Hackers Hit U.S. Senate GOP Committee

October 17, 2016

The national news media has been consumed of late with reports of Russian hackers breaking into networks of the Democratic National Committee. Lest the Republicans feel left out of all the excitement, a report this past week out of The Netherlands suggests Russian hackers have for the past six months been siphoning credit card data from visitors to the Web storefront of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC).

nrscThat’s right: If you purchased a “Never Hillary” poster or donated funds to the NRSC through its Web site between March 2016 and the first week of this month, there’s an excellent chance that your payment card data was siphoned by malware and is now for sale in the cybercrime underground.

News of the break-in comes from Dutch researcher Willem De Groot, co-founder and head of security at Dutch e-commerce site byte.nl. De Groot said the NRSC was one of more than 5,900 e-commerce sites apparently hacked by the same actors, and that the purloined card data was sent to a network of servers operated by a Russian-language Internet service provider incorporated in Belize.

De Groot said he dissected the malware planted on the NRSC’s site and other servers (his analysis of the malware is available here) and found that the hackers used security vulnerabilities or weak passwords to break in to the various e-commerce sites.

The researcher found the malware called home to specific Web destinations made to look like legitimate sites associated with e-commerce activity, such as jquery-cloud[dot]net, visa-cdn[dot]com, and magento-connection[dot]com.

“[The attackers] really went out of their way to pick domain names that look legitimate,” De Groot said.

The NRSC did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but a cached copy of the site’s source code from October 5, 2016 indicates the malicious code was on the site at the time (load this link, click “view source” and then Ctrl-F for “jquery-cloud.net”).

A majority of the malicious domains inserted into the hacked sites by the malware map back to a few hundred Internet addresses assigned to a company called dataflow[dot]su.

Dataflow markets itself as an “offshore” hosting provider with presences in Belize and The Seychelles. Dataflow has long been advertised on Russian-language cybercrime forums as an offshore haven that offers so-called “bulletproof hosting,” a phrase used to describe hosting firms that court all manner of sites that most legitimate hosting firms shun, including those that knowingly host spam and phishing sites as well as malicious software.

De Groot published a list of the sites currently present at Dataflow. The list speaks for itself as a collection of badness, including quite a number of Russian-language sites selling synthetic drugs and stolen credit card data.

According to De Groot, other sites that were retrofitted with the malware included e-commerce sites for the shoe maker Converse as well as the automaker Audi, although he says those sites and the NRSC’s have been scrubbed of the malicious software since his report was published. Continue reading

Self-Checkout Skimmers Go Bluetooth

October 14, 2016

This blog has featured several stories about payment card skimming devices designed to be placed over top of credit card terminals in self-checkout lanes at grocery stores and other retailers. Many readers have asked for more details about the electronics that power these so-called “overlay” skimmers. Here’s a look at one overlay skimmer  equipped with Bluetooth technology that allows thieves to snarf swiped card data and PINs wirelessly using nothing more than a mobile phone.

The rather crude video below shows a Bluetooth enabled overlay skimmer crafted to be slipped directly over top of Ingenico iSC250 credit card terminals. These Ingenico terminals are widely used at countless U.S. based merchants; earlier this year I wrote about Ingenico overlay skimmers being found in self-checkout lanes at some WalMart locations.

The demo video briefly shows the electronics hidden on the back side of the overlay skimmer, but most of the sales video demonstrates the Bluetooth functionality built into the device. The video appears to show the skimmer seller connecting his mobile phone to the Bluetooth elements embedded in the skimmer. The demo continues on to show the phone intercepting PIN pad presses and card swipe data. Continue reading

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IoT Devices as Proxies for Cybercrime

October 13, 2016

Multiple stories published here over the past few weeks have examined the disruptive power of hacked “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices such as routers, IP cameras and digital video recorders. This post looks at how crooks are using hacked IoT devices as proxies to hide their true location online as they engage in a variety of other types of cybercriminal activity — from frequenting underground forums to credit card and tax refund fraud.

networktechniciansRecently, I heard from a cybersecurity researcher who’d created a virtual “honeypot” environment designed to simulate hackable IoT devices. The source, who asked to remain anonymous, said his honeypot soon began seeing traffic destined for Asus and Linksys routers running default credentials. When he examined what that traffic was designed to do, he found his honeypot systems were being told to download a piece of malware from a destination on the Web.

