On July 22, 2025, the European police agency Europol said a long-running investigation led by the French Police resulted in the arrest of a 38-year-old administrator of XSS, a Russian-language cybercrime forum with more than 50,000 members. The action has triggered…
Category: Krebs on Security
Who Got Arrested in the Raid on the XSS Crime Forum?
On July 22, 2025, the European police agency Europol said a long-running investigation led by the French Police resulted in the arrest of a 38-year-old administrator of XSS, a Russian-language cybercrime forum with more than 50,000 members. The action has triggered…
Scammers Unleash Flood of Slick Online Gaming Sites
Fraudsters are flooding Discord and other social media platforms with ads for hundreds of polished online gaming and wagering websites that lure people with free credits and eventually abscond with any cryptocurrency funds deposited by players. Here’s a closer look…
Phishers Target Aviation Execs to Scam Customers
KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from a reader whose boss’s email account got phished and was used to trick one of the company’s customers into sending a large payment to scammers. An investigation into the attacker’s infrastructure points to a long-running Nigerian…
Microsoft Fix Targets Attacks on SharePoint Zero-Day
On Sunday, July 20, Microsoft Corp. issued an emergency security update for a vulnerability in SharePoint Server that is actively being exploited to compromise vulnerable organizations. The patch comes amid reports that malicious hackers have used the Sharepoint flaw to…
Poor Passwords Tattle on AI Hiring Bot Maker Paradox.ai
Security researchers recently revealed that the personal information of millions of people who applied for jobs at McDonald’s was exposed after they guessed the password (“123456”) for the fast food chain’s account at Paradox.ai, a company that makes artificial intelligence…
DOGE Denizen Marko Elez Leaked API Key for xAI
Marko Elez, a 25-year-old employee at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been granted access to sensitive databases at the U.S. Social Security Administration, the Treasury and Justice departments, and the Department of Homeland Security. So it should…
DOGE Denizen Marko Elez Leaked API Key for xAI
Marko Elez, a 25-year-old employee at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been granted access to sensitive databases at the U.S. Social Security Administration, the Treasury and Justice departments, and the Department of Homeland Security. So it should…
UK Arrests Four in ‘Scattered Spider’ Ransom Group
Authorities in the United Kingdom this week arrested four alleged members of “Scattered Spider,” a prolific data theft and extortion group whose recent victims include multiple airlines and the U.K. retail chain Marks & Spencer. This article has been indexed from…
UK Charges Four in ‘Scattered Spider’ Ransom Group
Authorities in the United Kingdom this week arrested four alleged members of “Scattered Spider,” a prolific data theft and extortion group whose recent victims include multiple airlines and the U.K. retail chain Marks & Spencer. This article has been indexed from…
Microsoft Patch Tuesday, July 2025 Edition
Microsoft today released updates to fix at least 137 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software. None of the weaknesses addressed this month are known to be actively exploited, but 14 of the flaws earned Microsoft’s most-dire…
Senator Chides FBI for Weak Advice on Mobile Security
Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) briefed Capitol Hill staff recently on hardening the security of their mobile devices, after a contacts list stolen from the personal phone of the White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was…
Inside a Dark Adtech Empire Fed by Fake CAPTCHAs
Late last year, security researchers made a startling discovery: Kremlin-backed disinformation campaigns were bypassing moderation on social media platforms by leveraging the same malicious advertising technology that powers a sprawling ecosystem of online hucksters and website hackers. A new report…
Patch Tuesday, June 2025 Edition
Microsoft today released security updates to fix at least 67 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and software. Redmond warns that one of the flaws is already under active attack, and that software blueprints showing how to exploit a pervasive…
Proxy Services Feast on Ukraine’s IP Address Exodus
Ukraine has seen nearly one-fifth of its Internet space come under Russian control or sold to Internet address brokers since February 2022, a new study finds. The analysis indicates large chunks of Ukrainian Internet address space are now in the…
U.S. Sanctions Cloud Provider ‘Funnull’ as Top Source of ‘Pig Butchering’ Scams
The U.S. government today imposed economic sanctions on Funnull Technology Inc., a Philippines-based company that provides computer infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of websites involved in virtual currency investment scams, commonly known as “pig butchering.” In January 2025, KrebsOnSecurity detailed…
Pakistan Arrests 21 in ‘Heartsender’ Malware Service
Authorities in Pakistan have arrested 21 individuals accused of operating “Heartsender,” a once popular spam and malware dissemination service that operated for more than a decade. The main clientele for HeartSender were organized crime groups that tried to trick victim…
Oops: DanaBot Malware Devs Infected Their Own PCs
The U.S. government today unsealed criminal charges against 16 individuals accused of operating and selling DanaBot, a prolific strain of information-stealing malware that has been sold on Russian cybercrime forums since 2018. The FBI says a newer version of DanaBot…
KrebsOnSecurity Hit With Near-Record 6.3 Tbps DDoS
KrebsOnSecurity last week was hit by a near record distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that clocked in at more than 6.3 terabits of data per second (a terabit is one trillion bits of data). The brief attack appears to have been…
Breachforums Boss to Pay $700k in Healthcare Breach
In what experts are calling a novel legal outcome, the 22-year-old former administrator of the cybercrime community Breachforums will forfeit nearly $700,000 to settle a civil lawsuit from a health insurance company whose customer data was posted for sale on…