gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/hacking-brian-krebs-s...

Brian Krebs is great. Back in 2018, I discovered a flaw in a website enabling anyone to track any US cellphone’s location without consent, and I contacted US-CERT and Krebs to break the news (https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/tracking-firm-locationsm...). After checking the locations of several numbers he provided, I remember discussing his need for location privacy - and his shock when he found it was so easy to break. His opsec might be very strict, but when every cellular carrier is eager to sell off your location data, that level of security is absolutely justified.

I worked with a guy a few years ago, a React dev, who would do this in serious meetings. A bunch of us would find it pretty amusing. It was like that scene from Supertroopers. His Slack avatar was also Nyan Cat.

>One hint some of the accounts belonged to Waifu: He liked to use animated cats as avatars. Other aliases included Meowist, Catist and Scarlet the Meow Cat, according to court filings. “He would say meow all the time. I don’t really know what that’s about,” Krebs said.

I don't think it was Waifu. This was in Austalia after all.

These hackers and scammers take so much risk for little $. The crypto doubling scam on youtube and twitter earns far more and no arrests. One stream made 1 million of BTC in a week with it...deepfake elon video or something like that. AFIK these crypto scams never lead to arrest or investigation. The mistake these hackers make is breaking into corporations. That always leads to an investigation. Crypto streamers target users, not the actual corporation.

One thing that really surprises me is the average age of these criminals. Where from and how do they get the knowledge to break in these places being so young?

With the level of opsec described, I'd honestly be surprised if his legal name was Brian Krebs

Random aside: after reading this article I for one am grateful to know that the site is called Krebs On Security; my mushed up brain has thought since forever that it was in fact Krebson Security.

I wonder if the elections and Russia encouraged those people to commit crime.

I really hate cyber security, you would need to pay me a lot of money to work in this field.

These criminals aren't very bright. It doesn't take much effort to be a ghost online.

They may also have numerous executive function impairments. Such things tend to be orthogonal to IQ.

We probably never read about the competent criminals. Or we do because they framed a "state actor".

[dead]

But did they play chess?