Latest Warnings

State Govts. Warned of Malware-Laden CD Sent Via Snail Mail from China

Here’s a timely reminder that email isn’t the only vector for phishing attacks: Several U.S. state and local government agencies have reported receiving strange letters via snail mail that include malware-laden compact discs (CDs) apparently sent from China, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

This particular ruse, while crude and simplistic, preys on the curiosity of recipients who may be enticed into popping the CD into a computer. According to a non-public alert shared with state and local government agencies by the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), the scam arrives in a Chinese postmarked envelope and includes a “confusingly worded typed letter with occasional Chinese characters.”

Several U.S. state and local government agencies have reported receiving this letter, which includes a malware-laden CD. Images copyright Sarah Barsness.

The MS-ISAC said preliminary analysis of the CDs indicate they contain Mandarin language Microsoft Word (.doc) files, some of which include malicious Visual Basic scripts. So far, State Archives, State Historical Societies, and a State Department of Cultural Affairs have all received letters addressed specifically to them, the MS-ISAC says. It’s not clear if anyone at these agencies was tricked into actually inserting the CD into a government computer.

I’m sure many readers could think of clever ways that this apparent mail-based phishing campaign could be made more effective or believable, such as including tiny USB drives instead of CDs, or at least a more personalized letter that doesn’t look like it was crafted by someone without a mastery of the English language.

Nevertheless, attacks like this are a reminder that cybercrime can take many forms. The first of Krebs’s 3 Basic Rules for Online Safety — “If you didn’t go looking for it don’t install it” — applies just as well here: If you didn’t go looking for it, don’t insert it or open it.

Sextortion Scam Uses Recipient’s Hacked Passwords

Here’s a clever new twist on an old email scam that could serve to make the con far more believable. The message purports to have been sent from a hacker who’s compromised your computer and used your webcam to record a video of you while you were watching porn. The missive threatens to release the video to all your contacts unless you pay a Bitcoin ransom. The new twist? The email now references a real password previously tied to the recipient’s email address.

The basic elements of this sextortion scam email have been around for some time, and usually the only thing that changes with this particular message is the Bitcoin address that frightened targets can use to pay the amount demanded. But this one begins with an unusual opening salvo:

“I’m aware that <substitute password formerly used by recipient here> is your password,” reads the salutation.

The rest is formulaic:

You don’t know me and you’re thinking why you received this e mail, right?

Well, I actually placed a malware on the porn website and guess what, you visited this web site to have fun (you know what I mean). While you were watching the video, your web browser acted as a RDP (Remote Desktop) and a keylogger which provided me access to your display screen and webcam. Right after that, my software gathered all your contacts from your Messenger, Facebook account, and email account.

What exactly did I do?

I made a split-screen video. First part recorded the video you were viewing (you’ve got a fine taste haha), and next part recorded your webcam (Yep! It’s you doing nasty things!).

What should you do?

Well, I believe, $1400 is a fair price for our little secret. You’ll make the payment via Bitcoin to the below address (if you don’t know this, search “how to buy bitcoin” in Google).

BTC Address: 1Dvd7Wb72JBTbAcfTrxSJCZZuf4tsT8V72
(It is cAsE sensitive, so copy and paste it)

Important:

You have 24 hours in order to make the payment. (I have an unique pixel within this email message, and right now I know that you have read this email). If I don’t get the payment, I will send your video to all of your contacts including relatives, coworkers, and so forth. Nonetheless, if I do get paid, I will erase the video immidiately. If you want evidence, reply with “Yes!” and I will send your video recording to your 5 friends. This is a non-negotiable offer, so don’t waste my time and yours by replying to this email.

Continue reading →

Latest Warnings / Security Tools — 76 Comments
28
Jun 18

Plant Your Flag, Mark Your Territory

Many people, particularly older folks, proudly declare they avoid using the Web to manage various accounts tied to their personal and financial data — including everything from utilities and mobile phones to retirement benefits and online banking services. The reasoning behind this strategy is as simple as it is alluring: What’s not put online can’t be hacked. But increasingly, adherents to this mantra are finding out the hard way that if you don’t plant your flag online, fraudsters and identity thieves may do it for you.

