Hard to believe we’ve gone another revolution around the Sun: Today marks the 9th anniversary of KrebsOnSecurity.com! This past year featured some 150 blog posts, but as usual the biggest contribution to this site came from the amazing community of… Read More »
A 22-year-old man convicted of cyberstalking and carrying out numerous bomb threats and swatting attacks — including a 2013 swatting incident at my home — was arrested Sunday morning in the Philippines after allegedly helping a friend dump the body of a housemate into a local river.
Authorities in the United States this week brought criminal hacking charges against three men as part of an unprecedented, international takedown targeting 15 different “booter” or “stresser” sites — attack-for-hire services that helped paying customers launch tens of thousands of digital sieges capable of knocking Web sites and entire network providers offline.
Microsoft today released an emergency software patch to plug a critical security hole in its Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser that attackers are already using to break into Windows computers.
Virtually all companies like to say they take their customers’ privacy and security seriously, make it a top priority, blah blah. But you’d be forgiven if you couldn’t tell this by studying the executive leadership page of each company’s Web site. That’s because very few of the world’s biggest companies list any security executives in their highest ranks. Even among top tech firms, less than half list a chief technology officer (CTO). This post explores some reasons why this is the case, and why it can’t change fast enough.
KrebsOnSecurity reviewed the Web sites for the global top 100 companies by market value, and found just five percent of top 100 firms listed a chief information security officer (CISO) or chief security officer (CSO). Only a little more than a third even listed a CTO in their executive leadership pages.
A new email extortion scam is making the rounds, threatening that someone has planted bombs within the recipient’s building that will be detonated unless a hefty bitcoin ransom is paid by the end of the business day.
Is it fair to judge an organization’s information security posture simply by looking at its Internet-facing assets for weaknesses commonly sought after and exploited by attackers, such as outdated software or accidentally exposed data and devices? Fair or not, a number of nascent efforts are using just such an approach to derive security scores for companies and entire industries. What’s remarkable is how many organizations don’t make an effort to view their public online assets as the rest of the world sees them — until it’s too late.
Adobe and Microsoft each released updates today to tackle critical security weaknesses in their software. Microsoft’s December patch batch is relatively light, addressing more than three dozen vulnerabilities in Windows and related applications. Adobe has issued security fixes for its Acrobat and PDF Reader products, and has a patch for yet another zero-day flaw in Flash Player that is already being exploited in the wild.
Back in April 2015, I tweeted about receiving a letter via snail mail suggesting the search engine rankings for a domain registered in my name would suffer if I didn’t pay a bill for some kind of dubious-looking service I’d never heard of. But it wasn’t until the past week that it become clear how many organizations — including towns, cities and political campaigns — actually have fallen for this brazen scam.
The alleged ringleader of a gang of cyber hooligans that made bomb threats against hundreds of schools and launched debilitating denial-of-service attacks against Web sites (including KrebsOnSecurity on multiple occasions) has been sentenced to three years in a U.K. prison, and faces the possibility of additional charges from U.S.-based law enforcement officials.
