US-CERT to Windows Users: Dump Apple Quicktime

April 18, 2016

Microsoft Windows users who still have Apple Quicktime installed should ditch the program now that Apple has stopped shipping security updates for it, warns the Department of Homeland Security‘s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT). The advice came just as researchers are reporting two new critical security holes in Quicktime that likely won’t be patched.

quicktimeUS-CERT cited an April 14 blog post by Christopher Budd at Trend Micro, which runs a program called Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) that buys security vulnerabilities and helps researchers coordinate fixing the bugs with software vendors. Budd urged Windows users to junk Quicktime, citing two new, unpatched vulnerabilities that ZDI detailed which could be used to remotely compromise Windows computers.

“According to Trend Micro, Apple will no longer be providing security updates for QuickTime for Windows, leaving this software vulnerable to exploitation,” US-CERT wrote. The advisory continued:

“Computers running QuickTime for Windows will continue to work after support ends. However, using unsupported software may increase the risks from viruses and other security threats. Potential negative consequences include loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability of data, as well as damage to system resources or business assets. The only mitigation available is to uninstall QuickTime for Windows. Users can find instructions for uninstalling QuickTime for Windows on the Apple Uninstall QuickTime page.”

While the recommendations from US-CERT and others apparently came as a surprise to many, Apple has been distancing itself from QuickTime on Windows for some time now. In 2013, the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant deprecated all developer APIs for Quicktime on Windows.

Apple shipped an update to Quicktime in January 2016 that removed the Quicktime browser plugin on Windows systems, meaning the threat from browser-based attacks on Quicktime flaws was largely mitigated over the past few months for Windows users who have been keeping up to date with the latest version. Nevertheless, if you have Quicktime on a Windows box — do yourself a favor and get rid of it.

Update, Apr. 21, 10:00 a.m. ET: Apple has finally posted a support document online that explains QuickTime 7 for Windows is no longer supported by Apple. See the full advisory here.

‘Blackhole’ Exploit Kit Author Gets 7 Years

April 14, 2016

A Moscow court this week convicted and sentenced seven hackers for breaking into countless online bank accounts — including “Paunch,” the nickname used by the author of the infamous “Blackhole” exploit kit.  Once an extremely popular crimeware-as-a-service offering, Blackhole was for several years responsible for a large percentage of malware infections and stolen banking credentials, and likely contributed to tens of millions of dollars stolen from small to mid-sized businesses over several years.

Paunch, the accused creator of the Blackhole Exploit Kit, stands in front of his Porche Cayenne.

Fedotov, the convicted creator of the Blackhole Exploit Kit, stands in front of his Porche Cayenne in an undated photo.

According to Russia’s ITAR-TASS news network, Dmitry “Paunch” Fedotov was sentenced on April 12 to seven years in a Russian penal colony. In October 2013, the then 27-year-old Fedotov was arrested along with an entire team of other cybercriminals who worked to sell, develop and profit from Blackhole.

According to Russian security firm Group-IB, Paunch had more than 1,000 customers and was earning $50,000 per month from his illegal activity. The image at right shows Paunch standing in front of his personal car, a Porsche Cayenne.

First spotted in 2010, BlackHole is commercial crimeware designed to be stitched into hacked or malicious sites and exploit a variety of Web-browser vulnerabilities for the purposes of installing malware of the customer’s choosing.

The price of renting the kit ran from $500 to $700 each month. For an extra $50 a month, Paunch also rented customers “crypting” services; cryptors are designed to obfuscate malicious software so that it remains undetectable by antivirus software.

Paunch worked with several other cybercriminals to purchase new exploits and security vulnerabilities that could be rolled into Blackhole and help increase the success of the software. He eventually sought to buy the exploits from other cybercrooks directly to fund a pricier ($10,000/month) and more exclusive exploit pack called “Cool Exploit Kit.”

The main page of the Blackhole exploit kit Web interface.

The main page of the Blackhole exploit kit Web interface.

As documented on this blog in January 2013 (see Crimeware Author Funds Exploit Buying Spree), Paunch contracted with a third-party exploit broker who announced that he had a $100,000 budget for buying new, previously undocumented “zero-day” vulnerabilities.

