Mastodon – Network Securitas

May 22, 2023

Interview With a Crypto Scam Investment Spammer

This post was originally published on this siteSocial networks are constantly battling inauthentic bot accounts that send direct messages to users promoting scam cryptocurrency investment platforms. What follows is an interview with a Russian hacker responsible for a series of aggressive crypto spam campaigns that recently prompted several large Mastodon communities to temporarily halt new registrations. According to the hacker, their spam software has been in private use until the last few weeks, when it was released as open source code. Renaud Chaput is a freelance programmer working on modernizing and scaling the Mastodon project infrastructure — including joinmastodon.org, mastodon.online, […]

May 26, 2023

Phishing Domains Tanked After Meta Sued Freenom

This post was originally published on this siteThe number of phishing websites tied to domain name registrar Freenom dropped precipitously in the months surrounding a recent lawsuit from social networking giant Meta, which alleged the free domain name provider has a long history of ignoring abuse complaints about phishing websites while monetizing traffic to those abusive domains. The volume of phishing websites registered through Freenom dropped considerably since the registrar was sued by Meta. Image: Interisle Consulting. Freenom is the domain name registry service provider for five so-called “country code top level domains” (ccTLDs), including .cf for the Central African […]

June 6, 2023

Service Rents Email Addresses for Account Signups

This post was originally published on this siteOne of the most expensive aspects of any cybercriminal operation is the time and effort it takes to constantly create large numbers of new throwaway email accounts. Now a new service offers to help dramatically cut costs associated with large-scale spam and account creation campaigns, by paying people to sell their email account credentials and letting customers temporarily rent access to a vast pool of established accounts at major providers. The service in question — kopeechka[.]store — is perhaps best described as a kind of unidirectional email confirmation-as-a-service that promises to “save your […]

April 10, 2024

Twitter’s Clumsy Pivot to X.com Is a Gift to Phishers

This post was originally published on this siteOn April 9, Twitter/X began automatically modifying links that mention “twitter.com” to read “x.com” instead. But over the past 48 hours, dozens of new domain names have been registered that demonstrate how this change could be used to craft convincing phishing links — such as fedetwitter[.]com, which until very recently rendered as fedex.com in tweets. The message displayed when one visits carfatwitter.com, which Twitter/X displayed as carfax.com in tweets and messages. A search at DomainTools.com shows at least 60 domain names have been registered over the past two days for domains ending in […]