Boss of ATM Skimming Syndicate Arrested in Mexico

Florian "The Shark" Tudor, the alleged ringleader of a prolific ATM skimming gang that siphoned hundreds of millions of dollars from bank accounts of tourists visiting Mexico over the last eight years, was arrested in Mexico City on Thursday in response to an extradition warrant from a Romanian...

WeLeakInfo Leaked Customer Payment Info

A little over a year ago, the FBI and law enforcement partners overseas seized WeLeakInfo.com, a wildly popular service that sold access to more than 12 billion usernames and passwords stolen from thousands of hacked websites. In an ironic turn of events, a lapsed domain registration tied to...

At Least 30,000 U.S. Organizations Newly Hacked Via Holes in Microsoft’s Email Software

At least 30,000 organizations across the United States -- including a significant number of small businesses, towns, cities and local governments -- have over the past few days been hacked by an unusually aggressive Chinese cyber espionage unit thats focused on stealing email from victim...

Who’s Behind the ‘Web Listings’ Mail Scam?

In December 2018, KrebsOnSecurity looked at how dozens of U.S. political campaigns, cities and towns had paid a shady company called Web Listings Inc. after receiving what looked like a bill for search engine optimization SEO services rendered on behalf of their domain names. The story concluded...

A Light at the End of Liberty Reserve’s Demise?

In May 2013, the U.S. Justice Department seized Liberty Reserve, alleging the virtual currency service acted as a $6 billion financial hub for the cybercrime world. Prompted by assurances that the government would one day afford Liberty Reserve users a chance to reclaim any funds seized as part o...

Mirai Botnet Authors Avoid Jail Time

Citing "extraordinary cooperation" with the government, a court in Alaska on Tuesday sentenced three men to probation, community service and fines for their admitted roles in authoring and using "Mirai," a potent malware strain used in countless attacks designed to knock Web sites offline --...

Reddit Breach Highlights Limits of SMS-Based Authentication

Reddit.com today disclosed that a data breach exposed some internal data, as well as email addresses and passwords for some Reddit users. As Web site breaches go, this one doesn't seem too severe. What's interesting about the incident is that it showcases once again why relying on mobile text...

Librarian Sues Equifax Over 2017 Data Breach, Wins $600

In the days following revelations last September that big-three consumer credit bureau Equifax had been hacked and relieved of personal data on nearly 150 million people, many Americans no doubt felt resigned and powerless to control their information. But not Jessamyn West. The 49-year-old...

Bad .Men at .Work. Please Don’t .Click

Web site names ending in new top-level domains TLDs like .men, .work and .click are some of the riskiest and spammy-est on the Internet, according to experts who track such concentrations of badness online. Not that there still aren't a whole mess of nasty .com, .net and .biz domains out there, b...

A Sobering Look at Fake Online Reviews

In 2016, KrebsOnSecurity exposed a network of phony Web sites and fake online reviews that funneled those seeking help for drug and alcohol addiction toward rehab centers that were secretly affiliated with the Church of Scientology. Not long after the story ran, that network of bogus reviews...

Survey: Americans Spent $1.4B on Credit Freeze Fees in Wake of Equifax Breach

Almost 20 percent of Americans froze their credit file with one or more of the big three credit bureaus in the wake of last year's data breach at Equifax, costing consumers an estimated $1.4 billion, according to a new study. The findings come as lawmakers in Congress are debating legislation tha...

Hyatt Hotels Suffers 2nd Card Breach in 2 Years

Hyatt Corp. is alerting customers about another credit card breach at some hotels, the second major incident with the hospitality chain in as many years. Hyatt said its cyber security team discovered signs of unauthorized access to payment card information from cards manually entered or swiped at...

Ten Years Later, New Clues in the Target Breach

On Dec. 18, 2013, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that U.S. retail giant Target was battling a wide-ranging computer intrusion that compromised more than 40 million customer payment cards over the previous month. The malware used in the Target breach included the text string "Rescator," which also...

Barracuda Urges Replacing — Not Patching — Its Email Security Gateways

Its not often that a zero-day vulnerability causes a network security vendor to urge customers to physically remove and decommission an entire line of affected hardware -- as opposed to just applying software updates. But experts say that is exactly what transpired this week with Barracuda...

Nuclear Bot Author Arrested in Sextortion Case

Last summer, a wave of sextortion emails began flooding inboxes around the world. The spammers behind this scheme claimed they'd hacked your computer and recorded videos of you watching porn, and promised to release the embarrassing footage to all your contacts unless a bitcoin demand was paid...

Marriott: Data on 500 Million Guests Stolen in 4-Year Breach

Hospitality giant Marriott today disclosed a massive data breach exposing the personal and financial information on as many as a half billion customers who made reservations at any of its Starwood properties over the past four years. Marriott said the breach involved unauthorized access to a...

