Krebs on Security

ATM Insert Skimmers: A Closer Look

November 27, 2016

KrebsOnSecurity has featured multiple stories about the threat from ATM fraud devices known as “insert skimmers,” wafer-thin data theft tools made to be completely hidden inside of a cash’s machine’s card acceptance slot. For a closer look at how stealthy insert skimmers can be, it helps to see videos of these things being installed and removed. Here’s a look at promotional sales videos produced by two different ATM insert skimmer peddlers.

Traditional ATM skimmers are fraud devices made to be placed over top of the cash machine’s card acceptance slot, usually secured to the ATM with glue or double-sided tape. Increasingly, however, more financial institutions are turning to technologies that can detect when something has been affixed to the ATM. As a result, more fraudsters are selling and using insert skimming devices — which are completely hidden from view once inserted into an ATM.

The fraudster demonstrating his insert skimmer in the short video above spends the first half of the demo showing how a regular bank card can freely move in and out of the card acceptance slot while the insert skimmer is nestled inside. Toward the end of the video, the scammer retrieves the insert skimmer using what appears to be a rather crude, handmade tool thin enough to fit inside a wallet.

A sales video produced by yet another miscreant in the cybercrime underground shows an insert skimmer being installed and removed from a motorized card acceptance slot that has been fully removed from an ATM so that the fraud device can be seen even while it is inserted.

In a typical setup, insert skimmers capture payment card data from the magnetic stripe on the backs of cards inserted into a hacked ATM, while a pinhole spy camera hidden above or beside the PIN pad records time-stamped video of cardholders entering their PINs. The data allows thieves to fabricate new cards and use PINs to withdraw cash from victim accounts.

Covering the PIN pad with your hand blocks any hidden camera from capturing your PIN — and hidden cameras are used on the vast majority of the more than three dozen ATM skimming incidents that I’ve covered here. Shockingly, few people bother to take this simple and effective step, as detailed in this skimmer tale from 2012, wherein I obtained hours worth of video seized from two ATM skimming operations and saw customer after customer walk up, insert their cards and punch in their digits — all in the clear.

Once you understand how stealthy these ATM fraud devices are, it’s difficult to use a cash machine without wondering whether the thing is already hacked. The truth is most of us probably have a better chance of getting physically mugged after withdrawing cash than encountering a skimmer in real life. However, here are a few steps we can all take to minimize the success of skimmer gangs.

-Cover the PIN pad while you enter your PIN.

-Keep your wits about you when you’re at the ATM, and avoid dodgy-looking and standalone cash machines in low-lit areas, if possible.

-Stick to ATMs that are physically installed in a bank. Stand-alone ATMs are usually easier for thieves to hack into.

-Be especially vigilant when withdrawing cash on the weekends; thieves tend to install skimming devices on a weekend — when they know the bank won’t be open again for more than 24 hours.

-Keep a close eye on your bank statements, and dispute any unauthorized charges or withdrawals immediately.

If you liked this piece and want to learn more about skimming devices, check out my series All About Skimmers.

DoD Opens .Mil to Legal Hacking, Within Limits

November 23, 2016

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Hackers of all stripes looking to test their mettle can now legally hone their cyber skills, tools and weaponry against any Web property operated by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), according to a new military-wide policy for reporting and fixing security vulnerabilities.

hackthearmy

Security researchers are often reluctant to report programming flaws or security holes they’ve stumbled upon for fear that the vulnerable organization might instead decide to shoot the messenger and pursue hacking charges.

But on Nov. 21, the DoD sought to clear up any ambiguity on that front for the military’s substantial online presence, creating both a centralized place to report cybersecurity flaws across the dot-mil space as well as a legal safe harbor (and the prospect of public recognition) for researchers who abide by a few ground rules.

The DoD said it would “deal in good faith” with researchers “who discover, test, and submit vulnerabilities or indicators of vulnerabilities in accordance with these guidelines:

“Your activities are limited exclusively to –
(1) Testing to detect a vulnerability or identify an indicator related to a vulnerability; or
(2) Sharing with, or receiving from, DoD information about a vulnerability or an indicator related to a vulnerability.”

