Man Behind Fatal ‘Swatting’ Gets 20 Years

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2019 22:19:15 +0000

Tyler Barriss, a 26-year-old California man who admitted making a phony emergency call to police in late 2017 that led to the shooting death of an innocent Kansas resident, has been sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.

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Alleged Child Porn Lord Faces US Extradition

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2019 19:32:39 +0000

In 2013, the FBI exploited a zero-day vulnerability in Firefox to seize control over a Dark Web network of child pornography sites. The alleged owner of that ring – 33-year-old Freedom Hosting operator Eric Eoin Marques – was arrested in Ireland later that year on a U.S. warrant and has been in custody ever since. This week, Ireland’s Supreme Court cleared the way for Marques to be extradited to the United States.

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Hackers Sell Access to Bait-and-Switch Empire

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Mon, 04 Mar 2019 22:11:33 +0000

Cybercriminals are auctioning off access to customer information stolen from an online data broker behind a dizzying array of bait-and-switch Web sites that sell access to a vast range of data on U.S. consumers, including DMV and arrest records, genealogy reports, phone number lookups and people searches. In an ironic twist, the marketing empire that owns the hacked online properties appears to be run by a Canadian man who’s been sued for fraud by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Microsoft and Oprah Winfrey, to name a few.

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Booter Boss Interviewed in 2014 Pleads Guilty

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2019 15:14:05 +0000

A 20-year-old Illinois man has pleaded guilty to running multiple DDoS-for-hire services that launched millions of attacks over several years. The plea deal comes almost exactly five years after KrebsOnSecurity interviewed both the admitted felon and his father and urged the latter to take a more active interest in his son’s online activities.

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Crypto Mining Service Coinhive to Call it Quits

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2019 23:19:28 +0000

Roughly one year ago, KrebsOnSecurity published a lengthy investigation into the individuals behind Coinhive[.]com, a cryptocurrency mining service that has been heavily abused to force hacked Web sites to mine virtual currency. On Tuesday, Coinhive announced plans to pull the plug on the project early next month.

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Former Russian Cybersecurity Chief Sentenced to 22 Years in Prison

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2019 00:43:41 +0000

A Russian court has handed down lengthy prison terms for two men convicted on treason charges for allegedly sharing information about Russian cybercriminals with U.S. law enforcement officials. The men — a former Russian cyber intelligence official and an executive at Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab — were reportedly prosecuted for their part in an investigation into Pavel Vrublevsky, a convicted cybercriminal who ran one of the world’s biggest spam networks and was a major focus of my 2014 book, Spam Nation.

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Bomb Threat Hoaxer Exposed by Hacked Gaming Site

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2019 05:37:06 +0000

Federal authorities this week arrested a North Carolina man who allegedly ran with a group of online hooligans that attacked Web sites (including this one), took requests on Twitter to call in bomb threats to thousands of schools, and tried to frame various online gaming sites as the culprits. In an ironic twist, the accused — who had fairly well separated his real life identity from his online personas — appears to have been caught after a gaming Web site he frequented got hacked.

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More Alleged SIM Swappers Face Justice

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2019 05:50:07 +0000

Prosecutors in Northern California have charged two men with using unauthorized SIM swaps to steal and extort money from victims. One of the individuals charged allegedly used a hacker nickname belonging to a key figure in the underground who’s built a solid reputation hijacking mobile phone numbers for profit. According to indictments unsealed this week, Tucson, Ariz. resident Ahmad Wagaafe Hared and Matthew Gene Ditman of Las Vegas were part of a group that specialized in tricking or bribing representatives at the major wireless providers into giving them control over phone numbers belonging to people they later targeted for extortion and theft.

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