Krebs on Security

Carefirst Blue Cross Breach Hits 1.1M

May 21, 2015

CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield on Wednesday said it had been hit with a data breach that compromised the personal information on approximately 1.1 million customers. There are indications that the same attack methods may have been used in this intrusion as with breaches at Anthem and Premera, incidents that collectively involved data on more than 90 million Americans.

According to a statement CareFirst issued Wednesday, attackers gained access to names, birth dates, email addresses and insurance identification numbers. The company said the database did not include Social Security or credit card numbers, passwords or medical information. Nevertheless, CareFirst is offering credit monitoring and identity theft protection for two years.

Nobody is officially pointing fingers at the parties thought to be responsible for this latest health industry breach, but there are clues implicating the same state-sponsored actors from China thought to be involved in the Anthem and Premera attacks. Continue reading →

mSpy Denies Breach, Even as Customers Confirm It

May 20, 2015

39 Comments

Last week, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that sensitive data apparently stolen from hundreds of thousands of customers mobile spyware maker mSpy had been posted online. mSpy has since been quoted twice by other publications denying a breach of its systems. Meanwhile, this blog has since contacted multiple people whose data was published to the deep Web, all of whom confirmed they were active or former mSpy customers.

mSpy told BBC News it had been the victim of a “predatory attack” by blackmailers, but said it had not given in to demands for money. mSpy also told the BBC that claims the hackers had breached its systems and stolen data were false.

“There is no data of 400,000 of our customers on the web,” a spokeswoman for the company told the BBC. “We believe to have become a victim of a predatory attack, aimed to take advantage of our estimated commercial achievements.”

Let’s parse that statement a bit further. No, the stolen records aren’t on the Web; rather, they’ve been posted to various sites on the Deep Web, which is only accessible using Tor. Also, I don’t doubt that mSpy was the target of extortion attempts; the fact that the company did not pay the extortionist is likely what resulted in its customers’ data being posted online.

How am I confident of this, considering mSpy has still not responded to requests for comment? I spent the better part of the day today pulling customer records from the hundreds of gigabytes of data leaked from mSpy. I spoke with multiple customers whose payment and personal data — and that of their kids, employees and significant others — were included in the huge cache. All confirmed they are or were recently paying customers of mSpy.

Joe Natoli, director of a home care provider in Arizona, confirmed what was clear from looking at the leaked data — that he had paid mSpy hundreds of dollars a month for a subscription to monitor all of the mobile devices distributed to employees by his company. Natoli said all employees agree to the monitoring when they are hired, but that he only used mSpy for approximately four months.

“The value proposition for the cost didn’t work out,” Natoli said.

Katherine Till‘s information also was in the leaked data. Till confirmed that she and her husband had paid mSpy to monitor the mobile device of their 14-year-old daughter, and were still a paying customer as of my call to her.

Till added that she was unaware of a breach, and was disturbed that mSpy might try to cover it up.

“This is disturbing, because who knows what someone could do with all that data from her phone,” Till said, noting that she and her husband had both discussed the monitoring software with their daughter. “As parents, it’s hard to keep up and teach kids all the time what they can and can’t do. I’m sure there are lots more people like us that are in this situation now.”

Another user whose financial and personal data was in the cache asked not to be identified, but sheepishly confirmed that he had paid mSpy to secretly monitor the mobile device of a “friend.”

Update, May 22, 10:24 a.m.: mSpy is finally admitting that it did have a breach that exposed customer information, but they are still downplaying the numbers. Continue reading →

Security Firm Redefines APT: African Phishing Threat

May 20, 2015

47 Comments

A security firm made headlines earlier this month when it boasted it had thwarted plans by organized Russian cyber criminals to launch an attack against multiple US-based banks. But a closer look at the details behind that report suggests the actors in question were relatively unsophisticated Nigerian phishers who’d simply registered a bunch of new fake bank Web sites.

