Krebs on Security

Hospital Declares ‘Internal State of Emergency’ After Ransomware Infection

March 22, 2016

A Kentucky hospital says it is operating in an “internal state of emergency” after a ransomware attack rattled around inside its networks, encrypting files on computer systems and holding the data on them hostage unless and until the hospital pays up.

A streaming red banner on Methodisthospital.net warns that a computer virus infection has limited the hospital’s use of electronic web-based services. Click to enlarge.

Henderson, Ky.-based Methodist Hospital placed a scrolling red alert on its homepage this week, stating that “Methodist Hospital is currently working in an Internal State of Emergency due to a Computer Virus that has limited our use of electronic web based services. We are currently working to resolve this issue, until then we will have limited access to web based services and electronic communications.”

Jamie Reid, information systems director at the hospital, said malware involved is known as the “Locky” strain of ransomware, a contagion that encrypts all of the important files, documents and images on an infected host, and then deletes the originals. Victims can regain access to their files only by paying the ransom, or by restoring from a backup that is hopefully not on a network which is freely accessible to the compromised computer.

In the case of Methodist Hospital, the ransomware tried to spread from the initial infection to the entire internal network, and succeeded in compromising several other systems, Reid said. That prompted the hospital to shut down all of the hospital’s desktop computers, bringing systems back online one by one only after scanning each for signs of the infection.

“We have a pretty robust emergency response system that we developed quite a few years ago, and it struck us that as everyone’s talking about the computer problem at the hospital maybe we ought to just treat this like a tornado hit, because we essentially shut our system down and reopened on a computer-by-computer basis,” said David Park, an attorney for the Kentucky healthcare center.

The attackers are demanding a mere four bitcoins in exchange for a key to unlock the encrypted files; that’s a little more than USD $1,600 at today’s exchange rate.

Park said the administration hasn’t ruled out paying the ransom.

“We haven’t yet made decision on that, we’re working through the process,” with the FBI, he said. “I think it’s our position that we’re not going to pay it unless we absolutely have to.”

The attack on Methodist comes just weeks after it was revealed that a California hospital that was similarly besieged with ransomware paid a $17,000 ransom to get its files back.

Park said the main effect of the infection has been downtime, which forced the hospital to process everything by hand on paper. He declined to say which systems were infected, but said no patient data was impacted. Continue reading →

Carders Park Piles of Cash at Joker’s Stash

March 21, 2016

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A steady stream of card breaches at retailers, restaurants and hotels has flooded underground markets with a historic glut of stolen debit and credit card data. Today there are at least hundreds of sites online selling stolen account data, yet only a handful of them actively court bulk buyers and organized crime rings. Faced with a buyer’s market, these elite shops set themselves apart by focusing on loyalty programs, frequent-buyer discounts, money-back guarantees and just plain old good customer service.

An ad for new stolen cards on Joker’s Stash.

Today’s post examines the complex networking and marketing apparatus behind “Joker’s Stash,” a sprawling virtual hub of stolen card data that has served as the distribution point for accounts compromised in many of the retail card breaches first disclosed by KrebsOnSecurity over the past two years, including Hilton Hotels and Bebe Stores.

Since opening for business in early October 2014, Joker’s Stash has attracted dozens of customers who’ve spent five- and six-figures at the carding store. All customers are buying card data that will be turned into counterfeit cards and used to fraudulently purchase gift cards, electronics and other goods at big-box retailers like Target and Wal-Mart.

Unlike so many carding sites that mainly resell cards stolen by other hackers, Joker’s Stash claims that all of its cards are “exclusive, self-hacked dumps.”

“This mean – in our shop you can buy only our own stuff, and our stuff you can buy only in our shop – nowhere else,” Joker’s Stash explained on an introductory post on a carding forum in October 2014.

“Just don’t wanna provide the name of victim right here, and bro, this is only the begin[ning], we already made several other big breaches – a lot of stuff is coming, stay tuned, check the news!” the Joker went on, in response to established forum members who were hazing the new guy. He continued:

“I promise u – in few days u will completely change your mind and will buy only from me. I will add another one absolute virgin fresh new zero-day db with 100%+1 valid rate. Read latest news on http://krebsonsecurity.com/ – this new huge base will be available in few days only at Joker’s Stash.”

As a business, Joker’s Stash made good on its promise. It’s now one of the most bustling carding stores on the Internet, often adding hundreds of thousands of freshly stolen cards for sale each week.

A true offshore pirate’s haven, its home base is a domain name ending in “.sh” Dot-sh is the country code top level domain (ccTLD) assigned to the tiny volcanic, tropical island of Saint Helena, but anyone can register a domain ending in dot-sh. St. Helena is on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) — the same time zone used by this carding Web site. However, it’s highly unlikely that any part of this fraud operation is in Saint Helena, a remote British territory in the South Atlantic Ocean that has a population of just over 4,000 inhabitants.

