Reports: Liberty Reserve Founder Arrested, Site Shuttered

The founder of Liberty Reserve, a digital currency that has evolved as perhaps the most popular form of payment in the cybercrime underground, was reportedly arrested in Spain this week on suspicion of money laundering. News of the law enforcement action may help explain an ongoing three-day outage at libertyreserve.com: On Friday, the domain registration … Читать далее

Skype Beta Plugs IP Resolver Privacy Leak

A few months ago, I warned readers that a glaring privacy weakness in voice-over-IP telephony service Skype allows anyone using the network to quickly learn the Internet address of any other Skype user. A new beta version of the popular Microsoft program appears to have nixed that privacy leak with a setting that restricts this capability … Читать далее

NC Fuel Distributor Hit by $800,000 Cyberheist

A fuel distribution firm in North Carolina lost more than $800,000 in a cyberheist earlier this month. Had the victim company or its bank detected the unauthorized activity sooner, the loss would have been far less. But both parties failed to notice the attackers coming and going for five days before being notified by a … Читать далее

Krebs, KrebsOnSecurity, As Malware Memes

Hardly a week goes by when I don’t hear from some malware researcher or reader who’s discovered what appears to be a new sample of malicious software or nasty link that invokes this author’s name or the name of this blog. I’ve compiled this post to document a few of these examples, some of which … Читать далее

Conversations with a Bulletproof Hoster

Criminal commerce on the Internet would mostly grind to a halt were it not for the protection offered by so-called “bulletproof hosting” providers — the online equivalent of offshore havens where shady dealings go ignored. Last month I had an opportunity to interview a provider of bulletproof services for one of the Web’s most notorious cybercrime … Читать далее

Ragebooter: ‘Legit’ DDoS Service, or Fed Backdoor?

On Monday, I profiled asylumbooter.com, one of several increasingly public DDoS-for-hire services posing as Web site “stress testing” services. Today, we’ll look at ragebooter.net, yet another attack service except for one secret feature which sets it apart from the competition: According the site’s proprietor, ragebooter.net includes a hidden backdoor that lets the FBI monitor customer activity. … Читать далее

Microsoft, Adobe Push Critical Security Updates

Microsoft and Adobe today each released updates to fix critical security holes in their software. Microsoft’s patch batch tackles at least 33 vulnerabilities in Windows and other products, including a fix for a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8 that attackers have been exploiting. Separately, Adobe pushed security updates for Flash Player, Adobe Reader, Acrobat … Читать далее

DDoS Services Advertise Openly, Take PayPal

The past few years have brought a proliferation of online services that can be hired to knock Web sites and individual Internet users offline. Once only found advertised in shadowy underground forums, many of today’s so-called “booter” or “stresser” services are operated by U.S. citizens who openly advertise their services while hiding behind legally dubious … Читать далее

A Stopgap Fix for the IE8 Zero-Day Flaw

Microsoft has released an stopgap solution to help Internet Explorer 8 users blunt the threat from attacks against a zero-day flaw in the browser that is actively being exploited in the wild. Microsoft is working on an official fix for the IE8 bug. In the meantime affected users should take advantage of the interim fix … Читать далее

Trade Sanctions Cited in Hundreds of Syrian Domain Seizures

In apparent observation of international trade sanctions against Syria, a U.S. firm that ranks as the world’s fourth-largest domain name registrar has seized hundreds of domains belonging to various Syrian entities, including a prominent Syrian hacker group and sites associated with the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian Electron Army complains about its … Читать далее