Not long after that story, the individual with whom Paunch worked to purchase those exclusive exploits — a miscreant who uses the nickname “J.P. Morgan” — posted a message to the Darkode[dot]com crime forum, stating that he was doubling his exploit-buying budget to $200,000. Continue reading

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‘Badlock’ Bug Tops Microsoft Patch Batch

April 13, 2016

Microsoft released fixes on Tuesday to plug critical security holes in Windows and other software. The company issued 13 patches to tackle dozens of vulnerabilities, including a much-hyped “Badlock” file-sharing bug that appears ripe for exploitation. Also, Adobe updated its Flash Player release to address at least two-dozen flaws — in addition to the zero-day vulnerability Adobe patched last week.

Source: badlock.org

Source: badlock.org

The Windows patch that seems to be getting the most attention this month remedies seven vulnerabilities in Samba, a service used to manage file and print services across networks and multiple operating systems. This may sound innocuous enough, but attackers who gain access to private or corporate network could use these flaws to intercept traffic, view or modify user passwords, or shut down critical services.

According to badlock.org, a Web site set up to disseminate information about the widespread nature of the threat that this vulnerability poses, we are likely to see active exploitation of the Samba vulnerabilities soon.

Two of the Microsoft patches address flaws that were disclosed prior to Patch Tuesday. One of them is included in a bundle of fixes for Internet Explorer. A critical update for the Microsoft Graphics Component targets four vulnerabilities, two of which have been detected already in exploits in the wild, according to Chris Goettl at security vendor Shavlik.

Just a reminder: If you use Windows and haven’t yet taken advantage of the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, a.k.a. “EMET,” you should definitely consider it. I describe the basic features and benefits of running EMET in this blog post from 2014 (yes, it’s time to revisit EMET in a future post), but the gist of it is that EMET helps block or blunt exploits against known and unknown Windows vulnerabilities and flaws in third-party applications that run on top of Windows. The latest version, v. 5.5, is available hereContinue reading

New Threat Can Auto-Brick Apple Devices

April 12, 2016

If you use an Apple iPhone, iPad or other iDevice, now would be an excellent time to ensure that the machine is running the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system — version 9.3.1. Failing to do so could expose your devices to automated threats capable of rendering them unresponsive and perhaps forever useless.

Zach Straley demonstrating the fatal Jan. 1, 1970 bug. Don't try this at home!

Zach Straley demonstrating the fatal Jan. 1, 1970 bug. Don’t try this at home!

On Feb. 11, 2016, researcher Zach Straley posted a Youtube video exposing his startling and bizarrely simple discovery: Manually setting the date of your iPhone or iPad all the back to January. 1, 1970 will permanently brick the device (don’t try this at home, or against frenemies!).

Now that Apple has patched the flaw that Straley exploited with his fingers, researchers say they’ve proven how easy it would be to automate the attack over a network, so that potential victims would need only to wander within range of a hostile wireless network to have their pricey Apple devices turned into useless bricks.

Not long after Straley’s video began pulling in millions of views, security researchers Patrick Kelley and Matt Harrigan wondered: Could they automate the exploitation of this oddly severe and destructive date bug? The researchers discovered that indeed they could, armed with only $120 of electronics (not counting the cost of the bricked iDevices), a basic understanding of networking, and a familiarity with the way Apple devices connect to wireless networks.

Apple products like the iPad (and virtually all mass-market wireless devices) are designed to automatically connect to wireless networks they have seen before. They do this with a relatively weak level of authentication: If you connect to a network named “Hotspot” once, going forward your device may automatically connect to any open network that also happens to be called “Hotspot.”

For example, to use Starbuck’s free Wi-Fi service, you’ll have to connect to a network called “attwifi”. But once you’ve done that, you won’t ever have to manually connect to a network called “attwifi” ever again. The next time you visit a Starbucks, just pull out your iPad and the device automagically connects.

From an attacker’s perspective, this is a golden opportunity. Why? He only needs to advertise a fake open network called “attwifi” at a spot where large numbers of computer users are known to congregate. Using specialized hardware to amplify his Wi-Fi signal, he can force many users to connect to his (evil) “attwifi” hotspot. From there, he can attempt to inspect, modify or redirect any network traffic for any iPads or other devices that unwittingly connect to his evil network.

TIME TO DIE

And this is exactly what Kelley and Harrigan say they have done in real-life tests. They realized that iPads and other iDevices constantly check various “network time protocol” (NTP) servers around the globe to sync their internal date and time clocks.

