Krebs on Security

Microsoft: 0Day Exploit Targeting Word, Outlook

March 24, 2014

Microsoft warned today that attackers are exploiting a previously unknown security hole in Microsoft Word that can be used to foist malicious code if users open a specially crafted text file, or merely preview the message in Microsoft Outlook.

In a notice published today, Microsoft advised:

“Microsoft is aware of a vulnerability affecting supported versions of Microsoft Word. At this time, we are aware of limited, targeted attacks directed at Microsoft Word 2010. The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted [rich text format] RTF file using an affected version of Microsoft Word, or previews or opens a specially crafted RTF email message in Microsoft Outlook while using Microsoft Word as the email viewer. An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the current user.”

To be clear, Microsoft said the exploits it has seen so far attacking this vulnerability have targeted Word 2010 users, but according to Microsoft’s advisory the flaw is also present in Word 2003, 2007, 2013, Word Viewer and Office for Mac 2011.

Microsoft says it’s working on an official fix for the flaw, but that in the meantime affected users can apply a special Fix-It solution that disables the opening of RTF content in Microsoft Word. Microsoft notes that the vulnerability could be exploited via Outlook only when using Microsoft Word as the email viewer, but by default Word is the email reader in Microsoft Outlook 2007, Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013.

One way to harden your email client is to render emails in plain text. For more information on how to do that with Microsoft Outlook 2003, 2007, 2010 and 2013, see these two articles.

Sources: Credit Card Breach at California DMV

March 22, 2014

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The California Department of Motor Vehicles appears to have suffered a wide-ranging credit card data breach involving online payments for DMV-related services, according to banks in California and elsewhere that received alerts this week about compromised cards that all had been previously used online at the California DMV.

The alert, sent privately by MasterCard to financial institutions this week, did not name the breached entity but said the organization in question experienced a “card-not-present” breach — industry speak for transactions conducted online. The alert further stated that the date range of the potentially compromised transactions extended from Aug. 2, 2013 to Jan. 31, 2014, and that the data stolen included the card number, expiration date, and three-digit security code printed on the back of cards.

Five different financial institutions contacted by this publication — including two mid-sized banks in California — confirmed receipt of the MasterCard notice, and said that all of the cards MasterCard alerted them about as compromised had been used for charges bearing the notation “STATE OF CALIF DMV INT”.

A representative from MasterCard, speaking on background, confirmed sending out an alert this week. According to bank sources, Visa has not sent out a similar alert. A Visa spokesperson said “Visa cannot comment on potential third party data compromises or ongoing investigations.”

Contacted about the alerts early Friday afternoon pacific time, California DMV Spokesperson Jessica Gonzalez said the agency would investigate the matter. Reached again at 6:30 p.m. PT (well after DMV business hours on a Friday), Ms. Gonzalez said her office was working late as a result of the inquiry from KrebsOnSecurity. She said the agency was still in the process of getting a statement approved, but that it planned to email the statement later that evening. So far, however, the California DMV has yet to issue a statement or respond to further requests for comment.

Update, 6:44 p.m. ET: The CA DMV just issued the following statement, which placed blame for the incident on the organization’s external card processing firm:

“The Department of Motor Vehicles has been alerted by law enforcement authorities to a potential security issue within its credit card processing services.”

” There is no evidence at this time of a direct breach of the DMV’s computer system. However, out of an abundance of caution and in the interest of protecting the sensitive information of California drivers, the DMV has opened an investigation into any potential security breach in conjunction with state and federal law enforcement.”

“In its investigation, the department is performing a forensic review of its systems and seeking information regarding any potential breach from both the external vendor that processes the DMV’s credit card transactions and the credit card companies themselves.”

The CA DMV did not say who their card processor is, but this document from the California Department of General Services seems to suggest that the processor is Elavon, a company based in Atlanta, Ga. Representatives for Elavon could not be immediately reached for comment [hat tip to @walshman23 for finding this document].

Update, Mar. 24, 10:54 a.m.: Elavon officials could not be reached for comment. But a spokesperson for Elavon parent firm U.S. Bank told this publication that “there has been NO confirmation of a breach. We are in touch with the CA-DMV and the authorities to determine if there is an issue.”

