>called a SWAT team to his home just as his mother was arriving for dinner. As far as pranks go thats actually pretty good. Better than 4chan's pizzas.
http://www.cato.org/raidmap
some prank alright.....
Reporting From the Web’s Underbelly
11–20 of 35 posts
Re: Reporting From the Web’s Underbelly
#12>called a SWAT team to his home just as his mother was arriving for dinner. As far as pranks go thats actually pretty good. Better than 4chan's pizzas.
Given the current state of policing in the US swatting someone has a non-zero chance of getting someone severally beaten, tazered, tear gassed, or just shot. I don't know of any deaths, but there have been some really close calls reported in the press and and injury plus property damage. I don't think that really qualifies as a good prank, more of a harassment/endangerment tactic.
Swat teams are known for "shoot first ask questions later" especially when they've been called in for narcotics. Hell, even playing cards.
"Why did you shoot me I was reading a book." http://www.salon.com/2013/07/07/%E2%80%9Cwhy_did_you_shoot_m...
Re: Reporting From the Web’s Underbelly
#13>called a SWAT team to his home just as his mother was arriving for dinner. As far as pranks go thats actually pretty good. Better than 4chan's pizzas.
Yeah, great. Drive away one of the few reporters who understands what's going on. Good idea.
Re: Reporting From the Web’s Underbelly
#14>called a SWAT team to his home just as his mother was arriving for dinner. As far as pranks go thats actually pretty good. Better than 4chan's pizzas.
Given the current state of policing in the US swatting someone has a non-zero chance of getting someone severally beaten, tazered, tear gassed, or just shot. I don't know of any deaths, but there have been some really close calls reported in the press and and injury plus property damage. I don't think that really qualifies as a good prank, more of a harassment/endangerment tactic.
Re: Reporting From the Web’s Underbelly
#15As an ex-journalist I'm really envious of Krebs' sources and understanding of this space. I also think his background as a journalist (reporting and writing skills) might have allowed him to be far more effective than many others in the space with comparable technical skills.
Re: Reporting From the Web’s Underbelly
#16Re: Reporting From the Web’s Underbelly
#17The online crime world has a bitter hatred of Krebs, moreso than any other "white hat" out there probably. Numerous malware families include references to him in their source code, control panels, and domain names.
As a security researcher I frequently find botnet command & control panels that have a picture of Krebs' face above the login form. Domain names similar to "briankrebsisachildmolestor.com" are sometimes used to host malware and botnets.
Considering all that, plus the real-life harassment he's gotten (death threats, the heroin framing attempt, SWATing), I hope he invests in a good home security system. Or a security guard.
Re: Reporting From the Web’s Underbelly
#18The online crime world has a bitter hatred of Krebs, moreso than any other "white hat" out there probably. Numerous malware families include references to him in their source code, control panels, and domain names. As a security researcher I frequently find botnet command & control panels that have a picture of Krebs' face above the login form. Domain names similar to "briankrebsisachildmolestor.com" are sometimes us…
One of the articles profiling him mentioned he recently upgraded to a 12-guage security system.
Re: Reporting From the Web’s Underbelly
#19> The source said that he had bought a large batch of stolen cards from an underground site and that they all appeared to have been used at Target.
Interesting sidenote in the Target hack. First, something that you might not know: not one of these breaches (that is Target, Neiman Marcus, Michaels, etc.) was discovered by the actual affected companies - they were all discovered by bank and security officials in the underground markets.
Bank and infosec people worked out a while ago that rather than wait for breaches to be discovered, it'd be best to set yourself up on the underground markets in the guise of a purchaser - buy up cards, correlate purchase history and work out who has been hacked. It is this type of reconstruction that lead back to Target, Neiman Marcus, et al.
Target was discovered not too long after the hackers had ramped up their sniffing, and with the response from banks and computers it meant the overall 'score' wasn't that great. A hack that should have provided enough dumps for the entire underground for more than a year ended up lasting weeks.
So score one for the good guys.
The problem now is that the black hat groups have wizened up to this. A few things are happening.
First, there has been a bit of a purge of users in the forums. It is harder than ever to get into the private forums.
Second, cards are now being 'laundered'. You take dumps from different sources and combine them together, to the point where it would be difficult to find out where the cards were stolen from. Being from a particular source used to be a selling point for the traders, but now they are blurring a lot of that info out and combining different dumps and then slicing them for sale in other ways (usually IBAN, State and Expiry).
The public 'auto sites' that sold these dumps have all been taken down, after getting a lot of attention over the Target attack. Many complete novices sought out the underground sites after the Target breach reporting in the mainstream media, flooding the forums with newbie questions and requests in a mini eternal september.
It is possible that with the underground adapting in this way and the state of security still being so poor that we won't even find out about the next big breaches.
Re: Reporting From the Web’s Underbelly
#20> The source said that he had bought a large batch of stolen cards from an underground site and that they all appeared to have been used at Target. Interesting sidenote in the Target hack. First, something that you might not know: not one of these breaches (that is Target, Neiman Marcus, Michaels, etc.) was discovered by the actual affected companies - they were all discovered by bank and security officials in the un…
Is there a bright side to this, though? Doesn't this mean that the barrier to entry will increase for this kind of crime, and thus a smaller group of criminals will be able to perform it? Maybe that's small consolation, considering that only a handful need to do it to cause widespread havoc. Still. I hope this isn't all bad.