National Crime Agency – Network Securitas

November 4, 2016

Ne’er-Do-Well News and Cyber Justice

This post was originally published on this siteWay back in the last millennium when I was a lowly copy aide at The Washington Post, I pitched the Metro Section editor on an idea for new column: “And the Good News Is…” The editor laughed me out of her office. But I still think it’s a decent idea — particularly in the context of cybersecurity — to periodically highlight the good news when people allegedly responsible for spewing so much badness online are made to face justice. NCA officials lead away a suspect arrested in this week’s raids. Image: NCA. In the United Kingdom this week, […]

November 17, 2016

Adobe Fined $1M in Multistate Suit Over 2013 Breach; No Jail for Spamhaus Attacker

This post was originally published on this siteAdobe will pay just $1 million to settle a lawsuit filed by 15 state attorneys general over its huge 2013 data breach that exposed payment records on approximately 38 million people. In other news, the 39-year-old Dutchman responsible for coordinating an epic, weeks-long distributed denial-of-service attack against anti-spam provider Spamhaus in 2013 will avoid any jail time for his crimes thanks to a court ruling in Amsterdam this week. On Oct. 3, 2013, KrebsOnSecurity broke the story that Adobe had just suffered a breach in which hackers siphoned usernames, passwords and payment card data on 38 […]

April 25, 2018

DDoS-for-Hire Service Webstresser Dismantled

This post was originally published on this siteAuthorities in the U.S., U.K. and the Netherlands on Tuesday took down popular online attack-for-hire service WebStresser.org and arrested its alleged administrators. Investigators say that prior to the takedown, the service had more than 136,000 registered users and was responsible for launching somewhere between four and six million attacks over the past three years. The action, dubbed “Operation Power Off,” targeted WebStresser.org (previously Webstresser.co), one of the most active services for launching point-and-click distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. WebStresser was one of many so-called “booter” services — virtual hired muscle that anyone can rent to knock nearly […]

September 6, 2018

Leader of DDoS-for-Hire Gang Pleads Guilty to Bomb Threats

This post was originally published on this siteA 19-year-old man from the United Kingdom who headed a cybercriminal group whose motto was “Feds Can’t Touch Us” pleaded guilty this week to making bomb threats against thousands of schools. On Aug. 31, officers with the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) arrested Hertfordshire resident George Duke-Cohan, who admitted making bomb threats to thousands of schools and a United Airlines flight traveling from the U.K. to San Francisco last month. One of many tweets from the attention-starved Apophis Squad, which launched multiple DDoS attacks against KrebsOnsecurity and Protonmail over the past few months. Duke-Cohan — […]