Picture: Shutterstock, Dreamansions.
KrebsOnSecurity.com turns 15 years outdated right now! Perhaps it’s indelicate to have fun the birthday of a cybercrime weblog that principally publishes unhealthy information, however fortunately a lot of 2024’s most engrossing safety tales have been about unhealthy issues taking place to unhealthy guys. It’s additionally an event to notice that regardless of my publishing fewer tales than ever this previous yr, we by some means managed to draw close to report ranges of readership (thanks!).
In case you missed any of them, right here’s a recap of 2024’s most-read tales. In January, KrebsOnSecurity informed the story of a Canadian man who was falsely charged with larceny and misplaced his job after turning into the sufferer of a complicated e-commerce rip-off referred to as triangulation fraud. This will happen if you purchase one thing on-line — from a vendor on Amazon or eBay, for instance — however the vendor doesn’t really personal the merchandise on the market. As an alternative, they buy the merchandise utilizing stolen fee card information and your delivery tackle. On this rip-off, you obtain what you ordered, and the one celebration left to dispute the transaction is the proprietor of the stolen fee card.
Triangulation fraud. Picture: eBay Enterprise.
March featured a number of investigations into the historical past of assorted people-search information dealer providers. One story uncovered how the Belarusian CEO of the privateness and information elimination service OneRep had really based dozens of people-search providers, together with many who OneRep was providing to take away folks from for a charge. That story rapidly prompted Mozilla to terminate its partnership with OneRep, which Mozilla had bundled as a privateness possibility for Firefox customers.
A narrative digging into the buyer information dealer Radaris discovered its CEO was a fabricated id, and that the corporate’s founders have been Russian brothers in Massachusetts who operated a number of Russian language relationship providers and affiliate packages, along with a dizzying array of people-search web sites.
Radaris repeatedly threatened to sue KrebsOnSecurity except that publication was retracted in full, alleging that it was replete with errors each factual and malicious. As an alternative, we doubled down and printed the entire supporting proof that wasn’t included within the unique story, leaving little room for doubt about its conclusions. Fittingly, Radaris now pimps OneRep as a service when customers request that their private info be faraway from the information dealer’s web site.
Simply the longest story this yr was an investigation into Stark Industries Options, a big, mysterious new Web internet hosting agency that materialized when Russia invaded Ukraine. That piece revealed how Stark was getting used as a worldwide proxy community to hide the true supply of cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns towards enemies of Russia.
The homepage of Stark Industries Options.
A lot of my summer season was spent reporting a narrative about how promoting and advertising companies have created a worldwide free-for-all the place anybody can observe the each day actions and associations of tons of of tens of millions of cell gadgets, due to the ubiquity of cell location information that’s broadly and cheaply obtainable.
Analysis printed in September explored the darkish nexus between hurt teams and cybercrime communities consumed with perpetrating monetary fraud. That evaluation discovered an growing variety of younger, Western cybercriminals are additionally members of fast-growing on-line teams that exist solely to bully, stalk, harass and extort susceptible teenagers into bodily harming themselves and others.
One focus of that story was a Canadian cybercriminal who used the nickname Judische. Recognized by the Mandiant as some of the consequential menace actors of 2024, Judische was answerable for a hacking rampage that uncovered personal info on tons of of tens of millions of People. That story withheld Judische’s actual identify, however the reporting got here in useful in late October when a 25-year-old Canadian man named Connor Riley Moucka was arrested and charged with 20 legal counts linked to the Snowflake information extortions.
A surveillance photograph of Connor Riley Moucka, a.ok.a. “Judische” and “Waifu,” dated Oct 21, 2024, 9 days earlier than Moucka’s arrest. This picture was included in an affidavit filed by an investigator with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
In November, KrebsOnSecurity printed a profile of Judische’s confederate — a hacker referred to as Kiberphant0m — detailing how Kiberphant0m had left a path of clues strongly suggesting that they’re or not too long ago have been a U.S. Military soldier stationed in South Korea.
My reporting in December was primarily cut up between two investigations. The primary profiled Cryptomus, a dodgy cryptocurrency change allegedly primarily based in Canada that has grow to be a serious fee processor and sanctions evasion platform for dozens of Russian exchanges and cybercrime providers on-line.
Lose a Fortune with Simply One Dangerous Click on informed the unhappy tales of two cryptocurrency heist victims who have been scammed out of six and 7 figures after falling for complicated social engineering schemes over the cellphone. In these assaults, the phishers abused at the least 4 completely different Google providers to trick targets into believing they have been talking with a Google consultant, and into giving thieves management over their account with a single click on. Search for a narrative right here in early 2025 that may discover the inner operations of those ruthless and ephemeral voice phishing gangs.
Earlier than signing off for 2024, permit me to remind readers that the reporting we’re in a position to present right here is made attainable primarily by the advertisements you might even see on the prime of this web site. When you at present don’t see any advertisements if you load this web site, please think about enabling an exception in your advert blocker for KrebsOnSecurity.com. There’s zero third-party content material on this web site, other than the occasional Youtube video embedded as a part of a narrative. Extra importantly, all of our advertisements are static pictures or GIFs which might be vetted by me and served in-house instantly.
Basically, my work is supported and improved by your readership, ideas, encouragement and, sure, criticism. So thanks for that, and hold it coming, please.
Right here’s to a contented, wholesome, rich and cautious 2025. Hope to see you all once more within the New 12 months!
