But the users of pr0gramm.com did not retaliate against Krebs; as his name literally means "cancer" in German, they started a donation blitz to local cancer research organisations. This was first reported by the website Bleeping Computer.
Coinhive has a script that can be used to mine the monero cryptocurrency. It has been found embedded in many sites by malware authors.
Another choice bit from today's story on #Coinhive: "Somewhere along the way, however, Moench ditched the priest idea and decided to become a spammer instead." https://t.co/QvV1vwFkHF
— briankrebs (@briankrebs) March 26, 2018
"The man hired used a machete to hack to death Moench’s parents & the family poodle. Moench later explained his actions saying he was upset his parents bought him a used car for his 18th birthday instead of the Ferrari he’d always wanted." More: https://t.co/QvV1vwFkHF
— briankrebs (@briankrebs) March 26, 2018
Krebs' long and tortuous article claimed to probe "who and what is Coinhive." But after identifying the individual whom he claimed was behind the script, Krebs then included lurid details about one Matthias Moench who was the first owner of the domain pr0gramm.com – even though the article said "Mr Moench is only tangentially connected to this research".
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"Publishing material by users he knew had trolled him to further the agenda that this is a right-wing site (it is not, the site has a huge fan base of Bernie Sanders and other leftist politicians).
"Look at his tweets and headlines (on Vice Motherboard for example) that are used to promote the story: They are almost exclusively focusing the the Matthias Moench part, which is completely irrelevant to pr0gramm, Coinhive, and even the mindmap."
Users of pr0gramm.com have created a hashtag #KrebsIsCancer under which details of various donations are being posted. Details of donations are also plastered all over the home page of pr0gramm.com.
As iTWire has reported, Krebs last year quietly took down a story he had written purporting to uncover the people behind the Shadow Brokers group who leaked a number of NSA exploits on the Web. No reason was offered for this takedown and it was mentioned only at the very end of a story he wrote about the arrest of a Vietnamese American who pleaded guilty to taking masses of NSA material home.
Comments were not allowed on this article, presumably to avoid criticism of his earlier claim. The allegations about the identity of the Brokers were fed to Krebs by a Washington DC-based security firm, InGuardians, a fact he mentioned only in the 30th paragraph of his story.
iTWire has contacted Krebs for comment.
