Krebs on Security

Cybercrime Kingpin Pleads Guilty

July 10, 2015

An Estonian man who ran an organized cybercrime ring that infected more than four million PCs in over 100 countries with moneymaking malware has pleaded guilty in New York to wire fraud and computer intrusion charges.

Vladimir Tsastsin, 35, ran an online Web hosting and advertising empire in Estonia called Rove Digital. From 2007 to 2011, Tsastin and six other men cooked up and executed a scheme to deploy malware that altered the domain name system (DNS) settings on infected computers (there were versions of the malware for both Mac and Windows systems).

Tsastsin. right, along with other Rove Digital men, at a 2013 hearing in Tallinn. Image: Postimees.ee.

Known as DNSChanger, the malware replaced legitimate ads in victim Web browsers with ads that rewarded Rove Digital, and hijacked referral commissions from other advertisers when victims clicked on ads. The malware also prevented infected systems from downloading software updates and visiting many security Web sites.

Following the takedown of the crime gang, the U.S. government assumed control over the DNS servers that were used by the malware, and spearheaded a global effort to clean up infected systems. U.S. authorities allege that the men made more than $14 million through click hijacking and advertisement replacement fraud.

Tsastsin and his accomplices were arrested in 2011 by Estonian authorities for their role in the scheme, but ultimately the men were acquitted. In June 2014, however, the Estonian Supreme Court revoked that decision, finding them guilty of money laundering. Tsastsin in particular was also found guilty of leading a criminal gang. All but one of the seven were later extradited to the United States, and have already pleaded guilty and/or been imprisoned.

I first encountered Tsastsin in 2008, after research and collaboration with numerous security firms and researchers led to a Washington Post series detailing how Rove Digital and its hosting business — a company called EstDomains — were hosting huge numbers of Web sites that foisted malicious software. His response at the time to assertions that he was somehow tied to Russian organized cybercrime: “Rubbish!” Continue reading →

Credit Card Breach at a Zoo Near You

July 9, 2015

38 Comments

Service Systems Associates, a company that serves gift shops and eateries at zoos and cultural centers across the United States, has acknowledged a breach of its credit and debit card processing systems.

Several banking industry sources told KrebsOnSecurity they have detected a pattern of fraud on cards that were all used at zoo gift shops operated by Denver-basd SSA. On Wednesday morning, CBS Detroit moved a story citing zoo officials there saying the SSA was investigating a breach involving point-of-sale malware.

Contacted about the findings, SSA confirmed that it was the victim of a data security breach.

“The violation occurred in the point of sale systems located in the gift shops of several of our clients,” the company said in a written statement. “This means that if a guest used a credit or debit card in the gift shop at one of our partner facilities between March 23 and June 25, 2015, the information on that card may have been compromised.”

SSA said it has been working with law enforcement officials and a third-party forensic investigator, Sikich, to investigate the breach.

“Though the investigation into this attack continues, the malware that caused the breach was identified and removed,” the statement continued. “All visitors should feel confident using credit or debit cards anywhere in these facilities.” Continue reading →

Finnish Decision is Win for Internet Trolls

July 8, 2015

146 Comments

In a win for Internet trolls and teenage cybercriminals everywhere, a Finnish court has decided not to incarcerate a 17-year-old found guilty of more than 50,000 cybercrimes, including data breaches, payment fraud, operating a huge botnet and calling in bomb threats, among other violations.

Julius “Ryan” Kivimaki.

As the Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat reports, Julius Kivimäki — a.k.a. “Ryan” and “Zeekill” — was given a two-year suspended sentence and ordered to forfeit EUR 6,558.

Kivimaki vaulted into the media spotlight late last year when he claimed affiliation with the Lizard Squad, a group of young hooligans who knocked offline the gaming networks of Microsoft and Sony for most of Christmas Day.

According to the BBC, evidence presented at Kivimaki’s trial showed that he compromised more than 50,000 computer servers by exploiting vulnerabilities in Adobe’s Cold Fusion web application software. Prosecutors also said Kivimaki used stolen credit cards to buy luxury goods and shop vouchers, and participated in a money laundering scheme that he used to fund a trip to Mexico.

Kivimaki allegedly also was involved in calling in multiple fake bomb threats and “swatting” incident — reporting fake hostage situations at an address to prompt a heavily armed police response to that location. DailyDot quotes Blair Strater, a victim of Kivimaki’s swatting and harassment, who expressed disgust at the Finnish ruling.