The report was released by Colorado Springs, Colo.-based security vendor root9B, which touts a number of former National Security Agency (NSA) and Department of Defense cybersecurity experts among its ranks. The report attracted coverage by multiple media outlets, including, Fox News, Politico, SC Magazine and The Hill. root9B said it had unearthed plans by a Russian hacking gang known variously as the Sofacy Group and APT28. APT is short for “advanced persistent threat,” and it’s a term much used among companies that sell cybersecurity services in response to breaches from state-funded adversaries in China and Russia that are bent on stealing trade secrets via extremely stealthy attacks.

The cover art for the root9B report.

“While performing surveillance for a root9B client, the company discovered malware generally associated with nation state attacks,” root9B CEO Eric Hipkins wrote of the scheme, which he said was targeted financial institutions such as Bank of America, Regions Bank and TD Bank, among others.

“It is the first instance of a Sofacy or other attack being discovered, identified and reported before an attack occurred,” Hipkins said. “Our team did an amazing job of uncovering what could have been a significant event for the international banking community. We’ve spent the past three days informing the proper authorities in Washington and the UAE, as well as the CISOs at the financial organizations.”

However, according to an analysis of the domains reportedly used by the criminals in the planned attack, perhaps root9B should clarify what it means by APT. Unless the company is holding back key details about their research, their definition of APT can more accurately be described as “African Phishing Threat.”

The report correctly identifies several key email addresses and physical addresses that the fraudsters used in common across all of the fake bank domains. But root9B appears to have scant evidence connecting the individual(s) who registered those domains to the Sofacy APT gang. Indeed, a reading of their analysis suggests their sole connection is that some of the fake bank domains used a domain name server previously associated with Sofacy activity: carbon2u[dot]com (warning: malicious host that will likely set off antivirus alerts).

The problem with that linkage is although carbon2u[dot]com was in fact at one time associated with activity emanating from the Sofacy APT group, Sofacy is hardly the only bad actor using that dodgy name server. There is plenty of other badness unrelated to Sofacy that calls Carbon2u home for their DNS operations, including these clowns.

From what I can tell, the vast majority of the report documents activity stemming from Nigerian scammers who have been conducting run-of-the-mill bank phishing scams for almost a decade now and have left quite a trail.

For example, most of the wordage in this report from root9B discusses fake domains registered to a handful of email addresses, including “adeweb2001@yahoo.com,” adeweb2007@yahoo.com,” and “rolexzad@yahoo.com”.

Each of these emails have long been associated with phishing sites erected by apparent Nigerian scammers. They are tied to this Facebook profile for a Showunmi Oluwaseun, who lists his job as CEO of a rather fishy-sounding organization called Rolexzad Fishery Nig. Ltd.

Continue reading →

St. Louis Federal Reserve Suffers DNS Breach

May 18, 2015

44 Comments

The St. Louis Federal Reserve today sent a message to those it serves alerting them that in late April 2015 attackers succeeded in hijacking the domain name servers for the institution. The attack redirected Web searches and queries for those seeking a variety of domains run by the government entity to a Web page set up by the attackers in an apparent bid by cybercrooks to hijack online communications of banks and other entities dealing with the regional Fed office.

The communique, shared by an anonymous source, was verified as legitimate by a source at another regional Federal Reserve location.

The notice from the St. Louis Fed stated that the “the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has been made aware that on April 24, 2015, computer hackers manipulated routing settings at a domain name service (DNS) vendor used by the St. Louis Fed so that they could automatically redirect some of the Bank’s web traffic that day to rogue webpages they created to simulate the look of the St. Louis Fed’s research.stlouisfed.org website, including webpages for FRED, FRASER, GeoFRED and ALFRED.”

Requests for comment from the St. Louis Fed so far have gone unreturned. It remains unclear what impact, if any, this event has had on the normal day-to-day operations of hundreds of financial institutions that interact with the regional Fed operator.

The advisory noted that “as is common with these kinds of DNS attacks, users who were redirected to one of these phony websites may have been unknowingly exposed to vulnerabilities that the hackers may have put there, such as phishing, malware and access to user names and passwords.”

The statement continues:

“These risks apply to individuals who attempted to access the St. Louis Fed’s research.stlouisfed.org website on April 24, 2015. If you attempted to log into your user account on that date, it is possible that this malicious group may have accessed your user name and password.

