Adobe has released a critical software update to fix nearly two-dozen security holes in its Flash Player browser plugin. Separately, I want to take a moment to encourage users who have Adobe Shockwave Player installed to finally junk this program; turns out Shockwave — which comes with its own version of Flash — is still many versions behind in bundling the latest Flash fixes.
If you use and need Flash Player, it’s time to update the program (the latest version is 19.0.0.185 for Windows and Mac users). Google Chrome and Internet Explorer bundle their own versions of Flash (also now at v. 19.0.0.185); each should auto-update to the latest. Find out if you have Flash installed and its current version number by visiting this page.
Adobe said it was unaware of any exploits in the wild for the vulnerabilities fixed in this Flash release. Nevertheless, I would recommend that if you use Flash that you strongly consider removing it, or at least hobbling it until and unless you need it. Disabling Flash in Chrome is simple enough, and can be easily reversed: On a Windows, Mac, Linux or Chrome OS installation of Chrome, type “chrome:plugins” into the address bar, and on the Plug-ins page look for the “Flash” listing: To disable Flash, click the disable link (to re-enable it, click “enable”). Windows users can remove Flash from the Add/Remove Programs panel, or use Adobe’s uninstaller for Flash Player.
If you’re concerned about removing Flash altogether, consider a dual-browser approach. That is, unplugging Flash from the browser you use for everyday surfing, and leaving it plugged in to a second browser that you only use for sites that require Flash.
If you decide to proceed with Flash and update, the most recent versions of Flash should be available from the Flash home page, but beware potentially unwanted add-ons, like McAfee Security Scan. To avoid this, uncheck the pre-checked box before downloading, or grab your OS-specific Flash download from here. Windows users who browse the Web with anything other than Internet Explorer may need to apply this patch twice, once with IE and again using the alternative browser (Firefox, Opera, e.g.).
SHOCKWAVE SHOCKER
In other Adobe patch news, on Sept. 8, 2015 I urged readers who have the Shockwave media player installed to update to the latest version or else junk the program altogether. In a post more than a year ago, I outlined Why You Should Ditch Adobe Shockwave, noting that the program bundles a component of Adobe Flash that was more than 15 months behind on security updates. Continue reading →
In December 2013, just days after a data breach exposed 40 million customer debit and credit card accounts, Target Corp. hired security experts at Verizon to probe its networks for weaknesses. The results of that confidential investigation — until now never publicly revealed — confirm what pundits have long suspected: Once inside Target’s network, there was nothing to stop attackers from gaining direct and complete access to every single cash register in every Target store.
According to an internal corporate report obtained by KrebsOnSecurity, Target commissioned the study “in anticipation of litigation” from banks that might join together to sue the retailer in a bid to recoup the costs of reissuing cards to their customers. Last week, a federal judge cleared those claims to go forward in a class action suit.
The Verizon assessment, conducted between December 21, 2013 to March 1, 2014, notably found “no controls limiting their access to any system, including devices within stores such as point of sale (POS) registers and servers.”
The report noted that Verizon consultants were able to directly communicate with point-of-sale registers and servers from the core network. In one instance, they were able to communicate directly with cash registers in checkout lanes after compromising a deli meat scale located in a different store.
Verizon’s findings lend credence to the working theory about how hackers initially broke into Target. In February 2014, KrebsOnSecurity was the first to report that investigators had zeroed in on the source of the breach: Fazio Mechanical, a small heating and air conditioning firm in Pennsylvania that worked with Target and had suffered its own breach via malware delivered in an email. In that intrusion, the thieves managed to steal the virtual private network credentials that Fazio’s technicians used to remotely connect to Target’s network.
Verizon’s report offers a likely playbook for how the Target hackers used that initial foothold provided by Fazio’s hack to push malicious software down to all of the cash registers at more than 1,800 stores nationwide.
Target spokesperson Molly Snyder would neither confirm nor deny the authenticity of the documents referenced in this report, but she maintained that Target has made great strides and is now an industry leader on cybersecurity.
“We’ve brought in new leaders, built teams, and opened a state-of-the-art cyber fusion center,” Snyder said. “We are proud of where we stand as a company and will be absolutely committed to being a leader on cybersecurity going forward.”
