‘Tis the Season for the Wayward Package Phish

The holiday shopping season always means big business for phishers, who tend to find increased success this time of year with a lure about a wayward package that needs redelivery. Heres a look at a fairly elaborate SMS-based phishing scam that spoofs FedEx in a bid to extract personal and financi...

Missouri Governor Vows to Prosecute St. Louis Post-Dispatch for Reporting Security Vulnerability

On Wednesday, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a story about how its staff discovered and reported a security vulnerability in a Missouri state education website that exposed the Social Security numbers of 100,000 elementary and secondary teachers. In a press conference this morning, Missouri Gov...

A Basic Timeline of the Exchange Mass-Hack

Sometimes when a complex story takes us by surprise or knocks us back on our heels, it pays to revisit the events in a somewhat linear fashion. Heres a brief timeline of what we know leading up to last weeks mass-hack, when hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Exchange Server systems got compromise...

Why Paying to Delete Stolen Data is Bonkers

Companies hit by ransomware often face a dual threat: Even if they avoid paying the ransom and can restore things from scratch, about half the time the attackers also threaten to release sensitive stolen data unless the victim pays for a promise to have the data deleted. Leaving aside the notion...

Secret Service Investigates Breach at U.S. Govt IT Contractor

The U.S. Secret Service is investigating a breach at a Virginia-based government technology contractor that saw access to several of its systems put up for sale in the cybercrime underground, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The contractor claims the access being auctioned off was to old test systems...

Why Is Your Location Data No Longer Private?

The past month has seen one blockbuster revelation after another about how our mobile phone and broadband providers have been leaking highly sensitive customer information, including real-time location data and customer account details. In the wake of these consumer privacy debacles, many are lef...

Hack of Attack-for-Hire Service vDOS Snares New Mexico Man

A New Mexico man is facing federal hacking charges for allegedly using the now defunct attack-for-hire service vDOS to launch damaging digital assaults aimed at knocking his former employer's Web site offline. Prosecutors were able to bring the case in part because vDOS got massively hacked last...

FBI Seizes NetNut Proxy Platform, Popa Botnet

The Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI said today it worked with industry partners to seize hundreds of domains associated with NetNut , a sprawling residential proxy service operated by the publicly-traded Israeli company Alarum TechnologiesNASDAQ: ALAR. The action comes roughly two weeks after...

‘Popa’ Botnet Linked to Publicly-Traded Israeli Firm

For the past four years, a sprawling Android-based botnet called Popa has forced millions of consumer TV boxes to relay Internet traffic linked to advertising fraud, account takeovers, and mass data-scraping efforts. This week, researchers from multiple security firms concluded that the Popa botn...

Anti-DDoS Firm Heaped Attacks on Brazilian ISPs

A Brazilian tech firm that specializes in protecting networks from distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks has been enabling a botnet responsible for an extended campaign of massive DDoS attacks against other network operators in Brazil, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The firm's chief executive...

How Phished Data Turns into Apple & Google Wallets

Carding -- the underground business of stealing, selling and swiping stolen payment card data -- has long been the dominion of Russia-based hackers. Happily, the broad deployment of more secure chip-based payment cards in the United States has weakened the carding market. But a flurry of innovati...

How Cryptocurrency Turns to Cash in Russian Banks

A financial firm registered in Canada has emerged as the payment processor for dozens of Russian cryptocurrency exchanges and websites hawking cybercrime services aimed at Russian-speaking customers, new research finds. Meanwhile, an investigation into the Vancouver street address used by this...

Why Your Wi-Fi Router Doubles as an Apple AirTag

Image: Shutterstock. Apple and the satellite-based broadband service Starlink each recently took steps to address new research into the potential security and privacy implications of how their services geo-locate devices. Researchers from the University of Maryland say they relied on publicly...

BlackCat Ransomware Raises Ante After FBI Disruption

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI disclosed today that it infiltrated the worlds second most prolific ransomware gang, a Russia-based criminal group known as ALPHV and BlackCat. The FBI said it seized the gangs darknet website, and released a decryption tool that hundreds of victim...

Who’s Behind the SWAT USA Reshipping Service?

Last week, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that one of the largest cybercrime services for laundering stolen merchandise was hacked recently, exposing its internal operations, finances and organizational structure. In todays Part II, well examine clues about the real-life identity of "Fearlless,"...

A Closer Look at the Snatch Data Ransom Group

Earlier this week, KrebsOnSecurity revealed that the darknet website for the Snatch ransomware group was leaking data about its users and the crime gangs internal operations. Today, well take a closer look at the history of Snatch, its alleged founder, and their claims that everyone has confused...

