In an effort to blend in and make their malicious traffic tougher to block, hosting firms catering to cybercriminals in China and Russia increasingly are funneling their operations through major U.S. cloud providers. Research published this week on one such…| krebsonsecurity.com
Yearly Archives: 2025| krebsonsecurity.com
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…| krebsonsecurity.com
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)…| krebsonsecurity.com
On September 22, 2016, this site was forced offline for nearly four days after it was hit with “Mirai,” a malware strain that enslaves poorly secured Internet of Things (IoT) devices like wireless routers and security cameras into a botnet…| krebsonsecurity.com
The source code that powers the "Internet of Things" (IoT) botnet responsible for launching the historically large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against KrebsOnSecurity last month has been publicly released, virtually guaranteeing that the Internet will soon be flooded with attacks…| krebsonsecurity.com
Criminals this morning massively attacked Dyn, a company that provides core Internet services for Twitter, SoundCloud, Spotify, Reddit and a host of other sites, causing outages and slowness for many of Dyn's customers.| krebsonsecurity.com
John Gilmore, an American entrepreneur and civil libertarian, once famously quipped that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”. This notion undoubtedly rings true for those who see national governments as the principal threats to free speech.…| krebsonsecurity.com
TalkTalk, a British phone and broadband provider with more than four million customers, disclosed Friday that intruders had hacked its Web site and may have stolen personal and financial data. Sources close to the investigation say the company has received…| krebsonsecurity.com
Monthly Archives: September 2019| krebsonsecurity.com
In a great many ransomware attacks, the criminals who pillage the victim's network are not the same crooks who gained the initial access to the victim organization. More commonly, the infected PC or stolen VPN credentials the gang used to…| krebsonsecurity.com
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…| krebsonsecurity.com
Monthly Archives: August 2025| krebsonsecurity.com
Cybercriminal groups peddling sophisticated phishing kits that convert stolen card data into mobile wallets have recently shifted their focus to targeting customers of brokerage services, new research shows. Undeterred by security controls at these trading platforms that block users from…| krebsonsecurity.com
On July 22, 2025, the European police agency Europol said a long-running investigation led by the French Police resulted in the arrest of a 38-year-old administrator of XSS, a Russian-language cybercrime forum with more than 50,000 members. The action has triggered…| krebsonsecurity.com
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…| krebsonsecurity.com
Monthly Archives: May 2015| krebsonsecurity.com
A new phone-based phishing scam that spoofs Apple Inc. is likely to fool quite a few people. It starts with an automated call that display's Apple's logo, address and real phone number, warning about a data breach at the company.…| krebsonsecurity.com
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.| krebsonsecurity.com
Most of us have been trained to be wary of clicking on links and attachments that arrive in emails unexpected, but it's easy to forget scam artists are constantly dreaming up innovations that put a new shine on old-fashioned telephone-based…| krebsonsecurity.com
Monthly Archives: April 2020| krebsonsecurity.com
Monthly Archives: June 2013| krebsonsecurity.com
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…| krebsonsecurity.com
U.S. state and federal investigators are being inundated with reports from people who’ve lost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in connection with a complex investment scam known as “pig butchering,” wherein people are lured by flirtatious strangers online…| krebsonsecurity.com
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…| krebsonsecurity.com
The number of phishing websites tied to domain name registrar Freenom dropped precipitously in the months surrounding a recent lawsuit from social networking giant Meta, which alleged the free domain name provider has a long history of ignoring abuse complaints…| krebsonsecurity.com
Monthly Archives: July 2024| krebsonsecurity.com
Monthly Archives: April 2025| krebsonsecurity.com
Monthly Archives: April 2024| krebsonsecurity.com
It's not uncommon for crooks who peddle stolen credit cards to seize on iconic American figures of wealth and power in the digital advertisements for these shops that run continuously on various cybercrime forums. Exhibit A: McDumpals, a hugely popular…| krebsonsecurity.com
In May 2025, the U.S. government sanctioned a Chinese national for operating a cloud provider linked to the majority of virtual currency investment scam websites reported to the FBI. But more than a month later, the accused continues to openly…| krebsonsecurity.com
