Security News
The Spanish National Police have arrested 55 members of the 'Black Panthers' cybercrime group, including one of the organization's leaders based in Barcelona. The gang was operating four specialized activity cells dedicated to social engineering, vishing, phishing, and carding, having a very organized structure.
According to Schütz, he stumbled on a total Android lockscreen bypass bug entirely by accident in June 2022, under real-life conditions that could easily have happened to anyone. In Schütz's case, it was the humble PIN on his SIM card that stumped him, and because SIM PINs can be as short as four digits, they're protected by a hardware lockout that limits you to three guesses at most.
Verizon has notified some prepaid customers that their accounts were compromised and their phone numbers potentially hijacked by crooks via SIM swaps. From there, the crooks could access the personal info in an account and perform a SIM swap.
According to court documents [PDF] filed Friday in federal New York City court, Ellis Pinsky agreed to pay Michael Terpin $22 million for his starring role in the SIM swap and Bitcoin heist. In a Rolling Stone interview over the summer, Pinsky - dubbed Baby Al Capone by the media - admitted he swiped millions in crypto-coins from Terpin via a SIM swap.
FBI: Criminals escalating SIM swap attacks to steal millions of dollars. The FBI says criminals have escalated SIM card swap attacks to hijack victims' phone numbers and steal millions of dollars from fiat and virtual currency accounts.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation says criminals have escalated SIM swap attacks to steal millions by hijacking victims' phone numbers. "From January 2018 to December 2020, the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center received 320 complaints related to SIM swapping incidents with adjusted losses of approximately $12 million. In 2021, IC3 received 1,611 SIM swapping complaints with adjusted losses of more than $68 million."
T-Mobile confirmed that recent reports of a new data breach are linked to notifications sent to a "Very small number of customers" who fell victim to SIM swap attacks. SIM swapping makes it possible for attackers to take control of a target's mobile phone number by tricking or bribing the carrier's employees to reassign the numbers to attacker-controlled SIM cards.
The US Department of Justice has indicted a suspected Twitter hacker known as 'PlugWalkJoe' for also stealing $784,000 worth of cryptocurrency using SIM swap attacks. SIM swap attacks are when threat actors take control of targets' phone numbers by porting them to their own device's SIM card.
The Federal Communications Commission in the U.S. this week announced that it started to work on rules that would pull the brake on SIM swapping attacks. The decision comes after the agency "Received numerous complaints from consumers who have suffered significant distress, inconvenience, and financial harm as a result of SIM swapping and port-out fraud."
Declan Harrington, a Massachusetts man charged two years ago for his alleged involvement in a series of SIM swapping attacks, pleaded guilty to stealing cryptocurrency from multiple victims and hijacking the Instagram account of others. Harrington was charged with Eric Meiggs in November 2019 for targeting the owners of high-value Instagram and Tumblr accounts.