating tens of billions of dollars in money laundering by transnational criminal and cybercriminal organizations. Sources close to the investigati...

The Dark Nexus Between Harm Groups and ‘The Com’

A cyberattack that shut down two of the top casinos in Las Vegas last year quickly became one of the most riveting security stories of 2023. It was the first known case of native English-speaking hackers in the United States and Britain teaming up with ransomware gangs based in Russia. But that...

Phish-Friendly Domain Registry “.top” Put on Notice

The Chinese company in charge of handing out domain names ending in ".top" has been given until mid-August 2024 to show that it has put in place systems for managing phishing reports and suspending abusive domains, or else forfeit its license to sell domains. The warning comes amid the release of...

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...

Fulton County, Security Experts Call LockBit’s Bluff

The ransomware group LockBit told officials with Fulton County, Ga. they could expect to see their internal documents published online this morning unless the county paid a ransom demand. LockBit removed Fulton Countys listing from its victim shaming website this morning, claiming the county had...

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...

Why is .US Being Used to Phish So Many of Us?

Domain names ending in ".US" -- the top-level domain for the United States -- are among the most prevalent in phishing scams, new research shows. This is noteworthy because .US is overseen by the U.S. government, which is frequently the target of phishing domains ending in .US. Also, .US domains...

A Serial Tech Investment Scammer Takes Up Coding?

John Clifton Davies, a 60-year-old con man from the United Kingdom who fled the country in 2015 before being sentenced to 12 years in prison for fraud, has enjoyed a successful life abroad swindling technology startups by pretending to be a billionaire investor. Davies newest invention appears to...

Feds Charge NY Man as BreachForums Boss “Pompompurin”

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI this week arrested a New York man on suspicion of running BreachForums, a popular English-language cybercrime forum where some of the world biggest hacked databases routinely show up for sale. The forums administrator "Pompompurin" has been a thorn in...

Fake CISO Profiles on LinkedIn Target Fortune 500s

Someone has recently created a large number of fake LinkedIn profiles for Chief Information Security Officer CISO roles at some of the worlds largest corporations. Its not clear whos behind this network of fake CISOs or what their intentions may be. But the fabricated LinkedIn identities are...

Say Hello to Crazy Thin ‘Deep Insert’ ATM Skimmers

A number of financial institutions in and around New York City are dealing with a rash of super-thin "deep insert" skimming devices designed to fit inside the mouth of an ATMs card acceptance slot. The card skimmers are paired with tiny pinhole cameras that are cleverly disguised as part of the...

Class Action Targets Experian Over Account Security

A class action lawsuit has been filed against big-three consumer credit bureau Experian over reports that the company did little to prevent identity thieves from hijacking consumer accounts. The legal filing cites liberally from an investigation KrebsOnSecurity published in July, which found that...

Adconion Execs Plead Guilty in Federal Anti-Spam Case

At the outset of their federal criminal trial for hijacking vast swaths of Internet addresses for use in large-scale email spam campaigns, three current or former executives at online advertising firm Adconion Direct now Amobee have pleaded guilty to lesser misdemeanor charges of fraud and...

Costa Rica May Be Pawn in Conti Ransomware Group’s Bid to Rebrand, Evade Sanctions

Costa Ricas national health service was hacked sometime earlier this morning by a Russian ransomware group known as Hive. The intrusion comes just weeks after Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves declared a state of emergency in response to a data ransom attack from a different Russian ransomware...

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...

Zales.com Leaked Customer Data, Just Like Sister Firms Jared, Kay Jewelers Did in 2018

In December 2018, bling vendor Signet Jewelers fixed a weakness in their Kay Jewelers and Jared websites that exposed the order information for all of their online customers. This week, Signet subsidiary Zales.com updated its website to remediate a nearly identical customer data exposure. Last...

NY Charges First American Financial for Massive Data Leak

In May 2019, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that the website of mortgage title insurance giant First American Financial Corp. had exposed approximately 885 million records related to mortgage deals going back to 2003. On Wednesday, regulators in New York announced that First American was the targ...

Russian Cybercrime Boss Burkov Gets 9 Years

A well-connected Russian hacker once described as “an asset of supreme importance” to Moscow was sentenced on Friday to nine years in a U.S. prison after pleading guilty to running a site that sold stolen payment card data, and to administering a highly secretive crime forum that counted among it...

Fiserv Flaw Exposed Customer Data at Hundreds of Banks

Fiserv, Inc., a major provider of technology services to financial institutions, just fixed a glaring weakness in its Web platform that exposed personal and financial details of countless customers across hundreds of bank Web sites, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Brookfield, Wisc.-based Fiserv...

Sextortion Scam Uses Recipient’s Hacked Passwords

Here's a clever new twist on an old email scam that could serve to make the con far more believable. The message purports to have been sent from a hacker who's compromised your computer and used your webcam to record a video of you while you were watching porn. The missive threatens to release th...

Bitcoin Blackmail by Snail Mail Preys on Those with Guilty Conscience

KrebsOnSecurity heard from a reader whose friend recently received a remarkably customized extortion letter via snail mail that threatened to tell the recipient's wife about his supposed extramarital affairs unless he paid $3,600 in bitcoin. The friend said he had nothing to hide and suspects thi...

The Cloudflare Outage May Be a Security Roadmap

An intermittent outage at Cloudflare on Tuesday briefly knocked many of the Internet's top destinations offline. Some affected Cloudflare customers were able to pivot away from the platform temporarily so that visitors could still access their websites. But security experts say doing so may have...

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...

Canada Fines Cybercrime Friendly Cryptomus $176M

Financial regulators in Canada this week levied $176 million in fines against Cryptomus , a digital payments platform that supports dozens of Russian cryptocurrency exchanges and websites hawking cybercrime services. The penalties for violating Canada's anti money-laundering laws come ten months...

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...

Hacker in Snowflake Extortions May Be a U.S. Soldier

Two men have been arrested for allegedly stealing data from and extorting dozens of companies that used the cloud data storage company Snowflake , but a third suspect -- a prolific hacker known as Kiberphant0m -- remains at large and continues to publicly extort victims. However, this person's...

Juniper Support Portal Exposed Customer Device Info

Until earlier this week, the support website for networking equipment vendor Juniper Networks was exposing potentially sensitive information tied to customer products, including which devices customers bought, as well as each products warranty status, service contracts and serial numbers. Juniper...

Fla. Man Charged in SIM-Swapping Spree is Key Suspect in Hacker Groups Oktapus, Scattered Spider

On Jan. 9, 2024, U.S. authorities arrested a 19-year-old Florida man charged with wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and conspiring with others to use SIM-swapping to steal cryptocurrency. Sources close to the investigation tell KrebsOnSecurity the accused was a key member of a criminal hacki...