Monthly Archives: July 2025| krebsonsecurity.com
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…| krebsonsecurity.com
If you received a link to LinkedIn.com via email, SMS or instant message, would you click it? Spammers, phishers and other ne'er-do-wells are hoping you will, because they've long taken advantage of a marketing feature on the business networking site…| krebsonsecurity.com
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…| krebsonsecurity.com
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…| krebsonsecurity.com
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…| krebsonsecurity.com
Fiserv, Inc., a major provider of technology services to financial institutions, just fixed a glaring weakness in its Web platform that exposed personal and financial details of countless customers across hundreds of bank Web sites, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.| krebsonsecurity.com
Identity theft protection firm LifeLock -- a company that's built a name for itself based on the promise of helping consumers protect their identities online -- may have actually exposed customers to additional attacks from ID thieves and phishers. The…| krebsonsecurity.com
Panerabread.com, the Web site for the American chain of bakery-cafe fast casual restaurants by the same name, leaked millions of customer records -- including names, email and physical addresses, birthdays and the last four digits of the customer's credit card…| krebsonsecurity.com
Monthly Archives: November 2018| krebsonsecurity.com
The FBI and authorities in The Netherlands this week seized a number of servers and domains for a hugely popular spam and malware dissemination service operating out of Pakistan. The proprietors of the service, who use the collective nickname "The…| krebsonsecurity.com
Roughly nine years ago, KrebsOnSecurity profiled a Pakistan-based cybercrime group called "The Manipulaters," a sprawling web hosting network of phishing and spam delivery platforms. In January 2024, The Manipulaters pleaded with this author to unpublish previous stories about their work,…| krebsonsecurity.com
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…| krebsonsecurity.com
Monthly Archives: May 2025| krebsonsecurity.com
Authorities in Pakistan have arrested 21 individuals accused of operating "Heartsender," a once popular spam and malware dissemination service that operated for more than a decade. The main clientele for HeartSender were organized crime groups that tried to trick victim…| krebsonsecurity.com
An increasing number of websites are asking visitors to approve "notifications," browser modifications that periodically display messages on the user's mobile or desktop device. In many cases these notifications are benign, but several dodgy firms are paying site owners to…| krebsonsecurity.com
Monthly Archives: June 2025| krebsonsecurity.com
Late last year, security researchers made a startling discovery: Kremlin-backed disinformation campaigns were bypassing moderation on social media platforms by leveraging the same malicious advertising technology that powers a sprawling ecosystem of online hucksters and website hackers. A new report…| krebsonsecurity.com
One day after last summer's mass-hack of Twitter, KrebsOnSecurity wrote that 22-year-old British citizen Joseph "PlugwalkJoe" O'Connor appeared to have been involved in the incident. When the Justice Department last week announced O'Connor's arrest and indictment, his alleged role in…| krebsonsecurity.com
Yearly Archives: 2022| krebsonsecurity.com
Tag Archives: Security Keys| krebsonsecurity.com
Twitter was thrown into chaos on Wednesday after accounts for some of the world's most recognizable public figures, executives and celebrities starting tweeting out links to bitcoin scams. Twitter says the attack happened because someone tricked or coerced an employee…| krebsonsecurity.com
Monthly Archives: August 2022| krebsonsecurity.com
Yearly Archives: 2021| krebsonsecurity.com
In December 2013, just days after a data breach exposed 40 million customer debit and credit card accounts, Target Corp. hired security experts at Verizon to probe its networks for weaknesses. The results of that confidential investigation -- until now…| krebsonsecurity.com
News that Target's CEO Gregg Steinhafle is stepping down prompted a flurry of reports from media outlets trying to recap events since the company announced a data breach on Dec. 19, 2013. Sprinkled throughout those reports were lots of numbers,…| krebsonsecurity.com
Last year's breach at Target Corp. flooded underground markets with millions of stolen credit and debit cards. In the days surrounding the breach disclosure, the cards carried unusually high price tags -- in large part because few banks had gotten…| krebsonsecurity.com
The breach at Target Corp. that exposed credit card and personal data on more than 110 million consumers appears to have begun with a malware-laced email phishing attack sent to employees at an HVAC firm that did business with the…| krebsonsecurity.com
