In December 2023, KrebsOnSecurity revealed the real-life identity of Rescator, the nickname used by a Russian cybercriminal who sold more than 100 million payment cards stolen from Target and Home Depot between 2013 and 2014. Moscow resident Mikhail Shefel, who confirmed using the Rescator identity in a recent interview, also admitted reaching out because he is broke and seeking publicity for several new money making schemes.
Many of the same shadowy organizations that pay people to promote male erectile dysfunction drugs via spam and hacked websites recently have enjoyed a surge in demand for medicines used to fight malaria, lupus and arthritis, thanks largely to unfounded suggestions that these therapies can help fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
A review of the sales figures from some of the top pharmacy affiliate programs suggests sales of drugs containing hydroxychloroquine rivaled that of their primary product — generic Viagra and Cialis — and that this as-yet-unproven Coronavirus treatment accounted for as much as 25 to 30 percent of all sales over the past month.
A Russian court has handed down lengthy prison terms for two men convicted on treason charges for allegedly sharing information about Russian cybercriminals with U.S. law enforcement officials. The men — a former Russian cyber intelligence official and an executive at Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab — were reportedly prosecuted for their part in an investigation into Pavel Vrublevsky, a convicted cybercriminal who ran one of the world’s biggest spam networks and was a major focus of my 2014 book, Spam Nation.
Roman Seleznev, a Russian man who is already serving a record 27-year sentence in the United States for cybercrime charges, was handed a 14-year sentence this week by a federal judge in Atlanta for his role in a credit card and identity theft conspiracy that prosecutors say netted more than $50 million. Separately, a Canadian national has pleaded guilty to charges of helping to steal more than a billion user account credentials from Yahoo.
Some of you may have noticed that a new element recently debuted in the sidebar: The cover art for my upcoming book, Spam Nation, due to hit bookshelves (physical and virtual) November 18, 2014. Please allow me a few moments to explain what this book is about, and why you may wish to pre-order it today.
Pavel Vrublevsky, the owner of Russian payments firm ChronoPay and the subject of an upcoming book by this author, was sentenced to two-and-half years in a Russian penal colony this week after being found guilty of hiring botmasters to attack a rival… Read More »
Pavel Vrublevsky, the owner of Russian payments firm ChronoPay and the subject of an upcoming book by this author, was arrested today in Moscow for witness intimidation in his ongoing trial for allegedly hiring hackers to attack against Assist, a top ChronoPay competitor.
Last week, National Public Radio aired a story on my Pharma Wars series, which chronicles an epic battle between men who ran two competing cybercrime empires that used spam to pimp online pharmacy sites. As I was working with the NPR reporter on the story, I was struck by how much spam has decreased over the past couple of years. Below is a graphic that’s based on spam data collected by Symantec’s MessageLabs. It shows that global spam volumes fell and spiked fairly regularly, from highs of 6 trillion messages sent per month to just below 1 trillion. I produced this graph based on Symantec’s raw spam data.
Over the past 18 months, I’ve published a series of posts that provide clues about the possible real-life identities of the men responsible for building some of the largest and most disruptive spam botnets on the planet. I’ve since done a bit more digging into the backgrounds of the individuals thought to be responsible for the Rustock and Waledac spam botnets, which has produced some additional fascinating and corroborating details about these two characters.
The co-founder and owner of ChronoPay, one of Russia’s largest e-payment providers, is suing Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab, alleging that the latter published defamatory blog posts about him in connection with his ongoing cybercrime trial.