The Department of Defense also issued the following ten commandments for demonstrating compliance with its policy:

You do no harm and do not exploit any vulnerability beyond the minimal amount of testing required to prove that a vulnerability exists or to identify an indicator related to a vulnerability.
You avoid intentionally accessing the content of any communications, data, or information transiting or stored on DoD information system(s) – except to the extent that the information is directly related to a vulnerability and the access is necessary to prove that the vulnerability exists.
You do not exfiltrate any data under any circumstances.
You do not intentionally compromise the privacy or safety of DoD personnel (e.g. civilian employees or military members), or any third parties.
You do not intentionally compromise the intellectual property or other commercial or financial interests of any DoD personnel or entities, or any third parties.
You do not publicly disclose any details of the vulnerability, indicator of vulnerability, or the content of information rendered available by a vulnerability, except upon receiving explicit written authorization from DoD.
You do not conduct denial of service testing.
You do not conduct social engineering, including spear phishing, of DoD personnel or contractors.
You do not submit a high-volume of low-quality reports.
If at any point you are uncertain whether to continue testing, please engage with our team.

In return, the DoD said it commits to acknowledging receipt of a report within three business days, and that it will work to confirm the existence of the vulnerability to the researcher and keep the researcher informed of any remediation underway. There are some restrictions, however. For example, researchers who report vulnerabilities will be expected to refrain from publicly disclosing their findings unless and until the DoD provides written consent that it’s okay to do so.

“We want researchers to be recognized publicly for their contributions, if that is the researcher’s desire,” the DoD stated. “We will seek to allow researchers to be publicly recognized whenever possible. However, public disclosure of vulnerabilities will only be authorized at the express written consent of DoD.”

The DoD said if it couldn’t immediately fix or publicly acknowledge reported vulnerabilities, it might be because doing so could have life-or-death consequences for service members.

“Many DoD technologies are deployed in combat zones and, to varying degrees, support ongoing military operations; the proper functioning of DoD systems and applications can have a life-or-death impact on Service members and international allies and partners of the United States,” the agency observed. “DoD must take extra care while investigating the impact of vulnerabilities and providing a fix, so we ask your patience during this period.”

HACK THE ARMY

The Defense Department made the announcement via Hackerone.com, a company that helps organizations build and manage vulnerability reporting policies. HackerOne also helps customers build out “bug bounty” programs that remunerate and recognize researchers who report security flaws.

HackerOne currently is coordinating an upcoming bug bounty program called “Hack the Army,” in which some 500 qualifying contestants can earn cash rewards for finding and reporting cybersecurity weaknesses in the Army’s various online properties (incidentally, Hack the Army runs from Nov. 30 through Dec. 21, 2016, and interested/eligible hackers have until Nov. 28, at 17:00 EST to apply for a shot at one of those 500 spots). Continue reading →

Akamai on the Record KrebsOnSecurity Attack

November 22, 2016

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Internet infrastructure giant Akamai last week released a special State of the Internet report. Normally, the quarterly accounting of noteworthy changes in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks doesn’t delve into attacks on specific customers. But this latest Akamai report makes an exception in describing in great detail the record-sized attack against KrebsOnSecurity.com in September, the largest such assault it has ever mitigated.

“The attacks made international headlines and were also covered in depth by Brian Krebs himself,” Akamai said in its report, explaining one reason for the exception. “The same data we’ve shared here was made available to Krebs for his own reporting and we received permission to name him and his site in this report. Brian Krebs is a security blogger and reporter who does in-depth research and analysis of cybercrime throughout the world, with a recent emphasis on DDoS. His reporting exposed a stressor site called vDOS and the security firm BackConnect Inc., which made him the target of a series of large DDoS attacks starting September 15, 2016.”

A visual depiction of the increasing size and frequency of DDoS attacks against KrebsOnSecurity.com, between 2012 and 2016. Source: Akamai.