The crux of the problem is that while most types of customer accounts these days can be managed online, the process of tying one’s account number to a specific email address and/or mobile device typically involves supplying personal data that can easily be found or purchased online — such as Social Security numbers, birthdays and addresses.

Some examples of how being a modern-day Luddite can backfire are well-documented, such as when scammers create online accounts in someone’s name at the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Postal Service or the Social Security Administration.

Other examples may be far less obvious. Consider the case of a consumer who receives their home telephone service as part of a bundle through their broadband Internet service provider (ISP). Failing to set up a corresponding online account to manage one’s telecommunications services can provide a powerful gateway for fraudsters.

Carrie Kerskie is president of Griffon Force LLC, a company in Naples, Fla. that helps identity theft victims recover from fraud incidents. Kerskie recalled a recent case in which thieves purchased pricey items from a local jewelry store in the name of an elderly client who’d previously bought items at that location as gifts for his late wife.

In that incident, the perpetrator presented a MasterCard Black Card in the victim’s name along with a fake ID created in the victim’s name (but with the thief’s photo). When the jewelry store called the number on file to verify the transactions, the call came through to the impostor’s cell phone right there in the store.

Kerskie said a follow-up investigation revealed that the client had never set up an account at his ISP (Comcast) to manage it online. Multiple calls with the ISP’s customer support people revealed that someone had recently called Comcast pretending to be the 86-year-old client and established an online account.

“The victim never set up his account online, and the bad guy called Comcast and gave the victim’s name, address and Social Security number along with an email address,” Kerskie said. “Once that was set up, the bad guy logged in to the account and forwarded the victim’s calls to another number.”

Incredibly, Kerskie said, the fraudster immediately called Comcast to ask about the reason for the sudden account changes.

“While I was on the phone with Comcast, the customer rep told me to hold on a minute, that she’d just received a communication from the victim,” Kerskie recalled. “I told the rep that the client was sitting right beside me at the time, and that the call wasn’t from him. The minute we changed the call forwarding options, the fraudster called customer service to ask why the account had been changed.”

Two to three days after Kerskie helped the client clean up fraud with the Comcast account, she got a frantic call from the client’s daughter, who said she’d been trying her dad’s mobile phone but that he hadn’t answered in days. They soon discovered that dear old dad was just fine, but that he’d also neglected to set up an online account at his mobile phone provider.

“The bad guy had called in to the mobile carrier, provided his personal details, and established an online account,” Kerskie said. “Once they did that, they were able transfer his phone service to a new device.”

OFFLINE BANKING

Many people naively believe that if they never set up their bank or retirement accounts for online access then cyber thieves can’t get access either. But Kerskie said she recently had a client who had almost a quarter of a million dollars taken from his bank account precisely because he declined to link his bank account to an online identity.

“What we found is that the attacker linked the client’s bank account to an American Express Gift card, but in order to do that the bad guy had to know the exact amount of the microdeposit that AMEX placed in his account,” Kerskie said. “So the bad guy called the 800 number for the victim’s bank, provided the client’s name, date of birth, and Social Security number, and then gave them an email address he controlled. In this case, had the client established an online account previously, he would have received a message asking to confirm the fraudulent transaction.”

After tying the victim’s bank account to a prepaid card, the fraudster began slowly withdrawing funds in $5,000 increments. All told, thieves managed to siphon almost $170,000 over a six month period. The victim’s accounts were being managed by a trusted acquaintance, but the withdrawals didn’t raise alarms because they were roughly in line with withdrawal amounts the victim had made previously.

“But because the victim didn’t notify the bank within 60 days of the fraudulent transactions as required by law, the bank only had to refund the last 60 days worth of fraudulent transactions,” Kerskie said. “We were ultimately able to help him recover most of it, but that was a whole other ordeal.” Continue reading →

Latest Warnings — 40 Comments
18
Jun 18

Google to Fix Location Data Leak in Google Home, Chromecast

Google in the coming weeks is expected to fix a location privacy leak in two of its most popular consumer products. New research shows that Web sites can run a simple script in the background that collects precise location data on people who have a Google Home or Chromecast device installed anywhere on their local network.