The St. Louis Fed’s website itself was not compromised.

“Out of an abundance of caution, we wanted to alert you to this issue, and also make you aware that the next time you log into your user account, you will be asked to change your password. In addition, in the event that your user name and password are the same or similar as those you use for other websites, we highly recommend that you follow best practices and use a strong, unique and different password for each of your user accounts on the Internet. Click https://research.stlouisfed.org/useraccount/forgotpassword/step1 to change your user account password now.”

According to Wikipedia, the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) is a database maintained by the Research division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis that has more than 247,000 economic time series from 79 sources. The data can be viewed in graphical and text form or downloaded for import to a database or spreadsheet, and viewed on mobile devices. They cover banking, business/fiscal, consumer price indexes, employment and population, exchange rates, gross domestic product, interest rates, monetary aggregates, producer price indexes, reserves and monetary base, U.S. trade and international transactions, and U.S. financial data. Continue reading →

Starbucks Hacked? No, But You Might Be

May 18, 2015

48 Comments

When it comes to reporting on breaches involving customer accounts at major brands, the news media overall deserves an F-minus. Hardly a week goes by when I don’t hear from readers about a breathless story proclaiming that yet another household brand name company has been hacked. Upon closer inspection, the stories usually are based on little more than anecdotal evidence from customers who had their online loyalty or points accounts hijacked and then drained of value.

The latest example of this came last week from a story that was responsibly reported by Bob Sullivan, a former MSNBC journalist who’s since struck out on his own. Sullivan spoke with multiple consumers who’d seen their Starbucks card balances emptied and then topped up again.

Those customers had all chosen to tie their debit accounts to their Starbucks cards and mobile phones. Sullivan allowed in his story one logical explanation for the activity: These consumers had re-used their Starbucks account password at another site that got hacked, and attackers simply tried those account credentials en masse at other popular sites — knowing that a fair number of consumers use the same email address and password across multiple sites.

Following up on Sullivan’s story, the media pounced, suggesting that Starbucks had been compromised. In a written statement, Starbucks denied the unauthorized activity was the result of a hack or intrusion into its servers or mobile applications.

“Occasionally, Starbucks receives reports from customers of unauthorized activity on their online account,” the company wrote. “This is primarily caused when criminals obtain reused names and passwords from other sites and attempt to apply that information to Starbucks. To protect their security, customers are encouraged to use different user names and passwords for different sites, especially those that keep financial information.”

In most cases, a flurry of fraudulent account activity targeting a major brand is preceded by postings on noob-friendly hacker forums about large numbers of compromised accounts for sale, and the publication of teachable “methods” for extracting value from said hacked accounts.

Unsurprisingly, we saw large numbers of compromised Starbucks accounts for sale in the days leading up to the initial story about the Starbucks fraud, as well as the usual “methods” explaining to clueless ne’er-do-wells about how to perpetrate fraud against hacked accounts. Here’s another noob-friendly thread explaining how to cash out compromised Subway accounts; how long until we read media reports shouting that Subway has been hacked? Continue reading →

Mobile Spyware Maker mSpy Hacked, Customer Data Leaked

May 14, 2015

86 Comments

mSpy, the makers of a dubious software-as-a-service product that claims to help more than two million people spy on the mobile devices of their kids and partners, appears to have been massively hacked. Last week, a huge trove of data apparently stolen from the company’s servers was posted on the Deep Web, exposing countless emails, text messages, payment and location data on an undetermined number of mSpy “users.”

mSpy has not responded to multiple requests for comment left for the company over the past five days. KrebsOnSecurity learned of the apparent breach from an anonymous source who shared a link to a Web page that is only reachable via Tor, a technology that helps users hide their true Internet address and allows users to host Web sites that are extremely difficult to get taken down.

The Tor-based Web site hosting content stolen from mobile devices running mSpy.

The Tor-based site hosts several hundred gigabytes worth of data taken from mobile devices running mSpy’s products, including some four million events logged by the software. The message left by the unknown hackers who’ve claimed responsibility for this intrusion suggests that the data dump includes information on more than 400,000 users, including Apple IDs and passwords, tracking data, and payment details on some 145,000 successful transactions.

