Picture: Shutterstock, Dreamansions.
KrebsOnSecurity.com turns 15 years previous right now! Perhaps it’s indelicate to have fun the birthday of a cybercrime weblog that largely publishes dangerous information, however fortunately lots of 2024’s most engrossing safety tales had been about dangerous issues occurring to dangerous guys. It’s additionally an event to notice that regardless of my publishing fewer tales than ever this previous 12 months, we in some way managed to draw close to document 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 complex e-commerce scam known as triangulation fraud. This may 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 cost card knowledge and your transport 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 varied people-search knowledge dealer companies. One story uncovered how the Belarusian CEO of the privateness and knowledge removing service OneRep had really founded dozens of people-search services, 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 patron knowledge dealer Radaris found its CEO was a fabricated identity, and that the corporate’s founders had been Russian brothers in Massachusetts who operated a number of Russian language relationship companies and affiliate packages, along with a dizzying array of people-search web sites.
Radaris repeatedly threatened to sue KrebsOnSecurity until that publication was retracted in full, alleging that it was replete with errors each factual and malicious. As an alternative, we doubled down and published all of the supporting evidence 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 info be faraway from the information dealer’s web site.
Simply the longest story this 12 months was an investigation into Stark Industries Solutions, 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 in opposition to 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 global free-for-all where anyone can track the daily movements and associations of hundreds of millions of mobile devices, due to the ubiquity of cellular location knowledge that’s broadly and cheaply obtainable.
Analysis printed in September explored the dark nexus between harm groups and cybercrime communities consumed with perpetrating financial 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 one of the consequential menace actors of 2024, Judische was accountable for a hacking rampage that uncovered non-public info on a whole bunch 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 criminal counts connected to the Snowflake data 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 often known as Kiberphant0m — detailing how Kiberphant0m had left a path of clues strongly suggesting that they are or recently were a U.S. Army soldier stationed in South Korea.
My reporting in December was primarily break up between two investigations. The primary profiled Cryptomus, a dodgy cryptocurrency trade 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 services online.
How to Lose a Fortune with Just One Bad Click informed 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 cellphone. In these assaults, the phishers abused a minimum of 4 completely 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, enable me to remind readers that the reporting we’re capable of present right here is made doable primarily by the advertisements you might even see on the prime of this web site. Should 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, aside from the occasional Youtube video embedded as a part of a narrative. Extra importantly, all of our advertisements are static photos or GIFs which can be vetted by me and served in-house straight.
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 cheerful, wholesome, rich and cautious 2025. Hope to see you all once more within the New 12 months!
