Krebs on Security

Senator Demands More Info From Experian

October 24, 2013

In the wake of revelations that credit bureau Experian sold consumer data to the proprietors of an underground identity theft service, a powerful U.S. senator is calling on the company to divulge more information on the extent of the potential damage to consumers.

West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat who chairs the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, on Wednesday sent a letter (PDF) to Experian demanding additional details about the security breach. Specifically, Rockefeller asked for responses to questions about Experian’s vetting process for its customers and current practices for sharing consumer data. The senator also urged Experian to fully respond to his related previous inquiries regarding Experian’s customers, its oversight of its disclosure to third parties, and Experian’s data sources.

“The committee’s investigation has focused to date on how companies including Experian collect and sell consumer information for marketing purposes, while the information Experian reportedly sold to identity thieves – such as Social Security numbers and banking information – appears to be data Experian collects and sells for risk assessment activities,” Sen. Rockefeller wrote in the letter to Experian President Donald Robert. “However, if these recent news accounts are accurate, they raise serious questions about whether Experian as a company has appropriate practices in place for vetting its customers and sharing sensitive consumer data with them, regardless of the particular line of business.”

The letter is a follow-up to an investigation that Sen. Rockefeller launched in October 2012 regarding several data brokers — including Experian — to understand how the companies collect, store, and share personal consumer data. According to the committee, Experian is one of several companies that has refused to fully respond to Rockefeller’s request for information – which Rockefeller discussed publicly in this letter.

That 2012 letter was sent to the three major credit bureaus, including Experian, Equifax, TransUnion. Rockefeller also queried Reed Elsevier, the parent company of data aggregator LexisNexis. Last month, KrebsOnSecurity broke a story showing that LexisNexis was among three other data brokers that had been hacked by a cybercriminal gang which operated a competing underground identity theft service — ssndob[dot]ms.

In a statement provided to The New York Times, Experian spokesman Gerry Tschopp said: “We have responded — and will continue to respond – in a very transparent manner to Senator Rockefeller.”

According to The Times, Sen. Rockefeller last month widened his probe, asking a dozen popular Web sites to provide information on their information-sharing practices with data brokers. The sites included in that inquiry were About.com, Babycenter.com, Bankrate.com, Health.com, Investopedia.com, Mensfitness.com and Self.com.

“While some consumers may not object to having their information categorized and used for marketing,” the senator wrote, “before they share personal information, it is important that they know it may be used for purposes beyond those for which they originally provided it.”

Experian Sold Consumer Data to ID Theft Service

October 20, 2013

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An identity theft service that sold Social Security and drivers license numbers — as well as bank account and credit card data on millions of Americans — purchased much of its data from Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus, according to a lengthy investigation by KrebsOnSecurity.

superget.info home page

In November 2011, this publication ran a story about an underground service called Superget.info, a fraudster-friendly site that marketed the ability to look up full Social Security numbers, birthdays, drivers license records and financial information on millions of Americans. Registration was free, and accounts were funded via WebMoney and other virtual currencies that are popular in the cybercriminal underground.

Each SSN search on Superget.info returned consumer records that were marked with a set of varying and mysterious two- and three-letter “sourceid:” identifiers, including “TH,” “MV,” and “NCO,” among others. I asked readers who may have a clue about the meaning or source of those abbreviations to contact me. In the weeks following that post, I heard from many readers who had guesses and ideas, but none who seemed to have conclusive information.

That changed in the past week. An individual who read a story about the operators of a similar ID theft service online having broken into the networks of LexisNexis and other major data brokers wrote to say that he’d gone back and reviewed my previous stories on this topic, and that he’d identified the source of the data being resold by Superget.info. The reader said the abbreviations matched data sets produced by Columbus, Ohio-based USInfoSearch.com.

Contacted about the reader’s claim, U.S. Info Search CEO Marc Martin said the data sold by the ID theft service was not obtained directly through his company, but rather via Court Ventures, a third-party company with which US Info Search had previously struck an information sharing agreement. Martin said that several years ago US Info Search and CourtVentures each agreed to grant the other company complete access to its stores of information on US consumers.

Founded in 2001, Court Ventures described itself as a firm that “aggregates, repackages and distributes public record data, obtained from over 1,400 state and county sources.” Cached, historic copies of courtventures.com are available through archive.org.

