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    • The Coming Storm

    The Coming Storm — 39 Comments
    17
    Jun 10

    Sophisticated ATM Skimmer Transmits Stolen Data Via Text Message

    Operating and planting an ATM skimmer — cleverly disguised technology that thieves attach to cash machines to intercept credit and debit card data — can be a risky venture, because the crooks have to return to the scene of the crime to retrieve their skimmers along with the purloined data. Increasingly, however, criminals are using ATM skimmers that eliminate much of that risk by relaying the information via text message.

    [NOTE TO READERS: The Today Show this morning ran an interview with me for a segment they produced on ATM skimmers.]

    Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

    This latest entry in my series on skimmers includes a number of never before published pictures of a cell-phone based skimmer set that sends stolen bank card data to the attacker using encrypted text messages. The following images were obtained directly from a skimmer maker who sells them on a very well-protected online fraud forum. This particular craftsman designs the fraud devices made-to-order, even requesting photos of the customer’s targeted ATMs before embarking on a sale.

    Just as virus writers target Windows in large part because it is the dominant operating system on the planet, skimmer makers tend to center their designs around one or two ATM models that are broadly deployed around the globe. Among the most popular is the NCR 5886, a legitimate, unadulterated version of which is pictured below.

    This skimmer I’m writing about today sells for between $7,000 and $8,000 USD, and includes two main components: The actual card skimmer device that fits over the card acceptance slot and records the data that is stored on the back of any ATM cards inserted into the device; and a metal plate with a fake PIN pad that is designed to sit directly on top of the real PIN pad and capture the victim’s personal identification number (PIN) while simultaneously passing it on to the real PIN pad underneath.

    Not all skimmers are so pricey: Many are prefabricated, relatively simple devices that fraudsters attach to an ATM and then collect at some later point to retrieve the stolen data. The trouble with these devices is that the fraudster has to return to the compromised ATM to grab the device and the stolen data stored on it.

    In contrast, wireless skimmers like the one pictured below allow the thief to receive the stolen card data from anywhere in the world, provided he or she has a working cell phone signal.

    The actual card skimmer in this seller’s model is quite small, and yet includes both a magnetic strip reader and a tiny radio that sends the collected data (known as “dumps” in fraud circles) in an encrypted format to a device built into the PIN pad (more on that in a moment).

    Here are a few photos of the razor thin skimmer that comes with this kit:

    Card skimmer with track reader and radio, front side.

    And here’s a view of the electronics that powers this little thief:

    The card skimmer, reverse view

    Continue reading →

    The Coming Storm — 125 Comments
    24
    May 10

    Devious New Phishing Tactic Targets Tabs

    Most Internet users know to watch for the telltale signs of a traditional phishing attack: An e-mail that asks you to click on a link and enter your e-mail or banking credentials at the resulting Web site. But a new phishing concept that exploits user inattention and trust in browser tabs is likely to fool even the most security-conscious Web surfers.

    As Mozilla Firefox creative lead Aza Raskin describes it, the attack is as elegant as it is simple: A user has multiple tabs open, and surfs to a site that uses special javacript code to silently alter the contents of a tabbed page along with the information displayed on the tab itself, so that when the user switches back to that tab it appears to be the login page for a site the user normally visits.

    Consider the following scenario: Bob has six or seven tabs open, and one of the sites he has open (but not the tab currently being viewed) contains a script that waits for a few minutes or hours, and then quietly changes both the content of the page and the icon and descriptor in the tab itself so that it appears to be the login page for Gmail.

    In this attack, the phisher need not even change the Web address displayed in the browser’s navigation toolbar. Rather, this particular phishing attack takes advantage of user trust and inattention to detail, or what Raskin calls “the perceived immutability of tabs.” Then, as the user scans their many open tabs, the favicon and title act as a strong visual cue, and the user will most likely simply think they left a Gmail tab open.

    “When they click back to the fake Gmail tab, they’ll see the standard Gmail login page, assume they’ve been logged out, and provide their credentials to log in,” Raskin explained. “After the user has enter they have entered their login information and sent it back your server, you redirect them to Gmail. Because they were never logged out in the first place, it will appear as if the login was successful.”

    Raskin includes a proof-of-concept at his site, which is sort of creepy when you let it run. In fact, at least once while composing this blog post in Firefox I went to click on the tab that had my Gmail inbox open, only to discover I’d accidentally clicked on Raskin’s page, which had morphed into the fake Gmail site in the interim.

