The unprecedented volume of unemployment insurance fraud witnessed in 2020 hasn’t abated, although news coverage of the issue has largely been pushed off the front pages by other events. But the ID theft problem is coming to the fore once again: Countless Americans will soon be receiving notices from state regulators saying they owe thousands of dollars in taxes on benefits they never received last year.
U.S. and Bulgarian authorities this week seized the darkweb site used by the NetWalker ransomware cybercrime group to publish data stolen from its victims. In connection with the seizure, a Canadian national suspected of extorting more than $27 million through the spreading of NetWalker was charged in a Florida court.
Authorities across Europe on Tuesday said they’d seized control over Emotet, a prolific malware strain and cybercrime-as-service operation. Investigators say the action could help quarantine more than a million Microsoft Windows systems currently compromised with malware tied to Emotet infections.
Parler, the beleaguered social network advertised as a “free speech” alternative to Facebook and Twitter, has had a tough month. Apple and Google removed the Parler app from its stores, and Amazon blocked the platform from using its hosting services. Parler has since found a home in DDoS-Guard, a Russian digital infrastructure company. But now it appears DDoS-Guard is about to be relieved of more than two-thirds of the Internet address space the company leases to clients — including the Internet addresses currently occupied by Parler.
A hacker serving a 20-year sentence for stealing personal data on 1,300 U.S. military and government employees and giving it to an Islamic State hacker group in 2015 has been charged once again with fraud and identity theft. The new charges have derailed plans to deport him under compassionate release because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Joker’s Stash, by some accounts the largest underground shop for selling stolen credit card and identity data, says it’s closing up shop effective mid-February 2021. The announcement came on the heels of a turbulent year for the major cybercrime store, and just weeks after U.S. and European authorities seized a number of its servers.
Microsoft today released updates to plug more than 80 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, including one that is actively being exploited and another which was disclosed prior to today. Ten of the flaws earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating, meaning they could be exploited by malware or miscreants to seize remote control over unpatched systems with little or no interaction from Windows users.
New research into the malware that set the stage for the megabreach at IT vendor SolarWinds shows the perpetrators spent months inside the company’s software development labs honing their attack before inserting malicious code into updates that SolarWinds then shipped to thousands of customers. More worrisome, the research suggests the insidious methods used by the intruders to subvert the company’s software development pipeline could be repurposed against many other major software providers.
Ubiquiti, a major vendor of cloud-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as routers, network video recorders, security cameras and access control systems, is urging customers to change their passwords and enable multi-factor authentication. The company says an incident at a third-party cloud provider may have exposed customer account information and credentials used to remotely manage Ubiquiti gear.
The ongoing breach affecting thousands of organizations that relied on backdoored products by network software firm SolarWinds may have jeopardized the privacy of countless sealed court documents on file with the U.S. federal court system, according to a memo released Wednesday by the Administrative Office (AO) of the U.S. Courts.
