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    • Web Fraud 2.0

    A Little Sunshine / Web Fraud 2.0 — 21 Comments
    8
    Nov 11

    How Much Is Your Identity Worth?

    How much does it cost for thieves to discover the data that unlocks identity for creditors, such as your Social Security number, birthday, or mother’s maiden name? Would it surprise you to learn that crooks are selling this data to any and all comers for pennies on the dollar?

    superget.info home page

    At least, that’s the going price at superget.info. This fraudster-friendly site has been operating since July 2010, and markets the ability to look up SSNs, birthdays and other sensitive information on millions of Americans. Registration is free, and accounts are funded via WebMoney and Liberty Reserve, virtual currencies that are popular in the cybercriminal underground.

    Superget lets users search for specific individuals by name, city, and state. Each “credit” costs USD$1, and a successful hit on a Social Security number or date of birth costs 3 credits each. The more credits you buy, the cheaper the searches are per credit: Six credits cost $4.99; 35 credits cost $20.99, and $100.99 buys you 230 credits. Customers with special needs can avail themselves of the “reseller plan,” which promises 1,500 credits for $500.99, and 3,500 credits for $1000.99.

    “Our Databases are updated EVERY DAY,” the site’s owner enthuses. “About 99% nearly 100% US people could be found, more than any sites on the internet now.”

    Customers who aren’t choosy about the identities they’re stealing can get a real bargain. Among the most trafficked commodities in the hacker underground are packages called “fullz infos,” which include the full identity information on dozens or hundreds of individuals.

    The table at the right shows the bulk lookup price-per-identity in this class. In the “Fullz Info USA Type A” package, each record includes the subject’s first name, last name, middle name, email address, email password, physical address, phone number, date of birth, Social Security number, drivers license number, bank name, bank account number, bank routing number, the victim employer’s name, and the number of years that individual has been at his or her current job. The proprietor of this shop says he has more than 330,000 records of this type, and is adding 300-400 new records each day.

    If you want the mother’s maiden name included in each of the bulk records, you’ll need to select “Fullz Info USA Type B”; the site’s owner says this package includes data from an older database, and perhaps that explains why the prices for these identities (pictured at left) are so much lower than those in the Type A category. The price in Type B starts at 16 cents per identity, and falls as low as nine cents per record for those requesting more than 20,000 fullz from this category.

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    A Little Sunshine / Web Fraud 2.0 — 12 Comments
    31
    Oct 11

    Turning Hot Credit Cards into Hot Stuff

    Would that all cybercriminal operations presented such a tidy spreadsheet of the victim and perpetrator data as comprehensively as profsoyuz.biz, one of the longest-running criminal reshipping programs on the Internet.

    Launched in 2006 under a slightly different domain name, profsoyuz.biz is marketed on invite-only forums to help credit card thieves “cash out” compromised credit and debit card accounts by purchasing and selling merchandise online. Most Western businesses will not ship to Russia and Eastern Europe due to high fraud rates in those areas. Underground businesses like Profsoyuz hire Americans to receive stolen merchandise and reship it to those embargoed regions. Then they charge vetted customers for access to those reshipping services.

    Below is a screen shot of the administrative interface for Profsoyuz, which shows why its niche business is often called “Drops for Stuff” on the underground. The “Дроп” or “Drop” column lists Americans who are currently reshipping packages for the crime gang; the “Стафф” or “Stuff” column shows the items that are being purchased and reshipped with stolen credit card numbers.

    Profsoyuz reshipping service admin panel.

    The column marked “Холдер” or “Holder” indicates the cardholder — the name on the stolen credit card account that was used to purchase the stuff being sent to the drops. I rang Laura Kowaleski, listed as the person whose credit card was fraudulently used on Oct. 11, 2011 to buy a Star Wars Lego set for $189, plus $56 in shipping. She told me I reached her while she was in the process of filing a police report online, after reporting the unauthorized charge to her credit card company.

