On Wednesday, KrebsOnSecurity was hit with a fairly large attack which leveraged a feature in more than 42,000 blogs running the popular WordPress content management system (this blog runs on WordPress). This post is an effort to spread the word to other WordPress users to ensure their blogs aren’t used in attacks going forward.
For the second time since Aug. 2013, online retailer NoMoreRack.com has hired a computer forensics team after being notified by Discover about a potential breach of customer card data, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.
In October 2013, KrebsOnSecurity published an exclusive story detailing how a Vietnamese man running an online identity theft service bought personal and financial records on Americans directly from a company owned by Experian, one of the three major U.S. credit bureaus. Today’s story looks deeper at the damage wrought in this colossal misstep by one of the nation’s largest data brokers.
Jam and jelly maker Smucker’s last week shuttered its online store, notifying visitors that the site was being retooled because of a security breach that jeopardized customers’ credit card data. Closer examination of the attack suggests that the company was but one of several dozen firms — including at least one credit card processor — hacked last year by the same criminal gang that infiltrated some of the world’s biggest data brokers.
First American Bank in Illinois is urging residents and tourists alike to avoid paying for cab rides in Chicago with credit or debit cards, warning that an ongoing data breach seems to be connected with card processing systems used by a large number of taxis in the Windy City.
Last year’s breach at Target Corp. flooded underground markets with millions of stolen credit and debit cards. In the days surrounding the breach disclosure, the cards carried unusually high price tags — in large part because few banks had gotten around to canceling any of them yet. Today, two months after the breach, the number of unsold stolen cards that haven’t been cancelled by issuing banks is rapidly shrinking, forcing the miscreants behind this historic heist to unload huge volumes of cards onto underground markets and at cut-rate prices.
KrebsOnSecurity has been targeted by countless denial-of-service attacks intended to knock it offline. Earlier this week, KrebsOnSecurity was hit by easily the most massive and intense such attack yet — a nearly 200 Gpbs assault leverging a simple attack method that industry experts is becoming alarmingly common.
State authorities in Florida on Thursday announced criminal charges targeting three men who allegedly ran illegal businesses moving large amounts of cash in and out of the Bitcoin virtual currency. Experts say this is the first case in which Bitcoin vendors have been prosecuted under state anti-money laundering laws, and that prosecutions like these could smother one of the last remaining avenues for purchasing Bitcoins anonymously.
Ever since news broke that thieves stole more than 40 million debit and credit card accounts from Target using a strain of Point-Of-Sale malware known as BlackPOS, much speculation has swirled around unanswered questions, such as how this malware was introduced into the network, and what mechanisms were used to infect thousands of Target’s cash registers.
An examination of the malware used in the Target breach suggests that the attackers may have taken advantage of a poorly secured feature built into a widely-used IT management software product that was running on the retailer’s internal network.
