VMware Flaw a Vector in SolarWinds Breach?

U.S. government cybersecurity agencies warned this week that the attackers behind the widespread hacking spree stemming from the compromise at network software firm SolarWinds used weaknesses in other, non-SolarWinds products to attack high-value targets. According to sources, among those was a...

Malicious Domain in SolarWinds Hack Turned into ‘Killswitch’

A key malicious domain name used to control potentially thousands of computer systems compromised via the months-long breach at network monitoring software vendor SolarWinds was commandeered by security experts and used as a "killswitch" designed to turn the sprawling cybercrime operation against...

SolarWinds Hack Could Affect 18K Customers

The still-unfolding breach at network management software firm SolarWinds may have resulted in malicious code being pushed to nearly 18,000 customers, the company said in a legal filing on Monday. Meanwhile, Microsoft should soon have some idea which and how many SolarWinds customers were affecte...

U.S. Treasury, Commerce Depts. Hacked Through SolarWinds Compromise

Communications at the U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments were reportedly compromised by a supply chain attack on SolarWinds, a security vendor that helps the federal government and a range of Fortune 500 companies monitor the health of their IT networks. Given the breadth of the companys...

Payment Processing Giant TSYS: Ransomware Incident “Immaterial” to Company

Payment card processing giant TSYS suffered a ransomware attack earlier this month. Since then reams of data stolen from the company have been posted online, with the attackers promising to publish more in the coming days. But the company says the malware did not jeopardize card data, and that th...

Patch Tuesday, Good Riddance 2020 Edition

Microsoft today issued its final batch of security updates for Windows PCs in 2020, ending the year with a relatively light patch load. Nine of the 58 security vulnerabilities addressed this month earned Microsofts most-dire "critical" label, meaning they can be abused by malware or miscreants to...

IRS to Make ID Protection PIN Open to All

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service IRS said this week that beginning in 2021 it will allow all taxpayers to apply for an identity protection personal identification number IP PIN, a single-use code designed to block identity thieves from falsely claiming a tax refund in your name. Currently, IP PI...

Account Hijacking Site OGUsers Hacked, Again

For at least the third time in its existence, OGUsers -- a forum overrun with people looking to buy, sell and trade access to compromised social media accounts -- has been hacked. An offer by the apparent hackers of OGUsers, offering to remove account information from the eventual database leak i...

Bomb Threat, DDoS Purveyor Gets Eight Years

A 22-year-old North Carolina man has been sentenced to nearly eight years in prison for conducting bomb threats against thousands of schools in the U.S. and United Kingdom, running a service that launched distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks, and for possessing sexually explicit images of...

GoDaddy Employees Used in Attacks on Multiple Cryptocurrency Services

Fraudsters redirected email and web traffic destined for several cryptocurrency trading platforms over the past week. The attacks were facilitated by scams targeting employees at GoDaddy, the worlds largest domain name registrar, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The incident is the latest incursion a...

Convicted SIM Swapper Gets 3 Years in Jail

A 21-year-old Irishman who pleaded guilty to charges of helping to steal millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies from victims has been sentenced to just under three years in prison. The defendant is part of an alleged conspiracy involving at least eight others in the United States who stand accus...

Trump Fires Security Chief Christopher Krebs

President Trump on Tuesday fired his top election security official Christopher Krebs no relation. The dismissal came via Twitter two weeks to the day after Trump lost an election he baselessly claims was stolen by widespread voting fraud. Chris Krebs. Image: CISA. Krebs, 43, is a former Microsof...

Be Very Sparing in Allowing Site Notifications

An increasing number of websites are asking visitors to approve "notifications," browser modifications that periodically display messages on the users mobile or desktop device. In many cases these notifications are benign, but several dodgy firms are paying site owners to install their notificati...

Patch Tuesday, November 2020 Edition

Adobe and Microsoft each issued a bevy of updates today to plug critical security holes in their software. Microsofts release includes fixes for 112 separate flaws, including one zero-day vulnerability that is already being exploited to attack Windows users. Microsoft also is taking flak for...

Ransomware Group Turns to Facebook Ads

Its bad enough that many ransomware gangs now have blogs where they publish data stolen from companies that refuse to make an extortion payment. Now, one crime group has started using hacked Facebook accounts to run ads publicly pressuring their ransomware victims into paying up. On the evening o...

Body Found in Canada Identified as Neo-Nazi Spam King

The body of a man found shot inside a burned out vehicle in Canada three years ago has been identified as that of Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a prolific spammer and neo-Nazi who led a failed anti-government march on Washington, D.C. in 1999, according to news reports. Homicide detectives said they...