The exact number of mSpy users compromised could not be confirmed, but one thing is clear: There is a crazy amount of personal and sensitive data in this cache, including photos, calendar data, corporate email threads, and very private conversations. Also included in the data dump are thousands of support request emails from people around the world who paid between $8.33 to as much as $799 for a variety of subscriptions to mSpy’s surveillance software.

Mspy users can track Android and iPhone users, snoop on apps like Snapchat and Skype, and keep a record of every key the user types.

mSspy users can track the exact location of Android and iPhone users, snoop on apps like Snapchat and Skype, and keep a record of every word the user types.

It’s unclear exactly where mSpy is based; the company’s Web site suggests it has offices in the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom, although the firm does not appear to list an official physical address. However, according to historic Web site registration records, the company is tied to a now-defunct firm called MTechnology LTD out of the United Kingdom. Continue reading →

Adobe, Microsoft Push Critical Security Fixes

May 12, 2015

34 Comments

Microsoft today issued 13 patch bundles to fix roughly four dozen security vulnerabilities in Windows and associated software. Separately, Adobe pushed updates to fix a slew of critical flaws in its Flash Player and Adobe Air software, as well as patches to fix holes in Adobe Reader and Acrobat.

Three of the Microsoft patches earned the company’s most dire “critical” rating, meaning they fix flaws that can be exploited to break into vulnerable systems with little or no interaction on the part of the user. The critical patches plug at least 30 separate flaws. The majority of those are included in a cumulative update for Internet Explorer. Other critical fixes address problems with the Windows OS, .NET, Microsoft Office, and Silverlight, among other components.

According to security vendor Shavlik, the issues address in MS15-044 deserve special priority in patching, in part because it impacts so many different Microsoft programs but also because the vulnerabilities fixed in the patch can be exploited merely by viewing specially crafted content in a Web page or a document. More information on and links to today’s individual updates can be found here .

Adobe’s fix for Flash Player and AIR fix at least 18 security holes in the programs. Updates are available for Windows, OS X and Linux versions of the software. Mac and Windows users, the latest, patched version is v. 17.0.0.188. Continue reading →

Who’s Scanning Your Network? (A: Everyone)

May 10, 2015

63 Comments

Not long ago I heard from a reader who wanted advice on how to stop someone from scanning his home network, or at least recommendations about to whom he should report the person doing the scanning. I couldn’t believe that people actually still cared about scanning, and I told him as much: These days there are countless entities — some benign and research-oriented, and some less benign — that are continuously mapping and cataloging virtually every device that’s put online.

One of the more benign is scans.io, a data repository of research findings collected through continuous scans of the public Internet. The project, hosted by the ZMap Team at the University of Michigan, includes huge, regularly updated results grouped around scanning for Internet hosts running some of the most commonly used “ports” or network entryways, such as Port 443 (think Web sites protected by the lock icon denoting SSL/TLS Web site encryption); Port 21, or file transfer protocol (FTP); and Port 25, or simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP), used by many businesses to send email.

When I was first getting my feet wet on the security beat roughly 15 years ago, the practice of scanning networks you didn’t own looking for the virtual equivalent of open doors and windows was still fairly frowned upon — if not grounds to get one into legal trouble. These days, complaining about being scanned is about as useful as griping that the top of your home is viewable via Google Earth. Trying to put devices on the Internet and then hoping that someone or something won’t find them is one of the most futile exercises in security-by-obscurity.

To get a gut check on this, I spoke at length last week with University of Michigan researcher Zakir Durumeric (ZD) and Michael D. Bailey at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (MB) about their ongoing and very public project to scan all the Internet-facing things. I was curious to get their perspective on how public perception of widespread Internet scanning has changed over the years, and how targeted scanning can actually lead to beneficial results for Internet users as a whole.

MB: Because of the historic bias against scanning and this debate between disclosure and security-by-obscurity, we’ve approached this very carefully. We certainly think that the benefits of publishing this information are huge, and that we’re just scratching the surface of what we can learn from it.

