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IndependentKrebs

Who’s Behind the Screencam Extortion Scam?

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2018 23:35:40 +0000

The sextortion email scam last month that invoked a real password used by each recipient and threatened to release embarrassing Webcam videos almost certainly was not the work of one criminal or even one group of criminals. Rather, it’s likely that additional spammers and scammers piled on with their own versions of the phishing email after noticing that some recipients were actually paying up. The truth is we may never find out who’s responsible, but it’s still fun to follow some promising early leads and see where they take us.

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IndependentKrebs

Will the Real Joker’s Stash Come Forward?

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Tue, 29 May 2018 16:33:34 +0000

For as long as scam artists have been around so too have opportunistic thieves who specialize in ripping off other scam artists. This is the story about a group of Pakistani Web site designers who apparently have made an impressive living impersonating some of the most popular and well known “carding” markets, or online stores that sell stolen credit cards.

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IndependentKrebs

A Sobering Look at Fake Online Reviews

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2018 16:08:36 +0000

In 2016, KrebsOnSecurity exposed a network of phony Web sites and fake online reviews that funneled those seeking help for drug and alcohol addiction toward rehab centers that were secretly affiliated with the Church of Scientology. Not long after the story ran, that network of bogus reviews disappeared from the Web. Over the past few months, however, the same prolific purveyor of these phantom sites and reviews appears to be back at it again, enlisting the help of Internet users and paying people $25-$35 for each fake listing.

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IndependentKrebs

Mirai IoT Botnet Co-Authors Plead Guilty

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2017 16:23:18 +0000

The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday unsealed the guilty pleas of two men first identified in January 2017 by KrebsOnSecurity as the likely co-authors of Mirai, a malware strain that remotely enslaves so-called “Internet of Things” devices such as security cameras, routers, and digital video recorders for use in large scale attacks designed to knock Web sites and entire networks offline (including multiple major attacks against this site).

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IndependentKrebs

Who Was the NSA Contractor Arrested for Leaking the ‘Shadow Brokers’ Hacking Tools?

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2017 17:01:26 +0000

In August 2016, a mysterious entity calling itself “The Shadow Brokers” began releasing the first of several troves of classified documents and hacking tools purportedly stolen from “The Equation Group,” a highly advanced threat actor that is suspected of having ties to the U.S. National Security Agency. According to media reports, at least some of the information was stolen from the computer of an unidentified software developer and NSA contractor who was arrested in 2015 after taking the hacking tools home. In this post, we’ll examine clues left behind in the leaked Equation Group documents that may point to the identity of the mysterious software developer.

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IndependentKrebs

Correcting the Record on vDOS Prosecutions

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2017 13:11:31 +0000

KrebsOnSecurity recently featured a story about a New Mexico man who stands accused of using the now-defunct vDOS attack-for-hire service to hobble the Web sites of several former employers. That piece stated that I wasn’t aware of any other prosecutions related to vDOS customers, but as it happens there was a prosecution in the United Kingdom earlier this year of a man who’s admitted to both using and helping to administer vDOS. Here’s a look at some open-source clues that may have led to the U.K. man’s arrest.

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