The homepage of Stark Industries Solutions.
Much of my summer was spent reporting a story about how advertising and marketing firms have created
, thanks to the ubiquity of mobile location data that is broadly and cheaply available.
. That analysis found an increasing number of young, Western cybercriminals are also members of fast-growing online groups that exist solely to bully, stalk, harass and extort vulnerable teens into physically harming themselves and others.
Identified by the Mandiant as one of the most consequential threat actors of 2024, Judische was responsible for a hacking rampage that exposed private information on hundreds of millions of Americans. That story withheld Judische’s real name, but the reporting came in handy in late October when
.
A surveillance photo of Connor Riley Moucka, a.k.a. “Judische” and “Waifu,” dated Oct 21, 2024, 9 days before Moucka’s arrest. This image was included in an affidavit filed by an investigator with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
In November, KrebsOnSecurity published a profile of Judische’s accomplice — a hacker known as
Kiberphant0m — detailing how Kiberphant0m had left a trail of clues strongly suggesting that
they are or recently were a U.S. Army soldier stationed in South Korea.
My reporting in December was mainly split between two investigations. The first profiled
Cryptomus, a dodgy cryptocurrency exchange allegedly based in Canada that has become a major payment processor and sanctions evasion platform
for dozens of Russian exchanges and cybercrime services online.
How to Lose a Fortune with Just One Bad Click told the sad tales of two cryptocurrency heist victims who were scammed out of six and seven figures after falling for complex social engineering schemes over the phone. In these attacks, the phishers abused at least four different Google services to trick targets into believing they were speaking with a Google representative, and into giving thieves control over their account with a single click. Look for a story here in early 2025 that will explore the internal operations of these ruthless and ephemeral voice phishing gangs.
Before signing off for 2024, allow me to remind readers that the reporting we’re able to provide here is made possible primarily by the ads you may see at the top of this website. If you currently don’t see any ads when you load this website, please consider enabling an exception in your ad blocker for KrebsOnSecurity.com. There is zero third-party content on this website, apart from the occasional Youtube video embedded as part of a story. More importantly, all of our ads are static images or GIFs that are vetted by me and served in-house directly.
Fundamentally, my work is supported and improved by
your readership, tips, encouragement and, yes, criticism. So thank you for that, and keep it coming, please.
Here’s to a happy, healthy, wealthy and wary 2025. Hope to see you all again in the New Year!
Published: 2024-12-29T23:48:44