Coinhive Exposé Prompts Cancer Research Fundraiser

A story published here this week revealed the real-life identity behind the original creator of Coinhive -- a controversial cryptocurrency mining service that several security firms have recently labeled the most ubiquitous malware threat on the Internet today. In an unusual form of protest again...

San Diego Sues Experian Over ID Theft Service

The City of San Diego, Calif. is suing consumer credit bureau Experian, alleging that a data breach first reported by KrebsOnSecurity in 2013 affected more than a quarter-million people in San Diego but that Experian never alerted affected consumers as required under California law. The lawsuit,...

Correcting the Record on vDOS Prosecutions

KrebsOnSecurity recently featured a story about a New Mexico man who stands accused of using the now-defunct vDOS attack-for-hire service to hobble the Web sites of several former employers. That piece stated that I wasn't aware of any other prosecutions related to vDOS customers, but as it happe...

Reaper: Calm Before the IoT Security Storm?

It's been just over a year since the world witnessed some of the world's top online Web sites being taken down for much of the day by "Mirai," a zombie malware strain that enslaved "Internet of Things" IoT devices such as wireless routers, security cameras and digital video recorders for use in...

Flash Player is Dead, Long Live Flash Player!

Adobe last week detailed plans to retire its Flash Player software, a cross-platform browser plugin so powerful and so packed with security holes that it has become the favorite target of malware developers. To help eradicate this ubiquitous liability, Adobe is enlisting the help of Apple,...

Patch Tuesday, October 2024 Edition

Microsoft today released security updates to fix at least 117 security holes in Windows computers and other software, including two vulnerabilities that are already seeing active attacks. Also, Adobe plugged 52 security holes across a range of products, and Apple has addressed a bug in its new...

April’s Patch Tuesday Brings Record Number of Fixes

If only Patch Tuesdays came around infrequently -- like total solar eclipse rare -- instead of just creeping up on us each month like The Man in the Moon. Although to be fair, it would be tough for Microsoft to eclipse the number of vulnerabilities fixed in this months patch batch -- a record 147...

Who’s Behind the Botnet-Based Service BHProxies?

A security firm has discovered that a six-year-old crafty botnet known as Mylobot appears to be powering a residential proxy service called BHProxies, which offers paying customers the ability to route their web traffic anonymously through compromised computers. Heres a closer look at Mylobot, an...

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...

Arrest, Raids Tied to ‘U-Admin’ Phishing Kit

Cyber cops in Ukraine carried out an arrest and several raids last week in connection with the author of a U-Admin, a software package used to administer whats being called "one of the worlds largest phishing services." The operation was carried out in coordination with the FBI and authorities in...

Cachet Financial Reeling from MyPayrollHR Fraud

When New York-based cloud payroll provider MyPayrollHR unexpectedly shuttered its doors last month and disappeared with $26 million worth of customer payroll deposits, its payment processor Cachet Financial Services ended up funding the bank accounts of MyPayrollHR client company employees anyway...

Bug Bounty Hunter Ran ISP Doxing Service

A Connecticut man who's earned bug bounty rewards and public recognition from top telecom companies for finding and reporting security holes in their Web sites secretly operated a service that leveraged these same flaws to sell their customers' personal data, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. In May...

U.S. Secret Service Warns ID Thieves are Abusing USPS’s Mail Scanning Service

A year ago, KrebsOnSecurity warned that "Informed Delivery," a new offering from the U.S. Postal Service USPS that lets residents view scanned images of all incoming mail, was likely to be abused by identity thieves and other fraudsters unless the USPS beefed up security around the program and ma...

Fear Not: You, Too, Are a Cybercrime Victim!

Maybe you've been feeling left out because you weren't among the lucky few hundred million or billion who had their personal information stolen in either the Equifax or Yahoo! breaches. Well buck up, camper: Both companies took steps to make you feel better today. Yahoo! announced that, our bad!:...

Sued by Meta, Freenom Halts Domain Registrations

The domain name registrar Freenom, whose free domain names have long been a draw for spammers and phishers, has stopped allowing new domain name registrations. The move comes after the Dutch registrar was sued by Meta, which alleges the company ignores abuse complaints about phishing websites whi...

‘ValidCC,’ a Major Payment Card Bazaar and Looter of E-Commerce Sites, Shuttered

ValidCC, a dark web bazaar run by a cybercrime group that for more than six years hacked online merchants and sold stolen payment card data, abruptly closed up shop last week. The proprietors of the popular store said their servers were seized as part of a coordinated law enforcement operation...

DDoS-Guard To Forfeit Internet Space Occupied by Parler

Parler, the beleaguered social network advertised as a "free speech" alternative to Facebook and Twitter, has had a tough month. Apple and Google removed the Parler app from their stores, and Amazon blocked the platform from using its hosting services. Parler has since found a home in DDoS-Guard,...