ZD: Yes, there are close to two dozen papers published now based on broad, Internet-wide scanning. People who are more focused on comprehensive scans tend to be the more serious publications that are trying to do statistical or large-scale analyses that are complete, versus just finding devices on the Internet. It’s really been in the last year that we’ve started ramping up and adding scans [to the scans.io site] more frequently.

BK: What are your short- and long-term goals with this project?

ZD: I think long-term we do want to add coverage of additional protocols. A lot of what we’re focused on is different aspects of a protocol. For example, if you’re looking at hosts running the “https://” protocol, there are many different ways you can ask questions depending on what perspective you come from. You see different attributes and behavior. So a lot of what we’ve done has revolved around https, which is of course hot right now within the research community.

MB: I’m excited to add other protocols. There are a handful of protocols that are critical to operations of the Internet, and I’m very interested in understanding the deployment of DNS, BGP, and TLS’s interception with SMTP. Right now, there’s a pretty long tail to all of these protocols, and so that’s where it starts to get interesting. We’d like to start looking at things like programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and things that are responding from industrial control systems.

ZD: One of the things we’re trying to pay more attention to is the world of embedded devices, or this ‘Internet of Things’ phenomenon. As Michael said, there are also industrial protocols, and there are different protocols that these embedded devices are supporting, and I think we’ll continue to add protocols around that class of devices as well because from a security perspective it’s incredibly interesting which devices are popping up on the Internet.

BK: What are some of the things you’ve found in your aggregate scanning results that surprised you?

ZD: I think one thing in the “https://” world that really popped out was we have this very large certificate authority ecosystem, and a lot of the attention is focused on a small number of authorities, but actually there is this very long tail — there are hundreds of certificate authorities that we don’t really think about on a daily basis, but that still have permission to sign for any Web site. That’s something we didn’t necessary expect. We knew there were a lot, but we didn’t really know what would come up until we looked at those.

There also was work we did a couple of years ago on cryptographic keys and how those are shared between devices. In one example, primes were being shared between RSA keys, and because of this we were able to factor a large number of keys, but we really wouldn’t have seen that unless we started to dig into that aspect [their research paper on this is available here].

MB: One of things we’ve been surprised about is when we measure these things at scale in a way that hasn’t been done before, often times these kinds of emergent behaviors become clear.

BK: Talk about what you hope to do with all this data.

ZD: We were involved a lot in the analysis of the Heartbleed vulnerability. And one of the surprising developments there wasn’t that there were lots of people vulnerable, but it was interesting to see who patched, how and how quickly. What we were able to find was by taking the data from these scans and actually doing vulnerability notifications to everybody, we were able to increase patching for the Heartbleed bug by 50 percent. So there was an interesting kind of surprise there, not what you learn from looking at the data, but in terms of what actions do you take from that analysis? And that’s something we’re incredibly interested in: Which is how can we spur progress within the community to improve security, whether that be through vulnerability notification, or helping with configurations.

BK: How do you know your notifications helped speed up patching?

MB: With the Heartbleed vulnerability, we took the known vulnerable population from scans, and ran an A/B test. We split the population that was vulnerable in half and notified one half of the population, while not notifying the other half, and then measured the difference in patching rates between the two populations. We did end up after a week notifying the second population…the other half. Continue reading →

Deconstructing the 2014 Sally Beauty Breach

May 7, 2015

54 Comments

This week, nationwide beauty products chain Sally Beauty disclosed that, for the second time in a year, it was investigating reports that hackers had broken into its networks and stolen customer credit card data. That investigation is ongoing, but I recently had an opportunity to interview a former Sally Beauty IT technician who provided a first-hand look at how the first breach in 2014 went down.

On March 14, 2014, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that some 260,000 credit cards stolen from Sally Beauty stores had gone up for sale on Rescator[dot]cc, the same shop that first debuted cards stolen in the Home Depot and Target breaches. The company said thieves made off with just 25,000 customer cards. But the shop selling the cards listed each by the ZIP code of the Sally Beauty store from which the card data had been stolen, exactly like this same shop did with Home Depot and Target. An exhaustive analysis of the ZIP codes represented in the cards for sale on the fraud shop indicated that the hackers had hit virtually all 2,600 Sally Beauty locations nationwide.

