Krebs on Security

‘Operation Tovar’ Targets ‘Gameover’ ZeuS Botnet, CryptoLocker Scourge

June 2, 2014

The U.S. Justice Department is expected to announce today an international law enforcement operation to seize control over the Gameover ZeuS botnet, a sprawling network of hacked Microsoft Windows computers that currently infects an estimated 500,000 to 1 million compromised systems globally. Experts say PCs infected with Gameover are being harvested for sensitive financial and personal data, and rented out to an elite cadre of hackers for use in online extortion attacks, spam and other illicit moneymaking schemes.

This graphic, from 2012, shows the decentralized nature of P2P network connectivity of 23,196 PCs infected with Gameover. Image: Dell SecureWorks

The sneak attack on Gameover, dubbed “Operation Tovar,” began late last week and is a collaborative effort by investigators at the FBI, Europol, and the UK’s National Crime Agency; security firms CrowdStrike, Dell SecureWorks, Symantec, Trend Micro and McAfee; and academic researchers at VU University Amsterdam and Saarland University in Germany. News of the action first came to light in a blog post published briefly on Friday by McAfee, but that post was removed a few hours after it went online.

Gameover is based on code from the ZeuS Trojan, an infamous family of malware that has been used in countless online banking heists. Unlike ZeuS — which was sold as a botnet creation kit to anyone who had a few thousand dollars in virtual currency to spend — Gameover ZeuS has since October 2011 been controlled and maintained by a core group of hackers from Russia and Ukraine.

Those individuals are believed to have used the botnet in high-dollar corporate account takeovers that frequently were punctuated by massive distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks intended to distract victims from immediately noticing the thefts. According to the Justice Department, Gameover has been implicated in the theft of more than $100 million in account takeovers.

The curators of Gameover also have reportedly loaned out sections of their botnet to vetted third-parties who have used them for a variety of purposes. One of the most popular uses of Gameover has been as a platform for seeding infected systems with CryptoLocker, a nasty strain of malware that locks your most precious files with strong encryption until you pay a ransom demand.

According to a 2012 research paper published by Dell SecureWorks, the Gameover Trojan is principally spread via Cutwail, one of the world’s largest and most notorious spam botnets (for more on Cutwail and its origins and authors, see this post). These junk emails typically spoof trusted brands, including shipping and phone companies, online retailers, social networking sites and financial institutions. The email lures bearing Gameover often come in the form of an invoice, an order confirmation, or a warning about an unpaid bill (usually with a large balance due to increase the likelihood that a victim will click the link). The links in the email have been replaced with those of compromised sites that will silently probe the visitor’s browser for outdated plugins that can be leveraged to install malware.

It will be interesting to hear how the authorities and security researchers involved in this effort managed to gain control over the Gameover botnet, which uses an advanced peer-to-peer (P2P) mechanism to control and update the bot-infected systems. Continue reading →

Thieves Planted Malware to Hack ATMs

May 30, 2014

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A recent ATM skimming attack in which thieves used a specialized device to physically insert malicious software into a cash machine may be a harbinger of more sophisticated scams to come.

Two men arrested in Macau for allegedly planting malware on local ATMs (shown with equipment reportedly seized from their hotel room).

Authorities in Macau — a Chinese territory approximately 40 miles west of Hong Kong — this week announced the arrest of two Ukrainian men accused of participating in a skimming ring that stole approximately $100,000 from at least seven ATMs. Local police said the men used a device that was connected to a small laptop, and inserted the device into the card acceptance slot on the ATMs.

Armed with this toolset, the authorities said, the men were able to install malware capable of siphoning the customer’s card data and PINs. The device appears to be a rigid green circuit board that is approximately four or five times the length of an ATM card.

According to local press reports (and supplemented by an interview with an employee at one of the local banks who asked not to be named), the insertion of the circuit board caused the software running on the ATMs to crash, temporarily leaving the cash machine with a black, empty screen. The thieves would then remove the device. Soon after, the machine would restart, and begin recording the card and PINs entered by customers who used the compromised machines.

