Takeaways from the $566M BriansClub breach

Reporting on the exposure of some 26 million stolen credit cards leaked from a top underground cybercrime store highlighted some persistent and hard truths. Most notably, that the world's largest financial institutions tend to have a much better idea of which merchants and bank cards have been...

Patch Tuesday, August 2019 Edition

Most Microsoft Windows abusers probably welcome the monthly ritual of applying security updates about as much as they look forward to going to the dentist: It always seems like you were there just yesterday, and you never quite know how it's all going to turn out. Fortunately, this month's patch...

Tracing the Supply Chain Attack on Android

Earlier this month, Google disclosed that a supply chain attack by one of its vendors resulted in malicious software being pre-installed on millions of new budget Android devices. Google didn't exactly name those responsible, but said it believes the offending vendor uses the nicknames "Yehuo" or...

Naming & Shaming Web Polluters: Xiongmai

What do we do with a company that regularly pumps metric tons of virtual toxic sludge onto the Internet and yet refuses to clean up their act? If ever there were a technology giant that deserved to be named and shamed for polluting the Web, it is Xiongmai -- a Chinese maker of electronic parts th...

Dangerous Domain Corp.com Goes Up for Sale

As an early domain name investor, Mike O'Connor had by 1994 snatched up several choice online destinations, including bar.com, cafes.com, grill.com, place.com, pub.com and television.com. Some he sold over the years, but for the past 26 years O'Connor refused to auction perhaps the most sensitive...

Patch Tuesday, January 2019 Edition

Microsoft on Tuesday released updates to fix roughly four dozen security issues with its Windows operating systems and related software. All things considered, this first Patch Tuesday of 2019 is fairly mild, bereft as it is of any new Adobe Flash updates or zero-day exploits. But there are a few...

How the U.S. Govt. Shutdown Harms Security

The ongoing partial U.S. federal government shutdown is having a tangible, negative impact on cybercrime investigations, according to interviews with federal law enforcement investigators and a report issued this week by a group representing the interests of FBI agents. Even if lawmakers move...

Wazawaka Goes Waka Waka

In January, KrebsOnSecurity examined clues left behind by "Wazawaka," the hacker handle chosen by a major ransomware criminal in the Russian-speaking cybercrime scene. Wazawaka has since "lost his mind" according to his erstwhile colleagues, creating a Twitter account to drop exploit code for a...

Ransomware Hit ATM Giant Diebold Nixdorf

Diebold Nixdorf, a major provider of automatic teller machines ATMs and payment technology to banks and retailers, recently suffered a ransomware attack that disrupted some operations. The company says the hackers never touched its ATMs or customer networks, and that the intrusion only affected i...

Security Trade-Offs in the New EU Privacy Law

On two occasions this past year I've published stories here warning about the prospect that new European privacy regulations could result in more spams and scams ending up in your inbox. This post explains in a question and answer format some of the reasoning that went into that prediction, and...

Breach at Equifax May Impact 143M Americans

Equifax, one of the "big-three" U.S. credit bureaus, said today a data breach at the company may have affected 143 million Americans, jeopardizing consumer Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and some driver's license numbers. In a press release today, Equifax NYSE:EFX said it...

Microsoft (& Apple) Patch Tuesday, April 2023 Edition

Microsoft today released software updates to plug 100 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, including a zero-day vulnerability that is already being used in active attacks. Not to be outdone, Apple has released a set of important updates addressing two zero-day...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, April 2022 Edition

Microsoft on Tuesday released updates to fix roughly 120 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. Two of the flaws have been publicly detailed prior to this week, and one is already seeing active exploitation, according to a report from the U.S. National...

‘Wormable’ Flaw Leads January 2022 Patch Tuesday

Microsoft today released updates to plug nearly 120 security holes in Windows and supported software. Six of the vulnerabilities were publicly detailed already, potentially giving attackers a head start in figuring out how to exploit them in unpatched systems. More concerning, Microsoft warns tha...

Patch Tuesday Lowdown, April 2019 Edition

Microsoft today released fifteen software updates to fix more than 70 unique security vulnerabilities in various flavors of its Windows operating systems and supported software, including at least two zero-day bugs. These patches apply to Windows, Internet Explorer IE and Edge browsers, Office,...

SMS Phishing + Cardless ATM = Profit

Thieves are combining SMS-based phishing attacks with new "cardless" ATMs to rapidly convert phished bank account credentials into cash. Recent arrests in Ohio shed light on how this scam works. A number of financial institutions are now offering cardless ATM transactions that allow customers to...

A Deep Dive on the Recent Widespread DNS Hijacking Attacks

The U.S. government -- along with a number of leading security companies -- recently warned about a series of highly complex and widespread attacks that allowed suspected Iranian hackers to siphon huge volumes of email passwords and other sensitive data from multiple governments and private...