This fraud shop includes a built-in discount system for larger orders: 5 percent for customers who spend between $300-$500; 15 percent off for fraudsters spending between $1,000 and $2,500; and 30 percent off for customers who top up their bitcoin balances to the equivalent of $10,000 or more.

For its big-spender “partner” clients, Joker’s Stash assigns three custom domain names to each partner. After those partners log in, the different 3-word domains are displayed at the top of their site dashboard, and the user is encouraged to use only those three custom domains to access the carding shop in the future (see screenshot below). More on these three domains in a moment.

The dashboard for a Joker’s Stash customer who has spent over $10,000 buying stolen credit cards from the site. Click image to enlarge.

REFUNDS AND CUSTOMER LOYALTY BONUSES

Customers pay for stolen cards using Bitcoin, a virtual currency. All sales are final, although some batches of stolen cards for sale at Joker’s Stash come with a replacement policy — a short window of time from minutes to a few hours, generally — in which buyers can request replacement cards for any that come back as declined during that replacement timeframe.

Like many other carding shops, Joker’s Stash also offers an a-la-carte card-checking option that customers can use an insurance policy when purchasing stolen cards. Such checking services usually rely on multiple legitimate, compromised credit card merchant accounts that can be used to round-robin process a small charge against each card the customer wishes to purchase to test whether the card is still valid. Customers receive an automatic credit to their shopping cart balances for any purchased cards that come back as declined when run through the site’s checking service.

This carding site also employs a unique rating system for clients, supposedly to prevent abuse of the service and to provide what the proprietors of this store call “a loyalty program for honest partners with proven partner’s record.” Continue reading →

Spammers Abusing Trust in US .Gov Domains

March 17, 2016

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Spammers are abusing ill-configured U.S. dot-gov domains and link shorteners to promote spammy sites that are hidden behind short links ending in”usa.gov”.

shellgame Spam purveyors are taking advantage of so-called “open redirects” on several U.S. state Web sites to hide the true destination to which users will be taken if they click the link. Open redirects are potentially dangerous because they let spammers abuse the reputation of the site hosting the redirect to get users to visit malicious or spammy sites without realizing it.

For example, South Dakota has an open redirect:

http://dss.sd.gov/scripts/programredirect.asp?url=

…which spammers are abusing to insert the name of their site at the end of the script. Here’ a link that uses this redirect to route you through dss.sd.gov and then on to krebsonsecurity.com. But this same redirect could just as easily be altered to divert anyone clicking the link to a booby-trapped Web site that tries to foist malware.

The federal government’s stamp of approval comes into the picture when spammers take those open redirect links and use bit.ly to shorten them. Bit.ly’s service automatically shortens any US dot-gov or dot-mil (military) site with a “1.usa.gov” shortlink. That allows me to convert the redirect link to krebsonsecurity.com from the ungainly….

http://dss.sd.gov/scripts/programredirect.asp?url=http://krebsonsecurity.com

…into the far less ugly and perhaps even official-looking:

http://1.usa.gov/1pwtneQ.

Helpfully, Uncle Sam makes available a list of all the 1.usa.gov links being clicked at this page. Keep an eye on that and you’re bound to see spammy links going by, as in this screen shot. One of the more recent examples I saw was this link — http:// 1.usa[dot]gov/1P8HfQJ# (please don’t visit this unless you know what you’re doing) — which was advertised via Skype instant message spam, and takes clickers to a fake TMZ story allegedly about “Gwen Stefani Sharing Blake Shelton’s Secret to Rapid Weight Loss.” Continue reading →

Thieves Phish Moneytree Employee Tax Data

March 16, 2016

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Payday lending firm Moneytree is the latest company to alert current and former employees that their tax data — including Social Security numbers, salary and address information — was accidentally handed over directly to scam artists.

Seattle-based Moneytree sent an email to employees on March 4 stating that “one of our team members fell victim to a phishing scam and revealed payroll information to an external source.”

“Moneytree was apparently targeted by a scam in which the scammer impersonated me and asked for an emailed copy of certain information about the Company’s payroll including Team Member names, home addresses, social security numbers, birthdates and W2 information,” Moneytree co-founder Dennis Bassford wrote to employees.

The message continued:

“Unfortunately, this request was not recognized as a scam, and the information about current and former Team Members who worked in the US at Moneytree in 2015 or were hired in early 2016 was disclosed. The good news is that our servers and security systems were not breached, and our millions of customer records were not affected. The bad news is that our Team Members’ information has been compromised.”