The Macau government alleges that the accused would return a few days after infecting the ATMs to collect the stolen card numbers and PINs. To do this, the thieves would reinsert the specialized chip card to retrieve the purloined data, and then a separate chip card to destroy evidence of the malware. Here’s a look at the devices that Macau authorities say the accused used to insert the malware into ATMs (I’m working on getting clearer photos of this hardware):

Five of the devices Macau police say the thieves used to insert the malware and retrieve stolen data.

Continue reading →

True Goodbye: ‘Using TrueCrypt Is Not Secure’

May 29, 2014

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The anonymous developers responsible for building and maintaining the free whole-disk encryption suite TrueCrypt apparently threw in the towel this week, shuttering the TrueCrypt site and warning users that the product is no longer secure now that Microsoft has ended support for Windows XP.

Sometime in the last 24 hours, truecrypt.org began forwarding visitors to the program’s home page on sourceforge.net, a Web-based source code repository. That page includes instructions for helping Windows users transition drives protected by TrueCrypt over to BitLocker, the proprietary disk encryption program that ships with every Windows version (Ultimate/Enterprise ~~or Pro~~) since Vista. The page also includes this ominous warning:

“WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues”

“This page exists only to help migrate existing data encrypted by TrueCrypt.”

“The development of TrueCrypt was ended in 5/2014 after Microsoft terminated support of Windows XP. Windows 8/7/Vista and later offer integrated support for encrypted disks and virtual disk images. Such integrated support is also available on other platforms (click here for more information). You should migrate any data encrypted by TrueCrypt to encrypted disks or virtual disk images supported on your platform.”

Doubters soon questioned whether the redirect was a hoax or the result of the TrueCrypt site being hacked. But a cursory review of the site’s historic hosting, WHOIS and DNS records shows no substantive changes recently.

What’s more, the last version of TrueCrypt uploaded to the site on May 27 (still available at this link) shows that the key used to sign the executable installer file is the same one that was used to sign the program back in January 2014 (hat tip to @runasand and @pyllyukko). Taken together, these two facts suggest that the message is legitimate, and that TrueCrypt is officially being retired.

That was the same conclusion reached by Matthew Green, a cryptographer and research professor at the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute and a longtime skeptic of TrueCrypt — which has been developed for the past 10 years by a team of anonymous coders who appear to have worked diligently to keep their identities hidden.

“I think the TrueCrypt team did this,” Green said in a phone interview. “They decided to quit and this is their signature way of doing it.”

Green last year helped spearhead dual crowdfunding efforts to raise money for a full-scale, professional security audit of the software. That effort ended up pulling in more than $70,000 (after counting the numerous Bitcoin donations) — far exceeding the campaign’s goal and demonstrating strong interest and support from the user community. Earlier this year, security firm iSEC Partners completed the first component of the code review: an analysis of TrueCrypt’s bootloader (PDF). Continue reading →

Backdoor in Call Monitoring, Surveillance Gear

May 28, 2014

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If your company’s core business is making software designed to help first responders and police record and intercept phone calls, it’s probably a good idea to ensure the product isn’t so full of security holes that it allows trivial access by unauthorized users. Unfortunately, even companies working in this sensitive space fall victim to the classic blunder that eventually turns most software into Swiss Cheese: Trying to bolt on security only after the product has shipped.

Few companies excel at showcasing such failures as SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab, a software testing firm based in Vienna, Austria. In a post last year called Security Vendors: Do No Harm, Heal Thyself, I wrote about Symantec quietly fixing serious vulnerabilities that SEC Consult found in its Symantec Web Gateway, a popular line of security appliances designed to help “protect organizations against multiple types of Web-borne malware.” Prior to that, this blog showcased the company’s research on backdoors it discovered in security hardware and software sold by Barracuda Networks.

Today’s post looks at backdoors and other serious vulnerabilities SEC Consult found in products made by NICE Systems, an Israeli software firm that sells a variety of call recording solutions for law enforcement, public safety organizations and small businesses. According to SEC Consult, NICE’s Recording eXpress — a call recording suite designed for small and medium-sized public safety organizations (PDF) — contains an undocumented backdoor account that provides administrator-level access to the product.