The researchers said they discovered they could build a hostile Wi-Fi network that would force Apple devices to download time and date updates from their own (evil) NTP time server: And to set their internal clocks to one infernal date and time in particular: January 1, 1970.

Harrigan and Kelley named their destructive Wi-Fi network "Phonebreaker."

Harrigan and Kelley named their destructive Wi-Fi test network “Phonebreaker.”

The result? The iPads that were brought within range of the test (evil) network rebooted, and began to slowly self-destruct. It’s not clear why they do this, but here’s one possible explanation: Most applications on an iPad are configured to use security certificates that encrypt data transmitted to and from the user’s device. Those encryption certificates stop working correctly if the system time and date on the user’s mobile is set to a year that predates the certificate’s issuance.

Harrigan and Kelley said this apparently creates havoc with most of the applications built into the iPad and iPhone, and that the ensuing bedlam as applications on the device compete for resources quickly overwhelms the iPad’s computer processing power. So much so that within minutes, they found their test iPad had reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit (54 Celsius), as the date and clock settings on the affected devices inexplicably and eerily began counting backwards.

 

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Adobe Patches Flash Player Zero-Day Threat

April 8, 2016

Adobe Systems this week rushed out an emergency patch to plug a security hole in its widely-installed Flash Player software, warning that the vulnerability is already being exploited in active attacks.

brokenflash-aAdobe said a “critical” bug exists in all versions of Flash including Flash versions 21.0.0.197 and lower (older) across a broad range of systems, including Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS. Find out if you have Flash and if so what version by visiting this link.

In a security advisory, the software maker said it is aware of reports that the vulnerability is being actively exploited on systems running Windows 7 and Windows XP with Flash Player version 20.0.0.306 and earlier.  Continue reading

FBI: $2.3 Billion Lost to CEO Email Scams

April 7, 2016

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) this week warned about a “dramatic” increase in so-called “CEO fraud,” e-mail scams in which the attacker spoofs a message from the boss and tricks someone at the organization into wiring funds to the fraudsters. The FBI estimates these scams have cost organizations more than $2.3 billion in losses over the past three years.

In an alert posted to its site, the FBI said that since January 2015, the agency has seen a 270 percent increase in identified victims and exposed losses from CEO scams. The alert noted that law enforcement globally has received complaints from victims in every U.S. state, and in at least 79 countries.

A typical CEO fraud attack. Image: Phishme

A typical CEO fraud attack. Image: Phishme

CEO fraud usually begins with the thieves either phishing an executive and gaining access to that individual’s inbox, or emailing employees from a look-alike domain name that is one or two letters off from the target company’s true domain name. For example, if the target company’s domain was “example.com” the thieves might register “examp1e.com” (substituting the letter “L” for the numeral 1) or “example.co,” and send messages from that domain.

Unlike traditional phishing scams, spoofed emails used in CEO fraud schemes rarely set off spam traps because these are targeted phishing scams that are not mass e-mailed. Also, the crooks behind them take the time to understand the target organization’s relationships, activities, interests and travel and/or purchasing plans.

They do this by scraping employee email addresses and other information from the target’s Web site to help make the missives more convincing. In the case where executives or employees have their inboxes compromised by the thieves, the crooks will scour the victim’s email correspondence for certain words that might reveal whether the company routinely deals with wire transfers — searching for messages with key words like “invoice,” “deposit” and “president.”

On the surface, business email compromise scams may seem unsophisticated relative to moneymaking schemes that involve complex malicious software, such as Dyre and ZeuS. But in many ways, CEO fraud is more versatile and adept at sidestepping basic security strategies used by banks and their customers to minimize risks associated with account takeovers. In traditional phishing scams, the attackers interact with the victim’s bank directly, but in the CEO scam the crooks trick the victim into doing that for them.

The FBI estimates that organizations victimized by CEO fraud attacks lose on average between $25,000 and $75,000. But some CEO fraud incidents over the past year have cost victim companies millions — if not tens of millions — of dollars.  Continue reading

After Tax Fraud Spike, Payroll Firm Greenshades Ditches SSN/DOB Logins

April 6, 2016

Online payroll management firm Greenshades.com is an object lesson in how not to do authentication. Until very recently, the company allowed corporate payroll administrators to access employee payroll data online using nothing more than an employee’s date of birth and Social Security number. That is, until criminals discovered this and began mass-filing fraudulent tax refund requests with the IRS on large swaths of employees at firms that use the company’s services.

A notice on the Greenshades Web site.