Akamai said so-called “booter” or “stresser” DDoS-for-hire services that sell attacks capable of knocking Web sites offline continue to account for a large portion of the attack traffic in mega attacks. According to Akamai, most of the traffic from those mega attacks in Q3 2016 were thanks to Mirai — the now open-source malware family that was used to coordinate the attack on this site in September and a separate assault against infrastructure provider Dyn in October.

Akamai said the attack on Sept. 20 was launched by just 24,000 systems infected with Mirai, mostly hacked Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as digital video recorders and security cameras.

“The first quarter of 2016 marked a high point in the number of attacks peaking at more than 100 Gbps,” Akamai stated in its report. “This trend was matched in Q3 2016, with another 19 mega attacks. It’s interesting that while the overall number of attacks fell by 8% quarter over quarter, the number of large attacks, as well as the size of the biggest attacks, grew significantly.”

As detailed here in several previous posts, KrebsOnSecurity.com was a pro-bono customer of Akamai, beginning in August 2012 with Prolexic before Akamai acquired them. Akamai mentions this as well in explaining its decision to terminate our pro-bono arrangement. KrebsOnSecurity is now behind Google‘s Project Shield, a free program run by Google to help protect journalists and dissidents from online censorship.

“Almost as soon as the site was on the Prolexic network, it was hit by a trio of attacks based on the Dirt Jumper DDoS tookit,” Akamai wrote of this site. “Those attacks marked the start of hundreds of attacks that were mitigated on the routed platform.”

In total, Akamai found, this site received 269 attacks in the little more than four years it was on the Prolexic/Akamai network. Continue reading →

Adobe Fined $1M in Multistate Suit Over 2013 Breach; No Jail for Spamhaus Attacker

November 17, 2016

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Adobe will pay just $1 million to settle a lawsuit filed by 15 state attorneys general over its huge 2013 data breach that exposed payment records on approximately 38 million people. In other news, the 39-year-old Dutchman responsible for coordinating an epic, weeks-long distributed denial-of-service attack against anti-spam provider Spamhaus in 2013 will avoid any jail time for his crimes thanks to a court ruling in Amsterdam this week.

On Oct. 3, 2013, KrebsOnSecurity broke the story that Adobe had just suffered a breach in which hackers siphoned usernames, passwords and payment card data on 38 million customers. The intruders also made off with digital truckloads of source code for some of Adobe’s most valuable software properties — including Adobe Acrobat and Reader, Photoshop and ColdFusion.

On Monday, Nov. 11, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper joined his counterparts in 14 other states in announcing a $1 million settlement with Adobe over the 2013 breach. According to Cooper, the hacked Adobe servers contained the personal information of approximately 552,000 residents of the participating 15 states. That works out to about $1.80 per victim across all 15 states.

A posting on anonnews.org that was later deleted.

According to a statement by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, “an investigation by the states revealed that in September 2013, Adobe received an alert that the hard drive for one of its application servers was nearing capacity. In responding to the alert, Adobe learned that an unauthorized attempt was being made to decrypt customer payment card numbers maintained on the server.”

“Adobe discovered that one or more unauthorized intruder(s) had compromised a public-facing web server and used it to access other servers on Adobe’s network, including areas where Adobe stored consumer data,” the statement from Healey’s office reads. “The intruder(s) ultimately stole consumer data from Adobe’s servers, including encrypted payment card numbers and expiration dates, names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, usernames (Adobe IDs), and passwords associated with the usernames.”

When I think of the Adobe breach I’m reminded of that scene out of the 1982 Spielberg horror classic “Poltergeist,” when Craig T. Nelson as “Steve Freeling” seizes the horrified neighborhood developer Mr. Teague by his coat collars and screams, “You son of a bitch! You moved the cemetery but you left the bodies, didn’t ya?! You left left the bodies and you only moved the headstones!! Why?!?!?! Whyyyyyyeeeiee??!?!?”

A scene from Poltergeist. Image: IMDB.

Likewise, Adobe had various storefronts for its various software products, but it eventually centralized many store operations. The main trouble was the company left copies of their customer records in multiple internal network locations that were no longer as protected as Adobe’s globally centralized storefront.

