Picture: Shutterstock, Dreamansions.
KrebsOnSecurity.com turns 15 years outdated right this moment! Perhaps it’s indelicate to have fun the birthday of a cybercrime weblog that largely publishes unhealthy information, however fortunately lots of 2024’s most engrossing safety tales have been about unhealthy issues occurring to unhealthy guys. It’s additionally an event to notice that regardless of my publishing fewer tales than ever this previous 12 months, 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 advised the story of a Canadian man who was falsely charged with larceny and misplaced his job after changing into the sufferer of a complicated e-commerce rip-off referred to as triangulation fraud. This will happen once you purchase one thing on-line — from a vendor on Amazon or eBay, for instance — however the vendor doesn’t truly personal the merchandise on the market. As an alternative, they buy the merchandise utilizing stolen cost card knowledge and your transport 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 cost card.
Triangulation fraud. Picture: eBay Enterprise.
March featured a number of investigations into the historical past of assorted people-search knowledge dealer providers. One story uncovered how the Belarusian CEO of the privateness and knowledge removing service OneRep had truly based dozens of people-search providers, together with many who OneRep was providing to take away individuals from for a payment. 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 knowledge dealer Radaris discovered its CEO was a fabricated identification, 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Radaris repeatedly threatened to sue KrebsOnSecurity except that publication was retracted in full, alleging that it was replete with errors each factual and malicious. As an alternative, we doubled down and printed the entire supporting proof that wasn’t included within the authentic 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 info dealer’s web site.
Simply the longest story this 12 months 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 and marketing companies have created a worldwide free-for-all the place anybody can observe the each day actions and associations of a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of cellular units, due to the ubiquity of cellular location knowledge that’s broadly and cheaply accessible.
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 weak 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 one of the consequential risk actors of 2024, Judische was liable for a hacking rampage that uncovered non-public info on a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of Individuals. That story withheld Judische’s actual title, 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 knowledge 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 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 just lately 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 based mostly in Canada that has turn out to be a serious cost processor and sanctions evasion platform for dozens of Russian exchanges and cybercrime providers on-line.
Tips on how to Lose a Fortune with Simply One Dangerous Click on advised 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 no less than 4 totally 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 capable of present right here is made attainable primarily by the advertisements you might even see on the high of this web site. When you at the moment don’t see any advertisements once you load this web site, please think about enabling an exception in your advert blocker for KrebsOnSecurity.com. There may be zero third-party content material on this web site, aside from the occasional Youtube video embedded as a part of a narrative. Extra importantly, all of our advertisements are static pictures or GIFs which can be vetted by me and served in-house instantly.
Essentially, my work is supported and improved by your readership, ideas, encouragement and, sure, criticism. So thanks for that, and maintain 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!
