Kenneth Carter, 44, of Portland, Oregon, a former AT&T retail store employee, was sentenced to 16 months in federal prison for acting as the inside man for a SIM-swap gang. According to his plea agreement, the scheme ran from May 2018 to November 2019 and involved at least three co-conspirators. Carter used privileged store access to move…
Episode 487 of the Smashing Security podcast covers the hijacking of Microsoft's official X (Twitter) account, which has 13 million followers. The attackers used a Clippy theme to promote a dubious crypto coin, and a corporate apology that circulated was not from Microsoft either. There was no ransomware or data theft. The episode also co…
Two official Twitter/X accounts of Ireland's police service, Garda Síochána, were accessed by an unauthorised third party on Wednesday evening and used to post cryptocurrency-related messages. The posts claimed followers could claim free cryptocurrency through an airdrop, a lure that can trick victims into handing over wallet keys and hav…
Robert Wayne Boling Jr., a 45-year-old US citizen living in Angeles City, Philippines, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, the US Department of Justice announced. Prosecutors call him the principal orchestrator of a scheme that used stolen PII to compromise bank accounts of thousands of US servicemember…
Researcher Pedro Cruz (gankd) documents two Client-Side Path Traversal (CSPT) chains found in production bug bounty programs. The first turns CSPT into Stored XSS and account takeover on a payments platform's Angular POS single-page application. The second, found with Felipe Torres, triggers unauthorized account deletion on one of the lar…
F5 Labs honeynet telemetry shows overall hostile activity rising 55.5% month over month in June 2026, a return to the levels of the earlier-year spike. Highlighted is CVE-2024-44000, an unauthenticated account takeover flaw (CVSS 9.8, CWE-522) in the LiteSpeed Cache WordPress plugin, which rose by 1,128 to 2,603 attacks (8). Scanning is i…
A modular phishing campaign targets YouTube creators with personalized sponsorship offers from fake brand representatives. One variant impersonates Hollyland, a maker of wireless video transmission equipment, and also Nike and Spotify. Victims are led through a convincing fake collaboration platform to a bogus "Sign in with Google" page t…
This ESET WeLiveSecurity article explains email bombing (also called form, list or subscription bombing) and cites a September report of a Virginia woman flooded with hundreds of emails in 24 hours. The flood hid a genuine bank alert about a fraudulent laptop purchase. Attackers use bots to sign a harvested email address up to many legiti…
Check Point Research reports that commercial antidetect browsers Kameleo, AdsPower and MultiLogin are widely referenced on Russian-language underground forums and are used for account takeover, carding, fraudulent loan applications, ad-revenue fraud and coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB). The tools spoof browser fingerprints, manage p…
Huntress published an explainer on business email compromise (BEC), a targeted form of phishing in which attackers impersonate or take over trusted email accounts to redirect payments or steal credentials. The article cites roughly $55 billion in worldwide losses and a Huntress survey of 500+ US IT professionals, in which 36% of organizat…
F5 Labs' 2025 Advanced Persistent Bots Report analyzes more than 200 billion web and mobile API transactions from F5 Bot Defense customers between November 2023 and September 2024. It finds that 10.2% (21.22 billion) of requests were bots or automation. Of these, 4.8% were unwanted bots mitigated by F5, 3.5% were flagged automation and 2.…