Happy Seventh Birthday, KrebsOnSecurity!

Hard to believe it’s time to celebrate another go ’round the Sun for KrebsOnSecurity! Today marks exactly seven years since I left The Washington Post and started this here solo thing. And what a remarkable year 2016 has been!

The word cloud above includes a sampling of tags used in stories on KrebsOnSecurity throughout the past year. It’s been a wild one, riddled with huge attacks, big cybercriminal busts and of course a whole mess of data breaches.

The biggest attack of all — the 620 Gbps distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assault against this site on Sept. 22 — resulted in KrebsOnSecurity being unplugged for several days. The silver lining? I now have a stronger site and readership. Through it all, the community that has grown up around this site was extremely supportive and encouraging. I couldn’t be prouder of this community, so a huge THANK YOU to all of my readers, both new and old.

It’s fair to say that many of the subjects in the word cloud above are going to continue to haunt us in 2017, particularly ransomware, CEO fraud and DDoS attacks. I am hopeful to have more on the “who” behind the September attacks against this site in the New Year. I promise it’s going to be a story worth waiting for. Stay tuned.

Also, many of you have asked whether we can have a more responsive theme on this blog. It is true that the site hasn’t been updated appearance-wise since it launched seven years ago, and that it’s long overdue for a facelift. We were on track to have that done by today’s blog post, but for a variety of reasons this will have to wait until the early New Year. Thank you for your patience.

My aim from the beginning with this site has been to focus on producing original, impactful reporting on computer security and cybercrime, and to keep the content free for anyone and everyone. That remains my intention. For those of you who have Adblock installed, please consider adding an exception for my site: For security reasons (see malvertising for more info), this site has not allowed third-party content since late 2011, and all of the handful of ads that run here are hosted locally and have been fully vetted.

As always, below are links to some of the most-read stories on the site this year. Thanks again for your readership, encouragement and support!

Oct. 21: Hacked Cameras, DVRs Powered Today’s Massive Internet Outage

Oct. 3: Who Makes the IoT Things Under Attack?

Sept. 25: The Democratization of Censorship

Sept. 13: Secret Service Warns of ‘Periscope’ Skimmers

Sept. 10: Alleged vDOS Proprietors Arrested in Israel

Sept. 8: Israeli Online Attack Service ‘vDOS’ Earned $600,000 in Two Years

Aug. 26: Inside ‘The Attack that Almost Broke the Internet’

Feb. 18: This is Why People Fear the Internet of Things

Feb. 16: The Great EMV Fakeout: No Chip for You!

Jan. 30: Sources: Security Firm Norse Corp. Imploding

Tags: ceo fraud, DDoS, KrebsOnSecurity birthday, ransomware

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 29th, 2016 at 10:15 am and is filed under Other. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.