Snyder said Target believes “that sharing accurate and actionable information – with consumers, policy makers, and even other companies and industries – will help make all of us safer and stronger,” she said in an emailed statement. “Sometimes that means providing information directly to consumers, other times that means sharing information about possible industry threats with other companies or through our participation in the Financial Services and Retail Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs), and sometimes that means working with law enforcement. What we don’t think it means is continuing to rehash a narrative that is nearly two years old.”
A high-level graphic showing the various routes that Verizon penetration testers were able to use to get all the way down to Target’s cash registers in 2013 and 2014.
THE ROLE OF DEFAULT AND WEAK PASSWORDS
The report notes that “while Target has a password policy, the Verizon security consultants discovered that it was not being followed. The Verizon consultants discovered a file containing valid network credentials being stored on several servers. The Verizon consultants also discovered systems and services utilizing either weak or default passwords. Utilizing these weak passwords the consultants were able to instantly gain access to the affected systems.”
Default passwords in key internal systems and servers also allowed the Verizon consultants to assume the role of a system administrator with complete freedom to move about Target’s sprawling internal network.
“The Verizon security consultants identified several systems that were using misconfigured services, such as several Microsoft SQL servers that had a weak administrator password, and Apache Tomcat servers using the default administrator password,” the report observes. “Through these weaknesses, the Verizon consultants were able to gain initial access to the corporate network and to eventually gain domain administrator access.”
Within one week, the security consultants reported that they were able to crack 472,308 of Target’s 547,470 passwords (86 percent) that allowed access to various internal networks, including; target.com, corp.target.com; email.target.com; stores.target.com; hq.target.com; labs.target.com; and olk.target.com. Continue reading →
In the previous twostories, I documented the damage wrought by an organized crime gang in Mexico that has been systematically bribing ATM technicians to install Bluetooth skimming components that allow thieves to steal card and PIN data wirelessly. What follows is a look at a mysterious new ATM company in Mexico that sources say may be tied to the skimming activity.
One ATM company operating in the Cancun area whose machines were apparently free from these skimming devices is a relatively new entity called Intacash. This company’s ATMs positively blanketed many of the areas I visited, particularly in the heavy tourist and commercial areas of downtown Cancun and Playa Del Carmen. For example, in a single city block on Boulevard Kukulcan in Zona Hotelera — probably the busiest tourist spot in Cancun — I counted no fewer than ten Intacash ATMs, most of which were all less than a couple hundred yards from each another.
Intacash ATMs positively blanket the most busy area of downtown Cancun and in very tight proximity to one another.
The experts I spoke with said they were mystified by Intacash’s strategy of placing so many cash machines in the region. Even for areas like Zona Hotelera with plenty of continuous foot traffic, adding so many cash machines in such a small space produces diminishing returns.
Two different ATM experts familiar with rates charged to place ATMs in the area and who asked to remain anonymous said there is no way Intacash could afford the rent required to place so many ATMs in such close proximity on public property and still turn a monthly profit. No way, that is, unless the company had a different profit motive in mind.
Intacash is a relative newcomer to the ATM scene in Mexico, bringing its first ATMs online there a little more than a year ago. It’s not at all clear who runs or owns Intacash, and there is precious little public information available about this company.
Intacash.com, registered in early 2014, consists of just four Web pages. There is no contact information for the firm on its site, which to this day has exactly zero sites linking in to it. From its inception, the site’s registration records have been hidden behind WHOIS privacy protection services. Intacash hosts its sites along with more than 6,000 other sites on a shared server at GoDaddy.com (for security and other reasons, financial institutions and service providers more typically spring for their own, dedicated servers).
Despite the presence of nearly 70 Intacash ATMs in Cancun, Playa Del Carmen, Tulum and other tourist areas in the Yucatan Peninsula, this company seems to have gone out of its way not to be noticed online. What’s more, a review of the text on Intacash.com suggests that much of the Web content on the site has been copied verbatim from other sites that preceded Intacash’s existence on the Internet.
Multiple emails sent to the contact addresses and forms on Intacash’s Web site went unreturned. Intacash’s sponsor bank in Mexico – Multiva — also did not respond to messages seeking comment.
