Category Archives: A Little Sunshine

Includes investigative blog posts meant to shine a light on the darker corners of the Internet.

Cyberheist Smokescreen: Email, Phone, SMS Floods

July 18, 2012
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It was early October 2011, and I was on the treadmill checking email when I noticed several hundred new messages had arrived since I last looked at my Gmail inbox just 20 minutes earlier. I didn’t know it at the time, but my account was being used to beta test a private service now offered openly in the criminal underground that can be hired to create highly disruptive floods of junk email, text messages and phone calls.

Many businesses request some kind of confirmation from their bank whenever high-dollar transfers are initiated. These confirmations may be sent via text message or email, or the business may ask their bank to call them to verify requested transfers. The attack that hit my inbox was part of an offering that crooks can hire to flood each medium of communication, thereby preventing a targeted business from ever receiving or finding alerts from their bank.

Spammers Target Dropbox Users

July 17, 2012
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“Always have your stuff when you need it with Dropbox.” That’s the marketing line for the online file storage service, but today users have had difficulty logging into the service. The outages came amid reports that many European Dropbox users were being blasted with spam for online casinos, suggesting some kind of leak of Dropbox user email addresses.

Plesk 0Day For Sale As Thousands of Sites Hacked

July 10, 2012
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Hackers in the criminal underground are selling an exploit that extracts the master password needed to control Parallels’ Plesk Panel, a software suite used to remotely administer hosted servers at a large number of Internet hosting firms. The attack comes amid reports from multiple sources indicating a spike in Web site compromises that appear to trace back to Plesk installations.

New Java Exploit to Debut in BlackHole Exploit Kits

July 5, 2012
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Malicious computer code that leverages a newly-patched security flaw in Oracle’s Java software is set to be deployed later this week to cybercriminal operations powered by the BlackHole exploit pack. The addition of a new weapon to this malware arsenal will almost certainly lead to a spike in compromised PCs, as more than 3 billion devices run Java and many of these installations are months out of date.

Who Says Email Is Eating at Postal Revenues?

July 3, 2012
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Shadowy online businesses that sell knockoff prescription drugs through spam and other dodgy advertising practices have begun relying more heavily on the U.S. Postal Service to deliver prescription drugs to buyers in the United States direct from warehouses or mules within the U.S. The shift comes as rogue online pill shops are seeking ways to lower shipping costs, a major loss leader for most of these operations.

Traditionally, a majority of the counterfeit pills advertised and sold to Americans online have shipped from India. But the process of getting the pills from India to customers in the United States is so expensive and fraught with complications that it has proved to be a big cost center for the largest rogue pharmaceutical operations, according to a study I wrote about last month.

‘Carderprofit’ Forum Sting Nets 26 Arrests

June 26, 2012
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The U.S. Justice Department today unveiled the results of a two-year international cybercrime sting that culminated in the arrest of at least two dozen people accused of trafficking in hundreds of thousands of stolen credit and debit card accounts. Among those arrested was an alleged core member of “UGNazi,” a malicious hacking group that has claimed responsibility for a flood of recent attacks on Internet businesses.

How to Break Into Security, Ptacek Edition

June 25, 2012
58 Comments

At least once a month, sometimes more, readers write in to ask how they can break into the field of computer security. Some of the emails are from people in jobs that have nothing to do with security, but who are fascinated enough by the field to contemplate a career change. Others are already in an information technology position but are itching to segue into security. I always respond with my own set of stock answers, but each time I do this, I can’t help but feel my advice is incomplete, or at least not terribly well-rounded.

I decided to ask some of the brightest minds in the security industry today what advice they’d give. Almost everyone I asked said they, too, frequently get asked the very same question, but each had surprisingly different takes on the subject. Today is the first installment in a series of responses to this question. When the last of the advice columns have run, I’ll create an archive of them all so that the next time someone asks how they can break into security, I’ll have more to offer than just my admittedly narrow perspectives on the matter.

PharmaLeaks: Rogue Pharmacy Economics 101

June 22, 2012
39 Comments

Consumer demand for cheap prescription drugs sold through spam-advertised Web sites shows no sign of abating, according to a new analysis of bookeeping records maintained by three of the world’s largest rogue pharmacy operations.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, the International Computer Science Institute and George Mason University examined caches of data showing the day-to-day finances of GlavMed, SpamIt, and Rx-Promotion, shadowy affiliate programs that over a four-year period processed more than $170 million worth of orders from customers seeking cheaper, more accessible and more discretely available drugs. The result is is perhaps the most detailed analysis yet of the business case for the malicious software and spam epidemics that persist to this day.

A Closer Look: Email-Based Malware Attacks

June 21, 2012
88 Comments

Nearly every time I write about a small to mid-sized business that has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars after falling victim to a malicious software attack, readers ask how the perpetrators broke through the victim organization’s defenses, and which type of malware paved the way. Normally, victim companies don’t know or disclose that information, so to get a better idea, I’ve put together a rough profile of the top daily email-based malware attacks over the past month.