Why Paying to Delete Stolen Data is Bonkers

Companies hit by ransomware often face a dual threat: Even if they avoid paying the ransom and can restore things from scratch, about half the time the attackers also threaten to release sensitive stolen data unless the victim pays for a promise to have the data deleted. Leaving aside the notion...

Two Charged in SIM Swapping, Vishing Scams

Two young men from the eastern United States have been hit with identity theft and conspiracy charges for allegedly stealing bitcoin and social media accounts by tricking employees at wireless phone companies into giving away credentials needed to remotely access and modify customer account...

FBI, DHS, HHS Warn of Imminent, Credible Ransomware Threat Against U.S. Hospitals

On Monday, Oct. 26, KrebsOnSecurity began following up on a tip from a reliable source that an aggressive Russian cybercriminal gang known for deploying ransomware was preparing to disrupt information technology systems at hundreds of hospitals, clinics and medical care facilities across the Unit...

Security Blueprints of Many Companies Leaked in Hack of Swedish Firm Gunnebo

In March 2020, KrebsOnSecurity alerted Swedish security giant Gunnebo Group that hackers had broken into its network and sold the access to a criminal group which specializes in deploying ransomware. In August, Gunnebo said it had successfully thwarted a ransomware attack, but this week it emerge...

Google Mending Another Crack in Widevine

For the second time in as many years, Google is working to fix a weakness in its Widevine digital rights management DRM technology used by online streaming sites like Disney, Hulu and Netflix to prevent their content from being pirated. The latest cracks in Widevine concern the encryption...

The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

Some of the worlds largest Internet firms have taken steps to crack down on disinformation spread by QAnon conspiracy theorists and the hate-filled anonymous message board 8chan. But according to a California-based security researcher, those seeking to de-platform these communities may have...

QAnon/8Chan Sites Briefly Knocked Offline

A phone call to an Internet provider in Oregon on Sunday evening was all it took to briefly sideline multiple websites related to 8chan/8kun -- a controversial online image board linked to several mass shootings -- and QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory which holds that a cabal of Satanic...

Breach at Dickey’s BBQ Smokes 3M Cards

One of the digital undergrounds most popular stores for peddling stolen credit card information began selling a batch of more than three million new card records this week. KrebsOnSecurity has learned the data was stolen in a lengthy data breach at more than 100 Dickeys Barbeque Restaurant...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, October 2020 Edition

Its Cybersecurity Awareness Month! In keeping with that theme, if you abuse Microsoft Windows computers you should be aware the company shipped a bevy of software updates today to fix at least 87 security problems in Windows and programs that run on top of the operating system. That means its onc...

Microsoft Uses Trademark Law to Disrupt Trickbot Botnet

Microsoft Corp. has executed a coordinated legal sneak attack in a bid to disrupt the malware-as-a-service botnet Trickbot, a global menace that has infected millions of computers and is used to spread ransomware. A court in Virginia granted Microsoft control over many Internet servers Trickbot...

Report: U.S. Cyber Command Behind Trickbot Tricks

A week ago, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that someone was attempting to disrupt the Trickbot botnet, a malware crime machine that has infected millions of computers and is often used to spread ransomware. A new report Friday says the coordinated attack was part of an operation carried out by th...

Amid an Embarrassment of Riches, Ransom Gangs Increasingly Outsource Their Work

Theres an old adage in information security: "Every company gets penetration tested, whether or not they pay someone for the pleasure." Many organizations that do hire professionals to test their network security posture unfortunately tend to focus on fixing vulnerabilities hackers could use to...

Promising Infusions of Cash, Fake Investor John Bernard Walked Away With $30M

September featured two stories on a phony tech investor named John Bernard, a pseudonym used by a convicted thief named John Clifton Davies whos fleeced dozens of technology companies out of an estimated $30 million with the promise of lucrative investments. Those stories prompted a flood of tips...

Attacks Aimed at Disrupting the Trickbot Botnet

Over the past 10 days, someone has been launching a series of coordinated attacks designed to disrupt Trickbot, an enormous collection of more than two million malware-infected Windows PCs that are constantly being harvested for financial data and are often used as the entry point for deploying...

Ransomware Victims That Pay Up Could Incur Steep Fines from Uncle Sam

Companies victimized by ransomware and firms that facilitate negotiations with ransomware extortionists could face steep fines from the U.S. federal government if the crooks who profit from the attack are already under economic sanctions, the Treasury Department warned today. Image: Shutterstock ...

Who’s Behind Monday’s 14-State 911 Outage?

Emergency 911 systems were down for more than an hour on Monday in towns and cities across 14 U.S. states. The outages led many news outlets to speculate the problem was related to Microsofts Azure web services platform, which also was struggling with a widespread outage at the time. However,...

Who is Tech Investor John Bernard?