THE INTACASH CONNECTION
Why was I so keen to learn more about Intacash? My source in the ATM industry who tipped me off about the Bluetooth skimming activity showcased in the first two stories here said his technicians began receiving bribes to let strangers install skimming components inside their machines around the same time that Intacash came online in Mexico. By early this year, all of my source’s ATM technicians had reported being approached by one of two guys who were trying to buy access to ATMs. The employees who reported these incidents to my ATM industry source said the men had Eastern European accents.
Intacash.com’s home page
Several of my source’s employees later identified the men who approached them after managing to locate their profile pages on Whatsapp, a popular mobile messaging service.
“My partner was at a meeting with the operating manager of [a major hotel] in Cancun, doing his sales pitch,” my source recalled in a recent interview. “And the fellow at the hotel told my guy that just the day before he’d been approached by another ATM company, and that the guys were Eastern European.”
My source said that, when pressed, the hotel manager acknowledged that the other company was indeed Intacash. My source said his business partner happened to have bookmarked on his smartphone the Whatsapp profiles of the men who’d tried to bribe his technicians, and that he opened the profiles one by one and showed them to the hotel manager.
“My partner asked, ‘Just out of curiosity was it one of these guys?'” my source said. “The hotel manager said why, yes it was.” Continue reading →
I spent four days last week in Mexico, tracking the damage wrought by an organized crime ring that is bribing ATM technicians to place Bluetooth skimmers inside of cash machines in and around the tourist areas of Cancun. Today’s piece chronicles the work of this gang in coastal regions farther south, following a trail of hacked ATMs from Playa Del Camen down to the ancient Mayan ruins in Tulum.
As I noted in yesterday’s story, the skimmers that this gang is placing in hacked ATMs consist of two Bluetooth components: One connected to the card reader inside each machine, and another attached to the PIN pad. Both components beacon out a Bluetooth signal called “Free2Move.” The thieves can retrieve the purloined card and PIN data just by strolling up to the hacked ATM with a smartphone, entering a secret passcode, and downloading all of the collected information.
Having found two hacked ATMs in Cancun — including one in the lobby of my hotel (the Marriott CasaMagna) — I decided to check out other tourist destinations in the region. On the way to Tulum, I dropped in at the Barcelo, a huge, all-inclusive resort. The security guards at the front gate at the resort initially prevented me from entering the complex because I didn’t have reservations.
After 10 minutes of Googling on my phone and a call to the front desk, the guards seemed satisfied that I was interested in buying a day pass to the hotel’s various facilities. The gate lifted and I was let in. Five minutes later, the very first ATM I stopped at was found to be emanating the telltale Free2Move Bluetooth signals indicating a compromise.
No sooner had I finished documenting that hacked ATM than a security guard rode up on a motorcycle and asked if I was having trouble finding the day-pass desk. I replied that I’d be headed that way shortly.
The Barcelo security guard followed me closely as I returned to my rented Jetta and drove to a different building in the complex. Multiple security guards were beginning to shadow me at a respectful distance. I decided it was best to at least demonstrate that I had an intention of buying a day pass.
The Barcelo reception desk said the price would be USD $80 per person. Feigning shock over the hefty price tag, I declared loudly that I had to hit the hotel’s ATM to withdraw more cash in order to pay such exorbitant prices. That ATM also was beaconing the Free2Move Bluetooth signal, but the ATM itself returned errors stating that it was temporarily offline and unable to dispense cash.
That outage turned out to be the perfect excuse to visit a third ATM in the complex, as I again loudly explained to the security guy following a few paces behind.By this point, a much more stern and beefy guard began following me around on foot, his walkie-talkie buzzing periodically as I crossed the hotel campus. The third and final ATM I checked also was compromised. While I was sure there were more ATMs I hadn’t checked in other areas of the resort, I decided not to press my luck, and hopped back in the Jetta and resumed my journey to Tulum.