    It’s important to keep in mind that this attack could be used against any site, not just Gmail. Also, Raskin includes a few suggestions about how this attack could be made far sneakier — such as taking advantage of CSS history attacks.

    Of course, if you are browsing with the excellent “Noscript” add-on and this is a site you have not allowed to run javascript, the proof-of-concept won’t work until you allow javascript on the page. It did not work completely against the Safari browser on my Mac (no favicon), and the test page failed completely against Google Chrome. [Update: As several readers have correctly pointed out, this attack does in fact work against Chrome, although it doesn't seem to change the favicon in Chrome tabs].

    I’m left wondering what this new form of phishing will be called if it is ever adopted by the bad guys. Tabnabbing? Tabgrabbing? See if you can coin a better phrase in the comments below.

    Update, May 25, 7:55 p.m. ET: Researcher Aviv Raff has posted an interesting proof-of-concept of his own that shows how this attack can work against Firefox even when users have the Noscript add-on installed and in full paranoid mode. Raff crafted his page, which is a mock up of this blog post, to morph into an image of the Gmail login page, and it will reload every 20 seconds but will only change to the sample phish page if you move to another tab with your mouse, or after 10 reloads (in case you moved with the keyboard). So it will change only after 3 minutes or so, unless you move to another tab with your mouse.

    “I was trying to find a way to work around the javascript need for the [proof-of-concept],” Raff said in an instant message. “First I was able to do this without knowing if the user moved to a new tab. Now I can almost be sure of that.”

    Update, May 27, 11:41 p.m. ET: For Firefox users with the Noscript plugin, there is an update to the program that can block these types of tabnabbing attacks.

    A Little Sunshine / Latest Warnings / The Coming Storm / Web Fraud 2.0 — 17 Comments
    8
    May 10

    Visa Warns of Fraud Attack from Criminal Group

    Visa is warning financial institutions that it has received reliable intelligence that an organized criminal group plans to attempt to move large amounts of fraudulent payments through a merchant account in Eastern Europe, possibly as soon as this weekend.

    In an alert sent to banks, card issuers and processors this week, Visa said it “has received intelligence from a third-party entity indicating that a criminal group has plans to execute “a large batch settlement fraud scheme.”

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    Latest Warnings / The Coming Storm — 23 Comments
    21
    Apr 10

    McAfee False Detection Locks Up Windows XP

    McAfee‘s anti-virus software is erroneously detecting legitimate Windows system files as malicious, causing reboot loops and serious stability problems for many Windows XP users, according to multiple reports.

    The SANS Internet Storm Center has received dozens of reports from McAfee users who complained that a recent anti-virus update (DAT 5958) is causing Windows xP Service Pack 3 clients to be locked out. According to SANS incident handler Johannes Ulllrich, McAfee is flagging “svchost.exe” as malicious. Svchost is a common system process typically used by multiple legitimate programs on a Windows system (although malware does often inject itself into this process), so having an anti-virus program that flags the process as a threat could cause major problems on a host system, Ullrich said.

    “The [reports] keep coming in,” Ullrich said. “Systems either get stuck in a reboot loop, or networking is no longer working.”

    One symptom seems to be that McAfee reports that user systems are infected with W32.Wecorl.a. The anti-virus program’s attempts to destroy or quarantine that targeted process then forces the Windows machine into a reboot cycle.

    McAfee’s own support forum is currently queuing up with a large number of users piping in with stories about how the incident is affecting their operations. That thread,which began at 9:54 a.m. today, has more than 27,000 views and 83 replies.

    Stay tuned for more updates as available.

    Update, 1:56 p.m. ET: McAfee released the following statement regarding this event. “McAfee is aware that a number of customers have incurred a false positive error due to incorrect malware alerts on Wednesday, April 21. The problem occurs with the 5958 virus definition file (DAT) that was released on April 21 at 2.00 PM GMT+1 (6am Pacific Time).

    Our initial investigation indicates that the error can result in moderate to significant performance issues on systems running Windows XP Service Pack 3.

    The faulty update has been removed from McAfee download servers for corporate users, preventing any further impact on those customers. We are not aware of significant impact on consumer customers and believe we have effectively limited such occurrence.

