Collaborate Disseminate
A 22-year-old man convicted of cyberstalking and carrying out numerous bomb threats and swatting attacks — including a 2013 swatting incident at my home — was arrested Sunday morning in the Philippines after allegedly helping a friend dump the body o… Continue reading Serial Swatter and Stalker Mir Islam Arrested for Allegedly Dumping Body in River
Authorities in the United States this week brought criminal hacking charges against three men as part of an unprecedented, international takedown targeting 15 different “booter” or “stresser” sites — attack-for-hire services that helped paying customers launch tens of thousands of digital sieges capable of knocking Web sites and entire network providers offline. Continue reading Feds Charge Three in Mass Seizure of Attack-for-hire Services
Microsoft today released an emergency software patch to plug a critical security hole in its Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser that attackers are already using to break into Windows computers. Continue reading Microsoft Issues Emergency Fix for IE Zero Day
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 site. That… Continue reading A Chief Security Concern for Executive Teams
A new email extortion scam is making the rounds, threatening that someone has planted bombs within the recipient’s building that will be detonated unless a hefty bitcoin ransom is paid by the end of the business day.
The post Spammed Bomb Threat Hoax D… Continue reading Spammed Bomb Threat Hoax Demands Bitcoin
Is it fair to judge an organization’s information security posture simply by looking at its Internet-facing assets for weaknesses commonly sought after and exploited by attackers, such as outdated software or accidentally exposed data and devices? Fair… Continue reading Scanning for Flaws, Scoring for Security
Adobe and Microsoft each released updates today to tackle critical security weaknesses in their software. Microsoft’s December patch batch is relatively light, addressing more than three dozen vulnerabilities in Windows and related applications. Adobe … Continue reading Patch Tuesday, December 2018 Edition
Back in April 2015, I tweeted about receiving a letter via snail mail suggesting the search engine rankings for a domain registered in my name would suffer if I didn’t pay a bill for some kind of dubious-looking service I’d never heard of. But it wasn’t until the past week that it become clear how many organizations — including towns, cities and political campaigns — actually have fallen for this brazen scam. Continue reading How Internet Savvy are Your Leaders?
The alleged ringleader of a gang of cyber hooligans that made bomb threats against hundreds of schools and launched debilitating denial-of-service attacks against Web sites (including KrebsOnSecurity on multiple occasions) has been sentenced to three y… Continue reading Bomb Threat Hoaxer, DDos Boss Gets 3 Years
Software giant Citrix Systems recently forced a password reset for many users of its Sharefile content collaboration service, warning it would be doing this on a regular basis in response to password-guessing attacks that target people who re-use passwords across multiple Web sites. Many Sharefile users interpreted this as a breach at Citrix and/or Sharefile, but the company maintains that’s not the case. Here’s a closer look at what happened, and some ideas about how to avoid a repeat of this scenario going forward. Continue reading A Breach, or Just a Forced Password Reset?