Original story:

If indeed the California DMV has suffered a breach of their online payments system, it’s unclear how many card numbers may have been stolen. But the experience of one institution that received the MasterCard alert this week may offer some perspective.

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Sony Pictures Plans Movie About Yours Truly

March 21, 2014

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Sony Pictures is reportedly planning to make a big screen movie based at least in part on my (mis)adventures over the past few years as an independent investigative reporter writing about cybercrime. Some gumshoe I am: This took me by complete surprise.

Source: BrianKrebsFacts.com

The first inkling I had of this project came a few weeks ago when New York Times reporter Nicole Perlroth forwarded me a note she’d received from a Hollywood producer who was (and still is) apparently interested in acquiring my “life rights” for an upcoming film project. The producer reached out to The Times reporter after reading her mid-February 2014 profile of me, which chronicled the past year’s worth of reader responses from the likes of the very ne’er-do-wells I write about daily. Perlroth’s story began:

“In the last year, Eastern European cybercriminals have stolen Brian Krebs’s identity a half dozen times, brought down his website, included his name and some unpleasant epithets in their malware code, sent fecal matter and heroin to his doorstep, and called a SWAT team to his home just as his mother was arriving for dinner.”

I didn’t quite know what to make of the Hollywood inquiry at the time, and was so overwhelmed and distracted with travel and other matters that I neglected to follow up on it. Then, just yesterday, I awoke to a flurry of messages both congratulatory and incredulous on Twitter and Facebook regarding a story in The Hollywood Reporter:

“Sony has picked up the rights to the New York Times article ‘Reporting From the Web’s Underbelly,’ which focused on cyber security blogger Brian Krebs. Krebs, with his site KrebsonSecurity.com, was the first person to expose the credit card breach at Target that shook the retail world in December.”

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Are Credit Monitoring Services Worth It?

March 19, 2014

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In the wake of one data breach after another, millions of Americans each year are offered credit monitoring services that promise to shield them from identity thieves. Although these services can help true victims step out from beneath the shadow of ID theft, the sad truth is that most services offer little in the way of real preventative protection against the fastest-growing crime in America.

Experian ‘protection’ offered for Target victims.

Having purchased credit monitoring/protection services for the past 24 months — and having been the target of multiple identity theft attempts — I feel somewhat qualified to share my experience with readers. The biggest takeaway for me has been that although these services may alert you when someone opens or attempts to open a new line of credit in your name, most will do little — if anything — to block that activity. My take: If you’re being offered free monitoring, it probably can’t hurt to sign up, but you shouldn’t expect the service to stop identity thieves from ruining your credit.

Avivah Litan, a fraud analyst at Gartner Inc., said offering credit monitoring has become the de facto public response for companies that experience a data breach, whether or not that breach resulted in the loss of personal information that could lead to actual identity theft (as opposed to mere credit card fraud).

“These are basically PR vehicles for most of the breached companies who offer credit report monitoring to potentially compromised consumers,” Litan said. “Breached companies such as Target like to offer it as a good PR move even though it does absolutely nothing to compensate for the fact that a criminal stole credit card mag stripe account data. My advice for consumers has been – sure get it for free from one of the companies where your data has been compromised (and surely these days there is at least one). But don’t expect it to help much – by the time you get the alert, it’s too late, the damage has been done. It just shortens the time to detection so you may have a slightly improved chance of cleaning up the damage faster. And you can get your credit reports three times a year from the government website for free which is almost just as good so why pay for it ever?”

FRAUD ALERT BREAKDOWN

Normally, I place fraud alerts on my credit file every 90 days, as allowed by law. This step is supposed to require potential creditors to contact you and obtain your permission before opening new lines of credit in your name. You merely need to file a fraud alert (also called a “security alert”) with one of the credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian or Trans Union). Whichever one you file with is required by law to alert the other two bureaus as well.

Most consumers don’t know this (few consumers know the names of the three main credit bureaus), but there is actually a fourth credit bureau that you should alert: Innovis. This bureau follows the same rules as the big three, and you may file a fraud alert with them at this link.