    McAfee teams are working with the highest priority to support impacted customers and plan to provide an update virus definition file shortly. McAfee apologizes for any inconvenience to our customers.”

    Update, 3:51 p.m. ET: McAfee’s main support forum is down due to an “unusually large traffic.” McAfee has posted a separate thread here that includes a couple of workarounds for customers struggling to deal with this problem.

    A Little Sunshine / The Coming Storm — 10 Comments
    17
    Apr 10

    Fraud Fighter ‘Bobbear’ to Hang Up His Cape

    The owner and curator of bobbear.co.uk, a site that specializes in exposing Internet scams and phantom online companies, announced Saturday that he will be shuttering the site at the end of April.

    Bobbear and its companion site bobbear.com, are creations of Bob Harrison, a 66-year-old U.K. resident who for the last four years has tirelessly chronicled and exposed a myriad of fraud and scam Web sites. The sites, which are well-indexed by Google and other search engines and receive about 2,000 hits per day, often are among the first results returned in a search for the names of fly-by-night corporations advertised in spam and aimed at swindling the unsuspecting or duping the unwitting.

    Indeed, bobbear.co.uk has been extremely valuable resource to krebsonsecurity.com, which has used it to track the constant stream of new fraudulent corporations used to recruit so-called money mules, people lured into helping organized criminals launder money stolen through online banking theft.

    In an interview with krebsonsecurity, Harrison said he’s been considering this move for some time now, and finally decided to quit the site for health and quality-of-life reasons.

    “The wife says I spend about 15 hours a day on it, although it may not be quite that much,” joked the pseudonymous Harrison, speaking via phone from his home near Kent, about 50 miles outside of London. “Things are quite hard and health isn’t that good, so the time has come.”

    An example of a money mule recruitment site exposed by bobbear.co.uk

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    A Little Sunshine / Latest Warnings / Target: Small Businesses / The Coming Storm — 30 Comments
    6
    Apr 10

    Computer Crooks Steal $100,000 from Ill. Town

    A rash of home foreclosures and abandoned dwellings had already taken its toll on the tax revenue for the Village of Summit, a town of 10,000 just outside Chicago. Then, in March, computer crooks broke into the town’s online bank account, making off with nearly $100,000.

    “As little as we are, $100,000 represents a good chunk of money, and it hurts,” said Judy Rivera, the town’s administrator. “We were already on a very lean budget, because the tax money just isn’t coming in.”

    Summit is just the latest in a string of towns, cities, counties and municipalities across America that have seen their coffers cleaned out by organized thieves who specialize in looting online bank accounts. Recently, crooks stole $100,000 from the New Jersey township of Egg Harbor; $130,000 from a public water utility in Arkansas; $378,000 from a New York town; $160,000 from a Florida public library; $500,000 from a New York middle school district; $415,000 from a Kentucky county (this is far from a comprehensive list).

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    A Little Sunshine / Target: Small Businesses / The Coming Storm — 14 Comments
    6
    Apr 10

    e-Banking Guidance for Banks & Businesses

    One bit of criticism I’ve heard about my stories on small businesses losing their shirts over online banking fraud is that I don’t often enough point out what banks and customers should be doing differently to lessen the chance of suffering one of these incidents. As it happens, a source of mine was recently at a conference where one of the key speakers was a senior official from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, one of the main banking industry regulators.

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    A Little Sunshine / Target: Small Businesses / The Coming Storm — 43 Comments
    22
    Mar 10

    Organized Crooks Hit NJ Town, Ark. Utility

    An Arkansas public water utility and a New Jersey town are the latest victims of an organized cyber crime gang that is stealing tens of millions of dollars from small to mid-sized organizations via online bank theft.

    On Thursday, officials in Egg Harbor Township, N.J. acknowledged that a sizable amount of money was taken in an “outside intrusion into a municipal banking account,” suggesting in public statements that computer criminals were responsible.

    On Monday, details began to emerge that implicate the work of the same gang that Krebs on Security has been tracking for close to a year now.

    Mayor James J. “Sonny” McCullough confirmed that the thieves took close to $100,000 from town coffers, sending the money in sub-$10,000 chunks to individuals around the country who had no prior businesses with Egg Harbor.

    McCullough said the town is working with local authorities and the FBI.

    “There’s a possibility that the bank will be able to [retrieve] some of the money,” McCullough told Krebs on Security.

