Fake News at Work in Spam Kingpin’s Arrest?

Over the past several days, many Western news media outlets have predictably devoured thinly-sourced reporting from a Russian publication that the arrest last week of a Russian spam kingpin in Spain was related to hacking attacks linked to last year’s U.S. election. While there is scant evidence...

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...

‘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...

‘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...

Iran-Backed Hackers Claim Wiper Attack on Medtech Firm Stryker

A hacktivist group with links to Iran's intelligence agencies is claiming responsibility for a data-wiping attack against Stryker , a global medical technology company based in Michigan. News reports out of Ireland, Stryker's largest hub outside of the United States, said the company sent home mo...

‘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...

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...

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...

Nearly a Year Later, Mozilla is Still Promoting OneRep

In mid-March 2024, KrebsOnSecurity revealed that the founder of the personal data removal service Onerep also founded dozens of people-search companies. Shortly after that investigation was published, Mozilla said it would stop bundling Onerep with the Firefox browser and wind down its partnershi...

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,...

FCC Fines Major U.S. Wireless Carriers for Selling Customer Location Data

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission FCC today levied fines totaling nearly $200 million against the four major carriers -- including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon -- for illegally sharing access to customers location information without consent. The fines mark the culmination of a mor...

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...

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...

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...

Fake Emergency Search Warrants Draw Scrutiny from Capitol Hill

On Tuesday, KrebsOnSecurity warned that hackers increasingly are using compromised government and police department email accounts to obtain sensitive customer data from mobile providers, ISPs and social media companies. Today, one of the U.S. Senates most tech-savvy lawmakers said he was trouble...

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...

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...

Microsoft Plugs Nearly 400 Security Holes

Microsoft today released updates to remedy at least 398 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software, including one weakness that is already being actively exploited and two others that were publicly detailed prior to today. Image: Shutterstock, Mallika Home...

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...

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...

DDoS Botnet Aisuru Blankets US ISPs in Record DDoS

The world's largest and most disruptive botnet is now drawing a majority of its firepower from compromised Internet-of-Things IoT devices hosted on U.S. Internet providers like AT &T, Comcast and Verizon , new evidence suggests. Experts say the heavy concentration of infected devices at U.S...

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...

ClickFix: How to Infect Your PC in Three Easy Steps

A clever malware deployment scheme first spotted in targeted attacks last year has now gone mainstream. In this scam, dubbed "ClickFix ," the visitor to a hacked or malicious website is asked to distinguish themselves from bots by pressing a combination of keyboard keys that causes Microsoft...

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...

MasterCard DNS Error Went Unnoticed for Years

The payment card giant MasterCard just fixed a glaring error in its domain name server settings that could have allowed anyone to intercept or divert Internet traffic for the company by registering an unused domain name. The misconfiguration persisted for nearly five years until a security...

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...

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...

Why Phishers Love New TLDs Like .shop, .top and .xyz

Phishing attacks increased nearly 40 percent in the year ending August 2024, with much of that growth concentrated at a small number of new generic top-level domains gTLDs -- such as .shop , .top , .xyz -- that attract scammers with rock-bottom prices and no meaningful registration requirements,...

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...

Sextortion Scams Now Include Photos of Your Home

An old but persistent email scam known as "sextortion " has a new personalized touch: The missives, which claim that malware has captured webcam footage of recipients pleasuring themselves, now include a photo of the target's home in a bid to make threats about publishing the videos more...

ICANN Launches Service to Help With WHOIS Lookups

More than five years after domain name registrars started redacting personal data from all public domain registration records, the non-profit organization overseeing the domain industry has introduced a centralized online service designed to make it easier for researchers, law enforcement and...

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,...

You Can Now Ask Google to Remove Your Phone Number, Email or Address from Search Results

Google said this week it is expanding the types of data people can ask to have removed from search results, to include personal contact information like your phone number, email address or physical address. The move comes just months after Google rolled out a new policy enabling people under the...

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...

Former Botmaster, ‘Darkode’ Founder is CTO of Hacked Bitcoin Mining Firm ‘NiceHash’

On Dec. 6, 2017, approximately USD $52 million worth of Bitcoin mysteriously disappeared from the coffers of NiceHash, a Slovenian company that lets users sell their computing power to help others mine virtual currencies. As the investigation into the heist nears the end of its second week, many...

Critical Security Fixes from Adobe, Microsoft

Adobe has released updates to fix dozens of vulnerabilities in its Acrobat, Reader and Flash Player software. Separately, Microsoft today issued patches to plug 48 security holes in Windows and other Microsoft products. If you use Windows or Adobe products, it's time once again to get your patche...

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...

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...

Who Operates the Badbox 2.0 Botnet?

The cybercriminals in control of Kimwolf -- a disruptive botnet that has infected more than 2 million devices -- recently shared a screenshot indicating they'd compromised the control panel for Badbox 2.0 , a vast China-based botnet powered by malicious software that comes pre-installed on many...

Feds Tie ‘Scattered Spider’ Duo to $115M in Ransoms

U.S. prosecutors last week levied criminal hacking charges against 19-year-old U.K. national Thalha Jubair for allegedly being a core member of Scattered Spider , a prolific cybercrime group blamed for extorting at least $115 million in ransom payments from victims. The charges came as Jubair and...

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...

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...