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Arrests in Tap-to-Pay Scheme Powered by Phishing

Authorities in at least two U.S. states last week independently announced arrests of Chinese nationals accused of perpetrating a novel form of tap-to-pay fraud using mobile devices. Details released by authorities so far indicate the mobile wallets being used by the scammers were created through online phishing scams, and that the accused were relying on a custom Android app to relay tap-to-pay transactions from mobile devices located in China. Image: WLVT-8. Authorities in Knoxville, Tennessee…

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DOGE to Fired CISA Staff: Email Us Your Personal Data

A message posted on Monday to the homepage of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is the latest exhibit in the Trump administration’s continued disregard for basic cybersecurity protections. The message instructed recently-fired CISA employees to get in touch so they can be rehired and then immediately placed on leave, asking employees to send their Social Security number or date of birth in a password-protected email attachment — presumably with the password needed…

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ClickFix: How to Infect Your PC in Three Easy Steps

A clever malware deployment scheme first spotted in targeted attacks last year has now gone mainstream. In this scam, dubbed “ClickFix,” the visitor to a hacked or malicious website is asked to distinguish themselves from bots by pressing a combination of keyboard keys that causes Microsoft Windows to download password-stealing malware. ClickFix attacks mimic the “Verify You are a Human” tests that many websites use to separate real visitors from content-scraping bots. This particular scam…

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Microsoft: 6 Zero-Days in March 2025 Patch Tuesday

Microsoft today issued more than 50 security updates for its various Windows operating systems, including fixes for a whopping six zero-day vulnerabilities that are already seeing active exploitation. Two of the zero-day flaws include CVE-2025-24991 and CVE-2025-24993, both vulnerabilities in NTFS, the default file system for Windows and Windows Server. Both require the attacker to trick a target into mounting a malicious virtual hard disk. CVE-2025-24993 would lead to the possibility of local code execution,…

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Alleged Co-Founder of Garantex Arrested in India

Authorities in India today arrested the alleged co-founder of Garantex, a cryptocurrency exchange sanctioned by the U.S. government in 2022 for facilitating tens of billions of dollars in money laundering by transnational criminal and cybercriminal organizations. Sources close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity the Lithuanian national Aleksej Besciokov, 46, was apprehended while vacationing on the coast of India with his family. Aleksej Bešciokov, “proforg,” “iram”. Image: U.S. Secret Service. On March 7, the U.S. Department…

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Feds Link $150M Cyberheist to 2022 LastPass Hacks

In September 2023, KrebsOnSecurity published findings from security researchers who concluded that a series of six-figure cyberheists across dozens of victims resulted from thieves cracking master passwords stolen from the password manager service LastPass in 2022. In a court filing this week, U.S. federal agents investigating a spectacular $150 million cryptocurrency heist said they had reached the same conclusion. On March 6, federal prosecutors in northern California said they seized approximately $24 million worth of…

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Who is the DOGE and X Technician Branden Spikes?

At 49, Branden Spikes isn’t just one of the oldest technologists who has been involved in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). As the current director of information technology at X/Twitter and an early hire at PayPal, Zip2, Tesla and SpaceX, Spikes is also among Musk’s most loyal employees. Here’s a closer look at this trusted Musk lieutenant, whose Russian ex-wife was once married to Elon’s cousin. The profile of Branden Spikes on X.…

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Unveiling WolfsBane: Gelsemium’s Linux counterpart to Gelsevirine

ESET researchers have identified multiple samples of Linux backdoor, which we have named WolfsBane, that we attribute with high confidence to the Gelsemium advanced persistent threat (APT) group. This China-aligned threat actor has a known history dating back to 2014 and until now, there have been no public reports of Gelsemium using Linux malware. Additionally, we discovered another Linux backdoor, which we named FireWood. However, we cannot definitively link FireWood to other Gelsemium tools, and…

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What is “Scam Likely”? Putting the phone down on unwanted calls

Tired of dodging all those ‘Scam Likely’ calls? Here’s what’s behind the label and how to stay one step ahead of phone scammers. Phil Muncaster 18 Nov 2024  •  , 5 min. read Despite all the wonders of modern technology, it is often the old ways that we rely on most. That’s certainly true of communications. We may have email, video conferencing, text, social media and end-to-end encrypted instant messages to choose from, but some…

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My information was stolen. Now what?

Back in May 2023, I wrote the blogpost You may not care where you download software from, but malware does as a call to arms, warning about the risks of running software downloaded from so-called “trusted sources” of pirated software. Of course, those files were anything but trustworthy and contained malware, such as ransomware or infostealers, specifically targeted at that demographic. My hope was that by educating the public about the risks involved, people would…

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