Avast, NordVPN Breaches Tied to Phantom User Accounts

Antivirus and security giant Avast and virtual private networking VPN software provider NordVPN each today disclosed months-long network intrusions that -- while otherwise unrelated -- shared a common cause: Forgotten or unknown user accounts that granted remote access to internal systems with...

Feds Charge Three in Mass Seizure of Attack-for-hire Services

Authorities in the United States this week brought criminal hacking charges against three men as part of an unprecedented, international takedown targeting 15 different "booter" or "stresser" sites -- attack-for-hire services that helped paying customers launch tens of thousands of digital sieges...

Dell Lost Control of Key Customer Support Domain for a Month in 2017

A Web site set up by PC maker Dell Inc. to help customers recover from malicious software and other computer maladies may have been hijacked for a few weeks this summer by people who specialize in deploying said malware, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. There is a program installed on virtually all...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, March 2023 Edition

Microsoft on Tuesday released updates to quash at least 74 security bugs in its Windows operating systems and software. Two of those flaws are already being actively attacked, including an especially severe weakness in Microsoft Outlook that can be exploited without any user interaction. The...

New KrebsOnSecurity Mobile-Friendly Site

Dear Readers, this has been long overdue, but at last I give you a more responsive, mobile-friendly version of KrebsOnSecurity. We tried to keep the visual changes to a minimum and focus on a simple theme that presents information in a straightforward, easy-to-read format. Please bear with us ove...

Ukraine Nabs Suspect in 773M Password ‘Megabreach’

In January 2019, dozens of media outlets raised the alarm about a new "megabreach" involving the release of some 773 million stolen usernames and passwords that was breathlessly labeled "the largest collection of stolen data in history." A subsequent review by KrebsOnSecurity quickly determined t...

Cryptic Rumblings Ahead of First 2020 Patch Tuesday

Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that Microsoft Corp. is slated to release a software update on Tuesday to fix an extraordinarily serious security vulnerability in a core cryptographic component present in all versions of Windows. Those sources say Microsoft has quietly shipped a patch for the bug to...

Should Failing Phish Tests Be a Fireable Offense?

Would your average Internet user be any more vigilant against phishing scams if he or she faced the real possibility of losing their job after falling for one too many of these emails? Recently, I met someone at a conference who said his employer had in fact terminated employees for such repeated...

Chase ‘Glitch’ Exposed Customer Accounts

Multiple Chase.com customers have reported logging in to their bank accounts, only to be presented with another customer's bank account details. Chase has acknowledged the incident, saying it was caused by an internal "glitch" Wednesday evening that did not involve any kind of hacking attempt or...

Serial SWATter Tyler “SWAuTistic” Barriss Charged with Involuntary Manslaughter

Tyler Raj Barriss, a 25-year-old serial "swatter" whose phony emergency call to Kansas police last month triggered a fatal shooting, has been charged with involuntary manslaughter and faces up to eleven years in prison. Tyler Raj Barriss, in an undated selfie. Barriss's online alias -- "SWAuTisti...

Is Your Mobile Carrier Your Weakest Link?

More online services than ever now offer two-step authentication -- requiring customers to complete a login using their phone or other mobile device after supplying a username and password. But with so many services relying on your mobile for that second factor, there has never been more riding o...

Credit Card Breach at Kmart Stores. Again.

For the second time in less than three years, Kmart Stores is battling a malware-based security breach of its store credit card processing systems. Last week I began hearing from smaller banks and credit unions who said they strongly suspected another card breach at Kmart. Some of those...

Canadian Man Pleads Guilty in Snowflake Extortions

A 26-year-old Canadian man once described as one of the most consequential cybercrime threat actors of 2024 has pleaded guilty to computer fraud and conspiracy to hack and extort more than 165 organizations that used the cloud provider Snowflake. Connor Riley Moucka , of Kitchener, Ontario, also...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, May 2020 Edition

Microsoft today issued software updates to plug at least 111 security holes in Windows and Windows-based programs. None of the vulnerabilities were labeled as being publicly exploited or detailed prior to today, but as always if you're running Windows on any of your machines it's time once again ...

Courts Hand Down Hard Jail Time for DDoS

Seldom do people responsible for launching crippling cyberattacks face justice, but increasingly courts around the world are making examples of the few who do get busted for such crimes. On Friday, a 34-year-old Connecticut man received a whopping 10-year prison sentence for carrying out...

ExxonMobil Bungles Rewards Card Debut

Energy giant ExxonMobil recently sent snail mail letters to its Plenti rewards card members stating that the points program was being replaced with a new one called Exxon Mobil Rewards+. Unfortunately, the letter includes a confusing toll free number and directs customers to a parked page that...

“FudCo” Spam Empire Tied to Pakistani Software Firm

In May 2015, KrebsOnSecurity briefly profiled "The Manipulaters," the name chosen by a prolific cybercrime group based in Pakistan that was very publicly selling spam tools and a range of services for crafting, hosting and deploying malicious email. Six years later, a review of the social media...