North Carolina’s Cooper said in a statement on the settlement that businesses and government must do more to protect consumer data. But if this settlement was meant as a deterrent to dissuade other companies from hosting customer payment data on public-facing Web servers, the fine might be more effective if it were more commensurate with the company’s size and the number of customers impacted.

As Digital Trends notes, such a breach under the new General Data Protection Regulation going into effect in 2018, would be quite a bit more costly. “Adobe could face fines of up to four percent of its annual global turnover,” wrote Jonathan Keane for DT. “Last we checked, Adobe’s previous quarterly earnings were $1.4 billion.”

Keane also notes that Adobe had previously settled a similar case in California where it settled for an undisclosed amount and $1.1 million in legal fees.

One interesting nugget tucked in at the end of the statement from the North Carolina AG’s office is this bit: More than 3,700 breaches impacting nearly 10 million North Carolinians have been reported since the state’s data breach notification law took effect in 2005, including 677 breaches reported so far in 2016. According to the United States Census Bureau, there were just over 10 million residents in North Carolina as of July 2015. Continue reading →

Chinese IoT Firm Siphoned Text Messages, Call Records

November 16, 2016

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A Chinese technology firm has been siphoning text messages and call records from cheap Android-based mobile smart phones and secretly sending the data to servers in China, researchers revealed this week. The revelations came the same day the White House and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued sweeping guidelines aimed at building security into Internet-connected devices, and just hours before a key congressional panel sought recommendations from industry in regulating basic security standards for so-called “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices.

At the center of the spyware controversy is software made by Shanghai ADUPS Technology, a Chinese firm whose product touts the ability to wirelessly update software installed on mobile and and IoT devices. The ADUPS technology is typically bundled with smart phones made by dozens of global wireless firms including ZTE, BLU and Huawei, and sold at popular consumer destinations like Amazon and BestBuy. Often retailing for between $50 and $100, the sleek and powerful devices sell so cheaply because they also require the user to accept on-screen advertisements.

An About Us page at ADUPS’s Web site explains the company’s foothold in the IoT market.

According to research released this week, the low up-front cost of these smart phones may be subsidized not just by ads but by also by the theft of private information stolen from users. Researchers at Fairfax, Va.-based security firm Kryptowire say the ADUPS software gives the company near-total control over the devices that it runs on, and that they have proof ADUPS has abused that control to siphon personal data from countless consumers.

Kryptowire researchers say they stumbled upon ADUPS’s spyware capabilities by accident after purchasing a $59 BLU R1 HD smart phone from Amazon.com for use during international travel. Prying apart the phone and the ADUPS software, they discovered that all call records and text messages to and from the device were being digitally copied, encrypted and secretly forwarded to a server in Shanghai, China every 72 hours.

They also learned that ADUPS’s product was able to mine user text messages for specific strings of text, as well as install and remove any software from host devices.

“This behavior cannot be detected by mobile anti-virus tools because they assume that software that ships with the device is not malware and that it is white-listed,” Kryptowire wrote in an advisory published Tuesday. “We were able to capture, decrypt, and trace the data on the network as they were sent to multiple server locations that are located in Shanghai, China.”

In a statement posted to its Web site, ADUPS said it collects “model information, device status, application information, bin/xbin information and summary information from phones and messages,” and that it has done so “in response to user demand to screen out junk texts and calls from advertisers.”

ADUPS further claims that the functionality was added in June 2016 to some Blu Product Inc. devices, and that it has since shipped an update through its firmware updating software to disable the spying functionality on Blu phones.

But Azzedine Benameur, director of research at Kryptowire, said ADUPS’s software — deeply embedded alongside the operating system on these mobile devices — gives it full ability to re-enable the spyware capabilities at any time. He says ADUPS’s public response to their research raises more questions than it answers.

“They do not provide how many devices were affected and how the data were used,” Benameur said. “Also, they don’t mention who had access to that data, including third parties and the Chinese government. Also, there might be other [manufacturers] and device models affected that ADUPS does not mention.”

ADUPS claims on its Web site to have worldwide presence with more than 700 million active users, and that its firmware is integrated into “more than 400 leading mobile operators, semiconductor vendors and device manufacturers spanning from wearable and mobile devices to cars and televisions.”

