Category Archives: Wired

Hacker Charged With Extorting Online Psychotherapy Service

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A 25-year-old Finnish man has been charged with extorting a once popular and now-bankrupt online psychotherapy company and its patients. Finnish authorities rarely name suspects in an investigation, but they were willing to make an exception for Julius “Zeekill” Kivimaki, a notorious hacker who — at the tender age of 17 — had been convicted of more than 50,000 cybercrimes, including data breaches, payment fraud, operating botnets, and calling in bomb threats. Continue reading Hacker Charged With Extorting Online Psychotherapy Service→

The Original APT: Advanced Persistent Teenagers

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Many organizations are already struggling to combat cybersecurity threats from ransomware purveyors and state-sponsored hacking groups, both of which tend to take days or weeks to pivot from an opportunistic malware infection to a full blown data breach. But few organizations have a playbook for responding to the kinds of virtual “smash and grab” attacks we’ve seen recently from LAPSUS$, a juvenile data extortion group whose short-lived, low-tech and remarkably effective tactics are putting some of the world’s biggest corporations on edge. Continue reading The Original APT: Advanced Persistent Teenagers→

Career Choice Tip: Cybercrime is Mostly Boring

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When law enforcement agencies tout their latest cybercriminal arrest, the defendant is often cast as a bravado outlaw engaged in sophisticated, lucrative, even exciting activity. But new research suggests that as cybercrime has become dominated by pay-for-service offerings, the vast majority of day-to-day activity needed to support these enterprises is in fact mind-numbingly boring and tedious, and that highlighting this reality may be a far more effective way combat cybercrime and steer offenders toward a better path. Continue reading Career Choice Tip: Cybercrime is Mostly Boring→

Who Owns Your Wireless Service? Crooks Do.

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Incessantly annoying and fraudulent robocalls. Corrupt wireless company employees taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to unlock and hijack mobile phone service. Wireless providers selling real-time customer location data, despite repeated promises to the contrary. A noticeable uptick in SIM-swapping attacks that lead to multi-million dollar cyberheists.

If you are somehow under the impression that you — the customer — are in control over the security, privacy and integrity of your mobile phone service, think again. And you’d be forgiven if you assumed the major wireless carriers or federal regulators had their hands firmly on the wheel. Continue reading Who Owns Your Wireless Service? Crooks Do.→

11/19/18: Dtex, Insider Threat, Privacy News Blog: Trump Signs CISA Legislation; Defending Against Culture; Surveillance: Freedom’s Killer

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Happy Thanksgiving! The holiday may equate to a short work week in the US but there is certainly no shortage of news breaking about cybersecurity, privacy and the insider threat. The biggest cybersecurity news out last week had to be passage of the Cyb… Continue reading 11/19/18: Dtex, Insider Threat, Privacy News Blog: Trump Signs CISA Legislation; Defending Against Culture; Surveillance: Freedom’s Killer→

Bug Bounty Hunter Ran ISP Doxing Service

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A Connecticut man who’s earned “bug bounty” rewards and public recognition from top telecom companies for finding and reporting security holes in their Web sites secretly operated a service that leveraged these same flaws to sell their customers’ personal data, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Continue reading Bug Bounty Hunter Ran ISP Doxing Service→

Wired Wireless Over Coax

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If it’s stupid and it works, then it’s not stupid. There’s no better evidence of that than [Tobias]’ networking setup.

He recently had to distribute Ethernet through a building, and there are a few ways to do that. You can use regular ‘ol twisted pair, or fiber, but in this case running new cables wasn’t possible. WiFi would be the next obvious choice, the distance was just a bit too far for ‘regular’ WiFi links. Ethernet over power lines was an option, but there are amateur radio operators in the house, and they put out a bunch of interference and …read more

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Hackaday Links: July 15, 2018

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Have you tried Altium CircuitMaker? Uh, you probably shouldn’t. [Dave] of EEVBlog fame informs us via a reliable source that CircuitMaker is intentionally crippled by adding a random sleep on high pad-count boards. The hilarious pseudocode suggested on the forum is if ((time.secs % 3) == 0) delayMicroseconds(padCount * ((rand() % 20) + 1));.Now, this is a rumor, however, I would assume [Dave] has a few back channels to Altium. Also, this assertation is supported by the documentation for CircuitStudio, which says, “While there are no ‘hard limits’ per se, the software has been engineered to make it impractical …read more

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