Craig Young, a researcher with security firm Tripwire, said he discovered an authentication weakness that leaks incredibly accurate location information about users of both the smart speaker and home assistant Google Home, and Chromecast, a small electronic device that makes it simple to stream TV shows, movies and games to a digital television or monitor.

Young said the attack works by asking the Google device for a list of nearby wireless networks and then sending that list to Google’s geolocation lookup services.

“An attacker can be completely remote as long as they can get the victim to open a link while connected to the same Wi-Fi or wired network as a Google Chromecast or Home device,” Young told KrebsOnSecurity. “The only real limitation is that the link needs to remain open for about a minute before the attacker has a location. The attack content could be contained within malicious advertisements or even a tweet.”

It is common for Web sites to keep a record of the numeric Internet Protocol (IP) address of all visitors, and those addresses can be used in combination with online geolocation tools to glean information about each visitor’s hometown or region. But this type of location information is often quite imprecise. In many cases, IP geolocation offers only a general idea of where the IP address may be based geographically.

This is typically not the case with Google’s geolocation data, which includes comprehensive maps of wireless network names around the world, linking each individual Wi-Fi network to a corresponding physical location. Armed with this data, Google can very often determine a user’s location to within a few feet (particularly in densely populated areas), by triangulating the user between several nearby mapped Wi-Fi access points. [Side note: Anyone who’d like to see this in action need only to turn off location data and remove the SIM card from a smart phone and see how well navigation apps like Google’s Waze can still figure out where you are].

“The difference between this and a basic IP geolocation is the level of precision,” Young said. “For example, if I geolocate my IP address right now, I get a location that is roughly 2 miles from my current location at work. For my home Internet connection, the IP geolocation is only accurate to about 3 miles. With my attack demo however, I’ve been consistently getting locations within about 10 meters of the device.”

Young said a demo he created (a video of which is below) is accurate enough that he can tell roughly how far apart his device in the kitchen is from another device in the basement.

“I’ve only tested this in three environments so far, but in each case the location corresponds to the right street address,” Young said. “The Wi-Fi based geolocation works by triangulating a position based on signal strengths to Wi-Fi access points with known locations based on reporting from people’s phones.”

Beyond leaking a Chromecast or Google Home user’s precise geographic location, this bug could help scammers make phishing and extortion attacks appear more realistic. Common scams like fake FBI or IRS warnings or threats to release compromising photos or expose some secret to friends and family could abuse Google’s location data to lend credibility to the fake warnings, Young notes.

“The implications of this are quite broad including the possibility for more effective blackmail or extortion campaigns,” he said. “Threats to release compromising photos or expose some secret to friends and family could use this to lend credibility to the warnings and increase their odds of success.”

When Young first reached out to Google in May about his findings, the company replied by closing his bug report with a “Status: Won’t Fix (Intended Behavior)” message. But after being contacted by KrebsOnSecurity, Google changed its tune, saying it planned to ship an update to address the privacy leak in both devices. Currently, that update is slated to be released in mid-July 2018. Continue reading →

Latest Warnings / Security Tools / The Coming Storm — 81 Comments
28
May 18

FBI: Kindly Reboot Your Router Now, Please

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is warning that a new malware threat has rapidly infected more than a half-million consumer devices. To help arrest the spread of the malware, the FBI and security firms are urging home Internet users to reboot routers and network-attached storage devices made by a range of technology manufacturers.

The growing menace — dubbed VPNFilter — targets Linksys, MikroTik, NETGEAR and TP-Link networking equipment in the small and home office space, as well as QNAP network-attached storage (NAS) devices, according to researchers at Cisco.

Experts are still trying to learn all that VPNFilter is built to do, but for now they know it can do two things well: Steal Web site credentials; and issue a self-destruct command, effectively rendering infected devices inoperable for most consumers.

Cisco researchers said they’re not yet sure how these 500,000 devices were infected with VPNFilter, but that most of the targeted devices have known public exploits or default credentials that make compromising them relatively straightforward.

