Category Archives: A Little Sunshine

Includes investigative blog posts meant to shine a light on the darker corners of the Internet.

As Scope of 2012 Breach Expands, LinkedIn to Again Reset Passwords for Some Users

May 18, 2016

A 2012 data breach that was thought to have exposed 6.5 million hashed passwords for LinkedIn users instead likely impacted more than 117 million accounts, the company now says. In response, the business networking giant said today that it would once again force a password reset for individual users thought to be impacted in the expanded breach.

Carding Sites Turn to the ‘Dark Cloud’

May 12, 2016

Crooks who peddle stolen credit cards on the Internet face a constant challenge: Keeping their shops online and reachable in the face of meddling from law enforcement officials, security firms, researchers and vigilantes. In this post, we’ll examine a large collection of hacked computers around the world that currently serves as a criminal cloud hosting environment for a variety of cybercrime operations, from sending spam to hosting malicious software and stolen credit card shops.

Fraudsters Steal Tax, Salary Data From ADP

May 3, 2016

Identity thieves stole tax and salary data from payroll giant ADP by registering accounts in the names of employees at more than a dozen customer firms, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. ADP says the incidents occurred because the victim companies all mistakenly published sensitive ADP account information online that made those firms easy targets for tax fraudsters.

How the Pwnedlist Got Pwned

May 2, 2016

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.

All About Fraud: How Crooks Get the CVV

April 26, 2016

A longtime reader recently asked: “How do online fraudsters get the 3-digit card verification value (CVV or CVV2) code printed on the back of customer cards if merchants are forbidden from storing this information? The answer: Probably by installing a Web-based keylogger at an online merchant so that all data that customers submit to the site is copied and sent to the attacker’s server.

‘Blackhole’ Exploit Kit Author Gets 7 Years

April 14, 2016

A Moscow court this week convicted and sentenced seven hackers for breaking into countless online bank accounts — including “Paunch,” the nickname used by the author of the infamous “Blackhole” exploit kit. Once an extremely popular crimeware-as-a-service offering, Blackhole was for several years responsible for a large percentage of malware infections and stolen banking credentials, and likely contributed to tens of millions of dollars stolen from small to mid-sized businesses over several years.

New Threat Can Auto-Brick Apple Devices

April 12, 2016

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.