My source grabbed a copy of the malware, analyzed it, and discovered it had two basic functions: To announce to a set of Internet addresses hard-coded in the malware a registration “I’m here” beacon; and to listen for incoming commands, such as scanning for new vulnerable hosts or running additional malware. He then wrote a script to simulate the hourly “I’m here” beacons, interpret any “download” commands, and then execute the download and “run” commands.

The researcher found that the malware being pushed to his honeypot system was designed to turn his faux infected router into a “SOCKS proxy server,” essentially a host designed to route traffic between a client and a server. Most often, SOCKS proxies are used to anonymize communications because they can help obfuscate the true origin of the client that is using the SOCKS server.

proxy

When he realized how his system was being used, my source fired up several more virtual honeypots, and repeated the process. Employing a custom tool that allows the user to intercept (a.k.a. “man-in-the-middle”) encrypted SSL traffic, the researcher was able to collect the underlying encrypted data passing through his SOCKS servers and decrypt it.

What he observed was that all of the systems were being used for a variety of badness, from proxying Web traffic destined for cybercrime forums to testing stolen credit cards at merchant Web sites. Further study of the malware files and the traffic beacons emanating from the honeypot systems indicated his honeypots were being marketed on a Web-based criminal service that sells access to SOCKS proxies in exchange for Bitcoin.

Unfortunately, this type of criminal proxying is hardly new. Crooks have been using hacked PCs to proxy their traffic for eons. KrebsOnSecurity has featured numerous stories about cybercrime services that sell access to hacked computers as a means of helping thieves anonymize their nefarious activities online. Continue reading

Microsoft: No More Pick-and-Choose Patching

October 11, 2016

Adobe and Microsoft today each issued updates to fix critical security flaws in their products. Adobe’s got fixes for Acrobat and Flash Player ready. Microsoft’s patch bundle for October includes fixes for at least five separate “zero-day” vulnerabilities — dangerous flaws that attackers were already exploiting prior to today’s patch release. Also notable this month is that Microsoft is changing how it deploys security updates, removing the ability for Windows users to pick and choose which individual patches to install.

brokenwindowsZero-day vulnerabilities describe flaws that even the makers of the targeted software don’t know about before they start seeing the flaws exploited in the wild, meaning the vendor has “zero days” to fix the bugs.

According to security vendor Qualys, Patch Tuesday updates fix zero-day bugs in Internet Explorer and Edge — the default browsers on different versions of Windows. MS16-121 addresses a zero-day in Microsoft Office. Another zero-day flaw affects GDI+ — a graphics component built into Windows that can be exploitable through the browser. The final zero-day is present in the Internet Messaging component of Windows.

Starting this month, home and business Windows users will no longer be able to pick and choose which updates to install and which to leave for another time. For example, I’ve often advised home users to hold off on installing .NET updates until all other patches for the month are applied — reasoning that .NET updates are very large and in my experience have frequently been found to be the source of problems when applying huge numbers of patches simultaneously.

But that cafeteria-style patching goes out the…err…Windows with this month’s release. Microsoft made the announcement in May of this year and revisited the subject again in August to add more detail behind its decision:

“Historically, we have released individual patches for these platforms, which allowed you to be selective with the updates you deployed,” wrote Nathan Mercer, a senior product marketing manager at Microsoft. “This resulted in fragmentation where different PCs could have a different set of updates installed leading to multiple potential problems:

  • Various combinations caused sync and dependency errors and lower update quality
  • Testing complexity increased for enterprises
  • Scan times increased
  • Finding and applying the right patches became challenging
  • Customers encountered issues where a patch was already released, but because it was in limited distribution it was hard to find and apply proactively

By moving to a rollup model, we bring a more consistent and simplified servicing experience to Windows 7 SP1 and 8.1, so that all supported versions of Windows follow a similar update servicing model. The new rollup model gives you fewer updates to manage, greater predictability, and higher quality updates. The outcome increases Windows operating system reliability, by eliminating update fragmentation and providing more proactive patches for known issues. Getting and staying current will also be easier with only one rollup update required. Rollups enable you to bring your systems up to date with fewer updates, and will minimize administrative overhead to install a large number of updates.”