“All of this has contributed to the quiet growth of this threat since at least 2016,” the company wrote on its Talos Intelligence blog.

The Justice Department said last week that VPNFilter is the handiwork of “APT28,” the security industry code name for a group of Russian state-sponsored hackers also known as “Fancy Bear” and the “Sofacy Group.” This is the same group accused of conducting election meddling attacks during the 2016 U.S. presidential race.

“Foreign cyber actors have compromised hundreds of thousands of home and office routers and other networked devices worldwide,” the FBI said in a warning posted to the Web site of the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). “The actors used VPNFilter malware to target small office and home office routers. The malware is able to perform multiple functions, including possible information collection, device exploitation, and blocking network traffic.”

According to Cisco, here’s a list of the known affected devices: Continue reading →

Latest Warnings / The Coming Storm — 77 Comments
22
May 18

Mobile Giants: Please Don’t Share the Where

Your mobile phone is giving away your approximate location all day long. This isn’t exactly a secret: It has to share this data with your mobile provider constantly to provide better call quality and to route any emergency 911 calls straight to your location. But now, the major mobile providers in the United States — AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon — are selling this location information to third party companies — in real time — without your consent or a court order, and with apparently zero accountability for how this data will be used, stored, shared or protected.

Think about what’s at stake in a world where anyone can track your location at any time and in real-time. Right now, to be free of constant tracking the only thing you can do is remove the SIM card from your mobile device never put it back in unless you want people to know where you are.

It may be tough to put a price on one’s location privacy, but here’s something of which you can be sure: The mobile carriers are selling data about where you are at any time, without your consent, to third-parties for probably far less than you might be willing to pay to secure it.

The problem is that as long as anyone but the phone companies and law enforcement agencies with a valid court order can access this data, it is always going to be at extremely high risk of being hacked, stolen and misused.

Consider just two recent examples. Earlier this month The New York Times reported that a little-known data broker named Securus was selling local police forces around the country the ability to look up the precise location of any cell phone across all of the major U.S. mobile networks. Then it emerged that Securus had been hacked, its database of hundreds of law enforcement officer usernames and passwords plundered. We also found out that Securus’ data was ultimately obtained from a California-based location tracking firm LocationSmart.

On May 17, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news of research by Carnegie Mellon University PhD student Robert Xiao, who discovered that a LocationSmart try-before-you-buy opt-in demo of the company’s technology was wide open — allowing real-time lookups from anyone on anyone’s mobile device — without any sort of authentication, consent or authorization.

Xiao said it took him all of about 15 minutes to discover that LocationSmart’s lookup tool could be used to track the location of virtually any mobile phone user in the United States.

Securus seems equally clueless about protecting the priceless data to which it was entrusted by LocationSmart. Over the weekend KrebsOnSecurity discovered that someone — almost certainly a security professional employed by Securus — has been uploading dozens of emails, PDFs, password lists and other files to Virustotal.com — a service owned by Google that can be used to scan any submitted file against dozens of commercial antivirus tools.

Antivirus companies willingly participate in Virustotal because it gives them early access to new, potentially malicious files being spewed by cybercriminals online. Virustotal users can submit suspicious files of all kind; in return they’ll see whether any of the 60+ antivirus tools think the file is bad or benign.

One basic rule that all Virustotal users need to understand is that any file submitted to Virustotal is also available to customers who purchase access to the service’s file repository. Nevertheless, for the past two years someone at Securus has been submitting a great deal of information about the company’s operations to Virustotal, including copies of internal emails and PDFs about visitation policies at a number of local and state prisons and jails that made up much of Securus’ business.

Some of the many, many files uploaded to Virustotal.com over the years by someone at Securus Technologies.

One of the files, submitted on April 27, 2018, is titled “38k user pass microsemi.com – joomla_production.mic_users_blockedData.txt”. This file includes the names and what appear to be hashed/scrambled passwords of some 38,000 accounts — supposedly taken from Microsemi, a company that’s been called the largest U.S. commercial supplier of military and aerospace semiconductor equipment.

