‘Scattered Spider’ Member ‘Tylerb’ Pleads Guilty

A 24-year-old British national and senior member of the cybercrime group "Scattered Spider " has pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy and aggravated identity theft. Tyler Robert Buchanan admitted his role in a series of text-message phishing attacks in the summer of 2022 that allowed the group...

Germany Doxes “UNKN,” Head of RU Ransomware Gangs REvil, GandCrab

An elusive hacker who went by the handle "UNKN " and ran the early Russian ransomware groups GandCrab and REvil now has a name and a face. Authorities in Germany say 31-year-old Russian Daniil Maksimovich Shchukin headed both cybercrime gangs and helped carry out at least 130 acts of computer...

‘CanisterWorm’ Springs Wiper Attack Targeting Iran

A financially motivated data theft and extortion group is attempting to inject itself into the Iran war, unleashing a worm that spreads through poorly secured cloud services and wipes data on infected systems that use Iran's time zone or have Farsi set as the default language. Experts say the wip...

Drones to Diplomas: How Russia’s Largest Private University is Linked to a $25M Essay Mill

A sprawling academic cheating network turbocharged by Google Ads that has generated nearly $25 million in revenue has curious ties to a Kremlin-connected oligarch whose Russian university builds drones for Russia's war against Ukraine. The Nerdify homepage. The link between essay mills and Russia...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, November 2025 Edition

Microsoft this week pushed security updates to fix more than 60 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software, including at least one zero-day bug that is already being exploited. Microsoft also fixed a glitch that prevented some Windows 10 users from taking advantage of...

Scammers Unleash Flood of Slick Online Gaming Sites

Fraudsters are flooding Discord and other social media platforms with ads for hundreds of polished online gaming and wagering websites that lure people with free credits and eventually abscond with any cryptocurrency funds deposited by players. Here's a closer look at the social engineering tacti...

U.S. Army Soldier Arrested in AT&T, Verizon Extortions

Federal authorities have arrested and indicted a 20-year-old U.S. Army soldier on suspicion of being Kiberphant0m , a cybercriminal who has been selling and leaking sensitive customer call records stolen earlier this year from AT &T and Verizon. As first reported by KrebsOnSecurity last month, th...

Sudanese Brothers Arrested in ‘AnonSudan’ Takedown

The U.S. government on Wednesday announced the arrest and charging of two Sudanese brothers accused of running Anonymous Sudan a.k.a. AnonSudan, a cybercrime business known for launching powerful distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks against a range of targets, including dozens of hospitals,...

Promising Jobs at the U.S. Postal Service, ‘US Job Services’ Leaks Customer Data

A sprawling online company based in Georgia that has made tens of millions of dollars purporting to sell access to jobs at the United States Postal Service USPS has exposed its internal IT operations and database of nearly 900,000 customers. The leaked records indicate the networks chief technolo...

Lawsuit Seeks Food Benefits Stolen By Skimmers

A nonprofit organization is suing the state of Massachusetts on behalf of thousands of low-income families who were collectively robbed of more than a $1 million in food assistance benefits by card skimming devices secretly installed at cash machines and grocery store checkout lanes across the...

Violence-as-a-Service: Brickings, Firebombings & Shootings for Hire

A 21-year-old New Jersey man has been arrested and charged with stalking in connection with a federal investigation into groups of cybercriminals who are settling scores by hiring people to carry out physical attacks on their rivals. Prosecutors say the defendant recently participated in several ...

“Downthem” DDoS-for-Hire Boss Gets 2 Years in Prison

A 33-year-old Illinois man was sentenced to two years in prison today following his conviction last year for operating services that allowed paying customers to launch powerful distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks against hundreds of thousands of Internet users and websites. The user...

Senators Urge FTC to Probe ID.me Over Selfie Data

Some of more tech-savvy Democrats in the U.S. Senate are asking the Federal Trade Commission FTC to investigate identity-proofing company ID.me for "deceptive statements" the company and its founder allegedly made over how they handle facial recognition data collected on behalf of the Internal...

Inside Ireland’s Public Healthcare Ransomware Scare

The consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers recently published lessons learned from the disruptive and costly ransomware attack in May 2021 on Irelands public health system. The unusually candid post-mortem found that nearly two months elapsed between the initial intrusion and the launching of the...

The ‘Groove’ Ransomware Gang Was a Hoax

A number of publications in September warned about the emergence of "Groove," a new ransomware group that called on competing extortion gangs to unite in attacking U.S. government interests online. It now appears that Groove was all a big hoax designed to toy with security firms and journalists...

Wipro Intruders Targeted Other Major IT Firms

The crooks responsible for launching phishing campaigns that netted dozens of employees and more than 100 computer systems last month at Wipro, India's third-largest IT outsourcing firm, also appear to have targeted a number of other competing providers, including Infosys and Cognizant, new...

