Showing only posts in Brian Krebs. Show all posts.

Drones to Diplomas: How Russia’s Largest Private University is Linked to a $25M Essay Mill

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A sprawling academic cheating network turbocharged by Google Ads that has generated nearly $25 million in revenue has curious ties to a Kremlin-connected oligarch whose Russian university builds drones for Russia’s war against Ukraine. The Nerdify homepage. The link between essay mills and Russian attack drones might seem …

SMS Phishers Pivot to Points, Taxes, Fake Retailers

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China-based phishing groups blamed for non-stop scam SMS messages about a supposed wayward package or unpaid toll fee are promoting a new offering, just in time for the holiday shopping season: Phishing kits for mass-creating fake but convincing e-commerce websites that convert customer payment card data into mobile wallets …

Meet Rey, the Admin of ‘Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters’

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A prolific cybercriminal group that calls itself “ Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters ” has dominated headlines this year by regularly stealing data from and publicly mass extorting dozens of major corporations. But the tables seem to have turned somewhat for “Rey,” the moniker chosen by the technical operator and public face of …

Is Your Android TV Streaming Box Part of a Botnet?

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On the surface, the Superbox media streaming devices for sale at retailers like BestBuy and Walmart may seem like a steal: They offer unlimited access to more than 2,200 pay-per-view and streaming services like Netflix, ESPN and Hulu, all for a one-time fee of around $400. But security …

Mozilla Says It’s Finally Done With Two-Faced Onerep

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In March 2024, Mozilla said it was winding down its collaboration with Onerep — an identity protection service offered with the Firefox web browser that promises to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites — after KrebsOnSecurity revealed Onerep’s founder had created dozens of people-search services and was continuing to …

The Cloudflare Outage May Be a Security Roadmap

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An intermittent outage at Cloudflare on Tuesday briefly knocked many of the Internet’s top destinations offline. Some affected Cloudflare customers were able to pivot away from the platform temporarily so that visitors could still access their websites. But security experts say doing so may have also triggered an …

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, November 2025 Edition

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Microsoft this week pushed security updates to fix more than 60 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software, including at least one zero-day bug that is already being exploited. Microsoft also fixed a glitch that prevented some Windows 10 users from taking advantage of an extra year …

Google Sues to Disrupt Chinese SMS Phishing Triad

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Google is suing more than two dozen unnamed individuals allegedly involved in peddling a popular China-based mobile phishing service that helps scammers impersonate hundreds of trusted brands, blast out text message lures, and convert phished payment card data into mobile wallets from Apple and Google. In a lawsuit filed …

Drilling Down on Uncle Sam’s Proposed TP-Link Ban

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The U.S. government is reportedly preparing to ban the sale of wireless routers and other networking gear from TP-Link Systems, a tech company that currently enjoys an estimated 50% market share among home users and small businesses. Experts say while the proposed ban may have more to do …

Cloudflare Scrubs Aisuru Botnet from Top Domains List

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For the past week, domains associated with the massive Aisuru botnet have repeatedly usurped Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft in Cloudflare’s public ranking of the most frequently requested websites. Cloudflare responded by redacting Aisuru domain names from their top websites list. The chief executive at Cloudflare says Aisuru …

Alleged Jabber Zeus Coder ‘MrICQ’ in U.S. Custody

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A Ukrainian man indicted in 2012 for conspiring with a prolific hacking group to steal tens of millions of dollars from U.S. businesses was arrested in Italy and is now in custody in the United States, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Sources close to the investigation say Yuriy Igorevich Rybtsov …

Aisuru Botnet Shifts from DDoS to Residential Proxies

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Aisuru, the botnet responsible for a series of record-smashing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks this year, recently was overhauled to support a more low-key, lucrative and sustainable business: Renting hundreds of thousands of infected Internet of Things (IoT) devices to proxy services that help cybercriminals anonymize their traffic. Experts says …