Fraud alerts last 90 days, and you can renew them as often as you like (a recurring calendar entry can help with this task); consumers who can demonstrate that they are victims or are likely to be victims of identity theft can apply for a long-term fraud alert that lasts up to 7 years (a police report and other documentation may be required).

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Sally Beauty Confirms Card Data Breach

March 17, 2014

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Nationwide cosmetics and beauty retailer Sally Beauty today confirmed that hackers had broken into its networks and stolen credit card data from stores. The admission comes nearly two weeks after KrebsOnSecurity first reported that the company had likely been compromised by the same criminal hacking gang that stole 40 million credit and debit cards from Target.

The advertisement run by thieves who stole the Sally Beauty card data.

Previously, Denton, Texas-based Sally Beauty had confirmed a breach, but said it had no evidence that card data was stolen in the break-in. But in a statement issued Monday morning, the company acknowledged it has now discovered evidence that “fewer than 25,000 records containing card present (track 2) payment card data have been illegally accessed on our systems and we believe have been removed.” Their statement continues:

“As experience has shown in prior data security incidents at other companies, it is difficult to ascertain with certainty the scope of a data security breach/incident prior to the completion of a comprehensive forensic investigation. As a result, we will not speculate as to the scope or nature of the data security incident.”

“We take this criminal activity very seriously. We continue to work diligently with Verizon on this investigation and are taking necessary actions and precautions to mitigate and remediate the issues caused by this security incident. In addition, we are working with the United States Secret Service on their preliminary investigation into the matter.”

On Mar. 5, this blog reported that hackers appeared to have broken into Sally Beauty’s network and stolen at least 282,000 cards from the retailer. That conclusion stemmed from purchases made by several banks at an archipelago of fraud sites that have been selling cards stolen in the Target breach. The first new batch of non-Target cards sold by this fraud network — a group of cards marketed under the label “Desert Strike” — all were found by three different financial institutions to have been recently used at Sally Beauty stores nationwide.

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The Long Tail of ColdFusion Fail

March 17, 2014

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Earlier this month, I published a story about a criminal hacking gang using Adobe ColdFusion vulnerabilities to build a botnet of hacked e-commerce sites that were milked for customer credit card data. Today’s post examines the impact that this botnet has had on several businesses, as well as the important and costly lessons these companies learned from the intrusions.

Last Tuesday’s story looked at two victims; the jam and jelly maker Smucker’s, and SecurePay, a credit card processor based in Georgia. Most of the companies contacted for this story did not respond to requests for comment. The few business listed that did respond had remarkably similar stories to tell about the ordeal of trying to keep their businesses up and running in the face of such intrusions. Each of them learned important lessons that any small online business would be wise to heed going forward.

The two companies that agreed to talk with me were both lighting firms, and both first learned of their site compromises after the credit card firm Discover alerted their card processors to a pattern of fraudulent activity on cards that were recently used at the stores.

Elightbulbs.com, a Maple Grove, Minn. based company that sells lighting products, was among those listed in the ColdFusion botnet panel. Elightbulbs.com Vice President Paul McLellan said he first learned of the breach on Nov. 7, 2013 from his company’s processor — Heartland Payment Systems.

McLellan said the unpatched ColdFusion vulnerabilities on the company’s site was certainly a glaring oversight. But he said he’s frustrated that his company was paying a third-party security compliance firm upwards of $6,000 a year to test Elightbulbs.com for vulnerabilities and that the firm also missed the ColdFusion flaws.

“Shortly before we were told by Heartland, we paid $6,000 a year for a company to brutalize our server, for protection and peace of mind,” McLellan said. “Turns out this flaw had existed for two years and they never saw it.

McLellan said the company received a visit from the FBI last year, and the agent said the group responsible for hitting Elightbulbs had compromised much more high-profile targets.

“The FBI investigator said, ‘Hey, don’t beat yourself up. We’ve got credit card processors and government institutions that run ColdFusion who were breached, this is small potatoes’,” McLellan said. “That was a small consolation.”

