The United States today unveiled sanctions and indictments against the alleged proprietor of Joker’s Stash, a now-defunct cybercrime store that peddled tens of millions of payment cards stolen in some of the largest data breaches of the past decade. The government also indicted a top Russian cybercriminal known as Taleon, whose cryptocurrency exchange Cryptex has evolved into one of Russia’s most active money laundering networks.
Google said this week it is expanding the types of data people can ask to have removed from search results, to include personal contact information like your phone number, email address or physical address. The move comes just months after Google rolled out a new policy enabling people under the age of 18 (or a parent/guardian) to request removal of their images from Google search results.
I was preparing to knock off work on a recent Friday evening when a curious and annoying email came in via the contact form on this site:
“Hello I go by the username Nuclear27 on your site Briansclub[.]com,” wrote “Mitch,” confusing me with the proprietor of perhaps the underground’s largest bazaar for stolen credit and identity data. “I made a deposit to my wallet on the site but nothing has shown up yet and I would like to know why.”
Several things stood out in Mitch’s message. For starters, that is not the actual domain for BriansClub. And it’s not hard to see why Mitch got snookered: The real BriansClub site is currently not at the top of search results when one queries that shop name at Google.
Cybercrime forums have been abuzz this week over news that BriansClub — one of the underground’s largest shops for stolen credit and debit cards — had been hacked, and its inventory of 26 million cards leaked to security contacts in the banking industry. Now it appears this brazen heist may have been the result of one of BriansClub’s longtime competitors trying to knock out a rival.
“BriansClub,” a popular underground store for buying stolen credit card data that uses Yours Truly’s likeness in its advertising, has itself been hacked. The data stolen from BriansClub encompasses more than 26 million credit and debit card records taken from hacked online and brick-and-mortar retailers over the past four years, including almost eight million records uploaded to the shop in 2019 alone.