    The Lego set was sent via FedEx to Oscar Padilla, a 37-year-old from Los Angeles. Padilla said he believed he was working for Transit Air Cargo Inc. (transitair.com), a legitimate shipping company in Santa Ana, Calif., and that he got hired in his current position after responding to a job offer on careerbuilder.com. However, the Web site used by the company that recruited him was transitac.com.

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    A Little Sunshine / Web Fraud 2.0 — 50 Comments
    12
    Oct 11

    Shady Reshipping Centers Exposed, Part I

    Last week, authorities in New York indicted more than 100 people suspected of being part of a crime ring that used forged credit cards to buy and resell an estimated $13 million worth of Apple products and other electronics overseas. In this post, I offer readers a behind-the-scenes look at a somewhat smaller but similar organized crime operation that uses stolen credit card numbers to purchase and launder high-end electronics.

    One of the simplest ways to extract cash from stolen credit card accounts is to buy pricey consumer goods online and resell them on the black market. Most online retailers grew wise to these scams years ago and stopped shipping to regions of the world most frequently associated with credit card fraud, including Eastern Europe, North Africa, and Russia. But these restrictions have created a burgeoning underground market for reshipping scams, which rely on willing or unwitting residents in the United States and Europe to receive and relay high-dollar stolen goods to crooks living in the embargoed areas.

    There are dozens of businesses in the criminal underground engaged in merchandise laundering, known as “Drops for stuff” on cybercrime forums. The “drops” are people who have responded to work-at-home package reshipping jobs advertised on craigslist.com and job search sites. Most reshipping scams promise employees a monthly salary and cash bonuses. But the crooks almost always sever communications with drops just before the first payday, usually about a month after the drop ships their first package.

    Dropforrent.net account for manager Dick Martin.

    A typical drop will receive and reship between two and four packages per day.  The packages arrive with prepaid shipping labels that are paid for with stolen credit card numbers, or with hijacked online accounts at FedEx and the US Postal Service. Drops are responsible for inspecting and verifying the contents of shipments, attaching the correct shipping label to each package, and sending them off via the appropriate shipping company.

    One drops operation, dropforrent.net, allows “clients” to “rent” drops who have signed up for reshipping jobs. “Managers,” those who facilitate drop recruitment scams, can earn money by purchasing merchandise that the reshipping operation can quickly resell. Most reshipping operations seek consumer electronics that can be easily sold for cash, including laptop computers, cameras, smart phones and parts for sports cars. Dropforrent.com pays managers and clients 30 percent of the value of laptops from ACER, HP, Toshiba, Dell, Compaq and Samsung, for example, and more than 40 percent of the retail price for Apple, Sony, VAIO, Canon and Nikon products.

    The phony storefront for a drops recruitment scheme.

    Drops also can be used to reship virtually anything else that the client or manager would like to use or consume themselves, such as clothes, jewelry, and candy. For this service, clients and managers pay a flat rate of 50 percent of the value of the goods to have the items reshipped abroad.

    The dropforrent.com managers recruit new hires by posing as legitimate businesses. One manager who uses the name Dick Martin operates a dummy business called applestore-direct.com, and actively recruits drops via ads on craigslist.com. Recruited drops are given a login to applestore-direct.com where they receive daily updates about pending shipments. Drops also are required to use this Web-based interface to notify their managers of received and reshipped items.

    Kent Tribbett, a 24-year-old from West Berlin, New Jersey, has been reshipping for applestore-direct.com for almost three weeks. He was hired by Martin via an ad on craigslist.com and was given an account at applestore-direct, where he was instructed to log in daily to receive and transmit information about packages arriving at his home. A screen shot of his user account is below.

    According to Dick Martin’s account at dropforrent, at least 10 clients were using Tribbett as a drop. Those same records show that Tribbett was one of 60 different drops recruited by Martin in the past 10 months.

