email bomb

August 18, 2016

Massive Email Bombs Target .Gov Addresses

This post was originally published on this siteOver the weekend, unknown assailants launched a massive cyber attack aimed at flooding targeted dot-gov (.gov) email inboxes with subscription requests to thousands of email lists. According to experts, the attack — designed to render the targeted inboxes useless for a period of time — was successful largely thanks to the staggering number of email newsletters that don’t take the basic step of validating new signup requests. These attacks apparently have been going on at a low level for weeks, but they intensified tremendously over this past weekend. This most recent assault reportedly involved more […]
August 30, 2017

Twitter Bots Use Likes, RTs for Intimidation

This post was originally published on this siteI awoke this morning to find my account on Twitter (@briankrebs) had attracted almost 12,000 new followers overnight. Then I noticed I’d gained almost as many followers as the number of re-tweets (RTs) earned for a tweet I published on Tuesday. The tweet stated how every time I tweet something related to Russian President Vladimir Putin I get a predictable stream of replies that are in support of President Trump — even in cases when neither Trump nor the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign were even mentioned. This tweet about Putin generated more than 12,000 retweets and […]
April 28, 2020

Would You Have Fallen for This Phone Scam?

This post was originally published on this siteYou 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 transactions on your account — data that can then be abused to make their phone scams more believable and expose you to additional forms of identity theft. Last week, KrebsOnSecurity told the harrowing tale of a reader (a security expert, no less) who tried to […]