Last week's story about steeply falling prices on credit and debit card data stolen from Target mentioned several reasons why many banks may not have already reissued all of their cards impacted by the breach. But it left out one…| krebsonsecurity.com
An examination of the malware used in the Target breach suggests that the attackers may have taken advantage of a poorly secured feature built into a widely-used IT management software product that was running on the retailer's internal network.| krebsonsecurity.com
Last weekend, Target finally disclosed at least one cause of the massive data breach that exposed personal and financial information on more than 110 million customers: Malicious software that infected point-of-sale systems at Target checkout counters. Today's post includes new…| krebsonsecurity.com
Yesterday's story about the point-of-sale malware used in the Target attack has prompted a flood of reporting from antivirus and security vendors. Buried within those reports are some interesting details that speak to possible actors involved and to the timing…| krebsonsecurity.com
The previous two posts on this blog have featured stories about banks buying back credit and debit card accounts stolen in the Target hack and that ended up for sale on rescator[dot]la, a popular underground store. Today's post looks a…| krebsonsecurity.com
Cards stolen in a recent data breach at retail giant Target have been flooding underground black markets in recent weeks, selling in batches of one million cards and going for anywhere from $20 to more than $100 per card, KrebsOnSecurity…| krebsonsecurity.com
Monthly Archives: December 2013| krebsonsecurity.com
The U.S. government today imposed economic sanctions on Funnull Technology Inc., a Philippines-based company that provides computer infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of websites involved in virtual currency investment scams, commonly known as “pig butchering." In January 2025, KrebsOnSecurity detailed…| krebsonsecurity.com
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…| krebsonsecurity.com
The data privacy company Onerep.com bills itself as a Virginia-based service for helping people remove their personal information from almost 200 people-search websites. However, an investigation into the history of onerep.com finds this company is operating out of Belarus and…| krebsonsecurity.com
Many security-conscious people probably think they'd never fall for a phone-based phishing scam. But if your response to such a scam involves anything other than hanging up and calling back the entity that claims to be calling, you may be…| krebsonsecurity.com
One of the most-viewed stories on this site is a blog post+graphic that I put together last year to illustrate the ways that bad guys can monetize hacked computers. But just as folks who don't bank online or store sensitive…| krebsonsecurity.com
A employee at Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI leaked a private key on GitHub that for the past two months could have allowed anyone to query private xAI large language models (LLMs) which appear to have been custom made for…| krebsonsecurity.com
A critical resource that cybersecurity professionals worldwide rely on to identify, mitigate and fix security vulnerabilities in software and hardware is in danger of breaking down. The federally funded, non-profit research and development organization MITRE warned today that its contract…| krebsonsecurity.com
A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleged last week that denizens of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) siphoned gigabytes of data from the agency's sensitive case files in early March. The whistleblower said accounts created…| krebsonsecurity.com
A security architect with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleges that employees from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) transferred gigabytes of sensitive data from agency case files in early March, using short-lived accounts configured to leave few…| krebsonsecurity.com
Two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, a large, mysterious new Internet hosting firm called Stark Industries Solutions materialized and quickly became the epicenter of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on government and commercial targets in Ukraine and…| krebsonsecurity.com
U.S. Postal Service just fixed a security weakness that allowed anyone who has an account at usps.com to view account details for some 60 million other users, and in some cases to modify account details on their behalf. KrebsOnSecurity was contacted…| krebsonsecurity.com
A 21-year-old New Jersey man has been arrested and charged with stalking in connection with a federal investigation into groups of cybercriminals who are settling scores by hiring people to carry out physical attacks on their rivals. Prosecutors say the…| krebsonsecurity.com