LastPass: ‘Horse Gone Barn Bolted’ is Strong Password

The password manager service LastPass is now forcing some of its users to pick longer master passwords. LastPass says the changes are needed to ensure all customers are protected by their latest security improvements. But critics say the move is little more than a public relations stunt that will...

Teach a Man to Phish and He’s Set for Life

One frustrating aspect of email phishing is the frequency with which scammers fall back on tried-and-true methods that really have no business working these days. Like attaching a phishing email to a traditional, clean email message, or leveraging link redirects on LinkedIn, or abusing an encodin...

Service Rents Email Addresses for Account Signups

One of the most expensive aspects of any cybercriminal operation is the time and effort it takes to constantly create large numbers of new throwaway email accounts. Now a new service offers to help dramatically cut costs associated with large-scale spam and account creation campaigns, by paying...

Who’s Behind the NetWire Remote Access Trojan?

A Croatian national has been arrested for allegedly operating NetWire, a Remote Access Trojan RAT marketed on cybercrime forums since 2012 as a stealthy way to spy on infected systems and siphon passwords. The arrest coincided with a seizure of the NetWire sales website by the U.S. Federal Bureau...

Report: Big U.S. Banks Are Stiffing Account Takeover Victims

When U.S. consumers have their online bank accounts hijacked and plundered by hackers, U.S. financial institutions are legally obligated to reverse any unauthorized transactions as long as the victim reports the fraud in a timely manner. But new data released this week suggests that for some of t...

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...

KrebsOnSecurity in New Netflix Series on Cybercrime

Netflix has a new documentary series airing next week -- "Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies & the Internet" -- in which Yours Truly apparently has a decent amount of screen time. The debut episode explores the far-too-common harassment tactic of "swatting" -- wherein fake bomb threats or hostage...

Actions Target Russian Govt. Botnet, Hydra Dark Market

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI says it has disrupted a giant botnet built and operated by a Russian government intelligence unit known for launching destructive cyberattacks against energy infrastructure in the United States and Ukraine. Separately, law enforcement agencies in the...

The Original APT: Advanced Persistent Teenagers

Many organizations are already struggling to combat cybersecurity threats from ransomware purveyors and state-sponsored hacking groups, both of which tend to take days or weeks to pivot from an opportunistic malware infection to a full blown data breach. But few organizations have a playbook for...

Internet Backbone Giant Lumen Shuns .RU

Lumen Technologies, an American company that operates one of the largest Internet backbones and carries a significant percentage of the worlds Internet traffic, said today it will stop routing traffic for organizations based in Russia. Lumens decision comes just days after a similar exit by...

Conti Ransomware Group Diaries, Part II: The Office

Earlier this week, a Ukrainian security researcher leaked almost two years worth of internal chat logs from Conti, one of the more rapacious and ruthless ransomware gangs in operation today. Tuesdays story examined how Conti dealt with its own internal breaches and attacks from private security...

IRS To Ditch Biometric Requirement for Online Access

The Internal Revenue Service IRS said today it will be transitioning away from requiring biometric data from taxpayers who wish to access their records at the agencys website. The reversal comes as privacy experts and lawmakers have been pushing the IRS and other federal agencies to find less...

Norton 360 Now Comes With a Cryptominer

Norton 360, one of the most popular antivirus products on the market today, has installed a cryptocurrency mining program on its customers computers. Nortons parent firm says the cloud-based service that activates the program and allows customers to profit from the scheme -- in which the company...

15-Year-Old Malware Proxy Network VIP72 Goes Dark

Over the past 15 years, a cybercrime anonymity service known as VIP72 has enabled countless fraudsters to mask their true location online by routing their traffic through millions of malware-infected systems. But roughly two weeks ago, VIP72s online storefront -- which ironically enough has...

Ransomware Victims That Pay Up Could Incur Steep Fines from Uncle Sam

Companies victimized by ransomware and firms that facilitate negotiations with ransomware extortionists could face steep fines from the U.S. federal government if the crooks who profit from the attack are already under economic sanctions, the Treasury Department warned today. Image: Shutterstock ...

Confessions of an ID Theft Kingpin, Part II

Yesterdays piece told the tale of Hieu Minh Ngo, a hacker the U.S. Secret Service described as someone who caused more material financial harm to more Americans than any other convicted cybercriminal. Ngo was recently deported back to his home country after serving more than seven years in prison...

Who’s Tracking You? Use This New Service to Find Out

It can be daunting to determine who's responsible for showing ads on the websites we visit, or who's harvesting data from the mobile apps we use every day. That information is already semi-public, but it is not easily parsed and traditionally much of it has remained walled away in the hands of...

Scattered Spider Hackers Plead Guilty on Day 1 of Trial

Two men pleaded guilty in the United Kingdom this week to criminal charges stemming from an August 2024 cyberattack that crippled Transport for London , the entity responsible for the public transport network in the Greater London area. The duo were key members of a prolific cybercrime group know...