SolarWinds: What Hit Us Could Hit Others

New research into the malware that set the stage for the megabreach at IT vendor SolarWinds shows the perpetrators spent months inside the companys software development labs honing their attack before inserting malicious code into updates that SolarWinds then shipped to thousands of customers. Mo...

Govt. Services Firm Tyler Technologies Hit in Apparent Ransomware Attack

Tyler Technologies, a Texas-based company that bills itself as the largest provider of software and technology services to the United States public sector, is battling a network intrusion that has disrupted its operations. The company declined to discuss the exact cause of the disruption, but the...

The Case for Limiting Your Browser Extensions

Last week, KrebsOnSecurity reported to health insurance provider Blue Shield of California that its Web site was flagged by multiple security products as serving malicious content. Blue Shield quickly removed the unauthorized code. An investigation determined it was injected by a browser extensio...

SEC Investigating Data Leak at First American Financial Corp.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission SEC is investigating a security failure on the Web site of real estate title insurance giant First American Financial Corp. that exposed more than 885 million personal and financial records tied to mortgage deals going back to 2003, KrebsOnSecurity has...

Feds Target $100M ‘GozNym’ Cybercrime Network

Law enforcement agencies in the United States and Europe today unsealed charges against 11 alleged members of the GozNym malware network, an international cybercriminal syndicate suspected of stealing $100 million from more than 41,000 victims with the help of a stealthy banking trojan by the sam...

Bomb Threat Hoaxer, DDos Boss Gets 3 Years

The ringleader of a gang of cyber hooligans that made bomb threats against hundreds of schools and launched distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks against Web sites -- including KrebsOnSecurity on multiple occasions -- has been sentenced to three years in a U.K. prison, and faces the...

GovPayNow.com Leaks 14M+ Records

Government Payment Service Inc. — a company used by thousands of U.S. state and local governments to accept online payments for everything from traffic citations and licensing fees to bail payments and court-ordered fines — has leaked more than 14 million customer records dating back at least six...

Patch Tuesday, May 2024 Edition

Microsoft today released updates to fix more than 60 security holes in Windows computers and supported software, including two "zero-day" vulnerabilities in Windows that are already being exploited in active attacks. There are also important security patches available for macOS and Adobe users, a...

Dirt-Cheap, Legit, Windows Software: Pick Two

Buying heavily discounted, popular software from second-hand sources online has always been something of an iffy security proposition. But purchasing steeply discounted licenses for cloud-based subscription products like recent versions of Microsoft Office can be an extremely risky transaction,...

Tracking Firm LocationSmart Leaked Location Data for Customers of All Major U.S. Mobile Carriers Without Consent in Real Time Via Its Web Site

LocationSmart, a U.S. based company that acts as an aggregator of real-time data about the precise location of mobile phone devices, has been leaking this information to anyone via a buggy component of its Web site -- without the need for any password or other form of authentication or...

PlugwalkJoe Does the Perp Walk

Joseph "PlugwalkJoe" OConnor, in a photo from a paid press release on Sept. 02, 2020, pitching him as a trustworthy cryptocurrency expert and advisor. One day after last summers mass-hack of Twitter, KrebsOnSecurity wrote that 22-year-old British citizen Joseph "PlugwalkJoe" OConnor appeared to...

Riding the State Unemployment Fraud ‘Wave’

When a reliable method of scamming money out of people, companies or governments becomes widely known, underground forums and chat networks tend to light up with activity as more fraudsters pile on to claim their share. And that's exactly what appears to be going on right now as multiple U.S...

Cybersecurity Firm Imperva Discloses Breach

Imperva, a leading provider of Internet firewall services that help Web sites block malicious cyberattacks, alerted customers on Tuesday that a recent data breach exposed email addresses, scrambled passwords, API keys and SSL certificates for a subset of its firewall users. Redwood Shores,...

No Jail Time for “WannaCry Hero”

Marcus Hutchins, the "accidental hero" who helped arrest the spread of the global WannaCry ransomware outbreak in 2017, will receive no jail time for his admitted role in authoring and selling malware that helped cyberthieves steal online bank account credentials from victims, a federal judge rul...

First American Financial Corp. Leaked Hundreds of Millions of Title Insurance Records

The Web site for Fortune 500 real estate title insurance giant First American Financial Corp. NYSE:FAF leaked hundreds of millions of documents related to mortgage deals going back to 2003, until notified this week by KrebsOnSecurity. The digitized records -- including bank account numbers and...

Alleged Chief of Romanian ATM Skimming Gang Arrested in Mexico

An alleged top boss of a Romanian crime syndicate that U.S. authorities say is responsible for deploying card-skimming devices at Automated Teller Machines ATMs throughout North America was arrested in Mexico last week on firearms charges. The arrest comes months after the accused allegedly order...