Microsoft’s patch policy changes are slightly different for home versus business customers. Consumers on Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows 8.1 will henceforth receive what Redmond is calling a “Monthly Rollup,” which addresses both security issues and reliability issues in a single update. The “Security-only updates” option — intended for enterprises and not available via Windows Update —  will only include new security patches that are released for that month. 

What this means is that if any part of the patch bundle breaks, the only option is to remove the entire bundle (instead of the offending patch, as was previously possible). I have no doubt this simplifies things for Microsoft and likely saves them a ton of money, but my concern is this will leave end-users unable to apply critical patches simply due to a single patch breaking something. Continue reading

Europe to Push New Security Rules Amid IoT Mess

October 8, 2016

The European Commission is drafting new cybersecurity requirements to beef up security around so-called Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as Web-connected security cameras, routers and digital video recorders (DVRs). News of the expected proposal comes as security firms are warning that a great many IoT devices are equipped with little or no security protections.

iotb2According to a report at Euractiv.com, the Commission is planning the new IoT rules as part of a new plan to overhaul the European Union’s telecommunications laws. “The Commission would encourage companies to come up with a labeling system for internet-connected devices that are approved and secure,” wrote Catherine Stupp. “The EU labelling system that rates appliances based on how much energy they consume could be a template for the cybersecurity ratings.”

In last week’s piece, “Who Makes the IoT Things Under Attack?,” I looked at which companies are responsible for IoT products being sought out by Mirai — malware that scans the Internet for devices running default usernames and passwords and then forces vulnerable devices to participate in extremely powerful attacks designed to knock Web sites offline.

One of those default passwords — username: root and password: xc3511 — is in a broad array of white-labeled DVR and IP camera electronics boards made by a Chinese company called XiongMai Technologies. These components are sold downstream to vendors who then use it in their own products.

That information comes in an analysis published this week by Flashpoint Intel, whose security analysts discovered that the Web-based administration page for devices made by this Chinese company (http://ipaddress/Login.htm) can be trivially bypassed without even supplying a username or password, just by navigating to a page called “DVR.htm” prior to login.

Worse still, even if owners of these IoT devices change the default credentials via the device’s Web interface, those machines can still be reached over the Internet via communications services called “Telnet” and “SSH.” These are command-line, text-based interfaces that are typically accessed via a command prompt (e.g., in Microsoft Windows, a user could click Start, and in the search box type “cmd.exe” to launch a command prompt, and then type “telnet” to reach a username and password prompt at the target host).

“The issue with these particular devices is that a user cannot feasibly change this password,” said Flashpoint’s Zach Wikholm. “The password is hardcoded into the firmware, and the tools necessary to disable it are not present. Even worse, the web interface is not aware that these credentials even exist.”

Flashpoint’s researchers said they scanned the Internet on Oct. 6 for systems that showed signs of running the vulnerable hardware, and found more than 515,000 of them were vulnerable to the flaws they discovered.

Flashpoint says the majority of media coverage surrounding the Mirai attacks on KrebsOnSecurity and other targets has outed products made by Chinese hi-tech vendor Dahua as a primary source of compromised devices. Indeed, Dahua’s products were heavily represented in the analysis I published last week.

For its part, Dahua appears to be downplaying the problem. On Thursday, Dahua published a carefully-worded statement that took issue with a Wall Street Journal story about the role of Dahua’s products in the Mirai botnet attacks.

“To clarify, Dahua Technology has maintained a B2B business model and sells its products through the channel,” the company said. “Currently in the North America market, we don’t sell our products directly to consumers and businesses through [our] website or retailers like Amazon. Amazon is not an approved Dahua distributor and we proactively conduct research to identify and take action against the unauthorized sale of our products. A list of authorized distributors is available here.” Continue reading

Feds Charge Two In Lizard Squad Investigation

October 6, 2016

The U.S. Justice Department has charged two 19-year-old men alleged to be core members of the hacking groups Lizard Squad and PoodleCorp. The pair are charged with credit card theft and operating so-called “booter”or “stresser” services that allowed paying customers to launch powerful attacks designed to knock Web sites offline.

The PoodleCorp attack-for-hire service. Image: USDOJ.

The PoodleCorp/PoodleStresser attack-for-hire service. Image: USDOJ.

Federal investigators charged Zachary Buchta of Fallston, Md., and Bradley Jan Willem Van Rooy of Leiden, the Netherlands with conspiring to cause damage to protected computers.

