Happy 14th Birthday, KrebsOnSecurity!

KrebsOnSecurity celebrates its 14th year of existence today! I promised myself this post wouldn’t devolve into yet another Cybersecurity Year in Review. Nor do I wish to hold forth about whatever cyber horrors may await us in 2024. But I do want to thank you all for your continued readership, encouragement and support, without which I could not do what I do.

As of this birthday, I’ve officially been an independent investigative journalist for longer than I was a reporter for The Washington Post (1995-2009). Of course, not if you count the many years I worked as a paperboy schlepping The Washington Post to dozens of homes in Springfield, Va. (as a young teen, I inherited a largish paper route handed down from my elder siblings).

True story: At the time I was hired as a lowly copy aide by The Washington Post, all new hires — everyone from the mailroom and janitors on up to the executives — were invited to a formal dinner in the Executive Suite with the publisher Don Graham. On the evening of my new hires dinner, I was feeling underdressed, undershowered and out of place. After wolfing down some food, I tried to slink away to the elevator with another copy aide, but was pulled aside by the guy who hired me. “Hey Brian, not so fast! Come over and meet Don!”

I was 23 years old, and I had no clue what to say except to tell him that paper route story, and that I’d already been working for him for half my life. Mr. Graham laughed and told me that was the best thing he’d heard all day. Which of course made my week, and made me feel more at ease among the suits.

I remain grateful to WaPo for instilling many skills, such as how to distill technobabble into plain English for a general audience. And how to make people the focus of highly technical stories. Because people — and their eternal struggles — are imminently relatable, regardless of whether one has a full grasp of the technical details.

Words fail me when trying to describe how grateful I am that this whole independent reporter thing still works, financially and otherwise. I mostly just keep my head down researching stuff and sharing what I find, and somehow loads of people keep coming back to the site. As I like to say, I hope they let me keep doing this, because I’m certainly unqualified to do much else!

Another milestone of sorts: We’ve now amassed more than 52,000 subscribers to our email newsletter, which is a fancy term for a plain text email that goes out immediately whenever a new story is published here. Subscribing is free, we never share anyone’s email address, and we don’t send emails other than new story notifications (2-3 per week).

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And in case you missed any of them, here are some of the most-read stories published by KrebsOnSecurity in 2023. Happy 2024 everyone!

Ten Years Later, New Clues in the Target Breach
It’s Still Easy for Anyone to Become You at Experian
Experts Fear Crooks are Cracking Keys Stolen in LastPass Breach
Why is .US Being Used to Phish So Many of US?
Few Fortune 100 Firms List Security Pros in Their Executive Ranks
Who’s Behind the Domain Networks Snail Mail Scam?
Phishing Domains Tanked After Meta Sued Freenom
Many Public Salesforce Sites are Leaking Private Data
Hackers Claim They Breached T-Mobile More Than 100 Times in 2022
Identity Thieves Bypassed Experian Security to View Credit Reports