“Attackers are able to completely compromise the voice recording / surveillance solution as they can gain access to the system and database level and listen to recorded calls without prior authentication,” wrote Johannes Greil and Stefan Viehböck of SEC Consult. “Furthermore, attackers would be able to use the voice recording server as a jumphost for further attacks of the internal voice VLAN, depending on the network setup.” Continue reading →

Complexity as the Enemy of Security

May 27, 2014

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Late last month, hackers allied with the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) compromised the Web site for the RSA Conference, the world’s largest computer security gathering. The attack, while unremarkable in many ways, illustrates the continued success of phishing attacks that spoof top executives within targeted organizations. It’s also a textbook example of how third-party content providers can be leveraged to break into high-profile Web sites.

A message left for Ira Winkler by the SEA.

The hack of rsaconference.com happened just hours after conference organizers posted several presentation videos from the February RSA Conference sessions, including one by noted security expert Ira Winkler that belittled the SEA’s hacking skills and labeled them “the cockroaches of the Internet.”

Shortly after that video went live, people browsing rsaconference.com with JavaScript enabled in their browser would have seen the homepage for the conference site replaced with a message from the SEA to Winkler stating, “If there is a cockroach in the internet it would definitely be you”.

The attackers were able to serve the message by exploiting a trust relationship that the RSA conference site had with a third-party hosting provider. The conference site uses a Web analytics package called “Lucky Orange,” which keeps track of how visitors use and browse the site. That package contained a Javascript function that called home to a stats page on a server hosted by codero.com, a hosting firm based in Austin, Texas.

According to Codero CEO Emil Sayegh, the attackers spoofed several messages from Codero executives and sent them to company employees. The messages led to a link that prompted the recipients to enter their account credentials, and someone within the organization who had the ability to change the domain name system (DNS) records for Codero fell for the ruse.

Sayegh said the attackers followed the script laid out in Winkler’s talk, almost to the letter.

“Go look at minute 16 from his talk,” Sayegh said. “It’s phenomenal. That’s exactly what they did.”

Continue reading →

Expert: Fake eBay Customer List is Bitcoin Bait

May 22, 2014

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In the wake of eBay’s disclosure that a breach may have exposed the personal data on tens of millions of users, several readers have written in to point out an advertisement that is offering to sell the full leaked user database for 1.4 bitcoins (roughly USD $772 at today’s exchange rates). The ad has even prompted some media outlets to pile on that the stolen eBay data is now for sale. But a cursory examination of the information suggests that it is almost certainly little more than a bid to separate the unwary from their funds.

The advertisement, posted on Pastebin here, promises a “full ebay user database dump with 145, 312, 663 unique records”, for sale to anyone who sends 1.453 bitcoins to a specific bitcoin wallet. The ad includes a link to a supposed “sample dump” of some 12,663 users from the Asia-Pacific region.

There is a surprisingly simple method for determining the validity of these types of offers. Most Web-based businesses allow one user or customer account per email address, and eBay is no exception here. I took a random sampling of five email addresses from the 12,663 users in that file, and tried registering new accounts with them. The outcome? Success on all five.

For a sanity check on my results, I reached out to Allison Nixon, a threat researcher with Deloitte & Touche LLP (and one of the best sources I’ve met for vetting and debunking these supposed “leaks”). Nixon did the same, and came away with identical results.

“A lot of this is inference — finding out whether an account exists,” Nixon said. “A lot of the time if they generate fake leaks, they’re not doing it based on data from real accounts, because if they did then they might as well hack the real web site.” Continue reading →

eBay Urges Password Changes After Breach

May 21, 2014

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eBay is asking users to pick new passwords following a data breach earlier this year that exposed the personal information of an untold number of the auction giant’s 145 million customers.

In a blog post published this morning, eBay said it had “no evidence of the compromise resulting in unauthorized activity for eBay users, and no evidence of any unauthorized access to financial or credit card information, which is stored separately in encrypted formats. However, changing passwords is a best practice and will help enhance security for eBay users.”

Assisted by federal investigators, eBay determined that the intrusion happened in late February and early march, after a “small number of employee log-in credentials” that allowed attackers access to eBay’s corporate network were compromised. The company said the information compromised included eBay customers’ name, encrypted password, email address, physical address, phone number and date of birth. eBay also said it has no evidence of unauthorized access or compromises to personal or financial information for PayPal users.

