Author Archives: BrianKrebs

How to Bury a Major Breach Notification

February 21, 2017
88 Comments

Amid the hustle and bustle of the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco last week, researchers at RSA released a startling report that received very little press coverage relative to its overall importance. The report detailed a malware campaign that piggybacked on a popular piece of software used by system administrators at some of the nation’s largest companies. Incredibly, the report did not name the affected software, and the vendor in question has apparently chosen to bury its breach disclosure. This post is an attempt to remedy that.

February Updates from Adobe, Microsoft

February 19, 2017
44 Comments

A handful of readers have inquired as to the whereabouts of Microsoft’s usual monthly patches for Windows and related software. Microsoft opted to delay releasing any updates until next month, even though there is a zero-day vulnerability in Windows going around. However, Adobe did push out updates this week as per usual to fix critical issues in its Flash Player software

Men Who Sent Swat Team, Heroin to My Home Sentenced

February 17, 2017
58 Comments

It’s been a remarkable week for cyber justice. On Thursday, a Ukrainian man who hatched a plan in 2013 to send heroin to my home and then call the cops when the drugs arrived was sentenced to 41 months in prison for unrelated cybercrime charges. Separately, a 19-year-old American who admitted to being part of a hacker group that sent a heavily-armed police force to my home in 2013 was sentenced to three years probation.

Who Ran Leakedsource.com?

February 15, 2017
96 Comments

Late last month, multiple news outlets reported that unspecified law enforcement officials had seized the servers for Leakedsource.com, perhaps the largest online collection of usernames and passwords leaked or stolen in some of the worst data breaches — including billions of credentials for accounts at top sites like LinkedIn, Myspace, and Yahoo.

In a development that may turn out to be deeply ironic, it seems that the real-life identity of Leakedsource’s principal owner may have been exposed by many of the same stolen databases he’s been peddling.

Fast Food Chain Arby’s Acknowledges Breach

February 9, 2017
109 Comments

Sources at nearly a half-dozen banks and credit unions independently reached out over the past 48 hours to inquire if I’d heard anything about a data breach at Arby’s fast-food restaurants. Asked about the rumors, Arby’s told KrebsOnSecurity that it recently remediated a breach involving malicious software installed on payment card systems at hundreds of its restaurant locations nationwide.

House Passes Long-Sought Email Privacy Bill

February 7, 2017
33 Comments

The U.S. House of Representatives on Monday approved a bill that would update the nation’s email surveillance laws so that federal investigators are required to obtain a court-ordered warrant for access to older stored emails. Under the current law, U.S. authorities can legally obtain stored emails older than 180 days using only a subpoena issued by a prosecutor or FBI agent without the approval of a judge.

How Google Took on Mirai, KrebsOnSecurity

February 3, 2017
42 Comments

The third week of September 2016 was a dark and stormy one for KrebsOnSecurity. Wave after wave of huge denial-of-service attacks flooded this site, forcing me to pull the plug on it until I could secure protection from further assault. The site resurfaced three days later under the aegis of Google’s Project Shield, an initiative which seeks to protect journalists and news sites from being censored by these crippling digital sieges.

Damian Menscher, a Google security engineer with whom I worked very closely on the migration to Project Shield, spoke publicly for the first time this week about the unique challenges involved in protecting a small site like this one from very large, sustained and constantly morphing attacks.

IRS: Scam Blends CEO Fraud, W-2 Phishing

February 2, 2017
25 Comments

Most regular readers here are familiar with CEO fraud — e-mail scams in which the attacker spoofs the boss and tricks an employee at the organization into wiring funds to the fraudster. Loyal readers also have heard an earful about W-2 phishing, in which crooks impersonate the boss and request a copy of all employee tax forms. According to a new “urgent alert” issued by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, scammers are now combining both schemes and targeting a far broader range of organizations than ever before.