Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) – Page 11

FBI warns that Hive ransomware hackers are calling victims by phone

Posted on August 27, 2021 by Jeff Stone

Americans already trying to avoid calls from telemarketers, call support scammers and long-winded in-laws now have another reason to ignore that ringing phone: ransomware hackers. Scammers affiliated with a digital extortion outfit known as Hive are using phone calls to dial victims who are infected with a malicious software strain that locks up their files until they agree to pay a hostage fee, according to an August 25 FBI alert. Investigators first observed hackers deploying the malware in June, with attackers leveraging Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol to infect business networks. In some cases, if victims don’t pay the demanded fee within two to six days, they have reported receiving phone calls from the hacking group. It’s the latest iteration of a personal tactic pioneered by other gangs — Maze, Conti and Ryuk, for instance — in which malware operators are thought to outsource tasks to a call center. Security firms […]

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Scammers impersonate Europol chief in an effort to defraud Belgians

Posted on August 26, 2021 by Sean Lyngaas

Scammers are impersonating the head of Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, in an attempt to spook victims into handing over their financial information. The Belgian police have received hundreds of reports of emails purporting to come from Catherine De Bolle, Europol’s executive director, according to the Brussels Times. The email accuses the recipient of child pornography and sex trafficking, and then attempts to steal the PayPal account credentials. The email threatens to initiate criminal prosecution against the recipient unless they reply within 72 hours. Europol, which had warned about this type of scam in April, again urged internet users on Thursday not to fall for the gimmick. “Our executive director would never contact members of the public threatening individuals with opening a criminal investigation,” tweeted Europol, which does investigate lots of actual cybercrime. Cybercrooks often impersonate the law enforcement agencies that hunt them in an effort to intimidate […]

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Ohio man pleads guilty to role in $300-million cryptocurrency laundering service

Posted on August 18, 2021 by Sean Lyngaas

A 38-year-old Ohio man has pleaded guilty to his role in a cryptocurrency laundering service that moved some $300 million on behalf of dark web marketplaces and other clients, the Justice Department said Wednesday. Larry Dean Harmon admitted to running Helix, a popular service for concealing the source of bitcoin transactions, from 2014 to 2017. Helix allegedly worked with AlphaBay, a notorious $1 billion marketplace for hacking tools and drugs that security researchers recently warned could be coming back online. Harmon faces up to 20 years in prison and a $500,000 fine, according to the Justice Department. A lawyer for Harmon could not be reached for comment. As part of his plea deal, Harmon agreed to forfeit more than $200 million in bitcoin. After a multi-year investigation of Helix, U.S. law enforcement arrested Harmon in his hometown of Akron in February, 2020. The U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has […]

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SEC, education company Pearson settle charges over 2018 security incident for $1 million

Posted on August 16, 2021 by Tim Starks

British educational software company Pearson settled charges with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for $1 million over it “misleading” handling of a 2018 data breach, the SEC announced Monday. The SEC based its charges on a July, 2019 disclosure to the agency that a hypothetical “data privacy incident” could “result in a major data privacy or confidentiality breach” when the company had in fact already been breached and known about it for months, among other statements. In its public response to the incident, which involved the theft of student information and administrator log-in accounts for 13,000 district, school and university customer accounts, Pearson also left out details about the extent of the stolen information, the SEC said. Pearson claimed to have “strict protections” in place even though it had left a critical vulnerability unpatched for six months that the hackers exploited, along with other poor security practices cited by […]

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Four years after FBI shut it down, AlphaBay dark web marketplace claims it’s back in business

Posted on August 11, 2021 by Sean Lyngaas

It might be time to update the obituary of one of the web’s most notorious marketplaces for hacking tools and drugs. Four years after the FBI shut down AlphaBay, which registered a reported $1 billion in transactions, a scammer is touting the launch of a new version of the illicit marketplace, according to threat intelligence firm Flashpoint. In an online posting earlier this week, someone claiming to be one of the original moderators of AlphaBay said the marketplace was coming back into business, Flashpoint researchers noted. Among the offerings on the revamped AlphaBay, according to the posting, will be the source code of a hacking tool that steals banking credentials, and money, from victims. U.S. and European law enforcement agencies have in the last year conducted a series of crackdowns on popular dark-web forums. But the alleged resurrection of AlphaBay, dubbed the Amazon.com of the dark web, shows how difficult it can […]