A notice on the Greenshades Web site.

Jacksonville, Fla.-based Greenshades posted an alert on its homepage stating that the company “has seen an abnormal increase in identity thieves using personal information to fraudulently log into the company’s system to access personal tax information.”

Many online services blame these sorts of attacks on customers re-using the same password at multiple sites, but Greenshades set customers up for this by allowing access to payroll records just by supplying the employee’s Social Security number and date of birth.

As this author has sought repeatedly to demonstrate, SSN/DOB information is extremely easy and cheap to obtain via multiple criminal-run Web sites: SSN/DOB data is reliably available for purchase from underground online crime shops for less than $4 per person (payable in Bitcoin only).

The spike in tax fraud against employees of companies that use Greenshades came to light earlier this month in various media stories. A number of employees at public high schools in Chicago discovered that crooks beat them to the punch on filing tax returns. An investigation into that incident suggested security weaknesses at Greenshades were to blame.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote last month about tax fraud perpetrated against local county workers, fraud that also was linked to compromised Greenshades accounts. In Nebraska, the Lower Platte North Natural Resources District and Fremont Health hospital had a number of employees with tax fraud linked to compromised Greenshades accounts, according to a report in the Fremont Tribune.

Greenshades co-CEO Matthew Kane said the company allowed payroll administrators to access W2 information with nothing more than SSN and DOB for one simple reason: Many customers demanded it.

“There’s a valid reason to have what I call weak login credentials,” Kane told KrebsOnSecurity. “Some of our clients clamor for weaker login credentials, such as companies that have a large staff of temporary workers.”

Kane said customers have a “wide range of options” to select from in choosing how they will authenticate to Greenshades.com, but that the most secure option currently offered is a simple username and password.

When asked whether the company offers any sort of two-step or two-factor authentication, Kane argued that corporate email addresses assigned to company employees serve as a kind of second factor. Continue reading

Sources: Trump Hotels Breached Again

April 4, 2016

Banking industry sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that the Trump Hotel Collection — a string of luxury properties tied to business magnate and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump — appears to be dealing with another breach of its credit card systems. If confirmed, this would be the second such breach at the Trump properties in less than a year.

Trump International Hotel in New York.

Trump International Hotel in New York.

A representative from Trump Hotels said the organization was investigating the claims.

“We are in the midst of a thorough investigation on this matter,” the company said in a written statement. “We are committed to safeguarding all guests’ personal information and will continue to do so vigilantly.”

KrebsOnSecurity reached out to the Trump organization after hearing from three sources in the financial sector who said they’ve noticed a pattern of fraud on customer credit cards which suggests that hackers have breached credit card systems at some — if not all — of the Trump Hotel Collection properties.

On July 1, 2015, this publication was the first to report that banks suspected a breach at Trump properties. After that story ran, Trump Hotel Collection acknowledged being alerted about suspicious activity tied to accounts that were recently used at its hotels. But it didn’t officially confirm that its payment systems had been infected with card-stealing malware until October 2015.

The Trump Hotel Collection includes more than a dozen properties globally. Sources said they noticed a pattern of fraud on cards that were all used at multiple Trump hotel locations in the past two to three months, including at Trump International Hotel New York, Trump Hotel Waikiki in Honolulu, and the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Toronto. Continue reading

Crooks Steal, Sell Verizon Enterprise Customer Data

March 24, 2016

Verizon Enterprise Solutions, a B2B unit of the telecommunications giant that gets called in to help Fortune 500’s respond to some of the world’s largest data breaches, is reeling from its own data breach involving the theft and resale of customer data, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

vzbzEarlier this week, a prominent member of a closely guarded underground cybercrime forum posted a new thread advertising the sale of a database containing the contact information on some 1.5 million customers of Verizon Enterprise.

The seller priced the entire package at $100,000, but also offered to sell it off in chunks of 100,000 records for $10,000 apiece. Buyers also were offered the option to purchase information about security vulnerabilities in Verizon’s Web site.

Contacted about the posting, Verizon Enterprise told KrebsOnSecurity that the company recently identified a security  flaw in its site that permitted hackers to steal customer contact information, and that it is in the process of alerting affected customers.

“Verizon recently discovered and remediated a security vulnerability on our enterprise client portal,” the company said in an emailed statement. “Our investigation to date found an attacker obtained basic contact information on a number of our enterprise customers. No customer proprietary network information (CPNI) or other data was accessed or accessible.”

