Category Archives: Latest Warnings

How the Pwnedlist Got Pwned

May 2, 2016
49 Comments

Last week, I learned about a vulnerability that exposed all 866 million account credentials harvested by pwnedlist.com, a service designed to help companies track public password breaches that may create security problems for their users. The vulnerability has since been fixed, but this simple security flaw may have inadvertently exacerbated countless breaches by preserving the data lost in them and then providing free access to one of the Internet’s largest collections of compromised credentials.

US-CERT to Windows Users: Dump Apple Quicktime

April 18, 2016
67 Comments

Microsoft Windows users who still have Apple Quicktime installed should ditch the program now that Apple has stopped shipping security updates for the platform, warns the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT). The advice came just as researchers are reporting two new critical security holes in Quicktime that likely won’t be patched.

New Threat Can Auto-Brick Apple Devices

April 12, 2016
48 Comments

If you use an Apple iPhone, iPad or other iDevice, now would be an excellent time to ensure that the machine is running the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system — version 9.3.1. Failing to do so could expose your devices to automated threats capable of rendering them unresponsive and perhaps forever useless.

FBI: $2.3 Billion Lost to CEO Email Scams

April 7, 2016
40 Comments

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) this week warned about a “dramatic” increase in so-called “CEO fraud,” e-mail scams in which the attacker spoofs a message from the boss and tricks someone at the organization into wiring funds to the fraudsters. The FBI estimates that these scams have cost organizations more than $2.3 billion in losses over the past three years.

From Stolen Wallet to ID Theft, Wrongful Arrest

March 14, 2016
81 Comments

It’s remarkable how quickly a stolen purse or wallet can morph into full-blow identity theft, and possibly even result in the victim’s wrongful arrest. All of the above was visited recently on a fellow infosec professional whose admitted lapse in physical security lead to a mistaken early morning arrest in front of his kids.

Seagate Phish Exposes All Employee W-2’s

March 6, 2016
71 Comments

Email scam artists last week tricked an employee at data storage giant Seagate Technology into giving away 2015 W-2 tax documents on all current and past employees, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. W-2 forms contain employee Social Security numbers, salaries and other personal data, and are highly prized by thieves involved in filing phony tax refund requests with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the states.

Breached Credit Union Comes Out of its Shell

February 25, 2016
61 Comments

Notifying people and companies about data breaches often can be a frustrating and thankless job. Despite my best efforts, sometimes a breach victim I’m alerting will come away convinced that I am not an investigative journalist but instead a scammer. This happened most recently this week, when I told a California credit union that its online banking site was compromised and apparently had been for nearly two months.