TULUM
Halfway down the southbound four-lane highway from Cancun to the ancient ruins in Tulum, traffic inexplicably slowed to a halt. There was some sort of checkpoint ahead by the Mexican Federal Police. I began to wonder whether it was a good idea to have brought along the ATM skimmer I’d received from a source instead of leaving it in the hotel safe. If the cops searched my stuff, how could I explain having ultra-sophisticated Bluetooth ATM skimmer components in my backpack?
A sign across the street from the police department in Tulum.
After several nervous minutes of creeping traffic, I was waved on through the checkpoint and immediately felt silly for having gotten so worked up about it. However, upon my arrival 20 minutes later in Tulum — a popular tourist destination due to its proximity to the Mayan ruins — I would have a much closer encounter with the police.
As I pulled into the area where tour buses normally drop off passengers by the hundreds each hour, a number of men stood waving pamphlets and offering “Cheap!” parking that was anything but (or at least I thought at the time). Each was trying to direct me to park the Volkswagen in one of several large, dusty lots.
“I’ll just be about five minutes,” I said, stupidly putting the vehicle in park on the main street right in front of the tourist lot. The attendants just shook their heads and began hailing other newcomers.
The Tulum visit yielded another three ATMs within a few hundred meters of each other that were all emanating the Free2Move signal. But unfortunately, that jaunt took more than five minutes: When I returned to the Volkswagen, I found a parking ticket on the windshield and the parking attendants smirking, gleefully shouting in Spanish that I should have listened to them and parked in their lot.Continue reading →
-Sept. 9, 12:30 p.m. CT, Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico:Halfway down the southbound four-lane highway from Cancun to the ancient ruins in Tulum, traffic inexplicably slowed to a halt. There was some sort of checkpoint ahead by the Mexican Federal Police. I began to wonder whether it was a good idea to have brought along the ATM skimmer instead of leaving it in the hotel safe. If the cops searched my stuff, how could I explain having ultra-sophisticated Bluetooth ATM skimmer components in my backpack?
The above paragraph is an excerpt that I pulled from the body of Part II in this series of articles and video essays stemming from a recent four-day trip to Mexico. During that trip, I found at least 19 different ATMs that all apparently had been hacked from the inside and retrofitted with tiny, sophisticated devices that store and transmit stolen card data and PINs wirelessly.
In June 2015, I heard from a source at an ATM firm who wanted advice and help in reaching out to the right people about what he described as an ongoing ATM fraud campaign of unprecedented sophistication, organization and breadth. Given my focus on ATM skimming technology and innovations, I was immediately interested.
My source asked to have his name and that of his employer omitted from the story because he fears potential reprisals from the alleged organized criminal perpetrators of this scam. According to my source, several of his employer’s ATM installation and maintenance technicians in the Cancun area reported recently being approached by men with Eastern European accents, asking each tech if he would be interested in making more than 100 times his monthly salary just for providing direct, physical access to the inside of a single ATM that the technician served.
One of my source’s co-workers was later found to have accepted the bribes, which apparently had only grown larger and more aggressive after technicians in charge of specific, very busy ATMs declined an initial offer.
My source said his company fired the rogue employee who’d taken the bait, but that the employee’s actions had still been useful because experts were now able to examine the skimming technology first-hand. The company tested the hardware by installing it into ATMs that were not in service. When they turned the devices on, they discovered each component was beaconing out the same Bluetooth signal: “Free2Move.”
Turns out, Free2Move is the default name for a bluetooth beacon in a component made by a legitimate wireless communications company of the same name. I also located a sales thread in a dubious looking site that specializes in offering this technology in mini form for ATM PIN pads and card readers for $550 per component (although the site claims it won’t sell the products to scammers).
The Bluetooth circuit boards allegedly supplied by the Eastern Europeans who bribed my source’s technician were made to be discretely wired directly onto the electronic ATM circuit boards which independently serve the machine’s debit card reader and PIN pad.
Each of the bluetooth circuit boards are tiny — wafer thin and about 1 cm wide by 2 cm long. Each also comes with its own data storage device. Stolen card data can be retrieved from the bluetooth components wirelessly: The thief merely needs to be within a few meters of the compromised ATM to pull stolen card data and PINs off the devices, providing he has the secret key needed to access that bluetooth wireless connection.