When Your Employees Post Passwords Online

Storing passwords in plaintext online is never a good idea, but it's remarkable how many companies have employees who are doing just that using online collaboration tools like Trello.com. Last week, KrebsOnSecurity notified a host of companies that employees were using Trello to share passwords f...

Breach at Sonic Drive-In May Have Impacted Millions of Credit, Debit Cards

Sonic Drive-In, a fast-food chain with nearly 3,600 locations across 45 U.S. states, has acknowledged a breach affecting an unknown number of store payment systems. The ongoing breach may have led to a fire sale on millions of stolen credit and debit card accounts that are now being peddled in...

Critical Security Updates from Adobe, Microsoft

Adobe and Microsoft separately issued updates on Tuesday to fix a slew of security flaws in their products. Adobe patched dozens of holes in its Flash Player, Acrobat and Reader products. Microsoft pushed fixes to address dozens of vulnerabilities in Windows and related software. The biggest chan...

Canvas Breach Disrupts Schools & Colleges Nationwide

An ongoing data extortion attack targeting the widely-used education technology platform Canvas disrupted classes and coursework at school districts and universities across the United States today, after a cybercrime group defaced the service's login page with a ransom demand that threatened to...

‘Starkiller’ Phishing Service Proxies Real Login Pages, MFA

Most phishing websites are little more than static copies of login pages for popular online destinations, and they are often quickly taken down by anti-abuse activists and security firms. But a stealthy new phishing-as-a-service offering lets customers sidestep both of these pitfalls: It uses...

Oregon Man Charged in ‘Rapper Bot’ DDoS Service

A 22-year-old Oregon man has been arrested on suspicion of operating "Rapper Bot ," a massive botnet used to power a service for launching distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks against targets -- including a March 2025 DDoS that knocked Twitter/X offline. The Justice Department asserts the...

Poor Passwords Tattle on AI Hiring Bot Maker Paradox.ai

Security researchers recently revealed that the personal information of millions of people who applied for jobs at McDonald 's was exposed after they guessed the password "123456" for the fast food chain's account at Paradox.ai , a company that makes artificial intelligence based hiring chatbots...

Senator Chides FBI for Weak Advice on Mobile Security

Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI briefed Capitol Hill staff recently on hardening the security of their mobile devices, after a contacts list stolen from the personal phone of the White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was reportedly used to fuel a series of text messages and...

Arrests in Tap-to-Pay Scheme Powered by Phishing

Authorities in at least two U.S. states last week independently announced arrests of Chinese nationals accused of perpetrating a novel form of tap-to-pay fraud using mobile devices. Details released by authorities so far indicate the mobile wallets being used by the scammers were created through...

DOGE to Fired CISA Staff: Email Us Your Personal Data

A message posted on Monday to the homepage of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency CISA is the latest exhibit in the Trump administration's continued disregard for basic cybersecurity protections. The message instructed recently-fired CISA employees to get in touch so they can ...

U.S. Soldier Charged in AT&T Hack Searched “Can Hacking Be Treason”

A U.S. Army soldier who pleaded guilty last week to leaking phone records for high-ranking U.S. government officials searched online for non-extradition countries and for an answer to the question "can hacking be treason?" prosecutors in the case said Wednesday. The government disclosed the detai...

Chinese Innovations Spawn Wave of Toll Phishing Via SMS

Residents across the United States are being inundated with text messages purporting to come from toll road operators like E-ZPass , warning that recipients face fines if a delinquent toll fee remains unpaid. Researchers say the surge in SMS spam coincides with new features added to a popular...

FBI: Spike in Hacked Police Emails, Fake Subpoenas

The Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI is urging police departments and governments worldwide to beef up security around their email systems, citing a recent increase in cybercriminal services that use hacked police email accounts to send unauthorized subpoenas and customer data requests to...

Scam ‘Funeral Streaming’ Groups Thrive on Facebook

Scammers are flooding Facebook with groups that purport to offer video streaming of funeral services for the recently deceased. Friends and family who follow the links for the streaming services are then asked to cough up their credit card information. Recently, these scammers have branched out...

Local Networks Go Global When Domain Names Collide

The proliferation of new top-level domains TLDs has exacerbated a well-known security weakness: Many organizations set up their internal Microsoft authentication systems years ago using domain names in TLDs that didnt exist at the time. Meaning, they are continuously sending their Windows usernam...

Okta: Breach Affected All Customer Support Users

When KrebsOnSecurity broke the news on Oct. 20, 2023 that identity and authentication giant Okta had suffered a breach in its customer support department, Okta said the intrusion allowed hackers to steal sensitive data from fewer than one percent of its 18,000+ customers. But today, Okta revised...

Why Malware Crypting Services Deserve More Scrutiny

If you operate a cybercrime business that relies on disseminating malicious software, you probably also spend a good deal of time trying to disguise or "crypt" your malware so that it appears benign to antivirus and security products. In fact, the process of "crypting" malware is sufficiently...