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    A Little Sunshine / The Coming Storm / Web Fraud 2.0 — 58 Comments
    19
    Mar 10

    Naming and Shaming ‘Bad’ ISPs

    Roughly two years ago, I began an investigation that sought to chart the baddest places on the Internet, the red light districts of the Web, if you will. What I found in the process was that many security experts, companies and private researchers also were gathering this intelligence, but that few were publishing it. Working with several other researchers, I collected and correlated mounds of data, and published what I could verify in The Washington Post. The subsequent unplugging of malware and spammer-friendly ISPs Atrivo and then McColo in late 2008 showed what can happen when the Internet community collectively highlights centers of badness online.

    Fast-forward to today, and we can see that there are a large number of organizations publishing data on the Internet’s top trouble spots. I polled some of the most vigilant sources of this information for their recent data, and put together a rough chart indicating the Top Ten most prevalent ISPs from each of their vantage points.  [A few notes about the graphic below: The ISPs or hosts that show up more frequently than others on these lists are color-coded to illustrate consistency of findings. The ISPs at the top of each list are the "worst," or have the most number of outstanding abuse issues.  "AS" stands for "autonomous system" and is mainly a numerical way of keeping track of ISPs and hosting providers. Click the image to enlarge it.]

    What you find when you start digging through these various community watch efforts is not that the networks named are entirely or even mostly bad, but that they do tend to have more than their share of  neighborhoods that have been overrun by the online equivalent of street gangs.  The trouble is, all of these individual efforts tend to map ISP reputation from just one or a handful of perspectives, each of which may be limited in some way by particular biases, such as the type of threats that they monitor. For example, some measure only phishing attacks, while others concentrate on charting networks that play host to malicious software and botnet controllers. Some only take snapshots of badness, as opposed to measuring badness that persists at a given host for a sizable period of time.

    Also, some organizations that measure badness are limited by their relative level of visibility or by simple geography. That is to say, while the Internet is truly a global network, any one watcher’s view of things may be colored by where they are situated in the world geographically, or where they most often encounter threats, as well as their level of visibility beyond their immediate horizon.

    In February 2009, I gave the keynote address at a Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) conference in San Francisco, where I was invited to talk about research that preceded the Atrivo and McColo takedowns. The biggest point I tried to hammer home in my talk was that there was a clear need for an entity whose organizing principle was to collate and publish near real-time information on the Web’s most hazardous networks. Instead of having 15 or 20 different organizations independently mapping ISP reputation, I said, why not create one entity that does this full-time?

    Unfortunately, some of the most clear-cut nests of badness online — the Troyaks of the world and other networks that appear to designed from the ground up for cyber criminals — are obscured for the most part from surface data collation efforts such as my simplistic attempt above. For a variety of reasons, unearthing and confirming that level of badness requires a far deeper dive. But even at its most basic, an ongoing, public project that cross-correlates ISP reputation data from a multiplicity of vantage points could persuade legitimate ISPs — particularly major carriers here in the United States — to do a better job of cleaning up their networks.

    What follows is the first in what I hope will be a series of stories on different, ongoing efforts to measure ISP reputation, and to hold Internet providers and Web hosts more accountable for the badness on their networks.

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    A Little Sunshine / The Coming Storm / Web Fraud 2.0 — 36 Comments
    17
    Mar 10

    Researchers Map Multi-Network Cybercrime Infrastructure

    Last week, security experts launched a sneak attack to disconnect Troyak, an Internet service provider in Eastern Europe that served as a global gateway to a nest of cyber crime activity. For the past seven days, unnamed members of the security community reportedly have been playing Whac-a-Mole with Troyak, which has bounced from one legitimate ISP to the next in a bid to reconnect to the wider Internet.

    But experts say Troyak’s apparent hopscotching is expected behavior from what is in fact a carefully architected, round-robin network of backup and redundant carriers, all designed to keep a massive organized criminal operation online should a disaster like the Troyak disconnection strike.

    Security firm RSA believes Troyak is but one of five upstream providers that encircle a nest of eight so-called “bulletproof networks” – Web hosting providers considered impervious to takedown by local law enforcement (pictured in red in the graphic below). RSA said this group of eight hosts some of the Internet’s largest concentrations of malicious software, including password stealing banking Trojans like ZeuS and Gozi, as well as huge repositories of personal and financial data stolen by these Trojans and a notorious Russian phishing operation known as RockPhish.

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