Speaking with KrebsOnSecurity, Strater called Kivimaki “a dangerous sociopath” who belongs behind bars.

Although it did not factor into his trial, sources close to the Lizard Squad investigation say Kivimaki also was responsible for making an August 2014 bomb threat against former Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley that grounded an American Airlines plane. That incident was widely reported to have started with a tweet from the Lizard Squad, but Smedley and others say it started with a call from Kivimaki.

In a phone interview, Smedley said he was disappointed that the judicial system in Finland didn’t do more.

“I personally got to listen to a recording of him calling in to American Airlines, and I know it was him because I talked to him myself,” Smedley said. “He’s done all kinds of bad stuff to me, including putting all of my information out on the Internet. He even attempted to use my credit numerous times. The harassment literally just did not stop.”

In an online interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Kivimaki denied involvement with the American Airlines incident, and said he was not surprised by the leniency shown by the court in his trial.

“During the trial it became apparent that nobody suffered significant (if any) damages because of the alleged hacks,” he said.

The danger in a decision such as this is that it emboldens young malicious hackers by reinforcing the already popular notion that there are no consequences for cybercrimes committed by individuals under the age of 18.

Case in point: Kivimaki is now crowing about the sentence; He’s changed the description on his Twitter profile to “Untouchable hacker god.” The Twitter account for the Lizard Squad tweeted the news of Kivimaki’s non-sentencing triumphantly: “All the people that said we would rot in prison don’t want to comprehend what we’ve been saying since the beginning, we have free passes.” Continue reading →

Adobe to Patch Hacking Team’s Flash Zero-Day

July 7, 2015

57 Comments

Adobe Systems Inc. says its plans to issue a patch on Wednesday to fix a zero-day vulnerability in its Flash Player software that is reportedly being exploited in active attacks. The flaw was disclosed publicly over the weekend after hackers broke into and posted online hundreds of gigabytes of data from Hacking Team, a controversial Italian company that’s long been accused of helping repressive regimes spy on dissident groups.

A knowledge base file stolen from Hacking Team explaining how to use a Flash exploit developed by the company.

In an advisory published today, Adobe said “a critical vulnerability (CVE-2015-5119) has been identified in Adobe Flash Player 18.0.0.194 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. Successful exploitation could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.”

Update, July 8, 12:13 p.m. ET: The patch is now available in Flash Player 18.0.0.203 for Windows and Mac systems. See this advisory for more information and for links to downloads.

Original story:

Several reports on Twitter suggested the exploit could be used to bypass Google Chrome‘s protective “sandbox” technology, a security feature that forces the program to run in a heightened security mode designed to block attacks that target vulnerabilities in Flash. A spokesperson for Google confirmed that attackers could evade the Chrome sandbox by using the Flash exploit in tandem with another Windows vulnerability that appears to be unpatched at the moment. Google also says its already in the process of pushing the Flash fix out to Chrome users.

The Flash flaw was uncovered after Hacking Team’s proprietary information was posted online by hacktivists seeking to disprove the company’s claims that it does not work with repressive regimes (the leaked data suggests that Hacking Team has contracted to develop exploits for a variety of countries, including Egypt, Lebanon, Ethiopia, Sudan and Thailand). Included in the cache are several exploits for unpatched flaws, including apparently a Windows vulnerability. Continue reading →

Don’t Be Fooled By Phony Online Reviews

July 5, 2015

104 Comments

The Internet is a fantastic resource for researching the reputation of companies with which you may wish to do business. Unfortunately, this same ease-of-use can lull the unwary into falling for marketing scams originally perfected by spammers: Namely, fake reviews and dodgy search engine manipulation techniques that seek to drown out legitimate, negative reviews in a sea of glowing but fake endorsements.

The home page of Full Service Van Lines.

Perhaps the most common example of this can be found among companies that offer moving and storage services, an industry that consistently ranks in the top 10 across the United States for consumer fraud complaints.

Trust your family heirlooms and other belongings to a moving company without scratching beneath the surface of that glowing review online and at best you could end up paying way more than the agreed-upon price once the company has all of your possessions loaded onto the truck. In most cases, the consumer horror stories about moves-gone-bad also include tales of massive damage to the customer’s stuff — if indeed the customer’s stuff ever arrives.

Even people who are steeped in the ways of the Interwebs can get bamboozled by slick search engine manipulation tricks. Last month I heard from David Matusiak, a longtime reader and information security professional who hired a Florida-based moving company that got five-star reviews from dozens of sites. Unfortunately for Matusiak, many of those “review” sites appear to have been set up and maintained by the people behind the company he hired.

