Category Archives: Breadcrumbs

Canadian Police Raid ‘Orcus RAT’ Author

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Canadian police last week raided the residence of a Toronto software developer responsible for authoring and selling “Orcus RAT,” a software product that’s been marketed on underground forums and used in countless malware attacks since its creation in 2015. Its author maintains Orcus is a legitimate Remote Administration Tool that is merely being abused, but security experts say it includes multiple features more typically seen in malware known as a Remote Access Trojan. Continue reading Canadian Police Raid ‘Orcus RAT’ Author→

Hackers Sell Access to Bait-and-Switch Empire

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Cybercriminals are auctioning off access to customer information stolen from an online data broker behind a dizzying array of bait-and-switch Web sites that sell access to a vast range of data on U.S. consumers, including DMV and arrest records, geneal… Continue reading Hackers Sell Access to Bait-and-Switch Empire→

773M Password ‘Megabreach’ is Years Old

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My inbox and Twitter messages positively lit up today with people forwarding stories from Wired and other publications about a supposedly new trove of nearly 773 million unique email addresses and 21 million unique passwords that were posted to a hacking forum. A story in The Guardian breathlessly dubbed it “the largest collection ever of breached data found.” But in an interview with the apparent seller, KrebsOnSecurity learned that it is not even close to the largest gathering of stolen data, and that it is at least two to three years old. Continue reading 773M Password ‘Megabreach’ is Years Old→

Who’s In Your Online Shopping Cart?

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Crooks who hack online merchants to steal payment card data are constantly coming up with crafty ways to hide their malicious code on Web sites. In Internet ages past, this often meant obfuscating it as giant blobs of gibberish text that is obvious even to the untrained eye. These days, a compromised e-commerce site is more likely to be seeded with a tiny snippet of code that invokes a hostile domain which appears harmless or that is virtually indistinguishable from the hacked site’s own domain. Continue reading Who’s In Your Online Shopping Cart?→

Who Is Agent Tesla?

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A powerful, easy-to-use password stealing program known as Agent Tesla has been infecting computers since 2014, but recently this malware strain has seen a surge in popularity — attracting more than 6,300 customers who pay monthly fees to license the software. Although Agent Tesla includes a multitude of features designed to help it remain undetected on host computers, the malware’s apparent creator seems to have done little to hide his real-life identity. Continue reading Who Is Agent Tesla?→

Who’s Behind the Screencam Extortion Scam?

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The sextortion email scam last month that invoked a real password used by each recipient and threatened to release embarrassing Webcam videos almost certainly was not the work of one criminal or even one group of criminals. Rather, it’s likely that additional spammers and scammers piled on with their own versions of the phishing email after noticing that some recipients were actually paying up. The truth is we may never find out who’s responsible, but it’s still fun to follow some promising early leads and see where they take us. Continue reading Who’s Behind the Screencam Extortion Scam?→

Will the Real Joker’s Stash Come Forward?

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For as long as scam artists have been around so too have opportunistic thieves who specialize in ripping off other scam artists. This is the story about a group of Pakistani Web site designers who apparently have made an impressive living impersonating some of the most popular and well known “carding” markets, or online stores that sell stolen credit cards. Continue reading Will the Real Joker’s Stash Come Forward?→

A Sobering Look at Fake Online Reviews

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In 2016, KrebsOnSecurity exposed a network of phony Web sites and fake online reviews that funneled those seeking help for drug and alcohol addiction toward rehab centers that were secretly affiliated with the Church of Scientology. Not long after the story ran, that network of bogus reviews disappeared from the Web. Over the past few months, however, the same prolific purveyor of these phantom sites and reviews appears to be back at it again, enlisting the help of Internet users and paying people $25-$35 for each fake listing. Continue reading A Sobering Look at Fake Online Reviews→

Mirai IoT Botnet Co-Authors Plead Guilty

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The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday unsealed the guilty pleas of two men first identified in January 2017 by KrebsOnSecurity as the likely co-authors of Mirai, a malware strain that remotely enslaves so-called “Internet of Things” devices such as security cameras, routers, and digital video recorders for use in large scale attacks designed to knock Web sites and entire networks offline (including multiple major attacks against this site). Continue reading Mirai IoT Botnet Co-Authors Plead Guilty→

Who Was the NSA Contractor Arrested for Leaking the ‘Shadow Brokers’ Hacking Tools?

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In August 2016, a mysterious entity calling itself “The Shadow Brokers” began releasing the first of several troves of classified documents and hacking tools purportedly stolen from “The Equation Group,” a highly advanced threat actor that is suspected of having ties to the U.S. National Security Agency. According to media reports, at least some of the information was stolen from the computer of an unidentified software developer and NSA contractor who was arrested in 2015 after taking the hacking tools home. In this post, we’ll examine clues left behind in the leaked Equation Group documents that may point to the identity of the mysterious software developer. Continue reading Who Was the NSA Contractor Arrested for Leaking the ‘Shadow Brokers’ Hacking Tools?→