According to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, Buchta, “who used the online screen names “@fbiarelosers,” “pein,” “xotehpoodle” and “lizard,” and van Rooy, who used the names “Uchiha,” “@UchihaLS,” “dragon” and “fox,” also conspired with other members of Lizard Squad to operate websites that provided cyber-attack-for-hire services, facilitating thousands of denial-of-service attacks, and to traffic stolen payment card account information for thousands of victims.”

The PoodleCorp’s “Poodlestresser” attack-for-hire service appears to have drawn much of its firepower using an application programming interface (API) set up by the proprietors of vDOS — a similar attack service that went offline last month following the arrest of two 18-year-old Israeli men who allegedly ran vDOS.

vDOS was hacked earlier this summer, and a copy of the user database was shared with KrebsOnSecurity. The database indicates that Poodlestresser was among vDOS’s biggest clients, and that KrebsOnSecurity was a frequent target of the attack-for-hire services. Continue reading

Who Makes the IoT Things Under Attack?

October 3, 2016

As KrebsOnSecurity observed over the weekend, the source code that powers the “Internet of Things” (IoT) botnet responsible for launching the historically large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against KrebsOnSecurity last month has been publicly released. Here’s a look at which devices are being targeted by this malware.

The malware, dubbed “Mirai,” spreads to vulnerable devices by continuously scanning the Internet for IoT systems protected by factory default usernames and passwords. Many readers have asked for more information about which devices and hardware makers were being targeted. As it happens, this is fairly easy to tell just from looking at the list of usernames and passwords included in the Mirai source code.

iotbadpass-pdf

In all, there are 68 username and password pairs in the botnet source code. However, many of those are generic and used by dozens of products, including routers, security cameras, printers and digital video recorder (DVRs).

I examined the less generic credential pairs and tried to match each with a IoT device maker and device type.  As we can see from the spreadsheet above (also available in CSV and PDFformats), most of the devices are network-based cameras, with a handful of Internet routers, DVRs and even printers sprinkled in.

I don’t claim to have special knowledge of each match, and welcome corrections if any of these are in error. Mainly, I turned to Google to determine which hardware makers used which credential pairs, but in some cases this wasn’t obvious or easy.

Which is part of the problem, says Will Dormann, senior vulnerability analyst at the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC).

“Even when users are interested in and looking for this information, the vendor doesn’t always make it easy,” Dormann said.

Dormann said instead of hard-coding credentials or setting default usernames and passwords that many users will never change, hardware makers should require users to pick a strong password when setting up the device.

Indeed, according to this post from video surveillance forum IPVM, several IoT device makers — including Hikvision, Samsung, and Panasonic — have begun to require unique passwords by default, with most forcing a mix of upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters.

“As long as the password can’t be reversed — for example, an algorithm based off of a discoverable tidbit of information — that would be a reasonable level of security.” Dormann said. Continue reading

Source Code for IoT Botnet ‘Mirai’ Released

October 1, 2016

The source code that powers the “Internet of Things” (IoT) botnet responsible for launching the historically large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against KrebsOnSecurity last month has been publicly released, virtually guaranteeing that the Internet will soon be flooded with attacks from many new botnets powered by insecure routers, IP cameras, digital video recorders and other easily hackable devices.

The leak of the source code was announced Friday on the English-language hacking community Hackforums. The malware, dubbed “Mirai,” spreads to vulnerable devices by continuously scanning the Internet for IoT systems protected by factory default or hard-coded usernames and passwords.

The Hackforums post that includes links to the Mirai source code.

The Hackforums post that includes links to the Mirai source code.

Vulnerable devices are then seeded with malicious software that turns them into “bots,” forcing them to report to a central control server that can be used as a staging ground for launching powerful DDoS attacks designed to knock Web sites offline.

The Hackforums user who released the code, using the nickname “Anna-senpai,” told forum members the source code was being released in response to increased scrutiny from the security industry.

“When I first go in DDoS industry, I wasn’t planning on staying in it long,” Anna-senpai wrote. “I made my money, there’s lots of eyes looking at IOT now, so it’s time to GTFO [link added]. So today, I have an amazing release for you. With Mirai, I usually pull max 380k bots from telnet alone. However, after the Kreb [sic] DDoS, ISPs been slowly shutting down and cleaning up their act. Today, max pull is about 300k bots, and dropping.”

Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that Mirai is one of at least two malware families that are currently being used to quickly assemble very large IoT-based DDoS armies. The other dominant strain of IoT malware, dubbed “Bashlight,” functions similarly to Mirai in that it also infects systems via default usernames and passwords on IoT devices.

According to research from security firm Level3 Communications, the Bashlight botnet currently is responsible for enslaving nearly a million IoT devices and is in direct competition with botnets based on Mirai.

“Both [are] going after the same IoT device exposure and, in a lot of cases, the same devices,” said Dale Drew, Level3’s chief security officer.
Continue reading

‘Money Mule’ Gangs Turn to Bitcoin ATMs

September 29, 2016

Fraudsters who hack corporate bank accounts typically launder stolen funds by making deposits from the hacked company into accounts owned by “money mules,” willing or unwitting dupes recruited through work-at-home job scams. The mules usually are then asked to withdraw the funds in cash and wire the money to the scammers. Increasingly, however, the mules are being instructed to remit the stolen money via Bitcoin ATMs.

I recently heard from a reader in Canada who said she’d recently accepted a job as a customer service officer for a company called LunarBay. This company claims to be a software development firm, and told this reader they needed to hire people to help process payments for LunarBay’s clients.

LunarBay’s Web site — Lunarbay[dot]biz — claims the company has been in business for several years, and even references a legitimate business by the same name in the United Kingdom. But the domain name was registered only in late August 2016, and appears to have lifted all of its content from a legitimate Australian digital marketing firm called Bonfire.

The Canadian reader who contacted KrebsOnSecurity about this scam was offered $870 per week and a five percent commission on every transaction she handled. After providing her bank account information to get paid, she became suspicious when she received instructions on how to forward funds on the LunarBay.

The scammers told her to withdraw the money from her account by going into the bank itself — not from the ATM (mainly due to daily withdrawal limits at the ATM). They also sent her a QR code (pictured below) that she was instructed to save as an image on her smartphone. The crooks then proceeded to tell her the location of the nearest Bitcoin ATM:

a) The nearest Bitcoin ATM is located at: 6364 Rue Pascal, Montréal-Nord, QC H1G 1T6, Canada (Bitcoin ATM is located at Dépanneur Pascal 2003 convenience shop in Montreal).

b) You can find the instructions of how to make payment using Bitcoin ATM in this video

c) Please find the image attached to this message. This is a QR code – an unique identification number for a transaction. I ask you to save this image to your smartphone beforehand.

4. The payment must be processed within 3 hours. The Bitcoin rate is constantly changing in relation to CAD, USD and other currencies. That’s why the payment must be made during this time interval.

As the above Youtube video demonstrates, sending funds merely requires the user to scan a QR code shared by the intended recipient, and then insert cash into the Bitcoin ATM. Because Bitcoin is a non-refundable form of payment, once the money is sent the transaction cannot be reversed. Continue reading

Inside Arizona’s Pump Skimmer Scourge

September 27, 2016

Crooks who deploy skimming devices made to steal payment card details from fuel station pumps don’t just target filling stations at random: They tend to focus on those that neglect to deploy various tools designed to minimize such scams, including security cameras, non-standard pump locks and tamper-proof security tape. But don’t take my word for it: Here’s a look at fuel station compromises in 2016 as documented by the state of Arizona, which has seen a dramatic spike in fuel skimming attacks over the past year.

KrebsOnSecurity examined nearly nine months worth of pump skimming incidents in Arizona, where officials say they’ve documented more skimming attacks in the month of August 2016 alone than in all of 2015 combined.

With each incident, the Arizona Department of Agriculture’s Weights and Measures Services Division files a report detailing whether victim fuel station owners had observed industry best practices leading up to the hacks. As we can see from the interactive story map KrebsOnSecurity created below, the vast majority of compromised filling stations failed to deploy security cameras, and/or tamper-evident seals on the pumps.

Fewer still had changed the factory-default locks on their pumps, meaning thieves armed with a handful of master keys were free to unlock the pumps and install skimming devices at will.

These security report cards for fuel station owners aren’t complete assessments by any means. Some contain scant details about the above-mentioned precautionary measures, while other reports painstakingly document such information — complete with multiple photos of the skimming devices. Regardless, the data available show a clear trend of fraudsters targeting owners and operators that flout basic security best practices. Continue reading