Based in Morrisville, NC, Matusiak had just landed a job in California that wanted him to start right away. So after a couple of hours of reading reviews online for a reputable moving company, Matusiak settled on Full Service Van Lines based in Coconut Creek, Fla. Now, more than 30 days after his truckload of belongings left his home on the East Coast, Matusiak is still waiting for his stuff to arrive in California.

HUGE RED FLAGS

Matusiak said he read page after page of glowing reviews about Full Service Van Lines. Little did he know, the same email address used to register fullservicevanlines.com was used to register many of those “review” Web sites, which naturally list Full Service at the top of their supposed consumer rankings.

Interestingly, if you conduct a simple Google search on Full Service Van Lines, you’ll notice the top review sites — Google and Yelp — have two types of reviews for this company: Very positive and extremely negative, and not much in between. Continue reading →

Banks: Card Breach at Trump Hotel Properties

July 1, 2015

55 Comments

The Trump Hotel Collection, a string of luxury hotel properties tied to business magnate and now Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, appears to be the latest victim of a credit card breach, according to data shared by several U.S.-based banks.

Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago.

Contacted regarding reports from sources at several banks who traced a pattern of fraudulent debit and credit card charges to accounts that had all been used at Trump hotels, the company declined multiple requests for comment.

Update, 4:56 p.m. ET: The Trump Organization just acknowledged the issue with a brief statement from Eric Trump, executive vice president of development and acquisitions: “Like virtually every other company these days, we have been alerted to potential suspicious credit card activity and are in the midst of a thorough investigation to determine whether it involves any of our properties,” the statement reads. “We are committed to safeguarding all guests’ personal information and will continue to do so vigilantly.”

Original story:

But sources in the financial industry say they have little doubt that Trump properties in several U.S. locations — including Chicago, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York — are dealing with a card breach that appears to extend back to at least February 2015.

If confirmed, the incident would be the latest in a long string of credit card breaches involving hotel brands, restaurants and retail establishments. In March, upscale hotel chain Mandarin Oriental disclosed a compromise. The following month, hotel franchising firm White Lodging acknowledged that, for the second time in 12 months, card processing systems at several of its locations were breached by hackers.

It is likely that the huge number of card breaches at U.S.-based organizations over the past year represents a response by fraudsters to upcoming changes in the United States designed to make credit and debit cards more difficult and expensive to counterfeit. Non-chip cards store cardholder data on a magnetic stripe, which can be trivially copied and re-encoded onto virtually anything else with a magnetic stripe. Continue reading →

Crooks Use Hacked Routers to Aid Cyberheists

June 29, 2015

54 Comments

Cybercriminals have long relied on compromised Web sites to host malicious software for use in drive-by download attacks, but at least one crime gang is taking it a step further: New research shows that crooks spreading the Dyre malware for use in cyberheists are leveraging hacked wireless routers to deliver their password-stealing crimeware.

Ubiquity Networks airRouter

Dyre (a.k.a. “Dyreza”) is generally installed by a downloader Trojan that is flagged by most tools under the name “Upatre.” The latter is most often delivered via malicious e-mails containing a link which directs unsuspecting users to servers hosting malicious javascript or a basic redirection to a malicious payload. If the user clicks the malicious link, it may serve a bogus file — such as an invoice or bank statement — that if extracted and opened reaches out to an Upatre control server to download Dyre.

According to a recent in-depth report from Symantec, Dyre is a highly developed piece of malware, capable of hijacking all three major web browsers and intercepting internet banking sessions in order to harvest the victim’s credentials and send them to the attackers. Dyre is often used to download additional malware on to the victim’s computer, and in many cases the victim machine is added to a botnet which is then used to send out thousands of spam emails in order to spread the threat.

Recently, researchers at the Fujitsu Security Operations Center in Warrington, UK began tracking Upatre being served from hundreds of compromised home routers — particularly routers powered by MikroTik and Ubiquiti’s AirOS.

“We have seen literally hundreds of wireless access points, and routers connected in relation to this botnet, usually AirOS,” said Bryan Campbell, lead threat intelligence analyst at Fujitsu. “The consistency in which the botnet is communicating with compromised routers in relation to both distribution and communication leads us to believe known vulnerabilities are being exploited in the firmware which allows this to occur.”