Canada Fines Cybercrime Friendly Cryptomus $176M

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Financial regulators in Canada this week levied $176 million in fines against Cryptomus, a digital payments platform that supports dozens of Russian cryptocurrency exchanges and websites hawking cybercrime services. The penalties for violating Canada’s anti money-laundering laws come ten months after KrebsOnSecurity noted that Cryptomus’s Vancouver street …

Email Bombs Exploit Lax Authentication in Zendesk

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Cybercriminals are abusing a widespread lack of authentication in the customer service platform Zendesk to flood targeted email inboxes with menacing messages that come from hundreds of Zendesk corporate customers simultaneously. Zendesk is an automated help desk service designed to make it simple for people to contact companies for …

Patch Tuesday, October 2025 ‘End of 10’ Edition

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Microsoft today released software updates to plug a whopping 172 security holes in its Windows operating systems, including at least two vulnerabilities that are already being actively exploited. October’s Patch Tuesday also marks the final month that Microsoft will ship security updates for Windows 10 systems. If you …

DDoS Botnet Aisuru Blankets US ISPs in Record DDoS

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The world’s largest and most disruptive botnet is now drawing a majority of its firepower from compromised Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices hosted on U.S. Internet providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, new evidence suggests. Experts say the heavy concentration of infected devices at U.S. providers is …

ShinyHunters Wage Broad Corporate Extortion Spree

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A cybercriminal group that used voice phishing attacks to siphon more than a billion records from Salesforce customers earlier this year has launched a website that threatens to publish data stolen from dozens of Fortune 500 firms if they refuse to pay a ransom. The group also claimed responsibility …

Feds Tie ‘Scattered Spider’ Duo to $115M in Ransoms

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U.S. prosecutors last week levied criminal hacking charges against 19-year-old U.K. national Thalha Jubair for allegedly being a core member of Scattered Spider, a prolific cybercrime group blamed for extorting at least $115 million in ransom payments from victims. The charges came as Jubair and an alleged …

Self-Replicating Worm Hits 180+ Software Packages

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At least 187 code packages made available through the JavaScript repository NPM have been infected with a self-replicating worm that steals credentials from developers and publishes those secrets on GitHub, experts warn. The malware, which briefly infected multiple code packages from the security vendor CrowdStrike, steals and publishes even …

Bulletproof Host Stark Industries Evades EU Sanctions

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In May 2025, the European Union levied financial sanctions on the owners of Stark Industries Solutions Ltd., a bulletproof hosting provider that materialized two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine and quickly became a top source of Kremlin-linked cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns. But new findings show those sanctions have done …

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, September 2025 Edition

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Microsoft Corp. today issued security updates to fix more than 80 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and software. There are no known “zero-day” or actively exploited vulnerabilities in this month’s bundle from Redmond, which nevertheless includes patches for 13 flaws that earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” label …

18 Popular Code Packages Hacked, Rigged to Steal Crypto

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At least 18 popular JavaScript code packages that are collectively downloaded more than two billion times each week were briefly compromised with malicious software today, after a developer involved in maintaining the projects was phished. The attack appears to have been quickly contained and was narrowly focused on stealing …

GOP Cries Censorship Over Spam Filters That Work

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The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week sent a letter to Google’s CEO demanding to know why Gmail was blocking messages from Republican senders while allegedly failing to block similar missives supporting Democrats. The letter followed media reports accusing Gmail of disproportionately flagging messages from …

The Ongoing Fallout from a Breach at AI Chatbot Maker Salesloft

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The recent mass-theft of authentication tokens from Salesloft, whose AI chatbot is used by a broad swath of corporate America to convert customer interaction into Salesforce leads, has left many companies racing to invalidate the stolen credentials before hackers can exploit them. Now Google warns the breach goes far …

Affiliates Flock to ‘Soulless’ Scam Gambling Machine

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Last month, KrebsOnSecurity tracked the sudden emergence of hundreds of polished online gaming and wagering websites that lure people with free credits and eventually abscond with any cryptocurrency funds deposited by players. We’ve since learned that these scam gambling sites have proliferated thanks to a new Russian affiliate …

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