SIM swapping
Latest
Crypto scammer faces 18 months in prison over $22 million SIM attack
A young crypto scammer has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for allegedly helping to steal $22 million in cryptocurrency.
T-Mobile pins latest data breach on SIM swapping
T-Mobile has confirmed that a recent data breach had its roots in SIM swapping that compromised accounts.
Europol takes down hackers who allegedly stole over $100 million in crypto from celebs
Eight men have been arrested in the UK for their role in a spate of hacks on US celebs, per Europol, after the criminals broke into the victims’ phones to steal over $100 million in cryptocurrencies. SIM-swapping involves hackers taking control of a person’s phone number by deactivating their SIM and porting the number over to their own SIM card. This is typically done with the help of an insider at the targeted phone service or through social engineering ploys, such as phishing, according to law enforcement.
How a trivial cell phone hack is ruining lives
On a Tuesday night in May, Sean Coonce was reading the news in bed when his phone dropped service. He chalked it up to tech being tech and went to sleep. When he woke up, his Gmail account had been stolen and by Wednesday evening he was out $100,000.
Hackers turn tables on account hijackers by stealing forum data
Online account hijackers received a taste of ironic punishment this week. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that hackers stole the database from the popular hijacker forum OGusers on May 12th, obtaining email addresses, hashed passwords, IP addresses and private forum messages for 112,988 accounts. The administrator initially told users that a hard drive failure had wiped out the information and forced the use of a backup, but that tall tale fell apart when the administrator of a rival forum made the data public.
US charges nine people over $2.4 million SIM hijacking ring
American law enforcement just took down a significant SIM hijacking ring. Federal agents have charged nine men with wire fraud and identity theft charges for participating in The Community, a group that transferred phone numbers to SIM cards in their possession, used those to take control of online accounts (particularly those with two-factor authentication) and promptly stole cryptocurrency. The group has been accused of perpetrating seven attacks that stole more than $2.4 million in digital currencies from targets.