Many of the usernames in that file do map back to names of current and former employees at Microsemi. KrebsOnSecurity shared a copy of the database with Microsemi, but has not yet received a reply. Securus also has not responded to requests for comment.

These files that someone at Securus apparently submitted regularly to Virustotal also provide something of an internal roadmap of Securus’ business dealings, revealing the names and login pages for several police departments and jails across the country, such as the Travis County Jail site’s Web page to access Securus’ data.

Check out the screen shot below. Notice that forgot password link there? Clicking that prompts the visitor to enter their username and to select a “security question” to answer. There are but three questions: “What is your pet’s name? What is your favorite color? And what town were you born in?” There don’t appear to be any limits on the number of times one can attempt to answer a secret question.

Choose wisely and you, too, could gain the ability to look up anyone’s precise mobile location.

Given such robust, state-of-the-art security, how long do you think it would take for someone to figure out how to reset the password for any authorized user at Securus’ Travis County Jail portal?

Yes, companies like Securus and Location Smart have been careless with securing our prized location data, but why should they care if their paying customers are happy and the real-time data feeds from the mobile industry keep flowing?

No, the real blame for this sorry state of affairs comes down to AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon. T-Mobile was the only one of the four major providers that admitted providing Securus and LocationSmart with the ability to perform real-time location lookups on their customers. The other three carriers declined to confirm or deny that they did business with either company. Continue reading →

A Little Sunshine / Latest Warnings / The Coming Storm — 64 Comments
18
May 18

T-Mobile Employee Made Unauthorized ‘SIM Swap’ to Steal Instagram Account

T-Mobile is investigating a retail store employee who allegedly made unauthorized changes to a subscriber’s account in an elaborate scheme to steal the customer’s three-letter Instagram username. The modifications, which could have let the rogue employee empty bank accounts associated with the targeted T-Mobile subscriber, were made even though the victim customer already had taken steps recommended by the mobile carrier to help minimize the risks of account takeover. Here’s what happened, and some tips on how you can protect yourself from a similar fate.

Earlier this month, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Paul Rosenzweig, a 27-year-old T-Mobile customer from Boston who had his wireless account briefly hijacked. Rosenzweig had previously adopted T-Mobile’s advice to customers about blocking mobile number port-out scams, an increasingly common scheme in which identity thieves armed with a fake ID in the name of a targeted customer show up at a retail store run by a different wireless provider and ask that the number to be transferred to the competing mobile company’s network.

So-called “port out” scams allow crooks to intercept your calls and messages while your phone goes dark. Porting a number to a new provider shuts off the phone of the original user, and forwards all calls to the new device. Once in control of the mobile number, thieves who have already stolen a target’s password(s) can request any second factor that is sent to the newly activated device, such as a one-time code sent via text message or or an automated call that reads the one-time code aloud.

In this case, however, the perpetrator didn’t try to port Rosenzweig’s phone number: Instead, the attacker called multiple T-Mobile retail stores within an hour’s drive of Rosenzweig’s home address until he succeeded in convincing a store employee to conduct what’s known as a “SIM swap.”

A SIM swap is a legitimate process by which a customer can request that a new SIM card (the tiny, removable chip in a mobile device that allows it to connect to the provider’s network) be added to the account. Customers can request a SIM swap when their existing SIM card has been damaged, or when they are switching to a different phone that requires a SIM card of another size.

However, thieves and other ne’er-do-wells can abuse this process by posing as a targeted mobile customer or technician and tricking employees at the mobile provider into swapping in a new SIM card for that customer on a device that they control. If successful, the SIM swap accomplishes more or less the same result as a number port out (at least in the short term) — effectively giving the attackers access to any text messages or phone calls that are sent to the target’s mobile account.

Rosenzweig said the first inkling he had that something wasn’t right with his phone was on the evening of May 2, 2018, when he spotted an automated email from Instagram. The message said the email address tied to the three-letter account he’d had on the social media platform for seven years — instagram.com/par — had been changed. He quickly logged in to his Instagram account, changed his password and then reverted the email on the account back to his original address.

By this time, the SIM swap conducted by the attacker had already been carried out, although Rosenzweig said he didn’t notice his phone displaying zero bars and no connection to T-Mobile at the time because he was at home and happily surfing the Web on his device using his own wireless network.