“This is just one random device of theirs that we looked at,” Benameur said. “For a company that claims to provide over-the-air updates for 700 million devices, including cars and millions of IoT devices…this is really scary and unacceptable behavior.”

ADUPS’s offer to business partners, circa January 2015.

ADUPS’s current site promises the company’s partners “big data analytics” and higher profit for partners. Earlier versions of the same page from 2015 and cached at the Internet Archive promise partners a slightly less euphemistic menu of services, from an “app push service,” and “device data mining” to “unique package checking” and “mobile advertising.” Interestingly, this story from January 2015 documents how ADUPS’s software has been used to install unwanted apps on customer mobile devices.

As for the Blu R1 HD phone? Benameur said it would be nice if it came with a disclosure that owners can expect zero privacy or control while using it. Aside from that? “At $59, it’s a steal,” Benameur said. “Minus the spyware, it’s a great phone.” Continue reading →

Russian ‘Dukes’ of Hackers Pounce on Trump Win

November 10, 2016

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Less than six hours after Donald Trump became the presumptive president-elect of the United States, a Russian hacker gang perhaps best known for breaking into computer networks at the Democratic National Committee launched a volley of targeted phishing campaigns against American political think-tanks and non-government organizations (NGOs).

One of the phishing emails in the latest political espionage attack launched by The Dukes. Source: Volexity.

That’s according to a new report from Washington, D.C.-based cyber incident response firm Volexity. The firm’s researchers say they’ve been closely monitoring the activities of an well-established Russian malware development gang known variously as Cozy Bear, APT29, and The Dukes.

Hacking attacks launched by The Dukes were thought to be connected to intrusions at the Democratic National Committee (DNC), as well as cyber break-ins at multiple high-profile United States Government organizations, Volexity reports in a blog post published Thursday morning.

Last month, the Obama administration publicly acknowledged for the first time that it believed that the Russian government was responsible for stealing and disclosing emails from the DNC and a range of other institutions and prominent individuals, most recently Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta. The emails were posted on WikiLeaks and other sites.

Volexity CEO Steven Adair said The Dukes have launched at least five sorties of email-based malware phishing attacks since Trump’s acceptance speech, and that the malware campaigns are ongoing.

“Two of the attacks purported to be messages forwarded on from the Clinton Foundation giving insight and perhaps a postmortem analysis into the elections,” Adair wrote.”Two of the other attacks purported to be eFax links or documents pertaining to the election’s outcome being revised or rigged. The last attack claimed to be a link to a PDF download on “Why American Elections Are Flawed.”

According to Volexity, in July 2015 the Dukes started heavily targeting think tanks and NGOs.

“This represented a fairly significant shift in the group’s previous operations and one that continued in the lead up to and immediately after the 2016 United States Presidential election,” Adair wrote.

Prior to the election, The Dukes were active on August 10, 2016 and on August 25, 2016, launching several waves of highly targeted spear phishing attacks against several U.S.-based think tanks and NGOs.

“These spear phishing messages were spoofed and made to appear to have been sent from real individuals at well-known think tanks in the United States and Europe,” Adair wrote. “These August waves of attacks purported to be from individuals at Transparency International, the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Eurasia Group, and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).”

Adair said the more typical attacks from The Dukes come in the form of slightly less-targeted email blasts — often to just a few dozen recipients at a time — that include booby-trapped Microsoft Office documents.

When launched, the tainted Excel or Word document opens an actual file with real content, but it also prompts the target to enable “macros” — a powerful functionality built into Office documents that hackers can use to automatically download and run malicious code on a Windows system.

The Dukes prefer to launch the attacks using hacked servers and email inboxes belonging to unsuspecting, trusted workers at NGOs and U.S. government systems, Adair explained. Most often, he said, the intruders will repurpose a legitimate document found in one of these hacked inboxes and inject a sophisticated backdoor “trojan horse program.”

