A Ukrainian hacker who once hatched a plot to have heroin sent to my Virginia home and then alert police when the drugs arrived had his first appearance in a U.S. court today, after being extradited to the United States to face multiple cybercrime charges.
AshleyMadison.com, a site that helps married people cheat and whose slogan is “Life is Short, have an Affair,” recently put up a half million (Canadian) dollar bounty for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of the Impact Team, the name chosen by the hacker(s) who released data on more than 30 million Ashley Madison users. Here is the first of likely several posts examining individuals who appear to be closely connected to this attack.
Hardly a week goes by without a news story about state-sponsored Chinese cyberspies breaking into Fortune 500 companies to steal intellectual property, personal data and other invaluable assets. Now, researchers say they’ve unearthed evidence that some of the same Chinese hackers also have been selling access to compromised computers within those companies to help perpetuate future breaches
What makes one novel strain of malicious software more dangerous or noteworthy than another? Is it the sheer capability and feature set of the new malware, or are these qualities meaningless without also considering the skills, intentions and ingenuity of the person wielding it? Most experts probably would say it’s important to consider attribution insofar as it is knowable, but it’s remarkable how seldom companies that regularly publish reports on the latest criminal innovations go the extra mile to add context about the crooks apparently involved in deploying those tools.
Earlier this month I wrote about Antidetect, a commercial tool designed to help thieves evade fraud detection schemes employed by many e-commerce companies. That piece walked readers through a sales video produced by the author of Antidetect showing the software being used to buy products online with stolen credit cards. Today, we’ll take a closer look at clues to a possible real-life identity of this tool’s creator.
The Lizard Squad, a band of young hooligans that recently became Internet famous for launching crippling distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against the largest online gaming networks, is now advertising own Lizard-branded DDoS-for-hire service. Read on for a decidedly different take on this offering than what’s being portrayed in the mainstream media.
The core members of a group calling itself “Lizard Squad” — which took responsibility for attacking Sony’s Playstation and Microsoft’s Xbox networks and knocking them offline for Christmas Day — want very much to be recognized for their actions. So, here’s a closer look at two young men who appear to be anxious to let the world know they are closely connected to the attacks.
A 17-year-old male from London, England pleaded guilty this week to carrying out a massive denial-of-service attack last year against anti-spam outfit SpamHaus and content delivery network CloudFlare, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.
A long trail of spam, dodgy domains and hijacked Internet addresses leads back to a 37-year-old junk email purveyor in San Diego who was the first alleged spammer to have been criminally prosecuted 13 years ago for blasting unsolicited commercial email.
A Ukrainian man who claimed responsibility for organizing a campaign to send heroin to my home last summer has been arrested in Italy on suspicion of trafficking in stolen credit card accounts, among other things, KrebsOnSecurity.com has learned.