The company said it will begin pushing out emails today asking customers to change their passwords. eBay has not said what type of encryption it used to protect customer passwords, but it previous breaches are any indication, the attackers are probably hard at work trying to crack them. Continue reading →

Why You Should Ditch Adobe Shockwave

May 21, 2014

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This author has long advised computer users who have Adobe‘s Shockwave Player installed to junk the product, mainly on the basis that few sites actually require the browser plugin, and because it’s yet another plugin that requires constant updating. But I was positively shocked this week to learn that this software introduces a far more pernicious problem: Turns out, it bundles a component of Adobe Flash that is more than 15 months behind on security updates, and which can be used to backdoor virtually any computer running it.

My re-education on this topic comes courtesy of Will Dormann, a computer security expert who writes threat advisories for Carnegie Mellon University’s CERT. In a recent post on the release of the latest bundle of security updates for Adobe’s Flash player, Dormann commented that Shockwave actually provides its own version of the Flash runtime, and that the latest Shockwave version released by Adobe has none of the recent Flash fixes.

Worse yet, Dormann said, the current version of Shockwave for both Windows and Mac systems lacks any of the Flash security fixes released since January 2013. By my count, Adobe has issued nearly 20 separate security updates for Flash since then, including fixes for several dangerous zero-day vulnerabilities.

“Flash updates can come frequently, but Shockwave not so much,” Dormann said. “So architecturally, it’s just flawed to provide its own Flash.”

Dormann said he initially alerted the public to this gaping security hole in 2012 via this advisory, but that he first told Adobe about this lackluster update process back in 2010. Continue reading →

‘Blackshades’ Trojan Users Had It Coming

May 19, 2014

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The U.S. Justice Department today announced a series of actions against more than 100 people accused of purchasing and using “Blackshades,” a password-stealing Trojan horse program designed to infect computers throughout the world to spy on victims through their web cameras, steal files and account information, and log victims’ key strokes. While any effort that discourages the use of point-and-click tools for ill-gotten gains is a welcome development, the most remarkable aspect of this crackdown is that those who were targeted in this operation lacked any clue that it was forthcoming.

The Blackshades user forum.

To be sure, Blackshades is an effective and easy-to-use tool for remotely compromising and spying on your targets. Early on in its development, researchers at CitzenLab discovered that Blackshades was being used to spy on activists seeking to overthrow the regime in Syria.

The product was sold via well-traveled and fairly open hacker forums, and even included an active user forum where customers could get help configuring and wielding the powerful surveillance tool. Although in recent years a license to Blackshades sold for several hundred Euros, early versions of the product were sold via PayPal for just USD $40.

In short, Blackshades was a tool created and marketed principally for buyers who wouldn’t know how to hack their way out of a paper bag. From the Justice Department’s press release today:

“After purchasing a copy of the RAT, a user had to install the RAT on a victim’s computer – i.e., “infect” a victim’s computer. The infection of a victim’s computer could be accomplished in several ways, including by tricking victims into clicking on malicious links or by hiring others to install the RAT on victims’ computers.

The RAT contained tools known as ‘spreaders’ that helped users of the RAT maximize the number of infections. The spreader tools generally worked by using computers that had already been infected to help spread the RAT further to other computers. For instance, in order to lure additional victims to click on malicious links that would install the RAT on their computers, the RAT allowed cybercriminals to send those malicious links to others via the initial victim’s social media service, making it appear as if the message had come from the initial victim.”

News that the FBI and other national law enforcement organizations had begun rounding up Blackshades customers started surfacing online last week, when multiple denizens of the noob-friendly hacker forum Hackforums[dot]net began posting firsthand experiences of receiving a visit from local authorities related to their prior alleged Blackshades use. See the image gallery at the end of this post for a glimpse into the angst that accompanied that development.

While there is a certain amount of schadenfreude in today’s action, the truth is that any longtime Blackshades customer who didn’t know this day would be coming should turn in his hacker card immediately. In June 2012, the Justice Department announced a series of indictments against at least two dozen individuals who had taken the bait and signed up to be active members of “Carderprofit,” a fraud forum that was created and maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Among those arrested in the CarderProfit sting was Michael Hogue, the alleged co-creator of Blackshades. That so many of the customers of this product are teenagers who wouldn’t know a command line prompt from a hole in the ground is evident by the large number of users who vented their outrage over their arrests and/or visits by the local authorities on Hackforums, which by the way was the genesis of the CarderProfit sting from Day One.