The seller of the Verizon Enterprise data offers the database in multiple formats, including the database platform MongoDB, so it seems likely that the attackers somehow forced the MongoDB system to dump its contents. Verizon has not yet responded to questions about how the breach occurred, or exactly how many customers were being notified. Continue reading

Phishing Victims Muddle Tax Fraud Fight

March 24, 2016

Many U.S. citizens are bound to experience delays in getting their tax returns processed this year, thanks largely to more stringent controls enacted by Uncle Sam and the states to block fraudulent tax refund requests filed by identity thieves. A steady drip of corporate data breaches involving phished employee W-2 information is adding to the backlog, as is an apparent mass adoption by ID thieves of professional tax services for processing large numbers of phony refund requests.
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According to data released this week by anti-fraud company iovation, the Internal Revenue Service is taking up to three times longer to review 2015 tax returns compared to past years.

Julie Magee, commissioner of Alabama’s Department of Revenue,  said much of the delay this year at the state level is likely due to new “fraud filters” the states have put in place with Gentax, a return processing and auditing system used by about half of U.S. state revenue departments. If the states can’t outright deny a suspicious refund request, they’ll very often deny the requested electronic bank deposit and issue a paper check to the taxpayer’s known address instead.

“Many states decided they weren’t going to start paying refunds until March 1, and on our side we’ve been using all our internal fraud resources and tools to analyze the tax return before we even put it in the queue,” Magee said. “That’s delaying refunds nationwide for the IRS and the states, and it’s pretty much going to also mean a helluva lot of paper checks are going out this year.”

The added fraud filters that states are employing take advantage of data elements shared for the first time this tax season by the major online tax preparation firms such as TurboTax. The filters look for patterns known to be associated with phony refund requests, such how quickly the return was filed, or whether the same Internet address was seen completing multiple returns.

Magee said some of the states have been adding new fraud filters nearly every time they learn of another big breach involving large numbers of stolen or phished employee W2 data, a huge problem this tax season that is forcing dozens of companies large and small to disclose data breaches over the past few weeks.

“Every time we turn around getting a phone call about another breach,” Magee said. “Because of all the different breaches, the states and the IRS have been taking extreme measures to filter, filter, filter. And each time we’d get news of an additional breach, we’d start over, reprogram our fraud filters, and re-assess those returns that were not processed fully yet and those waiting to be processed.”

Magee said the Gentax software assigns each tax return a score for “wage confidence” and “identity confidence,” and that usually fraudulent tax refund requests have high wage confidence but low — if any — identity confidence. That’s because the fraudsters are filing refund requests on taxpayers for whom they already have stolen W2 information. The identity confidence in these cases is low often because the fraudsters are asking to have the money electronically deposited into an account that can’t be directly tied to the taxpayer, or they have incorrectly supplied some of the victim’s data.

“I have zero confidence that filings which match this pattern are legitimate,” Magee said. “It’s early still, but our new filtering system seems to be working. But it’s still a big unknown about the percentage of fraudulent refunds we’re not stopping.”

MORE W2 PHISHING VICTIMS

athookMost states didn’t start processing returns until after March 1, which is exactly when a flood of data breaches related to phished employee W2 data began washing up. As KrebsOnSecurity first warned in mid-February, thieves have been sending targeted phishing emails to human resources and finance employees at countless organizations, spoofing a message from the CEO requesting all employee W2’s in PDF format.

In Magee’s own state, W2 phishers hauled in tax data on an estimated 180 employees of ISCO Industries in Huntsville, and some 425 employees at the EWTN Global Catholic Network in Irondale, Ala. But those are just the ones that have been made public. Magee’s office only learned of those breaches after employees at the affected organizations reached out to journalists who then wrote about the compromises.

Over the past week, KrebsOnSecurity similarly has heard from employees at a broad range of organizations that appear to have fallen victim to W2 phishing scams, including some 28,000 employees of the market research giant Kantar Group; 17,000+ employees of Sprouts Farmer’s Market; call center software provider Aspect; computer backup software maker AcronisKids Dental Kare in Los Angeles; Century Fence, a fencing company in Wisconsin; Nation’s Lending Corporation, a mortgage lending firm in Independent, Ohio; QTI Group, a Wisconsin-based human resources consulting company; and the jousting-and-feasting entertainment company Medieval Times. Continue reading