Category Archives: Cybersecurity

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said this week that beginning in 2021 it will allow all taxpayers to apply for an identity protection personal identification number (IP PIN), a single-use code designed to block identity thieves from falsely claiming a tax refund in your name. Currently, IP PINs are issued only to those whoContinue reading “IRS to Make ID Protection PIN Open to All”

For at least the third time in its existence, OGUsers — a forum overrun with people looking to buy, sell and trade access to compromised social media accounts — has been hacked. An offer by the apparent hackers of OGUsers, offering to remove account information from the eventual database leak in exchange for payment. RoughlyContinue reading “Account Hijacking Site OGUsers Hacked, Again”

A 22-year-old North Carolina man has been sentenced to nearly eight years in prison for conducting bomb threats against thousands of schools in the U.S. and United Kingdom, running a service that launched distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and for possessing sexually explicit images of minors. Timothy Dalton Vaughn from Winston-Salem, N.C. was a key memberContinue reading “Bomb Threat, DDoS Purveyor Gets Eight Years”

Fraudsters redirected email and web traffic destined for several cryptocurrency trading platforms over the past week. The attacks were facilitated by scams targeting employees at GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain name registrar, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The incident is the latest incursion at GoDaddy that relied on tricking employees into transferring ownership and/or control over targetedContinue reading “GoDaddy Employees Used in Attacks on Multiple Cryptocurrency Services”

A 21-year-old Irishman who pleaded guilty to charges of helping to steal millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies from victims has been sentenced to just under three years in prison. The defendant is part of an alleged conspiracy involving at least eight others in the United States who stand accused of theft via SIM swapping, aContinue reading “Convicted SIM Swapper Gets 3 Years in Jail”

President Trump on Tuesday fired his top election security official Christopher Krebs (no relation). The dismissal came via Twitter two weeks to the day after Trump lost an election he baselessly claims was stolen by widespread voting fraud. Chris Krebs. Image: CISA. Krebs, 43, is a former Microsoft executive appointed by Trump to head the CybersecurityContinue reading “Trump Fires Security Chief Christopher Krebs”

An increasing number of websites are asking visitors to approve “notifications,” browser modifications that periodically display messages on the user’s mobile or desktop device. In many cases these notifications are benign, but several dodgy firms are paying site owners to install their notification scripts and then selling that communications pathway to scammers and online hucksters.Continue reading “Be Very Sparing in Allowing Site Notifications”

Adobe and Microsoft each issued a bevy of updates today to plug critical security holes in their software. Microsoft’s release includes fixes for 112 separate flaws, including one zero-day vulnerability that is already being exploited to attack Windows users. Microsoft also is taking flak for changing its security advisories and limiting the amount of informationContinue reading “Patch Tuesday, November 2020 Edition”

It’s bad enough that many ransomware gangs now have blogs where they publish data stolen from companies that refuse to make an extortion payment. Now, one crime group has started using hacked Facebook accounts to run ads publicly pressuring their ransomware victims into paying up. On the evening of Monday, Nov. 9, an ad campaignContinue reading “Ransomware Group Turns to Facebook Ads”

The body of a man found shot inside a burned out vehicle in Canada three years ago has been identified as that of Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a prolific spammer and neo-Nazi who led a failed anti-government march on Washington, D.C. in 1999, according to news reports. Homicide detectives said they originally thought the man foundContinue reading “Body Found in Canada Identified as Neo-Nazi Spam King”