Many successful phishing attacks result in a financial loss or malware infection. But falling for some phishing scams, like those currently targeting Russians searching online for organizations that are fighting the Kremlin war machine, can cost you your freedom or your life. The real website of the Ukrainian paramilitary …

Authorities in at least two U.S. states last week independently announced arrests of Chinese nationals accused of perpetrating a novel form of tap-to-pay fraud using mobile devices. Details released by authorities so far indicate the mobile wallets being used by the scammers were created through online phishing scams …

A message posted on Monday to the homepage of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is the latest exhibit in the Trump administration’s continued disregard for basic cybersecurity protections. The message instructed recently-fired CISA employees to get in touch so they can be rehired and then …

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 of keyboard keys that causes Microsoft Windows to download …

Microsoft today issued more than 50 security updates for its various Windows operating systems, including fixes for a whopping six zero-day vulnerabilities that are already seeing active exploitation. Two of the zero-day flaws include CVE-2025-24991 and CVE-2025-24993, both vulnerabilities in NTFS, the default file system for Windows and Windows …

Authorities in India today arrested the alleged co-founder of Garantex, a cryptocurrency exchange sanctioned by the U.S. government in 2022 for facilitating tens of billions of dollars in money laundering by transnational criminal and cybercriminal organizations. Sources close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity the Lithuanian national Aleksej Besciokov …

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 this week, U.S. federal agents investigating a spectacular …

At 49, Branden Spikes isn’t just one of the oldest technologists who has been involved in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). As the current director of information technology at X/Twitter and an early hire at PayPal, Zip2, Tesla and SpaceX, Spikes is also among …

One of the most notorious providers of abuse-friendly “bulletproof” web hosting for cybercriminals has started routing its operations through networks run by the Russian antivirus and security firm Kaspersky Lab, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Security experts say the Russia-based service provider Prospero OOO (the triple O is the Russian version …

A U.S. Army soldier who pleaded guilty last week to leaking phone records for high-ranking U.S. government officials searched online for non-extradition countries and for an answer to the question “can hacking be treason?” prosecutors in the case said Wednesday. The government disclosed the details in a …

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 an ongoing effort by the world’s richest …

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 carding market. But a flurry of innovation from cybercrime groups in …

In mid-March 2024, KrebsOnSecurity revealed that the founder of the personal data removal service Onerep also founded dozens of people-search companies. Shortly after that investigation was published, Mozilla said it would stop bundling Onerep with the Firefox browser and wind down its partnership with the company. But nearly a …

Microsoft today issued security updates to fix at least 56 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software, including two zero-day flaws that are being actively exploited. All supported Windows operating systems will receive an update this month for a buffer overflow vulnerability that carries the catchy name …

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 necessary security clearances to do so. As today …

New mobile apps from the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek have remained among the top three “free” downloads for Apple and Google devices since their debut on Jan. 25, 2025. But experts caution that many of DeepSeek’s design choices — such as using hard-coded encryption keys, and sending …

The FBI joined authorities across Europe last week in seizing domain names for Cracked and Nulled, English-language cybercrime forums with millions of users that trafficked in stolen data, hacking tools and malware. An investigation into the history of these communities shows their apparent co-founders quite openly operate an Internet …

The FBI and authorities in The Netherlands this week seized dozens 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 Manipulaters,” have been the subject of three stories published here …

Image: Shutterstock, ArtHead. 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 outfit — a sprawling network tied …

Image: Shutterstock. Greg Meland. President Trump last week issued a flurry of executive orders that upended a number of government initiatives focused on improving the nation’s cybersecurity posture. The president fired all advisors from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Safety Review Board, called for the creation …

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 nearly five years until a security researcher spent $300 …

Residents across the United States are being inundated with text messages purporting to come from toll road operators like E-ZPass, warning that recipients face fines if a delinquent toll fee remains unpaid. Researchers say the surge in SMS spam coincides with new features added to a popular commercial phishing …

Microsoft today unleashed updates to plug a whopping 161 security vulnerabilities in Windows and related software, including three “zero-day” weaknesses that are already under active attack. Redmond’s inaugural Patch Tuesday of 2025 bundles more fixes than the company has shipped in one go since 2017. Rapid7 ‘s Adam …

Besieged by scammers seeking to phish user accounts over the telephone, Apple and Google frequently caution that they will never reach out unbidden to users this way. However, new details about the internal operations of a prolific voice phishing gang show the group routinely abuses legitimate services at Apple …

Federal authorities have arrested and indicted a 20-year-old U.S. Army soldier on suspicion of being Kiberphant0m, a cybercriminal who has been selling and leaking sensitive customer call records stolen earlier this year from AT&T and Verizon. As first reported by KrebsOnSecurity last month, the accused is a …