Even if you knew the initial PIN code to connect to the Bluetooth wireless component on the ATM —the stolen data that is sent by the bluetooth components is encrypted. Decrypting that data requires a private key that ostensibly only the owners of this crimeware possess.
These are not your ordinary skimming devices. Most skimmers are detectable because they are designed to be affixed to the outside of the ATMs. But with direct, internal access to carefully targeted cash machines, the devices could sit for months or even years inside of compromised ATMs before being detected (depending in part on how quickly and smartly the thieves used or sold the stolen card numbers and PINs).
Not long after figuring out the scheme used by this skimmer, my source instructed his contacts in Cancun and the surrounding area to survey various ATMs in the region to see if any of these machines were emitting a Bluetooth signal called “Free2Move.” Sure enough, the area was blanketed with cash machines spitting out Free2Move signals.
Going to the cops would be useless at best, and potentially dangerous; Mexico’s police force is notoriously corrupt, and for all my source knew the skimmer scammers were paying for their own protection from the police.
Rather, he said he wanted to figure out a way to spot compromised ATMs where those systems were deployed across Mexico (but mainly in the areas popular with tourists from Europe and The United States).
When my source said he knew where I could obtain one of these skimmers in Mexico firsthand, I volunteered to scour the tourist areas in and around Cancun to look for ATMs spitting out the Free2Move bluetooth signal.
I’d worked especially hard the previous two months: So much so that July and August were record traffic months for KrebsOnSecurity, with several big breach stories bringing more than a million new readers to the site. It was time to schedule a quasi-vacation, and this was the perfect excuse. I had a huge pile of frequent flier miles burning a hole in my pocket, and I wasted no time in using those miles to book a hotel and flight to Cancun. Continue reading →
Last month, KrebsOnSecurity posted an exclusive story about emails leaked from AshleyMadison that suggested the company’s former chief technology officer Raja Bhatia hacked into a rival firm in 2012. Now, an attorney for the former executive is threatening a libel lawsuit against this author unless the story is retracted.
According to Bhatia’s attorney, the part of the story they consider defamatory has to do with the headline of the piece, and this bit:
“A review of those missives shows that on at least one occasion, a former company executive hacked another dating website, exfiltrating their entire user database. On Nov. 30, 2012, Raja Bhatia, the founding chief technology officer of AshleyMadison.com, sent a message to Biderman notifying his boss of a security hole discovered in nerve.com, an American online magazine dedicated to sexual topics, relationships and culture.
At the time, nerve.com was experimenting with its own adult dating section, and Bhatia said he’d uncovered a way to download and manipulate the nerve.com user database.
“They did a very lousy job building their platform. I got their entire user base,” Bhatia told Biderman via email, including in the message a link to a Github archive with a sample of the database. “Also, I can turn any non paying user into a paying user, vice versa, compose messages between users, check unread stats, etc.”
Libel lawsuits in the United States are usually quite difficult and expensive for the plaintiff to win. But in Canada — where Bhatia’s attorney and AshleyMadison’s parent company Avid Life Media are headquartered — the libel laws are more complex for defendants. For example, according my consultation with a prominent Canadian digital media attorney, the onus there is on the accused to prove the disputed libelous claims are in fact true.
Nevertheless, I have no intention of posting a retraction or correcting any elements of this story. But I’m publishing a copy of the letter (PDF) from Bhatia’s lawyer in the likely event that other publications have also received libel and defamation threats from AshleyMadison and/or its current and former employees.
A story at Wired.com from Kim Zetter that ran shortly after my piece aired includes quite a few more colorful quotes from leaked emails Bhatia allegedly sent to AshMad CEO Noel Biderman.
Update, 11:49 a.m. ET: Added reference to Wired piece as the last sentence of this story.
Microsoft today released a dozen security updates for computers running supported versions of its Windows operating system. Five of the patches fix flaws that could get PCs compromised with little to no help from users, and five of the bulletins have vulnerabilities that were publicly disclosed before today (including one that reportedly has been detected in exploits in the wild). Separately, Adobe is pushing a security update for its Shockwave Player – a browser plugin that I’ve long urged readers to junk.