John Bernard, the subject of a story here last week about a self-proclaimed millionaire investor who has bilked countless tech startups, appears to be a pseudonym for John Clifton Davies, a U.K. man who absconded from justice before being convicted on multiple counts of fraud in 2015. Prior to hi...

Microsoft: Attackers Exploiting ‘ZeroLogon’ Windows Flaw

Microsoft warned on Wednesday that malicious hackers are exploiting a particularly dangerous flaw in Windows Server systems that could be used to give attackers the keys to the kingdom inside a vulnerable corporate network. Microsofts warning comes just days after the U.S. Department of Homeland...

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...

Chinese Antivirus Firm Was Part of APT41 ‘Supply Chain’ Attack

The U.S. Justice Department this week indicted seven Chinese nationals for a decade-long hacking spree that targeted more than 100 high-tech and online gaming companies. The government alleges the men used malware-laced phishing emails and "supply chain" attacks to steal data from companies and...

Two Russians Charged in $17M Cryptocurrency Phishing Spree

U.S. authorities today announced criminal charges and financial sanctions against two Russian men accused of stealing nearly $17 million worth of virtual currencies in a series of phishing attacks throughout 2017 and 2018 that spoofed websites for some of the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges...

Due Diligence That Money Can’t Buy

Most of us automatically put our guard up when someone we dont know promises something too good to be true. But when the too-good-to-be-true thing starts as our idea, sometimes that instinct fails to kick in. Heres the story of how companies searching for investors to believe in their ideas can r...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, Sept. 2020 Edition

Microsoft today released updates to remedy nearly 130 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating system and supported software. None of the flaws are known to be currently under active exploitation, but 23 of them could be exploited by malware or malcontents to seize complete control of...

The Joys of Owning an ‘OG’ Email Account

When you own a short email address at a popular email provider, you are bound to get gobs of spam, and more than a few alerts about random people trying to seize control over the account. If your account name is short and desirable enough, this kind of activity can make the account less reliable...

Sendgrid Under Siege from Hacked Accounts

Email service provider Sendgrid is grappling with an unusually large number of customer accounts whose passwords have been cracked, sold to spammers, and abused for sending phishing and email malware attacks. Sendgrids parent company Twilio says it is working on a plan to require multi-factor...

Confessions of an ID Theft Kingpin, Part II

Yesterdays piece told the tale of Hieu Minh Ngo, a hacker the U.S. Secret Service described as someone who caused more material financial harm to more Americans than any other convicted cybercriminal. Ngo was recently deported back to his home country after serving more than seven years in prison...

Confessions of an ID Theft Kingpin, Part I

At the height of his cybercriminal career, the hacker known as "Hieupc" was earning $125,000 a month running a bustling identity theft service that siphoned consumer dossiers from some of the worlds top data brokers. That is, until his greed and ambition played straight into an elaborate snare se...

FBI, CISA Echo Warnings on ‘Vishing’ Threat

The Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA on Thursday issued a joint alert to warn about the growing threat from voice phishing or "vishing" attacks targeting companies. The advisory came less than 24 hours after KrebsOnSecurity publishe...

Voice Phishers Targeting Corporate VPNs

The COVID-19 epidemic has brought a wave of email phishing attacks that try to trick work-at-home employees into giving away credentials needed to remotely access their employers networks. But one increasingly brazen group of crooks is taking your standard phishing attack to the next level,...

Microsoft Put Off Fixing Zero Day for 2 Years

A security flaw in the way Microsoft Windows guards users against malicious files was actively exploited in malware attacks for two years before last week, when Microsoft finally issued a software update to correct the problem. One of the 120 security holes Microsoft fixed on Aug. 11s Patch Tuesd...

Medical Debt Collection Firm R1 RCM Hit in Ransomware Attack

R1 RCM Inc. NASDAQ:RCM, one of the nations largest medical debt collection companies, has been hit in a ransomware attack. Formerly known as Accretive Health Inc., Chicago-based R1 RCM brought in revenues of $1.18 billion in 2019. The company has more than 19,000 employees and contracts with at...

Why & Where You Should Plant Your Flag

Several stories here have highlighted the importance of creating accounts online tied to your various identity, financial and communications services before identity thieves do it for you. This post examines some of the key places where everyone should plant their virtual flags. As KrebsOnSecurit...

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, August 2020 Edition

Microsoft today released updates to plug at least 120 security holes in its Windows operating systems and supported software, including two newly discovered vulnerabilities that are actively being exploited. Yes, good people of the Windows world, its time once again to backup and patch up! At lea...

Hacked Data Broker Accounts Fueled Phony COVID Loans, Unemployment Claims

A group of thieves thought to be responsible for collecting millions in fraudulent small business loans and unemployment insurance benefits from COVID-19 economic relief efforts gathered personal data on people and businesses they were impersonating by leveraging several compromised accounts at a...