Phishers are enjoying remarkable success using text messages to steal remote access credentials and one-time passcodes from employees at some of the world's largest technology companies and customer support firms. A recent spate of SMS phishing attacks from one cybercriminal…| krebsonsecurity.com
In September 2023, KrebsOnSecurity published findings from security researchers who concluded that a series of six-figure cyberheists across dozens of victims resulted from thieves cracking master passwords stolen from the password manager service LastPass in 2022. In a court filing…| krebsonsecurity.com
T-Mobile warned Monday that a data breach has exposed the names, date of birth, Social Security number and driver's license/ID information of more than 40 million current, former or prospective customers. The acknowledgment came less than 48 hours after millions…| krebsonsecurity.com
Carding -- the underground business of stealing, selling and swiping stolen payment card data -- has long been the dominion of Russia-based hackers. Happily, the broad deployment of more secure chip-based payment cards in the United States has weakened the…| krebsonsecurity.com
Communications giant T-Mobile said today it is investigating the extent of a data breach that hackers claim has exposed sensitive personal data on 100 million T-Mobile USA customers, in many cases including the name, Social Security number, address, date of…| krebsonsecurity.com
One month into his second term, President Trump's actions to shrink the government through mass layoffs, firings and withholding funds allocated by Congress have thrown federal cybersecurity and consumer protection programs into disarray. At the same time, agencies are battling…| krebsonsecurity.com
Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the…| krebsonsecurity.com
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…| krebsonsecurity.com
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…| krebsonsecurity.com
Adam Griffin is still in disbelief over how quickly he was robbed of nearly $500,000 in cryptocurrencies. A scammer called using a real Google phone number to warn his Gmail account was being hacked, sent email security alerts directly from…| krebsonsecurity.com
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said today it seized the website and user database for RaidForums, an extremely popular English-language cybercrime forum that sold access to more than 10 billion consumer records stolen in some of the world's largest…| krebsonsecurity.com
Recent weeks have seen a sizable uptick in the number of phishing scams targeting U.S. Postal Service (USPS) customers. Here's a look at an extensive SMS phishing operation that tries to steal personal and financial data by spoofing the USPS,…| krebsonsecurity.com
Two men have been arrested for allegedly stealing data from and extorting dozens of companies that used the cloud data storage company Snowflake, but a third suspect -- a prolific hacker known as Kiberphant0m -- remains at large and continues…| krebsonsecurity.com
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…| krebsonsecurity.com
When KrebsOnSecurity last month explored how cybercriminals were using hacked email accounts at police departments worldwide to obtain warrantless Emergency Data Requests (EDRs) from social media and technology providers, many security experts called it a fundamentally unfixable problem. But don't…| krebsonsecurity.com
A 26-year-old man in Ontario, Canada has been arrested for allegedly stealing data from and extorting more than 160 companies that used the cloud data service Snowflake. On October 30, Canadian authorities arrested Alexander Moucka, a.k.a. Connor Riley Moucka of…| krebsonsecurity.com
The criminals responsible for launching phishing campaigns that netted dozens of employees and more than 100 computer systems last month at Wipro, India's third-largest IT outsourcing firm, also appear to have targeted a number of other competing providers, including Infosys…| krebsonsecurity.com
Not long ago, the ability to remotely track someone’s daily movements just by knowing their home address, employer, or place of worship was considered a powerful surveillance tool that should only be in the purview of nation states. But a…| krebsonsecurity.com
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.| krebsonsecurity.com
InfraGard, a program run by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to build cyber and physical threat information sharing partnerships with the private sector, this week saw its database of contact information on more than 80,000 members go up…| krebsonsecurity.com
Here's a clever new twist on an old email scam that could serve to make the con far more believable. The message purports to have been sent from a hacker who's compromised your computer and used your webcam to record…| krebsonsecurity.com
New details are emerging about a breach at National Public Data (NPD), a consumer data broker that recently spilled hundreds of millions of Americans' Social Security Numbers, addresses, and phone numbers online. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that another NPD data broker…| krebsonsecurity.com