Oregon Man Charged in ‘Rapper Bot’ DDoS Service

A 22-year-old Oregon man has been arrested on suspicion of operating “Rapper Bot,” a massive botnet used to power a service for launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against targets — including a March 2025 DDoS that knocked Twitter/X offline. The Justice Department asserts the suspect and an unidentified co-conspirator rented out the botnet to online extortionists, and tried to stay off the radar of law enforcement by ensuring that their botnet was never pointed at KrebsOnSecurity.

August 19, 2025
Read More >>

Big Tech’s Mixed Response to U.S. Treasury Sanctions

In May 2025, the U.S. government sanctioned a Chinese national for operating a cloud provider linked to the majority of virtual currency investment scam websites reported to the FBI. But more than a month later, the accused continues to openly operate accounts at a slew of American tech companies, including Facebook, Github, LinkedIn, PayPal and Twitter/X.

July 3, 2025
Read More >>

Oops: DanaBot Malware Devs Infected Their Own PCs

The U.S. government today unsealed criminal charges against 16 individuals accused of operating and selling DanaBot, a prolific strain of information-stealing malware that has been sold on Russian cybercrime forums since 2018. The FBI says a newer version of DanaBot was used for espionage, and that many of the defendants exposed their real-life identities after accidentally infecting their own systems with the malware.

May 23, 2025
Read More >>

Malicious NPM packages target PayPal users

Threat actors deploy malicious NPM packages to steal PayPal credentials and hijack cryptocurrency transfers. Fortinet researchers discovered multiple malicious NPM packages that are used to target PayPal users. The packages were uploaded to the repository in early March by a threat actor known as tommyboy_h1 and tommyboy_h2, and were used to steal PayPal credentials and hijack cryptocurrency transfers. “Using PayPal-related […]

April 14, 2025
Read More >>