NCR Barred Mint, QuickBooks from Banking Platform During Account Takeover Storm

Banking industry giant NCR Corp. NYSE: NCR late last month took the unusual step of temporarily blocking third-party financial data aggregators Mint and QuickBooks Online from accessing Digital Insight, an online banking platform used by hundreds of financial institutions. That ban, which came in...

Patch Tuesday, September 2019 Edition

Microsoft today issued security updates to plug some 80 security holes in various flavors of its Windows operating systems and related software. The software giant assigned a "critical" rating to almost a quarter of those vulnerabilities, meaning they could be used by malware or miscreants to...

More Alleged SIM Swappers Face Justice

Prosecutors in Northern California have charged two men with using unauthorized SIM swaps to steal and extort money from victims. One of the individuals charged allegedly used a hacker nickname belonging to a key figure in the underground who's built a solid reputation hijacking mobile phone...

QuickBooks Cloud Hosting Firm iNSYNQ Hit in Ransomware Attack

Cloud hosting provider iNSYNQ says it is trying to recover from a ransomware attack that shut down its network and has left customers unable to access their accounting data for the past three days. Unfortunately for iNSYNQ, the company appears to be turning a deaf ear to the increasingly anxious...

Collections Firm Behind LabCorp, Quest Breaches Files for Bankruptcy

A medical billing firm responsible for a recent eight-month data breach that exposed the personal information on nearly 20 million Americans has filed for bankruptcy, citing "enormous expenses" from notifying affected consumers and the loss of its four largest customers. The filing, first reporte...

Carbon Emissions: Oversharing Bug Puts Security Vendor Back in Spotlight

Last week, security firm DirectDefense came under fire for over-hyping claims that Cb Response, a cybersecurity product sold by competitor Carbon Black, was leaking proprietary data from customers who use it. Carbon Black responded that the bug identified by its competitor was a feature, and that...

Happy 9th Birthday, KrebsOnSecurity!

Hard to believe we've gone another revolution around the Sun: Today marks the 9th anniversary of KrebsOnSecurity.com! This past year featured some 150 blog posts, but as usual the biggest contribution to this site came from the amazing community of readers here who have generously contributed the...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, February 2020 Edition

Microsoft today released updates to plug nearly 100 security holes in various versions of its Windows operating system and related software, including a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer IE that is actively being exploited. Also, Adobe has issued a bevy of security updates for its vario...

Crooks Continue to Exploit GoDaddy Hole

Godaddy.com, the world's largest domain name registrar, recently addressed an authentication weakness that cybercriminals were using to blast out spam through legitimate, dormant domains. But several more recent malware spam campaigns suggest GoDaddy's fix hasn't gone far enough, and that scammer...

A Chief Security Concern for Executive Teams

Virtually all companies like to say they take their customers' privacy and security seriously, make it a top priority, blah blah. But you'd be forgiven if you couldn't tell this by studying the executive leadership page of each company's Web site. That's because very few of the world's biggest...

T-Mobile Employee Made Unauthorized ‘SIM Swap’ to Steal Instagram Account

T-Mobile is investigating a retail store employee who allegedly made unauthorized changes to a subscriber's account in an elaborate scheme to steal the customer's three-letter Instagram username. The modifications, which could have let the rogue employee empty bank accounts associated with the...

‘Wormable’ Flaw Leads July Microsoft Patches

Microsoft today released updates to plug a whopping 123 security holes in Windows and related software, including fixes for a critical, "wormable" flaw in Windows Server versions that Microsoft says is likely to be exploited soon. While this particular weakness mainly affects enterprises, July's...

Report: No ‘Eternal Blue’ Exploit Found in Baltimore City Ransomware

For almost the past month, key computer systems serving the government of Baltimore, Md. have been held hostage by a ransomware strain known as "Robbinhood." Media publications have cited sources saying the Robbinhood version that hit Baltimore city computers was powered by "Eternal Blue," a...

How Internet Savvy are Your Leaders?

Back in April 2015, I tweeted about receiving a letter via snail mail suggesting the search engine rankings for a domain registered in my name would suffer if I didn't pay a bill for some kind of dubious-looking service I'd never heard of. But it wasn't until the past week that it become clear ho...

Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

On Jan. 11, Ubiquiti Inc. NYSE:UI -- a major vendor of cloud-enabled Internet of Things IoT devices such as routers, network video recorders and security cameras -- disclosed that a breach involving a third-party cloud provider had exposed customer account credentials. Now a source who participat...

Man Behind Fatal ‘Swatting’ Gets 20 Years

Tyler Barriss, a 26-year-old California man who admitted making a phony emergency call to police in late 2017 that led to the shooting death of an innocent Kansas resident, has been sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. Tyler Barriss, in an undated selfie. Barriss has admitted to his role in t...