Hackers Used Meta’s AI Support Bot to Seize Instagram Accounts

The Instagram accounts for the Obama White House and the Chief Master Sergeant of the U.S. Space Force were briefly defaced with pro-Iranian images and messages over the weekend, after instructions began circulating on Telegram showing how to trick Meta's "AI support assistant" bot into resetting...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, July 2025 Edition

Microsoft today released updates to fix at least 137 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software. None of the weaknesses addressed this month are known to be actively exploited, but 14 of the flaws earned Microsoft's most-dire "critical" rating, meaning they...

Feds Link $150M Cyberheist to 2022 LastPass Hacks

In September 2023, KrebsOnSecurity published findings from security researchers who concluded that a series of six-figure cyberheists across dozens of victims resulted from thieves cracking master passwords stolen from the password manager service LastPass in 2022. In a court filing this week, U....

Feds Charge Five Men in ‘Scattered Spider’ Roundup

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles this week unsealed criminal charges against five men alleged to be members of a hacking group responsible for dozens of cyber intrusions at major U.S. technology companies between 2021 and 2023, including LastPass , MailChimp , Okta , T-Mobile and Twilio. A visu...

The Stark Truth Behind the Resurgence of Russia’s Fin7

The Russia-based cybercrime group dubbed "Fin7," known for phishing and malware attacks that have cost victim organizations an estimated $3 billion in losses since 2013, was declared dead last year by U.S. authorities. But experts say Fin7 has roared back to life in 2024 -- setting up thousands o...

Is Your Computer Part of ‘The Largest Botnet Ever?’

The U.S. Department of Justice DOJ today said they arrested the alleged operator of 911 S5, a ten-year-old online anonymity service that was powered by what the director of the FBI called "likely the worlds largest botnet ever." The arrest coincided with the seizure of the 911 S5 website and...

U.S. Charges Russian Man as Boss of LockBit Ransomware Group

The United States joined the United Kingdom and Australia today in sanctioning 31-year-old Russian national Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev as the alleged leader of the infamous ransomware group LockBit. The U.S. Department of Justice also indicted Khoroshev and charged him with using Lockbit to attac...

ID Theft Service Resold Access to USInfoSearch Data

One of the cybercrime undergrounds more active sellers of Social Security numbers, background and credit reports has been pulling data from hacked accounts at the U.S. consumer data broker USinfoSearch, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Since at least February 2023, a service advertised on Telegram...

Phishing Domains Tanked After Meta Sued Freenom

The number of phishing websites tied to domain name registrar Freenom dropped precipitously in the months surrounding a recent lawsuit from social networking giant Meta, which alleged the free domain name provider has a long history of ignoring abuse complaints about phishing websites while...

Why is ‘Juice Jacking’ Suddenly Back in the News?

KrebsOnSecurity received a nice bump in traffic this week thanks to tweets from the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI and the Federal Communications Commission FCC about "juice jacking," a term first coined here in 2011 to describe a potential threat of data theft when one plugs their mobile...

Fighting Fake EDRs With ‘Credit Ratings’ for Police

When KrebsOnSecurity recently explored how cybercriminals were using hacked email accounts at police departments worldwide to obtain warrantless Emergency Data Requests EDRs from social media firms and technology providers, many security experts called it a fundamentally unfixable problem. But do...

How Phishers Are Slinking Their Links Into LinkedIn

If you received a link to LinkedIn.com via email, SMS or instant message, would you click it? Spammers, phishers and other neer-do-wells are hoping you will, because theyve long taken advantage of a marketing feature on the business networking site which lets them create a LinkedIn.com link that...

Conti Ransom Gang Starts Selling Access to Victims

The Conti ransomware affiliate program appears to have altered its business plan recently. Organizations infected with Contis malware who refuse to negotiate a ransom payment are added to Contis victim shaming blog, where confidential files stolen from victims may be published or sold. But someti...

Gas Pump Skimmer Sends Card Data Via Text

Skimming devices that crooks install inside fuel station gas pumps frequently rely on an embedded Bluetooth component allowing thieves to collect stolen credit card data from the pumps wirelessly with any mobile device. The downside of this approach is that Bluetooth-based skimmers can be detecte...

Blind Trust in Email Could Cost You Your Home

The process of buying or selling a home can be extremely stressful and complex, but imagine the stress that would boil up if -- at settlement -- your money was wired to scammers in another country instead of to the settlement firm or escrow company. Here's the story about a phishing email that co...

DOGE Worker’s Code Supports NLRB Whistleblower

A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board NLRB alleged last week that denizens of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency DOGE siphoned gigabytes of data from the agency's sensitive case files in early March. The whistleblower said accounts created for DOGE at the NLRB...