A woman who answered a Moneytree phone number listed in the email confirmed the veracity of the co-founder’s message to employees, but would not say how many employees were notified. According to the company’s profile on Yellowpages.com, Moneytree Inc. maintains a staff of more than 1,200 employees. The company offers check cashing, payday loan, money order, wire transfer, mortgage, lending, prepaid gift cards, and copying and fax services.

Moneytree joins a growing list of companies disclosing to employees that they were duped by W2 phishing scams, which this author first warned about in mid-February. Earlier this month, data storage giant Seagate acknowledged that a similar phishing scam had compromised the tax and personal data on thousands of current and past employees. Continue reading →

From Stolen Wallet to ID Theft, Wrongful Arrest

March 14, 2016

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It’s remarkable how quickly a stolen purse or wallet can morph into full-blown identity theft, and possibly even result in the victim’s wrongful arrest. All of the above was visited recently on a fellow infosec professional whose admitted lapse in physical security led to a mistaken early morning arrest in front of his kids.

The guy police say stole Miller’s wallet and got him wrongfully arrested was himself apprehended earlier this month.

On the morning of Feb. 20, Lance Miller was arrested in front of his two children by local sheriffs in Golden, Colo. Miller, a managing partner at cybersecurity recruitment firm Curity, had discovered his wallet was missing three days prior to his arrest, reported it to the local police and canceled his credit cards. In the meantime someone had drained his checking account of approximately $5,000, and maxed out his credit cards for almost another $5,000.

“I was standing there in front of my kids saying, ‘You guys are crazy. Do I look like a burglar?'” Miller recalled. “The cop goes, ‘Well, I don’t know what a burglar looks like,’ and they put me in cuffs and in the car.”

Miller said it wasn’t until the 30-minute, handcuffed drive to police station that the local police and the local sheriff’s office began comparing notes, discovering in the process that they’d grabbed the wrong guy and removing the cuffs. Miller soon learned the thief who’d stolen his wallet had impersonated him during multiple traffic stops. A car the impostor was driving also was spotted speeding away from the scene of a burglary, but Miller said the police in that case didn’t give chase in that case because it wasn’t a violent crime. Continue reading →

Hackers Target Anti-DDoS Firm Staminus

March 11, 2016

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Staminus Communications Inc., a California-based Internet hosting provider that specializes in protecting customers from massive “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attacks aimed at knocking sites offline, has itself apparently been massively hacked. Staminus’s entire network was down for more than 20 hours until Thursday evening, leaving customers to vent their rage on the company’s Facebook and Twitter pages. In the midst of the outage, someone posted online download links for what appear to be Staminus’s customer credentials, support tickets, credit card numbers and other sensitive data.

The e-zine posted online Thursday following an outage at Staminus Communications.

Newport Beach, Calif.-based Staminus first acknowledged an issue on its social media pages because the company’s Web site was unavailable much of Thursday.

“Around 5am PST today, a rare event cascaded across multiple routers in a system wide event, making our backbone unavailable,” Staminus wrote to its customers. “Our technicians quickly began working to identify the problem. We understand and share your frustration. We currently have all hands on deck working to restore service but have no ETA for full recovery.”

Staminus now says its global services are back online, and that ancillary services are being brought back online. However, the company’s Web site still displays a black page with a short message directing customers to Staminus’s social media pages.

Meanwhile, a huge trove of data appeared online Thursday, in a classic “hacker e-zine” format entitled, “Fuck ’em all.” The page includes links to download databases reportedly stolen from Staminus and from Intreppid, another Staminus project that targets customers looking for protection against large DDoS attacks. Continue reading →

eero: A Mesh WiFi Router Built for Security

March 9, 2016

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User-friendly and secure. Hardly anyone would pick either word to describe the vast majority of wireless routers in use today. So naturally I was intrigued a year ago when I had the chance to pre-order a eero, a new WiFi system billed as easy-to-use, designed with security in mind, and able to dramatically extend the range of a wireless network without compromising speed. Here’s a brief review of the eero system I received and installed a week ago.

Three eero devices designed to create a "mesh" wireless network with extended range without compromising speed.

Three eero devices designed to create an extended range “mesh” wireless network without compromising speed.

The standard eero WiFi system comes with three eero devices, each about the width of a square coaster and roughly an inch thick. Every individual eero unit has two built-in WiFi radios that are designed to hand off traffic with the other two units.

This two-radio aspect is important, as most consumer devices that are made and marketed as WiFi range extenders or “repeaters” contain only one radio, and thus end up halving the speed of the repeated WiFi signal.

The makers of eero recommend one device for every 1,000 square feet, and advise placing one device no further than 40 feet from another. Each eero has two ethernet ports in the back, but only one of the eeros needs to be connected directly into your modem with an ethernet cable. That means that a 3-piece eero set has a total of five available ethernet ports, or at least one open ethernet port at each eero location.