MyEquifax.com Bypasses Credit Freeze PIN

Most people who have frozen their credit files with Equifax have been issued a numeric Personal Identification Number PIN which is supposed to be required before a freeze can be lifted or thawed. Unfortunately, if you don't already have an account at the credit bureau's new myEquifax portal, it m...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, June 2018 Edition

Microsoft today pushed out a bevy of software updates to fix more than four dozen security holes in Windows and related software. Almost a quarter of the vulnerabilities addressed in this month's patch batch earned Microsoft's "critical" rating, meaning malware or miscreants can exploit the flaws...

Money Laundering Via Author Impersonation on Amazon?

Patrick Reames had no idea why Amazon.com sent him a 1099 form saying he'd made almost $24,000 selling books via Createspace, the company's on-demand publishing arm. That is, until he searched the site for his name and discovered someone has been using it to peddle a $555 book that's full of...

Source: Deloitte Breach Affected All Company Email, Admin Accounts

Deloitte, one of the world's "big four" accounting firms, has acknowledged a breach of its internal email systems, British news outlet The Guardian revealed today. Deloitte has sought to downplay the incident, saying it impacted "very few" clients. But according to a source close to the...

Blowing the Whistle on Bad Attribution

The New York Times this week published a fascinating story about a young programmer in Ukraine who'd turned himself in to the local police. The Times says the man did so after one of his software tools was identified by the U.S. government as part of the arsenal used by Russian hackers suspected ...

Trump Hotels Hit By 3rd Card Breach in 2 Years

Maybe some of you missed this amid all the breach news recently I know I did, but Trump International Hotels Management LLC last week announced its third credit-card data breach in the past two years. I thought it might be useful to see these events plotted on a timeline, because it suggests that...

Interview With a Crypto Scam Investment Spammer

Social networks are constantly battling inauthentic bot accounts that send direct messages to users promoting scam cryptocurrency investment platforms. What follows is an interview with a Russian hacker responsible for a series of aggressive crypto spam campaigns that recently prompted several...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, December 2022 Edition

Microsoft has released its final monthly batch of security updates for 2022, fixing more than four dozen security holes in its various Windows operating systems and related software. The most pressing patches include a zero-day in a Windows feature that tries to flag malicious files from the Web,...

The Security Pros and Cons of Using Email Aliases

One way to tame your email inbox is to get in the habit of using unique email aliases when signing up for new accounts online. Adding a "+" character after the username portion of your email address -- followed by a notation specific to the site youre signing up at -- lets you create an infinite...

Hackers Sell Access to Bait-and-Switch Empire

Cybercriminals are auctioning off access to customer information stolen from an online data broker behind a dizzying array of bait-and-switch Web sites that sell access to a vast range of data on U.S. consumers, including DMV and arrest records, genealogy reports, phone number lookups and people...

Alleged ‘Satori’ IoT Botnet Operator Sought Media Spotlight, Got Indicted

A 20-year-old from Vancouver, Washington was indicted last week on federal hacking charges and for allegedly operating the "Satori" botnet, a malware strain unleashed last year that infected hundreds of thousands of wireless routers and other "Internet of Things" IoT devices. This outcome is hard...

Fear the Reaper, or Reaper Madness?

Last week we looked at reports from China and Israel about a new "Internet of Things" malware strain called "Reaper" that researchers said infected more than a million organizations by targeting newfound security weaknesses in countless Internet routers, security cameras and digital video recorde...

Hacked Ring Cams Used to Record Swatting Victims

Photo: BrandonKleinPhoto / Shutterstock.com Two U.S. men have been charged with hacking into the Ring home security cameras of a dozen random people and then "swatting" them -- falsely reporting a violent incident at the targets address to trick local police into responding with force. Prosecutor...

911 Proxy Service Implodes After Disclosing Breach

The 911 service as it existed until July 28, 2022. 911.re, a proxy service that since 2015 has sold access to hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Windows computers daily, announced this week that it is shutting down in the wake of a data breach that destroyed key components of its business...

Joker’s Stash Carding Market to Call it Quits

Jokers Stash, by some accounts the largest underground shop for selling stolen credit card and identity data, says its closing up shop effective mid-February 2021. The announcement came on the heels of a turbulent year for the major cybercrime store, and just weeks after U.S. and European...

Calif. Man Pleads Guilty in Fatal Swatting Case, Faces 20+ Years in Prison

A California man who pleaded guilty Tuesday to causing dozens of swatting attacks -- including a deadly incident in Kansas last year -- now faces 20 or more years in prison. Tyler Raj Barriss, in an undated selfie. Tyler Barriss, 25, went by the nickname SWAuTistic on Twitter, and reveled in...

Notorious ‘Hijack Factory’ Shunned from Web

Score one for the good guys: Bitcanal, a Portuguese Web hosting firm long accused of helping spammers hijack large swaths of dormant Internet address space over the years, was summarily kicked off the Internet this week after a half-dozen of the company's bandwidth providers chose to sever ties...