The following morning, Rosenzweig received another notice — this one from Snapchat — stating that the password for his account there (“p9r”) had been changed. He subsequently reset the Instagram password and then enabled two factor authentication on his Snapchat account.

“That was when I realized my phone had no bars,” he recalled. “My phone was dead. I couldn’t even call 611,” [the mobile short number that all major wireless providers make available to reach their customer service departments].”

It appears that the perpetrator of the SIM swap abused not only internal knowledge of T-Mobile’s systems, but also a lax password reset process at Instagram. The social network allows users to enable notifications on their mobile phone when password resets or other changes are requested on the account.

But this isn’t exactly two-factor authentication because it also lets users reset their passwords via their mobile account by requesting a password reset link to be sent to their mobile device. Thus, if someone is in control of your mobile phone account, they can reset your Instagram password (and probably a bunch of other types of accounts).

Rosenzweig said even though he was able to reset his Instagram password and restore his old email address tied to the account, the damage was already done: All of his images and other content he’d shared on Instagram over the years was still tied to his account, but the attacker had succeeded in stealing his “par” username, leaving him with a slightly less sexy “par54384321,” (apparently chosen for him at random by either Instagram or the attacker). Continue reading →

A Little Sunshine / Data Breaches / Latest Warnings / The Coming Storm — 67 Comments
17
May 18

Tracking Firm LocationSmart Leaked Location Data for Customers of All Major U.S. Mobile Carriers Without Consent in Real Time Via Its Web Site

LocationSmart, a U.S. based company that acts as an aggregator of real-time data about the precise location of mobile phone devices, has been leaking this information to anyone via a buggy component of its Web site — without the need for any password or other form of authentication or authorization — KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The company took the vulnerable service offline early this afternoon after being contacted by KrebsOnSecurity, which verified that it could be used to reveal the location of any AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile or Verizon phone in the United States to an accuracy of within a few hundred yards.

On May 10, The New York Times broke the news that a different cell phone location tracking company called Securus Technologies had been selling or giving away location data on customers of virtually any major mobile network provider to a sheriff’s office in Mississippi County, Mo.

On May 15, ZDnet.com ran a piece saying that Securus was getting its data through an intermediary — Carlsbad, CA-based LocationSmart.

Wednesday afternoon Motherboard published another bombshell: A hacker had broken into the servers of Securus and stolen 2,800 usernames, email addresses, phone numbers and hashed passwords of authorized Securus users. Most of the stolen credentials reportedly belonged to law enforcement officers across the country — stretching from 2011 up to this year.

Several hours before the Motherboard story went live, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Robert Xiao, a security researcher at Carnegie Mellon University who’d read the coverage of Securus and LocationSmart and had been poking around a demo tool that LocationSmart makes available on its Web site for potential customers to try out its mobile location technology.

LocationSmart’s demo is a free service that allows anyone to see the approximate location of their own mobile phone, just by entering their name, email address and phone number into a form on the site. LocationSmart then texts the phone number supplied by the user and requests permission to ping that device’s nearest cellular network tower.

Once that consent is obtained, LocationSmart texts the subscriber their approximate longitude and latitude, plotting the coordinates on a Google Street View map. [It also potentially collects and stores a great deal of technical data about your mobile device. For example, according to their privacy policy that information “may include, but is not limited to, device latitude/longitude, accuracy, heading, speed, and altitude, cell tower, Wi-Fi access point, or IP address information”].

But according to Xiao, a PhD candidate at CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, this same service failed to perform basic checks to prevent anonymous and unauthorized queries. Translation: Anyone with a modicum of knowledge about how Web sites work could abuse the LocationSmart demo site to figure out how to conduct mobile number location lookups at will, all without ever having to supply a password or other credentials.

“I stumbled upon this almost by accident, and it wasn’t terribly hard to do,” Xiao said. “This is something anyone could discover with minimal effort. And the gist of it is I can track most peoples’ cell phone without their consent.”