    I spoke with Tribbett briefly by phone; he denied receiving or reshipping packages for applestore-direct.com, and then hung up. But the numerous USPS tracking numbers and Express Mail bills attached to the past shipments in his account at the site suggest otherwise.

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    Other / Web Fraud 2.0 — 65 Comments
    5
    Oct 11

    How Much is That Phished PayPal Account?

    Compromised PayPal accounts are a valuable commodity in the criminal underground, and crooks frequently trade them in shadowy online forums. But it wasn’t until recently that I finally encountered a proper Web site dedicated to selling hacked PayPal accounts.

    Compromised PayPal accounts for sale at iProfit.su

    Many of the PayPal accounts for sale at iProfit.su have a zero balance, but according to the proprietor of this shop these are all “verified.” PayPal “verifies” an account when a customer agrees to attach a bank account to it; PayPal then sends a micropayment the bank account, and asks the user the value of that mini deposit. A bonus feature: all the hacked PayPal profiles currently for sale at iProfit.su are advertised as having a credit card attached to them, which is another way PayPal accounts can be verified.

    The creator of iProfit.su also advertises private, bulk sales of unverified PayPal accounts; currently he is selling these at $50 per 100 accounts – a bargain at only 50 cents apiece.

    Accounts are sold with or without email access (indicated by the “email” heading in the screenshot above): Accounts that come with email access include the username and password of the victim’s email account that they used to register at PayPal, the site’s proprietor told me via instant message. The creator of iProfit.su told me the accounts for sale were stolen via phishing attacks, but the fact that accounts are being sold along with email access suggests that at least some of the accounts are being hijacked by password-stealing computer Trojans on account holders’ PCs.

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    A Little Sunshine / The Coming Storm / Web Fraud 2.0 — 41 Comments
    26
    Sep 11

    MySQL.com Sold for $3k, Serves Malware

    A security firm revealed today that mysql.com, the central repository for widely-used Web database software, was hacked and booby-trapped to serve visitors with malicious software. The disclosure caught my eye because just a few days ago I saw evidence that administrative access to mysql.com was being sold in the hacker underground for just $3,000.

    Web security firm Armorize stated in its blog that mysql.com was poisoned with a script that invisibly redirects visitors to a Web site that uses the BlackHole exploit pack, an automated exploit toolkit that probes visiting browsers for a variety of known security holes.

    “It exploits the visitor’s browsing platform (the browser, the browser plugins like Adobe Flash, Adobe PDF, etc, Java, …), and upon successful exploitation, permanently installs a piece of malware into the visitor’s machine, without the visitor’s knowledge,” say the researchers. “The visitor doesn’t need to click or agree to anything; simply visiting mysql.com with a vulnerable browsing platform will result in an infection.”

    A screenshot of hacker on an exclusive Russian cybercrime forum selling root access to mysql.com for $3,000

    Late last week, I was lurking on a fairly exclusive Russian hacker forum and stumbled upon a member selling root access to mysql.com. As part of his pitch, which was published on the criminal forum Sept. 21, the seller called attention to the site’s daily and monthly stats, and posted screen shots of a root login prompt in a bid to prove his wares.

    The seller, ominously using the nickname “sourcec0de,” points out that mysql.com is a prime piece of real estate for anyone looking to plant an exploit kit: It boasts nearly 12 million visitors per month — almost 400,000 per day — and is ranked the 649th most-visited site by Alexa (Alexa currently rates it at 637).

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    A Little Sunshine / Latest Warnings / Web Fraud 2.0 — 18 Comments
    26
    Sep 11

    ‘Right-to-Left Override’ Aids Email Attacks

    Computer crooks and spammers are abusing a little-known encoding method that makes it easy to disguise malicious executable files (.exe) as relatively harmless documents, such as text or Microsoft Word files.