The company never disclosed additional details about the breach itself or how it happened. But earlier this week I spoke with Blake Curlovic, until recently an application support analyst at Sally Beauty who was among the first to respond when virtual alarm bells starting going off last year about a possible intrusion. Curlovic said that at the time, Sally Beauty was running exactly one enterprise solution for security — Tripwire (full disclosure: Tripwire is an advertiser on this blog). Tripwire’s core product monitors key operating system and application files for any changes, which then triggers alerts.

Tripwire fired a warning when the intruders planted a new file on point-of-sale systems within Sally Beauty’s vast network of cash registers. The file was a program designed to steal card numbers as they were being swiped through the registers, and the attackers had named their malware after a legitimate program running on all Sally Beauty registers. They also used a utility called Timestomp to change the date and time stamp on their malware to match the legitimate file, but that apparently didn’t fool Tripwire.

According to Curlovic, the intruders gained access through a Citrix remote access portal set up for use by employees who needed access to company systems while on the road.

“The attackers somehow had login credentials of a district manager,” Curlovic said. “This guy was not exactly security savvy. When we got his laptop back in, we saw that it had his username and password taped to the front of it.”

Once inside the Sally Beauty corporate network, the attackers scanned and mapped out the entire thing, located all shared drives and scoured those for Visual Basic (VB) scripts. Network administrators in charge of managing thousands or tens of thousands of systems often will write VB scripts to automate certain tasks across all of those systems, and very often those scripts will contain usernames and passwords that can be quite useful to attackers.

Curlovic said the intruders located a VB script on Sally Beauty’s network that contained the username and password of a network administrator at the company.

“That allowed them to basically copy files to the cash registers,” he said. “They used a simple batch file loop, put in all the [cash] register Internet addresses they found while scanning the network, looped through there and copied [the malware] to all of the point-of-sale devices — roughly 6,000 of them. They were in the network for like a week prior to that planning the attack.”

Continue reading →

PayIvy Sells Your Online Accounts Via PayPal

May 6, 2015

47 Comments

Normally, if one wishes to buy stolen account credentials for paid online services like Netflix, Hulu, XBox Live or Spotify, the buyer needs to visit a cybercrime forum or drop into a dark Web marketplace that only accepts Bitcoin as payment. Increasingly, however, these accounts are showing up for sale at Payivy[dot]com, an open Web marketplace that happily accepts PayPal in exchange for a variety of stolen accounts.

A PayIvy seller advertising Netflix accounts for a dollar apiece. Unlike most sites selling hacked accounts, this one takes PayPal.

Marketed and sold by a Hackforums user named “Sh1eld” as a supposed method of selling ebooks and collecting payments for affiliate marketers, PayIvy has instead become a major conduit for hawking stolen accounts and credentials for a range of top Web services.

There is no central index of items for sale via PayIvy per se, but this catalog of cached sales threads offers a fairly representative glimpse: License keys for Adobe and Microsoft software products, user account credentials in bulk for services like Hulu, Netflix, Spotify, DirecTV and HBO Go, as well as a raft of gaming accounts at Origin, Steam, PlayStation and XBox Live. Other indexes at archive.is and PayIvy’s page at Reddit reveal similar results.

It’s not clear how or why PayPal isn’t shutting down most of these merchants, but some of the sellers clearly are testing things to see how far they can push it: In just five minutes of searching online, I found several PayIvy sellers who were accepting PayPal payments via PayIvy for…wait for it…hijacked PayPal accounts! The fact that PayIvy takes PayPal as payment means that buyers can purchase hacked accounts with [stolen] credit cards — or, worse yet, stolen PayPal accounts.

Jack Christin, Jr., associate general counsel at PayPal, said while the site itself is not in violation of its Acceptable Use Policies (AUP), there have been cases where PayPal has identified accounts selling goods that violate its policy and in those cases, the company has exited those merchants from its system. Continue reading →

Last »