Transacting in Person with Strangers from the Internet

Communities like Craigslist, OfferUp, Facebook Marketplace and others are great for finding low- or no-cost stuff that one can pick up directly from a nearby seller, and for getting rid of useful things that dont deserve to end up in a landfill. But when dealing with strangers from the Internet,...

Why Paper Receipts are Money at the Drive-Thru

Check out this handmade sign posted to the front door of a shuttered Jimmy Johns sandwich chain shop in Missouri last week. See if you can tell from the store owners message what happened. If you guessed that someone in the Jimmy Johns store might have fallen victim to a Business Email Compromise...

Report: Recent 10x Increase in Cyberattacks on Ukraine

As their cities suffered more intense bombardment by Russian military forces this week, Ukrainian Internet users came under renewed cyberattacks, with one Internet company providing service there saying they blocked ten times the normal number of phishing and malware attacks targeting Ukrainians...

Twitter Hacking for Profit and the LoLs

The New York Times last week ran an interview with several young men who claimed to have had direct contact with those involved in last weeks epic hack against Twitter. These individuals said they were only customers of the person who had access to Twitters internal employee tools, and were not...

Microsoft to Require Multi-Factor Authentication for Cloud Solution Providers

It might be difficult to fathom how this isn't already mandatory, but Microsoft Corp. says it will soon force all Cloud Solution Providers CSPs that help companies manage their Office365 accounts to use multi-factor authentication. The move comes amid a noticeable uptick in phishing and malware...

Buyers Beware of Tampered Gift Cards

Prepaid gift cards make popular presents and no-brainer stocking stuffers, but before you purchase one be on the lookout for signs that someone may have tampered with it. A perennial scam that picks up around the holidays involves thieves who pull back and then replace the decals that obscure the...

Former NSA Employee Pleads Guilty to Taking Classified Data

A former employee for the National Security Agency pleaded guilty on Friday to taking classified data to his home computer in Maryland. According to published reports, U.S. intelligence officials believe the data was then stolen from his computer by hackers working for the Russian government. Ngh...

Shoney’s Hit By Apparent Credit Card Breach

It's Friday, which means it's time for another episode of "Which Restaurant Chain Got Hacked?" Multiple sources in the financial industry say they've traced a pattern of fraud on customer cards indicating that the latest victim may be Shoney's, a 70-year-old restaurant chain that operates primari...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, March 2026 Edition

Microsoft Corp. today pushed security updates to fix at least 77 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. There are no pressing "zero-day" flaws this month compared to February's five zero-day treat, but as usual some patches may deserve more rapid attention from...

Who is the Kimwolf Botmaster “Dort”?

In early January 2026, KrebsOnSecurity revealed how a security researcher disclosed a vulnerability that was used to build Kimwolf , the world's largest and most disruptive botnet. Since then, the person in control of Kimwolf -- who goes by the handle "Dort " -- has coordinated a barrage of...

Kimwolf Botnet Swamps Anonymity Network I2P

For the past week, the massive "Internet of Things" IoT botnet known as Kimwolf has been disrupting The Invisible Internet Project I2P, a decentralized, encrypted communications network designed to anonymize and secure online communications. I2P users started reporting disruptions in the network...

Kimwolf Botnet Lurking in Corporate, Govt. Networks

A new Internet-of-Things IoT botnet called Kimwolf has spread to more than 2 million devices, forcing infected systems to participate in massive distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks and to relay other malicious and abusive Internet traffic. Kimwolf's ability to scan the local networks of...

SMS Phishers Pivot to Points, Taxes, Fake Retailers

China-based phishing groups blamed for non-stop scam SMS messages about a supposed wayward package or unpaid toll fee are promoting a new offering, just in time for the holiday shopping season: Phishing kits for mass-creating fake but convincing e-commerce websites that convert customer payment...

The Ongoing Fallout from a Breach at AI Chatbot Maker Salesloft

The recent mass-theft of authentication tokens from Salesloft , whose AI chatbot is used by a broad swath of corporate America to convert customer interaction into Salesforce leads, has left many companies racing to invalidate the stolen credentials before hackers can exploit them. Now Google war...

SIM-Swapper, Scattered Spider Hacker Gets 10 Years

A 20-year-old Florida man at the center of a prolific cybercrime group known as "Scattered Spider " was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison today, and ordered to pay roughly $13 million in restitution to victims. Noah Michael Urban of Palm Coast, Fla. pleaded guilty in April 2025 to charges o...

DOGE Denizen Marko Elez Leaked API Key for xAI

Marko Elez , a 25-year-old employee at Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency DOGE, has been granted access to sensitive databases at the U.S. Social Security Administration, the Treasury and Justice departments, and the Department of Homeland Security. So it should fill all Americans wi...

UK Arrests Four in ‘Scattered Spider’ Ransom Group

Authorities in the United Kingdom this week arrested four people aged 17 to 20 in connection with recent data theft and extortion attacks against the retailers Marks & Spencer and Harrods , and the British food retailer Co-op Group. The breaches have been linked to a prolific but loosely-affiliat...