Xiao said his tests showed he could reliably query LocationSmart’s service to ping the cell phone tower closest to a subscriber’s mobile device. Xiao said he checked the mobile number of a friend several times over a few minutes while that friend was moving and found he was then able to plug the coordinates into Google Maps and track the friend’s directional movement.

“This is really creepy stuff,” Xiao said, adding that he’d also successfully tested the vulnerable service against one Telus Mobility mobile customer in Canada who volunteered to be found.

Before LocationSmart’s demo was taken offline today, KrebsOnSecurity pinged five different trusted sources, all of whom gave consent to have Xiao determine the whereabouts of their cell phones. Xiao was able to determine within a few seconds of querying the public LocationSmart service the near-exact location of the mobile phone belonging to all five of my sources.

LocationSmart’s demo page.

One of those sources said the longitude and latitude returned by Xiao’s queries came within 100 yards of their then-current location. Another source said the location found by the researcher was 1.5 miles away from his current location. The remaining three sources said the location returned for their phones was between approximately 1/5 to 1/3 of a mile at the time.

Reached for comment via phone, LocationSmart Founder and CEO Mario Proietti said the company was investigating.

“We don’t give away data,” Proietti said. “We make it available for legitimate and authorized purposes. It’s based on legitimate and authorized use of location data that only takes place on consent. We take privacy seriously and we’ll review all facts and look into them.”

LocationSmart’s home page features the corporate logos of all four the major wireless providers, as well as companies like Google, Neustar, ThreatMetrix, and U.S. Cellular. The company says its technologies help businesses keep track of remote employees and corporate assets, and that it helps mobile advertisers and marketers serve consumers with “geo-relevant promotions.”

LocationSmart’s home page lists many partners.

It’s not clear exactly how long LocationSmart has offered its demo service or for how long the service has been so permissive; this link from archive.org suggests it dates back to at least January 2017. This link from The Internet Archive suggests the service may have existed under a different company name — loc-aid.com — since mid-2011, but it’s unclear if that service used the same code. Loc-aid.com is one of four other sites hosted on the same server as locationsmart.com, according to Domaintools.com. Continue reading →

Latest Warnings / Security Tools / Time to Patch — 46 Comments
8
May 18

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, May 2018 Edition

Microsoft today released a bundle of security updates to fix at least 67 holes in its various Windows operating systems and related software, including one dangerous flaw that Microsoft warns is actively being exploited. Meanwhile, as it usually does on Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday — the second Tuesday of each month — Adobe has a new Flash Player update that addresses a single but critical security weakness.

First, the Flash Tuesday update, which brings Flash Player to v. 29.0.0.171. Some (present company included) would argue that Flash Player is itself “a single but critical security weakness.” Nevertheless, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer/Edge ship with their own versions of Flash, which get updated automatically when new versions of these browsers are made available.

You can check if your browser has Flash installed/enabled and what version it’s at by pointing your browser at this link. Adobe is phasing out Flash entirely by 2020, but most of the major browsers already take steps to hobble Flash. And with good reason: It’s a major security liability. Continue reading →

Latest Warnings / Time to Patch — 45 Comments
3
May 18

Twitter to All Users: Change Your Password Now!

Twitter just asked all 300+ million users to reset their passwords, citing the exposure of user passwords via a bug that stored passwords in plain text — without protecting them with any sort of encryption technology that would mask a Twitter user’s true password. The social media giant says it has fixed the bug and that so far its investigation hasn’t turned up any signs of a breach or that anyone misused the information. But if you have a Twitter account, please change your account password now.

Or if you don’t trust links in blogs like this (I get it) go to Twitter.com and change it from there. And then come back and read the rest of this. We’ll wait.

In a post to its company blog this afternoon, Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal wrote:

“When you set a password for your Twitter account, we use technology that masks it so no one at the company can see it. We recently identified a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log. We have fixed the bug, and our investigation shows no indication of breach or misuse by anyone.

A message posted this afternoon (and still present as a pop-up) warns all users to change their passwords.

“Out of an abundance of caution, we ask that you consider changing your password on all services where you’ve used this password. You can change your Twitter password anytime by going to the password settings page.” Continue reading →