According to security firm Shavlik, the patches that address flaws which have already been publicly disclosed include a large Internet Explorer (IE) update that corrects 17 flaws and a fix for Microsoft Edge, Redmond’s flagship replacement browser for IE; both address this bug, among others.
A critical fix for a Windows graphics component addresses flaws that previously showed up in two public disclosures, one of which Shavlik says is currently being exploited in the wild (CVE-2015-2546). The 100th patch that Microsoft has issued so far this year — a salve for Windows Media Player – fixes two different vulnerabilities that were publicly disclosed before today (CVE-2015-2509 and CVE-2015-2504).
In other important patch news today, Adobe has released a security update for its Shockwave Player browser plugin. If you need this program, then update it; the latest version is v. 12.2.0.162. But in my experience, most users don’t need it and are better off without it. For more on what I say that, see Why You Should Ditch Adobe Shockwave.
Not sure whether your computer has Shockwave installed? If you visit this link and see a short animation, it should tell you which version of Shockwave you have installed. If it prompts you to download Shockwave (or in the case of Google Chrome for some reason just automatically downloads the installer), then you don’t have Shockwave installed. To remove Shockwave, grab Adobe’s uninstall tool here. Mozilla Firefox users should note that the presence of the “Shockwave Flash” plugin listed in the Firefox Add-ons section denotes an installation of Adobe Flash Player plugin — not Adobe Shockwave Player.
Authorities in Europe have arrested alleged key players behind the development and deployment of sophisticated banking malware, including Citadel and Dridex. The arrests involved a Russian national and a Moldovan man, both of whom were traveling or residing outside of their native countries and are now facing extradition to the United States.
Last week, a 30-year-old from Moldova who was wanted by U.S. authorities was arrested in Paphos — a coastal vacation spot in Cyprus where the accused was reportedly staying with his wife. A story in the Cyprus Mail has few other details about the arrest, other than to say authorities believe the man was responsible for more than $3.5 million in bank fraud using a PC.
Sources close to the investigation say the man is a key figure in an organized crime gang responsible for developing and using a powerful banking Trojan known as “Dridex” (a.k.a. Cridex, Bugat). The Dridex gang is thought to have spun off from the “Business Club,” an Eastern European organized cybercrime gang accused of stealing more than $100 million from banks and businesses worldwide.
In June 2014, the U.S. Justice Department joined multiple international law enforcement agencies and security firms in taking down the Business Club’s key asset: The Gameover ZeuS botnet, an ultra-sophisticated, global crime machine that infected upwards of a half-million PCs and was used in countless cyberheists. Dridex would first emerge in July 2014, a month after the Gameover Zeus botnet was dismantled.
Separately, the press in Norway writes about a 27-year-old Russian man identified only as “Mark” who was reportedly arrested in the Norwegian town of Fredrikstad at the request of the FBI. The story notes that American authorities believe Mark is the software developer behind Citadel, a malware-as-a-service product that played a key role in countless cyberheists against American and European small businesses.
The Norwegian newspaper VGwrites that Mark has been held under house arrest for the past 11 months, while the FBI tries to work out his extradition to the United States. His detention is being fought by Russia, which is naturally opposed to the treatment he may receive in the United States and says the evidence against Mark is scant.
According to VG, the U.S. Justice Department believes Mark is none other than “Aquabox,” the nickname chosen by the proprietor of the Citadel malware, which was created based off of the source code for the ZeuS Trojan malware. Citadel was sold and marketed as a service that let buyers and users interact with the developer and one another, to solicit feedback on how to fix bugs in the malware program, and to request new features in the malware going forward.
For a full translation of the original Citadel sales pitch as penned by Aquabox in 2011, see this link (PDF). For a full translated version of the VG story on Mark, see this PDF (thanks to KrebsOnSecurity reader Jeevan Sivagnanasuntharam for helping with the translation). VG notes that Mark continues to maintain his innocence. [Side note: The Citadel malware has for years had in its code a dig directed at the author of this blog: Included in the guts of the Trojan is the text string, “Coded by BRIAN KREBS for personal use only. I love my job & wife.” Needless to say, the second part of that statement is true, but Citadel was not coded by this Brian Krebs.]