    The “right to left override” (RLO) character is a special character within unicode, an encoding system that allows computers to exchange information regardless of the language used. Unicode covers all the characters for all writing systems of the world, modern and ancient. It also includes technical symbols, punctuations, and many other characters used in writing text. For example, a blank space between two letters, numbers or symbols is expressed in unicode as “U+0020″.

    The RLO character (U+202e in unicode) is designed to support languages that are written right to left, such as Arabic and Hebrew. The problem is that this override character also can be used to make a malicious file look innocuous.

    This threat is not new, and has been known for some time. But an increasing number of email based attacks are taking advantage of the RLO character to trick users who have been trained to be wary of clicking on random .exe files, according to Internet security firm Commtouch.

    Take the following file, for example, which is encoded with the RLO character:

    “CORP_INVOICE_08.14.2011_Pr.phylexe.doc”

    Looks like a Microsoft Word document, right? This was the lure used in a recent attack that downloaded Bredolab malware. The malicious file, CORP_INVOICE_08.14.2011_Pr.phyldoc.exe, was made to display as CORP_INVOICE_08.14.2011_Pr.phylexe.doc by placing the unicode command for right to left override just before the “d” in “doc”.

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    A Little Sunshine / Web Fraud 2.0 — 32 Comments
    19
    Sep 11

    Cultural CAPTCHAs

    CAPTCHAs, those squiggly and frustrating puzzles that many Web sites require users to solve before registering or leaving comments, are designed to block automated activity and deter spammers. But for some Russian-language forums that cater to spammers and other miscreants, CAPTCHAs may also be part of a vetting process designed to frustrate foreigners and outsiders.

    I'm still slogging through Disc 2 of this lengthy Soviet-era spy series.

    “Verified,” one of the longest-running Russian-language forums dedicated to Internet scammers of all stripes, uses various methods to check that users aren’t just casual lurkers or law enforcement. It recently began using CAPTCHAs that quiz users about random bits of Russian culture when they register or log in.

    Consider this CAPTCHA, from Verified: “Введите пропущенное число ‘… мгнoвeний вeсны.’” That translates to, “Enter the missing number ‘__ moments of spring.’”

    But it may not be so simple to decipher “мгнoвeний вeсны,” the “moments of spring” bit. One use of cultural CAPTCHA is to frustrate non-native speakers who are trying to browse forums using tools like Google translate. For example, Google translates мгнoвeний вeсны to the transliteration “mgnoveny vesny.” The answer to this CAPTCHA is “17,” as in Seventeen Moments of Spring, a 1973 Russian television mini-series that was enormously popular during the Soviet Union era, but which is probably unknown to most Westerners.

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    A Little Sunshine / Web Fraud 2.0 — 42 Comments
    6
    Sep 11

    Rent-a-Bot Networks Tied to TDSS Botnet

    Criminals who operate large groupings of hacked PCs tend to be a secretive lot, and jealously guard their assets against hijacking by other crooks. But one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated botnets is openly renting its infected PCs to any and all comers, and has even created a Firefox add-on to assist customers.

    The TDSS botnet is the most sophisticated threat today, according to experts at Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab. First launched in 2008, TDSS is now in its fourth major version (also known as TDL-4). The malware uses a “rootkit” to install itself deep within infected PCs, ensuring that it loads before the Microsoft Windows operating system starts. TDSS also removes approximately 20 malicious programs from host PCs, preventing systems from communicating with other bot families.

    In an exhaustive analysis of TDSS published in June, Kaspersky researchers Sergey Golovanov and Igor Soumenkov wrote that among the many components installed by TDSS is a file called “socks.dll,” which allows infected PCs to be used by others to surf the Web anonymously.

    Researchers say this Firefox add-on helps customers use Internet connections of TDSS-infected PCs.

    “Having control over such a large number of computers with this function, the cybercriminals have started offering anonymous Internet access as a service, at a cost of roughly $100 per month,” the researchers wrote. “For the sake of convenience, the cybercriminals have also developed a Firefox add-on that makes it easy to toggle between proxy servers within the browser.”