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Blogs of War: Don’t Be Cannon Fodder

March 13, 2014

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On Wednesday, KrebsOnSecurity was hit with a fairly large attack which leveraged a feature in more than 42,000 blogs running the popular WordPress content management system (this blog runs on WordPress). This post is an effort to spread the word to other WordPress users to ensure their blogs aren’t used in attacks going forward.

At issue is the “pingback” function, a feature built into WordPress and plenty of other CMS tools that is designed to notify (or ping) a site that you linked to their content. Unfortunately, like most things useful on the Web, the parasites and lowlifes of the world are turning pingbacks into a feature to be disabled, lest it be used to attack others.

And that is exactly what’s going on. Earlier this week, Web site security firm Sucuri Security warned that it has seen attackers abusing the pingback function built into more than 160,000 WordPress blogs to launch crippling attacks against other sites.

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NoMoreRack.com Probes Possible Card Breach

March 12, 2014

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For the second time since Aug. 2013, online retailer NoMoreRack.com has hired a computer forensics team after being notified by Discover about a potential breach of customer card data, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

Over the past several weeks, a number of banks have shared information with this reporter indicating that they are seeing fraud on cards that were all recently used by nomorerack.com customers. Turns out, nomorerack.com has heard this as well, and for the second time in the last seven months has called in outside investigators to check for signs of a digital break-in.

Vishal Agarwal, director of business development for the New York City-based online retailer, said the company was first approached by Discover Card back in August 2013, when the card association said it had isolated nomorerack.com as a likely point-of-compromise.

“They requested then that we go through a forensics audit, and we did that late October by engaging with Trustwave,” Agarwal said. “Trustwave came out with a report at end of October saying there was no clear cut evidence that our systems had been compromised. There were a few minor bugs reported, but not conclusive evidence of anything that caused a leakage in our systems.”

Then, just last month, NoMoreRack heard once again from Discover, which said that between Nov. 1, 2013 and Jan. 15, 2014, the company had determined there were more incidents of fraud tied to cards that were all used at the company’s online store.

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Adobe, Microsoft Push Security Updates

March 11, 2014

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Adobe and Microsoft today each released software updates to fix serious security flaws in their products. Adobe pushed an update that plugs a pair of holes in its Flash Player software. Microsoft issued five updates, including one that addresses a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer that attackers have been exploiting of late.

Microsoft’s five bulletins address 23 distinct security weaknesses in Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer and Silverlight. The Internet Explorer patch is rated critical for virtually all supported versions of IE, and plugs at least 18 security holes, including a severe weakness in IE 9 and 10 that is already being exploited in targeted attacks.

Microsoft notes that the exploits targeting the IE bug seen so far appear to perform a check for the presence of Microsoft’s Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET); according to Microsoft, the exploits fail to proceed if EMET is detected. I’ve recommended EMET on several occasions, and would encourage any Windows users who haven’t yet deployed this tool to spend a few minutes reading this post and consider taking advantage of it to further harden their systems. The latest version — 4.1 — is available at this link and requires Microsoft’s .NET Framework 4 platform. For those of you who don’t mind beta-testing software, Microsoft has released a preview version of the next generation of EMET — EMET 5.0 Technical Preview.

This month’s updates include a fix for another dangerous bug — deep within the operating system on just about every major version of Windows — that also was publicly disclosed prior to today’s patches. Microsoft’s Technet Blog has more details on these and other bulletins released today.

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KrebsOnSecurity.com Wins Awards

March 11, 2014

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In February, this blog and its author were recognized for three separate awards. At the RSA Security conference in San Francisco, KrebsOnSecurity.com was voted the “Most Educational Security Blog” at the Security Bloggers Meetup (for the second year in a row). The judges at the meetup also gave KrebsOnSecurity.com the honor of the “Best Blog Post of the Year,” for my reporting on the Adobe breach.

Separately, I am honored to have received the Mary Litynsky Award for Protecting the Online Community, a lifetime achievement recognition given by the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group. M3AAWG’s announcement about the award is here. Past recipients of this award are listed here.

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