A text string inside of the Citadel trojan. Source: AhnLab
Ars Technica carries an interesting piece about Deniss Calovskis, a Latvian man who was arrested in February and extradited to the United States for his role in creating the Gozi virus, another powerful malware family that has been used in countless cyberheists. The 30-year-old Calovskis long maintained his innocence, but ultimately acknowledged his role in a guilty plea entered in a federal court in Manhattan last week. Continue reading →
Most of us know to keep our guard up when withdrawing cash from an ATM and to look for any signs that the machine may have been tampered with. But ATM fraud experts say they continue to see criminal innovations with “insert skimmers,” wafer-thin data theft devices that fit inside the ATM’s card acceptance slot and do not alter the outward appearance of a compromised cash machine.
The insert skimmer pictured below was recently pulled from an ATM in Europe. According to a report by the European ATM Security Team (EAST), this type of device is inserted through the card reader throat and then sits inside the card reader capturing the data of cards that are subsequently inserted.
An insert skimmer. Image: EAST.
Of course, an insert skimmer alone isn’t going to capture your PIN. For that, thieves typically rely on cleverly hidden tiny cameras. Often, the spy camera is tucked inside a false panel above or directly beside the PIN pad. But as I’ve noted in stories about skimming attacks that never touch the ATM (such as vestibule door skimmers), crooks often get very creative, hiding cameras behind things like convex mirrors — or even phony fire alarms.
The image below was captured last year by a U.S.-based bank’s own ATM security camera. It shows a skimmer scammer getting ready to install a tiny camera hidden inside of a fake fire alarm.
Hidden cameras made to work in tandem with skimming devices need not be hidden on the compromised ATM itself.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has awarded a $133 million contract to a private firm in an effort to provide credit monitoring services for three years to nearly 22 million people who had their Social Security numbers and other sensitive data stolen by cybercriminals. But perhaps the agency should be offering the option to pay for the cost that victims may incur in “freezing” their credit files, a much more effective way of preventing identity theft.
Not long after news broke that Chinese hackers had stolen SSNs and far more sensitive data on 4.2 million individuals — including background investigations, fingerprint data, addresses, medical and mental-health history, and financial history — OPM announced it had awarded a contract worth more than $20 million to Austin, Texas-based identity protection firm CSID to provide 18 months of protection for those affected.
Soon after the CSID contract was awarded, the OPM acknowledged that the breach actually impacted more than five times as many individuals as originally thought. In response, the OPM has awarded a $133 million contract to Portland, Ore. based ID Experts.
No matter how you slice it, $133 million is a staggering figure for a service that in all likelihood will do little to prevent identity thieves from hijacking the names, good credit and good faith of breach victims. While state-sponsored hackers thought to be responsible for this breach were likely interested in the data for more strategic than financial reasons (recruiting, discovering and/or thwarting spies), the OPM should not force breach victims to pay for true protection.
As I’ve noted in story after story, identity protection services like those offered by CSID, Experian and others do little to block identity theft: The most you can hope for from these services is that they will notify you after crooks have opened a new line of credit in your name. Where these services do excel is in helping with the time-consuming and expensive process of cleaning up your credit report with the major credit reporting agencies.
Many of these third party services also induce people to provide even more information than was leaked in the original breach. For example, CSID offers the ability to “monitor thousands of websites, chat rooms, forums and networks, and alerts you if your personal information is being bought or sold online.” But in order to use this service, users are encouraged to provide bank account and credit card data, passport and medical ID numbers, as well as telephone numbers and driver’s license information.
The only step that will reliably block identity thieves from accessing your credit file — and therefore applying for new loans, credit cards and otherwise ruining your good name — is freezing your credit file with the major credit bureaus. This freeze process — described in detail in the primer, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Security Freeze — can be done online or over the phone. Each bureau will give the consumer a unique personal identification number (PIN) that the consumer will need to provide in the event that he needs to apply for new credit in the future.
If you use and need Flash Player, it’s time to update the program (the latest version is 19.0.0.185 for Windows and Mac users). Google Chrome and Internet Explorer bundle their own versions of Flash (also now at v. 19.0.0.185); each should auto-update to the latest. Find out if you have Flash installed and its current version number by visiting this page.