    The storefront for this massive botnet is awmproxy.net, which advertises “the fastest anonymous proxies.” According to Golovanov, when socks.dll is installed on a TDSS-infected computer, it notifies awmproxy.net that a new proxy is available for rent. Soon after that notification is completed, the infected PC starts to accept approximately 10 proxy requests each minute, he said.

    “For us it was enough to see that this additional proxy module for tdl4 was installed directly on encrypted partition and runs thru rootkit functionality,” Golovanov told KrebsOnSecurity. “So we believe that awmproxy has direct connection to tdl4 developer but how they are working together we don’t know.” The curators of AWMproxy did not respond to requests for comment.

    AWMproxy.net, the storefront for renting access to TDSS-infected PCs

    The service’s proxies are priced according to exclusivity and length of use. Regular browser proxies range from $3 per day to $25 monthly. Proxies that can be used to anonymize all of the Internet traffic on a customer’s PC cost between $65 and $500 a month. For $160 a week, customers can rent exclusive access to 100 TDSS-infected systems at once. Interestingly, AWMproxy says it accepts payment via PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa.

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    A Little Sunshine / The Coming Storm / Web Fraud 2.0 — 37 Comments
    26
    Aug 11

    Coordinated ATM Heist Nets Thieves $13M

    An international cybercrime gang stole $13 million from a Florida-based financial institution earlier this year, by executing a highly-coordinated heist in which thieves used ATMs around the globe to cash out stolen prepaid debit cards, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

    Jacksonville based Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) bills itself as the world’s largest processor of prepaid debit cards; FIS claims to process more than 775 million transactions annually. The company disclosed the breach in its first quarter earnings statement issued May 3, 2011. But details of the attack remained shrouded in secrecy as the FBI and forensic investigators probed one of the biggest and most complex banking heists of its kind.

    FIS said it had incurred a loss of approximately $13 million related to unauthorized activities involving one client and 22 prepaid cards on its Sunrise, Fla. based eFunds Prepaid Solutions, formerly WildCard Systems Inc., which was acquired by FIS in 2007.

    FIS stated: “The Company has identified that 7,170 prepaid accounts may have been at risk and that three individual cardholders’ non-public information may have been disclosed as a result of the unauthorized activities. FIS worked with the impacted clients to take appropriate action, including blocking and reissuing cards for the affected accounts. The Company has taken steps to further enhance security and continues to work with Federal law enforcement officials on this matter.” The disclosure was scarcely noted by news media.

    KrebsOnSecurity recently discovered previously undisclosed details of the successful escapade. According to sources close to the investigation, cyber thieves broke into the FIS network and targeted the Sunrise platform’s “open-loop” prepaid debit cards. The balances on these prepaid cards aren’t stored on the cards themselves; rather, the card numbers correspond to records in a central database, where the balances are recorded. Some prepaid cards cannot be used once their balance has been exhausted, but the prepaid cards used in this attack can be replenished by adding funds. Prepaid cards usually limit the amounts that cardholders can withdraw from a cash machine within a 24 hour period.

    Apparently, the crooks were able to drastically increase or eliminate the withdrawal limits for 22 prepaid cards that they had obtained. The fraudsters then cloned the prepaid cards, and distributed them to co-conspirators in several major cities across Europe, Russia and Ukraine.

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    A Little Sunshine / Pharma Wars / Web Fraud 2.0 — 25 Comments
    19
    Aug 11

    Pharma Wars, Part II

    Earlier this year, Russian police arrested Dmitry Stupin, a man known in hacker circles as “SaintD.” Stupin was long rumored to be the right-hand man of Igor Gusev, the alleged proprietor of GlavMed and SpamIt, two shadowy sister organizations that until this time last year were the largest sources of spam touting rogue Internet pharmacies.