If the phishing target opens the document and has macros enabled in Microsoft Office — or allows macros to be run after the decoy document is shown — a malicious script embedded in the macro installs on the target’s system a powerful foothold for the attacker. Continue reading →

Patch Tuesday, 2016 U.S. Election Edition

November 9, 2016

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Let’s get this out of the way up front: Having “2016 election” in the headline above is probably the only reason anyone might read this story today. It remains unclear whether Republicans and Democrats can patch things up after a bruising and divisive election, but thanks to a special Election Day Patch Tuesday hundreds of millions of Adobe and Microsoft users have some more immediate patching to do.

As the eyes of the world stayed glued to screens following the U.S. presidential election through the night, Microsoft and Adobe were busy churning out a large number of new security updates for Windows, MS Office, Flash Player and other software. If you use Flash Player or Microsoft products, please take a deep breath and read on.

brokenwindows

Regularly scheduled on the second Tuesday of each month, this month’s “Patch Tuesday” fell squarely on Election Day in the United States and included 14 patch bundles. Those patches fixed a total of 68 unique security flaws in Windows and related software.

Six of the 14 patches carry Microsoft’s most’s-dire “critical” label, meaning they fix bugs that malware or miscreants could use to remotely compromise vulnerable PCs without any help from users apart from maybe visiting a hacked or malicious Web site.

Microsoft says two of the software flaws addressed this week are already being exploited in active attacks. It also warned that three of the software vulnerabilities were publicly detailed prior to the release of these fixes – potentially giving attackers a head start in figuring out how to exploit the bugs.

“MS16-129 is our usual dogs breakfast of remote code execution vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Edge browser, impacting both HTML rendering and scripting,” said Bobby Kuzma, systems engineer at Core Security. “MS16-130 contains a privilege escalation in the onscreen keyboard function from Vista forward. That’s great news for anyone running touchscreen kiosks that are supposedly locked down.” Continue reading →

Did the Mirai Botnet Really Take Liberia Offline?

November 4, 2016

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KrebsOnSecurity received many a missive over the past 24 hours from readers who wanted to know why I’d not written about widespread media reports that Mirai — a malware strain made from hacked “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices such as poorly secured routers and IP cameras — was used to knock the entire country of Liberia offline. The trouble is, as far as I can tell no such nationwide outage actually occurred.

First, a quick recap on Mirai: This blog was taken offline in September following a record 620 Gpbs attack launched by a Mirai botnet. The source code for Mirai was leaked online at the end of September. Since then, the code has been forked several times, resulting in the emergence of several large Mirai-based botnets. In late October, many of the Internet’s top destinations went offline for the better part of a day when Mirai was used to attack Internet infrastructure firm Dyn.

Enter Kevin Beaumont, a security architect from Liverpool, England who on Thursday published a piece on Medium.com about an attack by Mirai against Liberia. Beaumont had been researching the output of an automated Twitter account set up by security researchers to monitor attacks from these various Mirai botnets. That Twitter account, @MiraiAttacks, burps out a tweet with each new Mirai attack, listing the targeted Internet address, the attack type, and the observed duration of the attack.

Beamont’s story noted that a botnet based on Mirai was seen attacking the telecommunications infrastructure in the West African nation of Liberia. Citing anonymous sources, Beaumont said transit providers confirmed an attack of more than 500 Gpbs targeting Liberia’s lone underseas large-transit Internet cable, which Beaumont said “provides a single point of failure for internet access.”

“From monitoring we can see websites hosted in country going offline during the attacks,” Beaumont wrote. “Additionally, a source in country at a Telco has confirmed to a journalist they are seeing intermittent internet connectivity, at times which directly match the attack. The attacks are extremely worrying because they suggest a Mirai operator who has enough capacity to seriously impact systems in a nation state.”

Not long after Beamont’s story went live, a piece at The Hacker News breathlessly announced that hackers using Mirai had succeeded in knocking Liberia off the Internet. The Hacker News piece includes nifty graphics and images of Liberia’s underseas Internet cables. Soon after, ZDNet picked up the outage angle, as did the BBC and The Guardian and a host of other news outlets.

A graphic The Hacker News used to explain Liberia’s susceptibility to a DDoS attack.

