Individuals who normally promote unlicensed, fly-by-night Internet pharmacies recently registered thousands of hardcore porn and bestiality Web sites using contact information for the founder of a company that has helped to shutter more than 10,000 of these Internet pill mills over the past year, KrebsOnSecurity.com has learned.
Since the dawn of the Internet, tutorials showing would-be scammers how to fleece others have been available online, and there is a growing catalog of fraud instructional videos as well. But for novices who who can’t be bothered to scour the ‘Net for these far flung free resources, the tricks of the trade can now be learned through intensive one-on-one apprenticeships that are sold online like community college classes in e-thievery.
A group tasked with devising strategies to deter cyber attacks is calling for mandatory public disclosure of fraud and hacking incidents by governments and organizations of all sizes, including banks.
Authorities in the United States, United Kingdom and Ukraine launched a series of law enforcement sweeps beginning late last month against some of the world’s most notorious gangs running botnets powered by ZeuS, a powerful password-stealing Trojan horse program. ZeuS botnet activity worldwide took a major hit almost immediately thereafter, but it appears to be already on the rebound, according to one prominent ZeuS-watching site.
An organized cyber crime gang known for aggressively pushing male enhancement drugs and other knockoff pharmaceuticals used Internet addresses belonging to Microsoft in a massive denial-of-service attack against KrebsOnSecurity.com late last month.
I have long urged readers who have no need for Java to remove the program, because failing to keep this software updated with the latest security patches exposes users to dangerous, ubiquitous attacks. In this blog post, I’ll show readers how attacks against Java vulnerabilities have fast emerged as the top moneymaker for authors of the best-selling “exploit kits,” commercial software designed to be stitched into hacked or malicious sites to exploit a variety of Web-browser vulnerabilities.
Take one look at the newest kit on the block – “Blackhole” — and it is plain that Java vulnerabilities continue to be give attackers the most mileage and profit, and have surpassed Adobe flaws as the most successful exploit vehicles.
The Federal Communications Commissions (FCC) may soon kickstart a number of new initiatives to encourage Internet service providers to do a better job cleaning up bot-infected PCs and malicious Web sites on their networks, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.
Spam trackers are seeing a fairly dramatic drop in junk e-mail sent over the past few days, specifically spam relayed by the one of the world’s largest spam botnets – although security experts disagree on exactly which botnet may be throttling back or experiencing problems.
Organized cyber thieves took roughly $600,000 from the coastal city of Brigantine, New Jersey this week after stealing the city’s online banking credentials. The break-in marks the second time this year that hackers have robbed the coffers of an Atlantic County town: In March, a similar attack struck Egg Harbor Township, N.J., which lost $100,000 in a similar intrusion.
Authorities in Ukraine this week detained five individuals believed to be the masterminds behind sophisticated cyber thefts that stole $70 million – out of an attempted $220 million — from hundreds of U.S.-based small to mid-sized businesses over the last several years, the FBI said Friday.
