Independent

IndependentKrebs

FBI, Dutch Police Disrupt ‘Manipulaters’ Phishing Gang

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2025 18:35:32 +0000

The FBI and authorities in The Netherlands this week seized a number of servers and domains for a hugely popular spam and malware dissemination service operating out of Pakistan. The proprietors of the service, who use the collective nickname “The Manipulaters,” have been the subject of three stories published here since 2015. The FBI said the main clientele are organized crime groups that try to trick victim companies into making payments to a third party.

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IndependentKrebs

Infrastructure Laundering: Blending in with the Cloud

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2025 17:10:08 +0000

In an effort to blend in and make their malicious traffic tougher to block, hosting firms catering to cybercriminals in China and Russia increasingly are funneling their operations through major U.S. cloud providers. Research published this week on one such outfit — a sprawling network tied to Chinese organized crime gangs and aptly named “Funnull” — highlights a persistent whac-a-mole problem facing cloud services.

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IndependentKrebs

A Tumultuous Week for Federal Cybersecurity Efforts

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2025 02:50:10 +0000

President Trump last week issued a flurry of executive orders that upended a number of government initiatives focused on improving the nation’s cybersecurity posture. The president fired all advisors from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Safety Review Board, called for the creation of a strategic cryptocurrency reserve, and voided a Biden administration action that sought to reduce the risks that artificial intelligence poses to consumers, workers and national security.

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IndependentKrebs

MasterCard DNS Error Went Unnoticed for Years

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2025 15:24:41 +0000

The payment card giant MasterCard just fixed a glaring error in its domain name server settings that could have allowed anyone to intercept or divert Internet traffic for the company by registering an unused domain name. The misconfiguration persisted for nearly five years until a security researcher spent $300 to register the domain and prevent it from being grabbed by cybercriminals.

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IndependentKrebs

Chinese Innovations Spawn Wave of Toll Phishing Via SMS

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2025 21:18:48 +0000

Residents across the United States are being inundated with text messages purporting to come from toll road operators like E-ZPass, warning that recipients face fines if a delinquent toll fee remains unpaid. Researchers say the surge in SMS spam coincides with new features added to a popular commercial phishing kit sold in China that makes it simple to set up convincing lures spoofing toll road operators in multiple U.S. states.

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IndependentKrebs

A Day in the Life of a Prolific Voice Phishing Crew

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2025 23:41:53 +0000

Besieged by scammers seeking to phish user accounts over the telephone, Apple and Google frequently caution that they will never reach out unbidden to users this way. However, new details about the internal operations of a prolific voice phishing gang show the group routinely abuses legitimate services at Apple and Google to force a variety of outbound communications to their users, including emails, automated phone calls and system-level messages sent to all signed-in devices.

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IndependentKrebs

U.S. Army Soldier Arrested in AT&T, Verizon Extortions

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2024 04:05:51 +0000

Federal authorities have arrested and indicted a 20-year-old U.S. Army soldier on suspicion of being Kiberphant0m, a cybercriminal who has been selling and leaking sensitive customer call records stolen earlier this year from AT&T and Verizon. As first reported by KrebsOnSecurity last month, the accused is a communications specialist who was recently stationed in South Korea.

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