NY Payroll Company Vanishes With $35 Million

MyPayrollHR, a now defunct cloud-based payroll processing firm based in upstate New York, abruptly ceased operations this past week after stiffing employees at thousands of companies. The ongoing debacle, which allegedly involves malfeasance on the part of the payroll company’s CEO, resulted i...

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Feds Allege Adconion Employees Hijacked IP Addresses for Spamming

Federal prosecutors in California have filed criminal charges against four employees of Adconion Direct, an email advertising firm, alleging they unlawfully hijacked vast swaths of Internet addresses and used them in large-scale spam campaigns. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that the charges are likely...

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Forced Password Reset? Check Your Assumptions

Almost weekly now I hear from an indignant reader who suspects a data breach at a Web site they frequent that has just asked the reader to reset their password. Further investigation almost invariably reveals that the password reset demand was not the result of a breach but rather the site’s e...

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The Rise of “Bulletproof” Residential Networks

Cybercrooks increasingly are anonymizing their malicious traffic by routing it through residential broadband and wireless data connections. Traditionally, those connections have been mainly hacked computers, mobile phones, or home routers. But this story is about so-called “bulletproof residen...

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Meet Bluetana, the Scourge of Pump Skimmers

“Bluetana,” a new mobile app that looks for Bluetooth-based payment card skimmers hidden inside gas pumps, is helping police and state employees more rapidly and accurately locate compromised fuel stations across the nation, a study released this week suggests. Data collected in the cour...

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iNSYNQ Ransom Attack Began With Phishing Email

A ransomware outbreak that hit QuickBooks cloud hosting firm iNSYNQ in mid-July appears to have started with an email phishing attack that snared an employee working in sales for the company, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. It also looks like the intruders spent roughly ten days rooting aroun...

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Who Owns Your Wireless Service? Crooks Do.

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 i...

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What We Can Learn from the Capital One Hack

On Monday, a former Amazon employee was arrested and charged with stealing more than 100 million consumer applications for credit from Capital One. Since then, many have speculated the breach was perhaps the result of a previously unknown “zero-day” flaw, or an “insi...

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Neo-Nazi SWATters Target Dozens of Journalists

Nearly three dozen journalists at a broad range of major publications have been targeted by a far-right group that maintains a Deep Web database listing the personal information of people who threaten their views. This group specializes in encouraging others to harass those targeted by their ire, an...

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What You Should Know About the Equifax Data Breach Settlement

Big-three credit bureau Equifax has reportedly agreed to pay at least $650 million to settle lawsuits stemming from a 2017 breach that let intruders steal personal and financial data on roughly 148 million Americans. Here’s a brief primer that attempts to break down what this settlement means ...

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Party Like a Russian, Carder’s Edition

“It takes a certain kind of man with a certain reputationTo alleviate the cash from a whole entire nation…” KrebsOnSecurity has seen some creative yet truly bizarre ads for dodgy services in the cybercrime underground, but the following animated advertisement for a popular credit ...

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FEC: Campaigns Can Use Discounted Cybersecurity Services

The U.S. Federal Election Commission (FEC) said today political campaigns can accept discounted cybersecurity services from companies without running afoul of existing campaign finance laws, provided those companies already do the same for other non-political entities. The decision comes amid much j...

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Who’s Behind the GandCrab Ransomware?

The crooks behind an affiliate program that paid cybercriminals to install the destructive and wildly successful GandCrab ransomware strain announced on May 31, 2019 they were terminating the program after allegedly having earned more than $2 billion in extortion payouts from victims. What foll...

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Report: No ‘Eternal Blue’ Exploit Found in Baltimore City Ransomware

For almost the past month, key computer systems serving the government of Baltimore, Md. have been held hostage by a ransomware strain known as “Robbinhood.” Media publications have cited sources saying the Robbinhood version that hit Baltimore city computers was powered by “Eterna...

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NY Investigates Exposure of 885 Million Mortgage Documents

New York regulators are investigating a weakness that exposed 885 million mortgage records at First American Financial Corp. [NYSE:FAF] as the first test of the state’s strict new cybersecurity regulation. That measure, which went into effect in March 2019 and is considered among the toughest ...

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Canada Uses Civil Anti-Spam Law in Bid to Fine Malware Purveyors

Canadian government regulators are using the country’s powerful new anti-spam law to pursue hefty fines of up to a million dollars against Canadian citizens suspected of helping to spread malicious software. In March 2019, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) ...

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Should Failing Phish Tests Be a Fireable Offense?

Would your average Internet user would be any more vigilant against phishing scams if he or she faced the real possibility of losing their job after falling for one too many of these emails? Recently, I met someone at a conference who said his employer had in fact terminated employees for such repea...

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Account Hijacking Forum OGusers Hacked

Ogusers[.]com — a forum popular among people involved in hijacking online accounts and conducting SIM swapping attacks to seize control over victims’ phone numbers — has itself been hacked, exposing the email addresses, hashed passwords, IP addresses and private messages for nearly...

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Credit Union Sues Fintech Giant Fiserv Over Security Claims

A Pennsylvania credit union is suing financial industry technology giant Fiserv, alleging that “baffling” security vulnerabilities in the company’s software are “wreaking havoc” on its customers. The credit union said the investigation that fueled the lawsuit was prompt...

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Data: E-Retail Hacks More Lucrative Than Ever

For many years and until quite recently, credit card data stolen from online merchants has been worth far less in the cybercrime underground than cards pilfered from hacked brick-and-mortar stores. But new data suggests that over the past year, the economics of supply-and-demand have helped to doubl...

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