But Fly apparently did not fully trust his bride-to-be, so he had malware installed on her system that forwarded him copies of all email that she sent and received.īut Fly would make at least two big operational security mistakes in this spying effort: First, he had his fiancée’s messages forwarded to an email account he’d used for plenty of cybercriminal stuff related to his various “Fly” identities. prison, his propensity for password re-use ultimately landed him in Italy’s worst prison for more than a year before he was extradited to face charges in America.Īround the same time Fly was taking bitcoin donations for a fund to purchase heroin on my behalf, he was also engaged to be married to a young woman. As I described in a 2019 story about an interview Fly gave to a Russian publication upon his release from a U.S. Of all the stories I’ve written here over the last 11 years, probably the piece I get asked most to recount is the one about Sergey “Fly” Vovnenko, a Ukrainian man who in 2013 hatched and executed a plan to buy heroin off the dark web, ship it to our house and then spoof a call to the police from one of our neighbors saying we were dealing drugs.įly was the administrator of a Russian-language identity theft forum at the time, and as a secret lurker on his forum KrebsOnSecurity watched his plan unfold in real time. Which means when a cybercrime forum gets hacked and its user databases posted online, it is often possible to work backwards from some of the more unique passwords for each account and see where else that password was used. Interestingly, one of the more common connections involves re-using or recycling passwords across multiple accounts.Īnd yes, hackers get their passwords compromised at the same rate as the rest of us. The long-running Breadcrumbs series here tracks how cybercriminals get caught, and it’s mostly through odd connections between their online and offline selves scattered across the Internet. In a world in which all databases - including hacker forums - are eventually compromised and leaked online, it can be tough for cybercriminals to maintain their anonymity if they’re in the habit of re-using the same unusual passwords across multiple accounts associated with different email addresses. Our passwords can say a lot about us, and much of what they have to say is unflattering. When cybercriminals develop the same habit, it can eventually cost them their freedom. When normal computer users fall into the nasty habit of recycling passwords, the result is most often some type of financial loss.
0 kommentar(er)