The only problem that I can see with these stories is that there does not appear to have been anything close to a country-wide outage as a result of this Mirai attack.

Daniel Brewer, general manager for the Cable Consortium of Liberia, confirmed that his organization has fielded inquiries from news outlets and other interest groups following multiple media reports of a nationwide outage. But he could not point to the reason.

“Both our ACE submarine cable monitoring systems and servers hosted (locally) in LIXP (Liberia Internet Exchange Point) show no downtime in the last 3 weeks,” Brewer said. “While it is likely that a local operator might have experienced a brief outage, we have no knowledge of a national Internet outage and there are no data to [substantiate] that.” Continue reading →

Ne’er-Do-Well News and Cyber Justice

November 4, 2016

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Way back in the last millennium when I was a lowly copy aide at The Washington Post, I pitched the Metro Section editor on an idea for new column: “And the Good News Is…” The editor laughed me out of her office. But I still think it’s a decent idea — particularly in the context of cybersecurity — to periodically highlight the good news when people allegedly responsible for spewing so much badness online are made to face justice.

NCA officials lead away a suspect arrested in this week’s raids. Image: NCA.

In the United Kingdom this week, 14 people were arrested on suspicion of laundering at least £11 million (~USD $13.7M) on behalf of thieves who stole the money using sophisticated banking Trojans like Dridex and Dyre. A statement issued by the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) said 13 men and a woman, aged between 23 and 52, were arrested in the roundup, including a number of foreign nationals.

The NCA warned in a report released this year that cybercrime had overtaken traditional crime in the United Kingdom. According to the U.K.’s Office of National Statistics, there were 2.46 million cyber incidents and 2.11 million victims of cybercrime in the U.K. in 2015.

Also in the U.K., 19-year-old Adam Mudd pleaded guilty to operating and profiting from Titanium Stresser, an attack-for-hire or “booter” service that could be hired to knock Web sites offline. When U.K. authorities arrested Mudd at his home last year, they found detailed records of the attack service’s customers and victims, which included evidence of more than 1.7 million attacks. Prosecutors say Mudd launched the service when he was 15 years old.

TitaniumStresser[dot]net, as it appeared in 2014.

As I noted in this 2014 story, the source code for Titanium Stresser was later used by miscreants with the Lizard Squad hacking group to power their Lizard Stresser attack service. Happily, two other 19-year-olds were arrested earlier this month and accused of operating the Lizard Stresser attack service. It’s nice to see authorities here and abroad sending a message that operating booter service can land you in jail, full stop. Continue reading →

Computer Virus Cripples UK Hospital System

November 2, 2016

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Citing a computer virus outbreak, a hospital system in the United Kingdom has canceled all planned operations and diverted major trauma cases to neighboring facilities. The incident came as U.K. leaders detailed a national cyber security strategy that promises billions in cybersecurity spending, new special police units to pursue organized online gangs, and the possibility of retaliation for major attacks.

In a “major incident” alert posted to its Web site, the National Health Service’s Lincolnshire and Goole trust said it made the decision to cancel surgeries and divert trauma patients after a virus infected its electronic systems on Sunday, October 30.

A portion of the alert posted to the NHS’s home page.

“We have taken the decision, following expert advise, to shut down the majority of our systems so we can isolate and destroy it,” the NHS said, of the unspecified malware infection. “All planned operations, outpatient appointments and diagnostic procedures have been cancelled for Wednesday, Nov. 2 with a small number of exceptions.”

The advisory continued:

“Inpatients will continue to be cared for and discharged as soon as they are medically fit. Major trauma cases will continue to be diverted to neighboring hospitals as will high risk women in labour.”

Although the NHS didn’t say what kind of virus infected its systems, it is likely an infestation of ransomware — a malware scourge whose purveyors have taken to targeting hospitals and healthcare facilities.

Ransomware scours an infected computer for documents, audio files, pictures and other things likely to be of value to the system’s owner, and then encrypts that data with very powerful encryption software. Most ransomware variants also scour the local network for other systems or network shares to infect. Victims usually can only get their files back after paying a specified ransom demand using a virtual currency, such as Bitcoin. Continue reading →

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