News

For several months I’ve been poking at a decent-sized spam botnet that appears to be used mainly for promoting adult dating sites. Having hit a wall in my research, I decided it might be good to publish what I’ve unearthed so far to see if this dovetails with any other research out there.

In late October 2016, an anonymous source shared with KrebsOnSecurity.com a list of nearly 100 URLs that — when loaded into a Firefox browser — each displayed what appeared to be a crude but otherwise effective “counter” designed to report in real time how many “bots” were reporting in for duty.

Here’s a set of archived screenshots of those counters illustrating how these various botnet controllers keep a running tab of how many “activebots” — hacked servers set up to relay spam — are sitting idly by and waiting for instructions.

A new report proves the value of following the money in the fight against dodgy cybercrime services known as “booters” or “stressers” — virtual hired muscle that can be rented to knock nearly any website offline.

Last fall, two 18-year-old Israeli men were arrested for allegedly running a vDOS, perhaps the most successful booter service of all time. The pair were detained within hours of being named in a story on this blog as the co-proprietors of the service (this site would later suffer a three-day outage as a result of an attack that was alleged to have been purchased in retribution for my reporting on vDOS).

That initial vDOS story was based on data shared by an anonymous source who had hacked vDOS and obtained its private user and attack database. The story showed how the service made approximately $600,000 over just two of the four years it was in operation. Most of those profits came in the form of credit card payments via PayPal.

But prior to vDOS’s takedown in September 2016, the service was already under siege thanks to work done by a group of academic researchers who teamed up with PayPal to identify and close accounts that vDOS and other booter services were using to process customer payments. The researchers found that their interventions cut profits in half for the popular booter service, and helped reduce the number of attacks coming out of it by at least 40 percent.

For the second time in less than three years, Kmart Stores is battling a malware-based security breach of its store credit card processing systems.

Last week I began hearing from smaller banks and credit unions who said they strongly suspected another card breach at Kmart. Some of those institutions received alerts from the credit card companies about batches of stolen cards that all had one thing in comment: They were all used at Kmart locations.

Ask to respond to rumors about a card breach, Kmart’s parent company Sears Holdings said some of its payment systems were infected with malicious software:

Earlier this month, KrebsOnSecurity featured a story about a basic security flaw in the Web site of medical diagnostics firm True Health Group that let anyone who was logged in to the site view all other patient records. In that story I mentioned True Health was one of three major healthcare providers with similar website problems, and that the other two providers didn’t even require a login to view all patient records. Today we’ll examine such a flaw that was just fixed by Molina Healthcare, a Fortune 500 company that until recently was exposing countless patient medical claims to the entire Internet without requiring any authentication.

In March 2017, KrebsOnSecurity warned that thieves who perpetrate tax refund fraud with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service were leveraging a widely-used online student loan tool to find critical data on consumers that allows them to claim huge refunds with the IRS in someone else’s name. This week, it emerged that a Louisiana-based private investigator is being charged with using the same online tool to glean tax data on then-presidential candidate Donald J. Trump.

A story today at Diverseeducation.com points to court filings in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana, in which local private eye Jordan Hamlett is accused by federal prosecutors of abusing an automated tool at the U.S. Department of Education website that is designed to make it easier for families to complete the Education Department’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) — a lengthy form that serves as the starting point for students seeking federal financial assistance to pay for college or career school.