Picture: Shutterstock, Dreamansions.
KrebsOnSecurity.com turns 15 years previous as we speak! Perhaps it’s indelicate to rejoice the birthday of a cybercrime weblog that principally publishes dangerous information, however fortunately a lot of 2024’s most engrossing safety tales had 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 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 advised the story of a Canadian man who was falsely charged with larceny and misplaced his job after turning into the sufferer of a posh e-commerce rip-off often called triangulation fraud. This could happen if 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 fee card knowledge and your delivery handle. On this rip-off, you obtain what you ordered, and the one social gathering left to dispute the transaction is the proprietor of the stolen fee card.
Triangulation fraud. Picture: eBay Enterprise.
March featured a number of investigations into the historical past of varied people-search knowledge dealer providers. One story uncovered how the Belarusian CEO of the privateness and knowledge elimination service OneRep had truly 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 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 had been Russian brothers in Massachusetts who operated a number of Russian language courting providers and affiliate packages, 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Radaris repeatedly threatened to sue KrebsOnSecurity except that publication was retracted in full, alleging that it was replete with errors each factual and malicious.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 all the 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 info be faraway from the info 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 in opposition to enemies of Russia.
The homepage of Stark Industries Options.
A lot of my summer time was spent reporting a narrative about how promoting and advertising and marketing companies have created a world free-for-all the place anybody can monitor the day by day actions and associations of lots of of tens of millions of cell gadgets, due to the ubiquity of cell location knowledge 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 rising 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 probably the most consequential menace actors of 2024, Judische was chargeable for a hacking rampage that uncovered personal info on lots of of tens of millions 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 prison counts linked to the Snowflake knowledge extortions.
A surveillance picture 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 often called Kiberphant0m — detailing how Kiberphant0m had left a path of clues strongly suggesting that they’re or just 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 primarily based in Canada that has change into a serious fee processor and sanctions evasion platform for dozens of Russian exchanges and cybercrime providers on-line.
Methods 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 complicated social engineering schemes over the telephone. In these assaults, the phishers abused at the very least 4 totally different Google providers 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 can 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 in a position to present right here is made potential primarily by the adverts you might even see on the high of this web site. If you happen to presently don’t see any adverts if you load this web site, please contemplate 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 adverts are static pictures or GIFs which are vetted by me and served in-house instantly.
Basically, 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 Yr!
