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The Strange Case of the Tom Ripley of Book Publishing
I've heard whispers about the "Spine Collector," as he's come to be known, for years now. The New York Times published a story about it last December; Vulture did a long-form feature on it in August...
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Project Veritas scammed out of $165,000 by a phishing email
Project Veritas, the conservative media group known for staging "sting operations" with hidden cameras where they trick people into saying things out of context that "confirm" right-wing conspiracy...
View ArticleIt's dismayingly easy to make an app that turns a smart-speaker into a...
German security researchers from Security Research Lab created a suite of apps for Google and Amazon smart speakers that did trivial things for their users, appeared to finish and go dormant, but...
View ArticlePhishers steal San Diego school data going back to 2008 -- UPDATED
After a successful phishing attack that captured over 50 accounts, hackers stole 500,000 records from the San Diego Unified School District, for staff, current students, and past students going all...
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New sextortion phishing scam uses target's harvested password
A new twist on an old email scam making the rounds addresses its recipients by name and uses an actual password (hopefully deprecated). They attempt to blackmail victims, and it's definitely a little...
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Jargon watch: smishing and vishing
Smishing: phishing with SMSes. Vishing: phishing with voice-response systems. A pair of Romanian hackers have been extradited to the U.S. after allegedly bilking unwitting victims out of more than $18...
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Spam was nearly dead, then it became an essential tool for crime and came...
In the early 2000s, a mix of legislative action, vigorous prosecution and advanced countermeasures looked set to kill spam: the terrible economics of mass-scale marketing could easily be disrupted by...
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Unknown hackers have gained near-total control over some US power generation...
Hacker takeovers of power infrastructure have been seen in Ukraine (where they are reliably attributed to Russian state actors), but now the US power-grid has been compromised by hackers of unknown...
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How a fishing guide's WordPress site became home to half a million fraudulent...
Ned Desmond shares the scary story of how a small site he managed that advertised fishing expeditions ended up with 565,192 scam pages. He also suggests five ways to avoid the same fate. (more…)
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Amnesty: hackers spent months building personas used to phish Qatari labor...
In a new report, Amnesty International summarizes the security research they did on the victims of a sophisticated phishing attack aimed at Qatari labor activists, dubbed "Operation Kingphish." (more…)
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It turns out that halfway clever phishing attacks really, really work
A new phishing attack hops from one Gmail account to the next by searching through compromised users' previous emails for messages with attachments, then replies them from the compromised account,...
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12 days of two-factor authentication: this Xmas, give yourself the gift of opsec
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched a new series, 12 Days of 2FA, in which every installment explains how to turn on two-factor authentication for a range of online services and platforms....
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Whaling: phishing for executives and celebrities
A fraudster's term of art, "whaling" refers to phishing attempts targeted at "C-level corporate executives, politicians and celebrities" -- it's a play on "phishing" (attacks that trick users into...
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Researchers learn about wire-fraud scam after Nigerian scammers infect...
In Wire Wire: A West African Cyber Threat, researchers from Secureworks reveal their findings from monitoring a Nigerian bank-fraud ring whose members had unwittingly infected themselves with their...
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EFF and partners reveal Kazakh government phished journalists, opposition...
At Defcon, researchers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, First Look Media and Amnesty International, revealed their findings on a major phishing attack through which the government of...
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Iranians connected to phishing attempt on tortured Syrian activist
Former Syrian National Council vice-president Nour Al-Ameer fled to Turkey after being arrested and tortured by the Assad regime -- that's when someone attempted to phish her and steal her identity...
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Phishing for Bitcoin with fake 0-days
Arriving in my inbox at a steady clip this morning: a series of phishing emails aimed at Bitcoiners, promising that the sender has found a bug in "the Bitcoin client" and promising "Pay 0.07 BTC...
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Phishers trick Mattel into transferring $3M to a Chinese bank
Last spring, in the chaos following the firing of Mattel's CEO (who presided over a disastrous slide in Barbie sales), a Mattel finance executive got an email from his new boss, replacement CEO...
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Security-conscious darkweb crime marketplaces institute world-leading...
If you are a seller on Alphabay -- a darkweb site that sells "drugs, stolen data and hacking tools," you'll have to use two-factor authentication (based on PGP/GPG) for all your logins. (more…)
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US Embassy staffer ran a sextortion racket from work computer for 2 years
Michael C Ford has been sentenced to four years and nine months in prison, having pleaded guilty to running a sextortion/phishing operation from his work computer at the US embassy in London for two...
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