In June 2010, Hackforums administrator Jesse Labrocca — a.k.a. “Omniscient” — posted a message to all users of the forum, notifying them that the forum would no longer tolerate the posting of messages about ways to buy and use the ZeuS Trojan, a far more sophisticated remote-access Trojan that is heavily used by cybercriminals worldwide and has been implicated in the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars from small- to mid-sized businesses worldwide.

Hackforums admin Jesse "Omniscient" LaBrocca urging users to register at a new forum -- Carderprofit.eu -- a sting Web site set up by the FBI.

Hackforums admin Jesse “Omniscient” LaBrocca urging users to register at a new forum — Carderprofit.cc — a sting Web site set up by the FBI.

Continue reading →

Experian Breach Tied to NY-NJ ID Theft Ring

May 19, 2014

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Last year, a top official from big-three credit bureau Experian told Congress that the firm was not aware of any consumers that had been harmed by an incident in which a business unit of Experian sold consumer records directly to an online identity theft service for nearly 10 months. Today’s post presents evidence that among the ID theft service’s clients was an identity theft and credit card fraud ring of at least 32 people who were arrested last year for allegedly using the information to steal millions from more than 1,000 victims across the country.

Ngo’s ID theft service superget.info

On March 31, 2014, 26-year-old Idris Soyemi of Brooklyn, New York pleaded guilty in a New Hampshire court to one count of wire fraud. In Soyemi’s guilty plea hearing, the prosecutor laid out how Soyemi on several occasions bought Social Security numbers, dates of birth and other personal information from an online identity theft service run by guy named Hieu Minh Ngo.

Ngo is a Vietnamese national who for several years ran an online identity theft service called superget.info. Shortly after my 2011 initial story about his service, Ngo tauntingly renamed his site to findget.me. The Secret Service took him up on that challenge, and succeeded in luring him out of Vietnam into Guam, where he was arrested and brought to New Hampshire for trial. He pleaded guilty earlier this year to running the ID theft service, and the government has been working on rounding up his customers ever since.

According to Soyemi’s guilty plea transcript (PDF), U.S. Secret Service agents seized control over Ngo’s email account in February 2013 and used it to interact with his customers. Posing as Ngo, the undercover agent reached out to Soyemi and wrote, “I’m back. You doing tax refund or credit card?”, asking Soyemi whether he was buying personal data on consumers to set up new lines of credit in their names or to file fraudulent tax refund requests with the IRS — a rapidly growing form of cybercrime. Soyemi responded, “I do credit cards but can you tell me about tax refund?” (if you missed last month’s story about an Ohio man who’s accused of using Ngo’s service to file at least 150 fraudulent tax refund requests with the IRS, check that out here).

Interestingly, Soyemi was part of a huge network of nearly three dozen people who were rounded up last year and charged with taking out new credit cards in victims’ names and then using the cards to make millions of dollars in retail purchases that were then fenced on the black market. From an April 2013 story in the Jersey Journal:

“The leaders of the group, authorities say, purchased the identities of unsuspecting victims from online brokers, who got the information from computer hackers across the United States….”

“In a process known as ‘punching,’ electronic account information from the cards’ magnetic strips would be transferred onto counterfeit cards, which were provided to “strikers” who conducted the purchases at retailers all over the Eastern Seaboard, authorities say…”

….”The investigation has identified nearly 1,000 victims across the country and millions of dollars in phony transactions, authorities say.”

“Authorities say the suspects spent the proceeds on luxury cars, high-end jewelry and other lavish expenses. Some of the money was additionally sent to accounts in Nigeria, authorities say.”

Further tying this group to Ngo’s service is a four-count indictment (PDF) lodged against another man named in that identity theft ring roundup by the New Jersey prosecutor’s office: Oluwaseun Adekoya, 25, of Sewaren, NJ. Adekoya’s indictment makes numerous references to his alleged purchase of hundreds of consumer records from an online identity theft service that was taken over by U.S. Secret Service agents in February 2013 (recall that in Soyemi’s guilty plea hearing government prosecutors said that in that same month undercover Secret Service agents assumed control of the email account tied to Ngo’s identity theft service). Continue reading →

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