Most wireless routers require owners to configure the device by using a hard-wired computer or laptop, opening a browser and navigating to a numeric Internet address to enter some default credentials. From there, you’re on your own. In contrast, the eero system relies on a simple mobile app for setup. The app asks for your name, email address and mobile number, and then sends a text with a one-time passcode.

After you verify the code on your mobile device, the app prompts you to pick a network name (SSID) and password. The device defaults to WPA-2 PSK (AES) for encryption — the strongest security currently available.

Once you’ve assigned each eero a unique location — and as long as the three devices can talk to each other — the network should be set up. The entire process — from placing and plugging in the eeros to setting up the network — took me about five minutes, but most of that was just me walking from one room or floor to the next to adjust the location of the devices. Continue reading →

Adobe, Microsoft Push Critical Updates

March 8, 2016

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Microsoft today pushed out 13 security updates to fix at least 39 separate vulnerabilities in its various Windows operating systems and software. Five of the updates fix flaws that allow hackers or malware to break into vulnerable systems without any help from the user, save for perhaps visiting a hacked Web site.

brokenwindows The bulk of the security holes plugged in this month’s Patch Tuesday reside in either Internet Explorer or in Microsoft’s flagship browser — Edge. As security firm Shavlik notes, Microsoft’s claim that Edge is more secure than IE seems to be holding out, albeit not by much. So far this year, Shavlik found, Edge has required 19 fixes versus IE’s 27.

Windows users who get online with a non-Microsoft browser still need to get their patches on: Ten of the updates affect Windows — including three other critical updates from Microsoft. As always, Qualys has a readable post about the rest of the Microsoft patches. If you experience any issues with the Windows patches, please share your experience in the comments below.

As it is known to do on patch Tuesday, Adobe issued security updates for its Reader and Acrobat software. Alas, there appears to be no update for Adobe’s Flash Player plugin as per usual on Patch Tuesday. However, an Adobe spokesperson told KrebsOnSecurity that the company will be issuing a Flash Player update on Thursday morning.

IRS Suspends Insecure ‘Get IP PIN’ Feature

March 7, 2016

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Citing ongoing security concerns, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has suspended a service offered via its Web site that allowed taxpayers to retrieve so-called IP Protection PINs (IP PINs), codes that the IRS has mailed to some 2.7 million taxpayers to help prevent those individuals from becoming victims of tax refund fraud two years in a row. The move comes just days after KrebsOnSecurity first exposed how ID thieves were abusing the service to revisit tax refund on innocent taxpayers two years running.

irsbldg Last week, this blog told the story of Becky Wittrock, a certified public accountant (CPA) from Sioux Falls, S.D., who received an IP PIN in 2014 after crooks tried to impersonate her to the IRS. Wittrock said she found out her IP PIN had been compromised by thieves this year after she tried to file her tax return on Feb. 25, 2016. Turns out, the crooks beat her to the punch by more than three weeks, filing a large refund request with the IRS on Feb. 2, 2016.

The problem, as Wittrock’s case made clear, is that IRS allows IP PIN recipients to retrieve their PIN via the agency’s Web site, after supplying the answers to four easy-to-guess questions from consumer credit bureau Equifax. These so-called knowledge-based authentication (KBA) or “out-of-wallet” questions focus on things such as previous address, loan amounts and dates and can be successfully enumerated with random guessing. In many cases, the answers can be found by consulting free online services, such as Zillow and Facebook.

In a statement issued Monday evening, the IRS said that as part of its ongoing security review, the agency was temporarily suspending the Identity Protection PIN tool on IRS.gov.

“The IRS is conducting a further review of the application that allows taxpayers to retrieve their IP PINs online and is looking at further strengthening the security features on the tool,” the agency said. Continue reading →

Seagate Phish Exposes All Employee W-2’s

March 6, 2016

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Email scam artists last week tricked an employee at data storage giant Seagate Technology into giving away W-2 tax documents on all current and past employees, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. W-2 forms contain employee Social Security numbers, salaries and other personal data, and are highly prized by thieves involved in filing phony tax refund requests with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the states.

Seagate headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. Image: Wikipedia

According to Seagate, the scam struck on March 1, about a week after KrebsOnSecurity warned readers to be on the lookout for email phishing scams directed at finance and HR personnel that spoof a letter from the organization’s CEO requesting all employee W-2 forms.

KrebsOnSecurity first learned of this incident from a former Seagate employee who received a written notice from the company. Seagate spokesman Eric DeRitis confirmed that the notice was, unfortunately, all too real.

“On March 1, Seagate Technology learned that the 2015 W-2 tax form information for current and former U.S.-based employees was sent to an unauthorized third party in response to the phishing email scam,” DeRitis said. “The information was sent by an employee who believed the phishing email was a legitimate internal company request.” Continue reading →

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