Image: Shutterstock, Dreamansions.
KrebsOnSecurity.com turns 15 years outdated at the moment! Maybe it’s indelicate to have fun the birthday of a cybercrime weblog that principally publishes dangerous information, however fortunately a lot of 2024’s most engrossing safety tales have been about dangerous issues taking place to dangerous guys. It’s additionally an event to notice that regardless of my publishing fewer tales than ever this previous yr, we in some way managed to draw close to file 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 instructed 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 often known as triangulation fraud. This can happen while 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. Instead, they buy the merchandise utilizing stolen fee card information and your transport handle. In this rip-off, you obtain what you ordered, and the one occasion left to dispute the transaction is the proprietor of the stolen fee card.
Triangulation fraud. Image: eBay Enterprise.
March featured a number of investigations into the historical past of varied people-search information dealer providers. One story uncovered how the Belarusian CEO of the privateness and information removing service OneRep had really based dozens of people-search providers, together with many who OneRep was providing to take away folks from for a payment. That story shortly prompted Mozilla to terminate its partnership with OneRep, which Mozilla had bundled as a privateness choice 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 courting providers and affiliate applications, 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Radaris repeatedly threatened to sue KrebsOnSecurity except that publication was retracted in full, alleging that it was replete with errors each factual and malicious. Instead, we doubled down and revealed all the 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 shoppers request that their private info be faraway from the information dealer’s web site.
Easily the longest story this yr was an investigation into Stark Industries Solutions, a big, mysterious new Internet internet hosting agency that materialized when Russia invaded Ukraine. That piece revealed how Stark was getting used as a world proxy community to hide the true supply of cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns in opposition to enemies of Russia.
The homepage of Stark Industries Solutions.
Much of my summer time was spent reporting a narrative about how promoting and advertising corporations have created a world free-for-all the place anybody can monitor the day by day actions and associations of a whole lot of thousands and thousands of cellular gadgets, because of the ubiquity of cellular location information that’s broadly and cheaply accessible.
Research revealed 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 weak teenagers into bodily harming themselves and others.
One focus of that story was a Canadian cybercriminal who used the nickname Judische. Identified by the Mandiant as some of the consequential risk actors of 2024, Judische was liable for a hacking rampage that uncovered personal info on a whole lot of thousands and thousands of Americans. 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 felony counts linked to the Snowflake information extortions.
A surveillance picture 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 revealed a profile of Judische’s confederate — a hacker often known 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. Army soldier stationed in South Korea.
My reporting in December was primarily break up between two investigations. The first profiled Cryptomus, a dodgy cryptocurrency change allegedly primarily based in Canada that has develop into a significant fee processor and sanctions evasion platform for dozens of Russian exchanges and cybercrime providers on-line.
How to Lose a Fortune with Just One Bad Click instructed 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 telephone. 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. Look for a narrative right here in early 2025 that can discover the interior operations of those ruthless and ephemeral voice phishing gangs.
Before signing off for 2024, enable me to remind readers that the reporting we’re in a position to present right here is made potential primarily by the adverts you may even see on the prime of this web site. If you at the moment don’t see any adverts while you load this web site, please contemplate enabling an exception in your advert blocker for KrebsOnSecurity.com. There is zero third-party content material on this web site, aside from the occasional Youtube video embedded as a part of a narrative. More importantly, all of our adverts are static photographs or GIFs which can be vetted by me and served in-house immediately.
Fundamentally, my work is supported and improved by your readership, suggestions, encouragement and, sure, criticism. So thanks for that, and maintain it coming, please.
Here’s to a cheerful, wholesome, rich and cautious 2025. Hope to see you all once more within the New Year!