Is it Time to Can the CAN-SPAM Act?

Regulators at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission FTC are asking for public comment on the effectiveness of the CAN-SPAM Act, a 14-year-old federal law that seeks to crack down on unsolicited commercial email. Judging from an unscientific survey by this author, the FTC is bound to get an earful...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, July 2022 Edition

Microsoft today released updates to fix at least 86 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software, including a weakness in all supported versions of Windows that Microsoft warns is actively being exploited. The software giant also has made a controversial decision t...

Former Russian Cybersecurity Chief Sentenced to 22 Years in Prison

A Russian court has handed down lengthy prison terms for two men convicted on treason charges for allegedly sharing information about Russian cybercriminals with U.S. law enforcement officials. The men -- a former Russian cyber intelligence official and an executive at Russian security firm...

‘LuminosityLink RAT’ Author Pleads Guilty

A 21-year-old Kentucky man has pleaded guilty to authoring and distributing a popular hacking tool called "LuminosityLink," a malware strain that security experts say was used by thousands of customers to gain unauthorized access to tens of thousands of computers across 78 countries worldwide. Th...

No SOCKS, No Shoes, No Malware Proxy Services!

With the recent demise of several popular "proxy" services that let cybercriminals route their malicious traffic through hacked PCs, there is now something of a supply chain crisis gripping the underbelly of the Internet. Compounding the problem, several remaining malware-based proxy services hav...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, May 2021 Edition

Microsoft today released fixes to plug at least 55 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software. Four of these weaknesses can be exploited by malware and malcontents to seize complete, remote control over vulnerable systems without any help from users. On deck this month are...

Three Charged in July 15 Twitter Compromise

Three individuals have been charged for their alleged roles in the July 15 hack on Twitter, an incident that resulted in Twitter profiles for some of the worlds most recognizable celebrities, executives and public figures sending out tweets advertising a bitcoin scam. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezoss Twitt...

Insert Skimmer + Camera Cover PIN Stealer

Very often the most clever component of your typical ATM skimming attack is the hidden pinhole camera used to record customers entering their PINs. These little video bandits can be hidden 100 different ways, but they're frequently disguised as ATM security features -- such as an extra PIN pad...

Hacked Password Service Leakbase Goes Dark

Leakbase, a Web site that indexed and sold access to billions of usernames and passwords stolen in some of the world largest data breaches, has closed up shop. A source close to the matter says the service was taken down in a law enforcement sting that may be tied to the Dutch police raid of the...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, April 2021 Edition

Microsoft today released updates to plug at least 110 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other products. The patches include four security fixes for Microsoft Exchange Server -- the same systems that have been besieged by attacks on four separate and zero-day bugs in the email...

MyPayrollHR CEO Arrested, Admits to $70M Fraud

Earlier this month, employees at more than 1,000 companies saw one or two paycheck's worth of funds deducted from their bank accounts after the CEO of their cloud payroll provider absconded with $35 million in payroll and tax deposits from customers. On Monday, the CEO was arrested and allegedly...

Neo-Nazi SWATters Target Dozens of Journalists

Nearly three dozen journalists at a broad range of major publications have been targeted by a far-right group that maintains a Deep Web database listing the personal information of people who threaten their views. This group specializes in encouraging others to harass those targeted by their ire,...

Equifax Has Chosen Experian. Wait, What?

A year after offering free credit monitoring to all Americans on account of its massive data breach that exposed the personal information of nearly 148 million people, Equifax now says it has chosen to extend the offer by turning to a credit monitoring service offered by a top competitor --...

Calendar Meeting Links Used to Spread Mac Malware

Malicious hackers are targeting people in the cryptocurrency space in attacks that start with a link added to the targets calendar at Calendly, a popular application for scheduling appointments and meetings. The attackers impersonate established cryptocurrency investors and ask to schedule a vide...

‘Satori’ IoT Botnet Operator Pleads Guilty

A 21-year-old man from Vancouver, Wash. has pleaded guilty to federal hacking charges tied to his role in operating the "Satori" botnet, a crime machine powered by hacked Internet of Things IoT devices that was built to conduct massive denial-of-service attacks targeting Internet service provider...

iNSYNQ Ransom Attack Began With Phishing Email

A ransomware outbreak that hit QuickBooks cloud hosting firm iNSYNQ in mid-July appears to have started with an email phishing attack that snared an employee working in sales for the company, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. It also looks like the intruders spent roughly ten days rooting around...

LabCorp: 7.7 Million Consumers Hit in Collections Firm Breach

Medical testing giant LabCorp. said today personal and financial data on some 7.7 million consumers were exposed by a breach at a third-party billing collections firm. That third party -- the American Medical Collection Agency AMCA -- also recently notified competing firm Quest Diagnostics that a...