Before He Spammed You, this Sly Prince Stalked Your Mailbox

A reader forwarded what he briefly imagined might be a bold, if potentially costly, innovation on the old Nigerian prince scam that asks for help squirreling away millions in unclaimed fortune: It was sent via the U.S. Postal Service, with a postmarked stamp and everything. In truth these old...

Google: Security Keys Neutralized Employee Phishing

Google has not had any of its 85,000+ employees successfully phished on their work-related accounts since early 2017, when it began requiring all employees to use physical Security Keys in place of passwords and one-time codes, the company told KrebsOnSecurity. A YubiKey Security Key made by...

Ransomware Gangs and the Name Game Distraction

Its nice when ransomware gangs have their bitcoin stolen, malware servers shut down, or are otherwise forced to disband. We hang on to these occasional victories because history tells us that most ransomware moneymaking collectives dont go away so much as reinvent themselves under a new name, wit...

Try This One Weird Trick Russian Hackers Hate

In a Twitter discussion last week on ransomware attacks, KrebsOnSecurity noted that virtually all ransomware strains have a built-in failsafe designed to cover the backsides of the malware purveyors: They simply will not install on a Microsoft Windows computer that already has one of many types o...

DarkSide Ransomware Gang Quits After Servers, Bitcoin Stash Seized

The DarkSide ransomware affiliate program responsible for the six-day outage at Colonial Pipeline this week that led to fuel shortages and price spikes across the country is running for the hills. The crime gang announced it was closing up shop after its servers were seized and someone drained th...

Three Top Russian Cybercrime Forums Hacked

Over the past few weeks, three of the longest running and most venerated Russian-language online forums serving thousands of experienced cybercriminals have been hacked. In two of the intrusions, the attackers made off with the forums user databases, including email and Internet addresses and...

Unproven Coronavirus Therapy Proves Cash Cow for Shadow Pharmacies

Many of the same shadowy organizations that pay people to promote male erectile dysfunction drugs via spam and hacked websites recently have enjoyed a surge in demand for medicines used to fight malaria, lupus and arthritis, thanks largely to unfounded suggestions that these therapies can help...

Ransomware Gangs Now Outing Victim Businesses That Don’t Pay Up

As if the scourge of ransomware wasn't bad enough already: Several prominent purveyors of ransomware have signaled they plan to start publishing data stolen from victims who refuse to pay up. To make matters worse, one ransomware gang has now created a public Web site identifying recent victim...

Email Provider VFEmail Suffers ‘Catastrophic’ Hack

Email provider VFEmail has suffered what the company is calling "catastrophic destruction" at the hands of an as-yet unknown intruder who trashed all of the company's primary and backup data in the United States. The firm's founder says he now fears some 18 years' worth of customer email may be...

Checked Your Credit Since the Equifax Hack?

A recent consumer survey suggests that half of all Americans still haven't checked their credit report since the Equifax breach last year exposed the Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses and other personal information on nearly 150 million people. If you're in that fifty percent,...

Twitter Bots Use Likes, RTs for Intimidation

I awoke this morning to find my account on Twitter @briankrebs had attracted almost 12,000 new followers overnight. Then I noticed I'd gained almost as many followers as the number of re-tweets RTs earned for a tweet I published on Tuesday. The tweet stated how every time I tweet something relate...

DSLRoot, Proxies, and the Threat of ‘Legal Botnets’

The cybersecurity community on Reddit responded in disbelief this month when a self-described Air National Guard member with top secret security clearance began questioning the arrangement they'd made with company called DSLRoot , which was paying $250 a month to plug a pair of laptops into the...

Fake Lawsuit Threat Exposes Privnote Phishing Sites

A cybercrook who has been setting up websites that mimic the self-destructing message service privnote.com accidentally exposed the breadth of their operations recently when they threatened to sue a software company. The disclosure revealed a profitable network of phishing sites that behave and...

Meet Ika & Sal: The Bulletproof Hosting Duo from Hell

In 2020, the United States brought charges against four men accused of building a bulletproof hosting empire that once dominated the Russian cybercrime industry and supported multiple organized cybercrime groups. All four pleaded guilty to conspiracy and racketeering charges. But there is a...

Who’s Behind the DomainNetworks Snail Mail Scam?

If youve ever owned a domain name, the chances are good that at some point youve received a snail mail letter which appears to be a bill for a domain or website-related services. In reality, these misleading missives try to trick people into paying for useless services they never ordered, dont...

What Happened to Facebook, Instagram, & WhatsApp?

Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We dont yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other...

Report: ATM Skimmer Gang Had Protection from Mexican Attorney General’s Office

A group of Romanians operating an ATM company in Mexico and suspected of bribing technicians to install sophisticated Bluetooth-based skimmers in cash machines throughout several top Mexican tourist destinations have enjoyed legal protection from a top anti-corruption official in the Mexican...