Europe’s Largest Private Hospital Operator Fresenius Hit by Ransomware

Fresenius, Europe’s largest private hospital operator and a major provider of dialysis products and services that are in such high demand thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, has been hit in a ransomware cyber attack on its technology systems. The company said the incident has limited some of its ...

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How Cybercriminals are Weathering COVID-19

In many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a boon to cybercriminals: With unprecedented numbers of people working from home and anxious for news about the virus outbreak, it’s hard to imagine a more target-rich environment for phishers, scammers and malware purveyors. In addition, many crook...

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Would You Have Fallen for This Phone Scam?

You may have heard that today’s phone fraudsters like to use use caller ID spoofing services to make their scam calls seem more believable. But you probably didn’t know that these fraudsters also can use caller ID spoofing to trick your bank into giving up information about recent transa...

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Unproven Coronavirus Therapy Proves Cash Cow for Shadow Pharmacies

Many of the same shadowy organizations that pay people to promote male erectile dysfunction drugs via spam and hacked websites recently have enjoyed a surge in demand for medicines used to fight malaria, lupus and arthritis, thanks largely to unfounded suggestions that these therapies can help ...

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When in Doubt: Hang Up, Look Up, & Call Back

Many security-conscious people probably think they’d never fall for a phone-based phishing scam. But if your response to such a scam involves anything other than hanging up and calling back the entity that claims to be calling, you may be in for a rude awakening. Here’s how one security ...

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Who’s Behind the “Reopen” Domain Surge?

The past few weeks have seen a large number of new domain registrations beginning with the word “reopen” and ending with U.S. city or state names. The largest number of them were created just hours after President Trump sent a series of all-caps tweets urging citizens to “liberate&...

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Sipping from the Coronavirus Domain Firehose

Security experts are poring over thousands of new Coronavirus-themed domain names registered each day, but this often manual effort struggles to keep pace with the flood of domains invoking the virus to promote malware and phishing sites, as well as non-existent healthcare products and charities. As...

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COVID-19 Has United Cybersecurity Experts, But Will That Unity Survive the Pandemic?

The Coronavirus has prompted thousands of information security professionals to volunteer their skills in upstart collaborative efforts aimed at frustrating cybercriminals who are seeking to exploit the crisis for financial gain. Whether it’s helping hospitals avoid becoming the next ransomwar...

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday, April 2020 Edition

Microsoft today released updates to fix 113 security vulnerabilities in its various Windows operating systems and related software. Those include at least three flaws that are actively being exploited, as well as two others which were publicly detailed prior to today, potentially giving attackers a ...

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New IRS Site Could Make it Easy for Thieves to Intercept Some Stimulus Payments

The U.S. federal government is now in the process of sending Economic Impact Payments by direct deposit to millions of Americans. Most who are eligible for payments can expect to have funds direct-deposited into the same bank accounts listed on previous years’ tax filings sometime next week. T...

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Microsoft Buys Corp.com So Bad Guys Can’t

In February, KrebsOnSecurity told the story of a private citizen auctioning off the dangerous domain corp.com for the starting price of $1.7 million. Domain experts called corp.com dangerous because years of testing showed whoever wields it would have access to an unending stream of passwords, email...

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‘War Dialing’ Tool Exposes Zoom’s Password Problems

As the Coronavirus pandemic continues to force people to work from home, countless companies are now holding daily meetings using videoconferencing services from Zoom. But without the protection of a password, there’s a decent chance your next Zoom meeting could be “Zoom bombed” &m...

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Phish of GoDaddy Employee Jeopardized Escrow.com, Among Others

A spear-phishing attack this week hooked a customer service employee at GoDaddy.com, the world’s largest domain name registrar, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The incident gave the phisher the ability to view and modify key customer records, access that was used to change domain settings fo...

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Annual Protest to ‘Fight Krebs’ Raises €150K+

In 2018, KrebsOnSecurity unmasked the creators of Coinhive — a now-defunct cryptocurrency mining service that was being massively abused by cybercriminals — as the administrators of a popular German language image-hosting forum. In protest of that story, forum members donated hundreds of...

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Russians Shut Down Huge Card Fraud Ring

Federal investigators in Russia have charged at least 25 people accused of operating a sprawling international credit card theft ring. Cybersecurity experts say the raid included the charging of a major carding kingpin thought to be tied to dozens of carding shops and to some of the bigger data brea...

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US Government Sites Give Bad Security Advice

Many U.S. government Web sites now carry a message prominently at the top of their home pages meant to help visitors better distinguish between official U.S. government properties and phishing pages. Unfortunately, part of that message is misleading and may help perpetuate a popular misunderstanding...

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Privacy

Privacy is more than just settings in your Social Media account or using the Tor Browser. Your data and actions are collected in a variety of ways. The more aware you are of just how much of your data is collected, the better you can protect it.

Who’s Behind the ‘Web Listings’ Mail Scam?

In December 2018, KrebsOnSecurity looked at how dozens of U.S. political campaigns, cities and towns had paid a shady company called Web Listings Inc. after receiving what looked like a bill for search engine optimization (SEO) services rendered on behalf of their domain names. The story concluded t...

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Security Breach Disrupts Fintech Firm Finastra

Finastra, a company that provides a range of technology solutions to banks worldwide, said it was shutting down key systems in response to a security breach discovered Friday morning. The company’s public statement and notice to customers does not mention the cause of the outage, but their res...

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Zxyel Flaw Powers New Mirai IoT Botnet Strain

In February, hardware maker Zyxel fixed a zero-day vulnerability in its routers and VPN firewall products after KrebsOnSecurity told the company the flaw was being abused by attackers to break into devices. This week, security researchers said they spotted that same vulnerability being exploited by ...

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