    According to several sources who are familiar with the matter, Russian police pulled Stupin off of a plane before it left Moscow. The police also reportedly took Stupin’s MacBook and copied its contents. The police detained Stupin as part of an investigation into Gusev launched nearly a year ago. Gusev fled his native Moscow last year and has not returned.

    Sometime in the past few days, more than four years’ worth of chat conversations — apparently between Stupin, Gusev and dozens of other GlavMed employees — were leaked. Those conversations offer a fascinating glimpse into the day-to-day operations one of the world’s largest cyber criminal organizations.

    The chat logs also catalog the long-running turf battle between Gusev and his former business partner, Pavel Vrublevsky. The two men were co-founders of ChronoPay, one of Russia’s largest online payments processor. Vrublevsky is now in jail awaiting trial on charges of hiring a hacker to attack his company’s rivals. He also has been identified as a co-owner of a competing rogue pharmacy program, the now-defunct Rx-Promotion.

    I have had numerous interviews with both Gusev and Vrublevsky, both of whom accuse one another of bribing Russian law enforcement officials and politicians to initiate criminal proceedings against each other.

    While there is no direct evidence Vrublevsky paid for a prosecution of Gusev, documents stolen from ChronoPay last year by hackers indicate that the company arranged to pay the salaries of several people on the Russian Association of Electronic Communications (RAEC). Those same documents show that Vrublevsky and RAEC members were closely involved in the investigation into Gusev the months and weeks leading up to the official charges against him.

    The chat records between Stupin and Gusev, a tiny sliver of which is translated here from Russian into English, suggest that the two men paid authorities for protection. Contacted via email, Gusev declined to say whether the chats logs were legitimate or comment further, explaining that he was still reviewing the documents.

    “If at least some of these logs are legit, then it means that I was telling the truth about paid criminal case against me initiated by Pavel and his constant connection with investigators,” Gusev said. “I know for sure that Pavel had access to evidences which were gathered by the investigators while he shouldn’t have such access. Before I just didn’t have any proof for this. Now I have.”

    The latest leaked archive contains more than 166 megabytes of chat logs, allegedly between Stupin, Gusev and others. The following chat log is dated Aug. 28, 2010, just days after Vrublevsky leaked the SpamIt and GlavMed affiliate and customer data to U.S. law enforcement agencies. In this conversation, Stupin and Gusev allegedly discuss whether to close SpamIt (SpamIt would be closed a month later). “Red” in the first sentence is a reference to Vrublevsky, well known to use the hacker alias “RedEye.”

    Gusev: It looks like I am in deep shit.  Red gave our database to Americans.

    Dmitriy Stupin

    Stupin: To which Americans?

    Gusev: I can’t tell exactly, yet. Probably to FBI or Secret Service. Have you read on Krebs’ blog about meeting at White House regarding illegal pharmacy problems on the Internet?

    Stupin: No.

    Gusev: http://krebsonsecurity.com/2010/08/white-house-calls-meeting-on-rogue-online-pharmacies

    Stupin: Maybe you return back to Russia?

    Gusev: I am planning to do that. I am really worried now :(

    Stupin: What about Red? For that money. May be let’s close down everything?

    Gusev: In any case, he will be squished to the end. Everything is done pretty properly. Chronology: – He got thrown out from major banks (Masterbank, Bank Standard and almost from UCS. Too many clients left him. Investigations have been made on data regarding processing. Major issue now – close down the channel via Azerbaijan  (the only place where he can do his own processing and processing for his clients). We need him have an acute issue with money, otherwise he is going to slow down the investigation as much as he can.

    Gusev: Do you think “closing down” will help? Just realize: they have our ENTIRE database… there are 900,000 records. What are we going to do with those? For conviction and 5-year jail time it is only necessary to prove 1 transaction! What is the worst? They combine the sentences and it is possible to get 5 life sentences.

    Stupin: I think yes, we will receive lower priority.

    Gusev: And who is considered a high priority? I am trying to figure out how he gave us up, and do the same for him. There will be 2 cases instead of one.

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