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US agencies circulate warning about ‘aggressive’ Chinese hacking effort to steal secrets from a range of targets

Posted on July 16, 2021 by Sean Lyngaas

Chinese government-backed hackers’ rampant appetite for intellectual property represents a “major threat to U.S. and allied cyberspace assets,” according to a U.S. government assessment obtained by CyberScoop. The analysis from the National Security Agency, FBI and Department of Homeland Security’s cyber agency warns that Beijing-linked hackers are still “aggressively” targeting U.S. and allied defense and semiconductor firms, medical institutions and universities to steal sensitive corporate data and personally identifiable information. The advisory is a reminder that, despite the Biden administration’s heightened attention on ransomware gangs based in Russia, Chinese state-backed hacking remains a formidable threat to U.S. interests. The document is scheduled to be released publicly in the coming weeks, perhaps as soon as Monday. “NSA, [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency], and FBI have observed increasingly sophisticated Chinese state-sponsored cyber activity targeting U.S. political, economic, military, educational, and [critical infrastructure] personnel and organizations,” says the advisory. “These cyber operations […]

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Houston man sentenced to 7 years for attempted $2 million romance scam

Posted on July 8, 2021 by Tim Starks

A U.S. federal judge sentenced a Nigerian national to 87 months in prison for his role in trying to steal more than $2 million from victims via romance scams and spoofed email requests for wire transfer payments. The judge on Wednesday also ordered Akhabue Ehis Onoimoimilin, who lives in Houston, to pay back nearly $900,000 to victims of the money laundering scheme to which he pleaded guilty. The indictment in the case indicates that Onoimoimilin and a co-defendant, whose name is redacted, caused $1.7 million in actual losses from the scheme. Onoimoimilin’s role involved opening bank accounts in the name of “David Harrison” to launder money for co-conspirators. Law enforcement identified more than $400,000 in attempted losses in the accounts, for which Onoimoimilin received 10 to 15% of the funds. Onoimoimilin opened the accounts in 2015, according to prosecutors. The indictment offers few details on the romance and business email […]

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US, UK accuse Russian military hackers of battering-ram password attacks against hundreds of targets

Posted on July 1, 2021 by Tim Starks

For two years, Russian military hackers have been bombarding hundreds of targets worldwide with passwords to gain access to their networks, making use of a popular open-source tool for managing application workloads, U.S. and U.K. agencies warned in an advisory Thursday. The Russian agency deploys a Kubernetes cluster — a set of worker machines — to conduct their brute force “password spray” attacks that guess commonly-used passwords to get into target networks, according to the advisory from the National Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI and the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre. It’s the alleged handiwork of Russia’s General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) 85th Main Special Service Center, military unit 26165. The hackers, often described as Fancy Bear or APT28, have beeen blamed for a number of high profile intrustions, most prominently for interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The […]

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International cops seize DoubleVPN, a service allegedly meant to shield ransomware attacks from investigators

Posted on June 30, 2021 by Jeff Stone

A security tool that hackers used to disguise their ransomware attacks, email scams and other nefarious activity is offline following a global law enforcement action. Servers and web domains belonging to DoubleVPN, a virtual private network (VPN), were seized during an investigation by the Dutch National Police, the FBI, the U.K.’s National Crime Agency and Europol, authorities said Wednesday. Accused cybercriminals advertised DoubleVPN throughout Russian and English-speaking hacker markets as a means of helping customers hide their location and internet traffic from police for prices as low as $25. “Law enforcement gained access to the servers of DoubleVPN and seized personal information, logs and statistics kept by DoubleVPN about all of its customers,” a seizure notice on the site advised. “DoubleVPN’s owners failed to provide the services they promised.” The police announcement did not identify the specific ransomware gangs that allegedly used DoubleVPN. Internet users throughout the world rely on […]

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