A Little Sunshine

IndependentKrebs

Busting SIM Swappers and SIM Swap Myths

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2018 05:49:37 +0000

KrebsOnSecurity recently had a chance to interview members of the REACT Task Force, a team of law enforcement officers and prosecutors based in Santa Clara, Calif. that has been tracking down individuals engaged in unauthorized “SIM swaps” — a complex form of mobile phone fraud that is often used to steal large amounts of cryptocurrencies and other items of value from victims. Snippets from that fascinating conversation are recounted below, and punctuated by accounts from a recent victim who lost more than $100,000 after his mobile phone number was hijacked.

Read More
IndependentKrebs

Who’s In Your Online Shopping Cart?

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Sun, 04 Nov 2018 19:10:06 +0000

Crooks who hack online merchants to steal payment card data are constantly coming up with crafty ways to hide their malicious code on Web sites. In Internet ages past, this often meant obfuscating it as giant blobs of gibberish text that is obvious even to the untrained eye. These days, a compromised e-commerce site is more likely to be seeded with a tiny snippet of code that invokes a hostile domain which appears harmless or that is virtually indistinguishable from the hacked site’s own domain.

Read More
IndependentKrebs

Equifax Has Chosen Experian. Wait, What?

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2018 16:47:13 +0000

A year after offering free credit monitoring to all Americans on account of its massive data breach that exposed the personal information of nearly 148 million people, Equifax now says it has chosen to extend the offer by turning to a credit monitoring service offered by a top competitor — Experian. And to do that, it will soon be sharing with Experian contact information that affected consumers gave to Equifax in order to sign up for the service. 

Read More
IndependentKrebs

How Do You Fight a $12B Fraud Problem? One Scammer at a Time

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2018 16:11:57 +0000

The fraudsters behind the often laughable Nigerian prince email scams have long since branched out into far more serious and lucrative forms of fraud, including account takeovers, phishing, dating scams, and malware deployment. Combating such a multifarious menace can seem daunting, but in truth it calls for concerted efforts to tackle the problem from many different angles. This post examines the work of a large, private group of volunteers dedicated to doing just that.

Read More
IndependentKrebs

Who Is Agent Tesla?

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2018 19:55:32 +0000

A powerful, easy-to-use password stealing program known as Agent Tesla has been infecting computers since 2014, but recently this malware strain has seen a surge in popularity — attracting more than 6,300 customers who pay monthly fees to license the software. Although Agent Tesla includes a multitude of features designed to help it remain undetected on host computers, the malware’s apparent creator seems to have done little to hide his real-life identity.

Read More
IndependentKrebs

Supply Chain Security 101: An Expert’s View

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2018 01:03:12 +0000

Earlier this month I spoke at a cybersecurity conference in Albany, N.Y. alongside Tony Sager, senior vice president and chief evangelist at the Center for Internet Security and a former bug hunter at the U.S. National Security Agency. We  talked at length about many issues, including supply chain security, and I asked Sager whether he’d heard anything about rumors that Supermicro — a high tech firm in San Jose, Calif. — had allegedly inserted hardware backdoors in technology sold to a number of American companies.

Read More
IndependentKrebs

Naming & Shaming Web Polluters: Xiongmai

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2018 00:41:56 +0000

What do we do with a company that regularly pumps metric tons of virtual toxic sludge onto the Internet and yet refuses to clean up their act? If ever there were a technology giant that deserved to be named and shamed for polluting the Web, it is Xiongmai — a Chinese maker of electronic parts that power a huge percentage of cheap digital video recorders (DVRs) and Internet-connected security cameras.

Read More