Picture: Shutterstock, Dreamansions.
KrebsOnSecurity.com turns 15 years outdated at this time! Perhaps it’s indelicate to have a good time the birthday of a cybercrime weblog that largely publishes unhealthy information, however fortunately lots of 2024’s most engrossing safety tales had 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 yr, we someway 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 advised the story of a Canadian man who was falsely charged with larceny and misplaced his job after changing into the sufferer of a advanced e-commerce rip-off generally known 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 really personal the merchandise on the market. As a substitute, they buy the merchandise utilizing stolen cost card information and your delivery handle. On this rip-off, you obtain what you ordered, and the one occasion 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 information dealer companies. One story uncovered how the Belarusian CEO of the privateness and information elimination service OneRep had really based dozens of people-search companies, together with many who OneRep was providing to take away folks from for a price. That story rapidly 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 had been Russian brothers in Massachusetts who operated a number of Russian language relationship companies 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Radaris repeatedly threatened to sue KrebsOnSecurity except that publication was retracted in full, alleging that it was replete with errors each factual and malicious.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 a substitute, 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 shoppers request that their private data 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 world 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 world free-for-all the place anybody can observe the every day actions and associations of tons of of tens of millions of cellular gadgets, because of the ubiquity of cellular location information that’s broadly and cheaply out there.
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 crucial consequential menace actors of 2024, Judische was accountable for a hacking rampage that uncovered non-public data on tons of of tens of millions of Individuals. That story withheld Judische’s actual identify, however the reporting got here in helpful 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 photograph of Connor Riley Moucka, a.okay.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 generally known as Kiberphant0m — detailing how Kiberphant0m had left a path of clues strongly suggesting that they’re or lately had 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 alternate allegedly based mostly in Canada that has develop into a significant cost processor and sanctions evasion platform for dozens of Russian exchanges and cybercrime companies 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 had been scammed out of six and 7 figures after falling for advanced social engineering schemes over the telephone. In these assaults, the phishers abused at the least 4 totally different Google companies to trick targets into believing they had 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 potential primarily by the adverts you may even see on the prime of this web site. Should you at the moment don’t see any adverts once you load this web site, please contemplate 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 adverts are static photos or GIFs which might be vetted by me and served in-house immediately.
Basically, my work is supported and improved by your readership, ideas, encouragement and, sure, criticism. So thanks for that, and preserve it coming, please.
Right here’s to a contented, wholesome, rich and cautious 2025. Hope to see you all once more within the New Yr!