Continue reading →

A Busy Week for Ne’er-Do-Well News

June 27, 2015

28 Comments

We often hear about the impact of cybercrime, but too seldom do we read about the successes that law enforcement officials have in apprehending those responsible and bringing them to justice. Last week was an especially busy time for cybercrime justice, with authorities across the globe bringing arrests, prosecutions and some cases stiff sentences in connection with a broad range of cyber crimes, including ATM and bank account cashouts, malware distribution and “swatting” attacks.

Ercan Findikoglu, posing with piles of cash.

Prosecutors in New York had a big week. Appearing in the U.S. court system for the first time last week was Ercan “Segate” Findikoglu, a 33-year-old Turkish man who investigators say was the mastermind behind a series of Oceans 11-type ATM heists between 2011 and 2013 that netted thieves more than $55 million.

According to prosecutors, Findikoglu organized the so-called “ATM cashouts” by hacking into networks of several credit and debit card payment processors. With each processor, the intruders were able to simultaneously lift the daily withdrawal limits on numerous prepaid accounts and dramatically increase the account balances on those cards to allow ATM withdrawals far in excess of the legitimate card balances.

The cards were then cloned and sent to dozens of co-conspirators around the globe, who used the cards at ATMs to withdraw millions in cash in the span of just a few hours. Investigators say these attacks are known in the cybercrime underground as “unlimited operations” because the manipulation of withdrawal limits lets the crooks steal literally unlimited amounts of cash until the operation is shut down.

Two of the attacks attributed to Findikoglu and his alleged associates were first reported on this blog, including a February 2011 attack against Fidelity National Information Services (FIS), and a $5 million heist in late 2012 involving a card network in India. The most brazen and lucrative heist, a nearly $40 million cashout against the Bank of Muscat in Oman, was covered in a May 2013 New York Times piece, which concludes with a vignette about the violent murder of alleged accomplice in the scheme.

Also in New York, a Manhattan federal judge sentenced the co-creator of the “Blackshades” Trojan to nearly five years in prison after pleading guilty to helping hundreds of people use and spread the malware. Twenty-five year old Swedish national Alexander Yucel was ordered to forfeit $200,000 and relinquish all of the computer equipment he used in commission of his crimes.

As detailed in this May 2014 piece, Blackshades Users Had It Coming, the malware was sophisticated but marketed mainly on English language cybecrime forums to young men who probably would have a hard time hacking their way out of a paper bag, let alone into someone’s computer. Initially sold via PayPal for just $40, Blackshades offered users a way to remotely spy on victims, and even included tools and tutorials to help users infect victim PCs. Many of Yucel’s customers also have been rounded up by law enforcement here in the U.S. an abroad. Continue reading →

Hershey Park Investigates Card Fraud Pattern

June 24, 2015

36 Comments

Hershey Park, a popular resort and amusement park in Hershey, Pa. has hired a security firm to investigate reports from multiple financial institutions about a possible credit card breach, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

Contacted after reports by several financial institutions about a pattern of fraudulent charges on customer cards that trace back to Hershey properties, the company says it is investigating.

“We have received reports from some of our guests that fraud charges appeared on their payment cards after they visited our property,” said Kathleen McGraw, director of communications for Hershey Entertainment and Resorts Company.

“We take reports like this very seriously,” McGraw continued. “While our company does have security measures in place designed to prevent unauthorized access to our network, we immediately began to investigate our system for signs of an issue and engaged an external computer security firm to assist us. The investigation is ongoing.”

Sources at three financial institutions say they have detected a pattern of fraudulent activity on customer cards that were used at Hershey properties in Pennsylvania between mid-March and late May 2015. According to the banks, the cards were used at a variety of Hershey locations, including food and beverage outlets, ticketing stations and the Hershey Lodge.

Emergency Patch for Adobe Flash Zero-Day

June 23, 2015

23 Comments

Adobe Systems Inc. today released an emergency update to fix a dangerous security hole in its widely-installed Flash Player browser plugin. The company warned that the vulnerability is already being exploited in targeted attacks, and urged users to update the program as quickly as possible.

In an advisory issued Tuesday morning, Adobe said the latest version of Flash — v. 18.0.0.194 on Windows and Mac OS X — fixes a critical flaw (CVE-2015-3113) that is being actively exploited in “limited, targeted attacks.” The company said systems running Internet Explorer for Windows 7 and below, as well as Firefox on Windows XP, are known targets of these exploits. Continue reading →

Last »