THE ROLE OF EXPERIAN

In March 2012, Court Ventures was purchased by Costa Mesa, Calif.-based Experian, one of the three major consumer credit bureaus. According to Martin, the proprietors of Superget.info had gained access to Experian’s databases by posing as a U.S.-based private investigator. In reality, Martin said, the individuals apparently responsible for running Superget.info were based in Vietnam.

Martin said he first learned of the ID theft service after hearing from a U.S. Secret Service agent who called and said the law enforcement agency was investigating Experian and had obtained a grand jury subpoena against the company.

The “sourceid” abbreviations pointed toward Court Ventures.

While the private investigator ruse may have gotten the fraudsters past Experian and/or CourtVentures’ screening process, according to Martin there were other signs that should have alerted Experian to potential fraud associated with the account. For example, Martin said the Secret Service told him that the alleged proprietor of Superget.info had paid Experian for his monthly data access charges using wire transfers sent from Singapore.

“The issue in my mind was the fact that this went on for almost a year after Experian did their due diligence and purchased” Court Ventures, Martin said. “Why didn’t they question cash wires coming in every month? Experian portrays themselves as the databreach experts, and they sell identity theft protection services. How this could go on without them detecting it I don’t know. Our agreement with them was that our information was to be used for fraud prevention and ID verification, and was only to be sold to licensed and credentialed U.S. businesses, not to someone overseas.”

Experian declined multiple requests for an interview. But in a written statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity, Experian acknowledged the broad outlines of Martin’s story and said it had worked with the Secret Service to bring a Vietnamese national to justice in connection with the online ID theft service. Their statement is as follows:

“Experian acquired Court Ventures in March, 2012 because of its national public records database. After the acquisition, the US Secret Service notified Experian that Court Ventures had been and was continuing to resell data from US Info Search to a third party possibly engaged in illegal activity. Following notice by the US Secret Service, Experian discontinued reselling US Info Search data and worked closely and in full cooperation with law enforcement to bring Vietnamese national Hieu Minh Ngo, the alleged perpetrator, to justice. Experian’s credit files were not accessed. Because of the ongoing federal investigation, we are not free to say anything further at this time.”

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Breach at PR Newswire Tied to Adobe Hack

October 16, 2013

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Earlier this year, hackers broke into the networks of marketing and press release distribution service PR Newswire, making off with usernames and encrypted passwords that customers use to access the company’s service and upload news releases, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

The stolen data was found on the same Internet servers that housed huge troves of source code recently stolen from Adobe Systems. Inc., suggesting the same attackers may have been responsible for both breaches. Date and time stamps on the stolen files indicate that breach at PR Newswire occurred on or after March 8, 2013.

Presented with a copy of the purloined data, PR Newswire confirmed ownership of the information. The company said that later today it will begin the process of alerting affected customers and asking them to change their account passwords. The company says its investigation is ongoing, but that the data appears to be related to a subset of its customers from Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India.

In a statement being sent to customers today, PR Newswire said it is “conducting an extensive investigation and have notified appropriate law enforcement authorities. Based on our preliminary review, we believe customer payment data were not compromised.”

As with the investigation into the Adobe breach, this author had significant help from Alex Holden, chief information security officer at Hold Security LLC. While there are no indications that the attackers did anything malicious with the PR Newswire data, Holden said the bad guys in this case could have used it to wreak financial havoc. The company’s customer list reads like a Who’s Who of PR firms and Fortune 1000 firms.

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Critical Java Update Plugs 51 Security Holes

October 16, 2013

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Oracle has released a critical security update that fixes at least 51 security vulnerabilities in its Java software. Patches are available for Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows versions of the software.

This update brings Java 7 to Update 45, and addresses a whole mess of security flaws. Oracle says that all but one of the 51 vulnerabilities fixed in this update may be remotely exploitable without authentication.

Updates are available from Java.com and the Java Control Panel. Apple has issued an update to its supported version of Java, which brings Java on the Mac to 1.6.0_65 for OS X 10.6.8 or later. As CNet notes, Apple is using this update to further encourage users to switch to Oracle’s Java runtime, especially for Web-based Java services.

“When this latest update is installed, according to Apple’s documentation it will remove the Apple-supplied Java plugin, and result in a ‘Missing plug-in’ section of a Web page that tries to run a Java applet,” CNet’s Topher Kessler writes. “If you click on the missing plug-in message, the system will direct you to Oracle’s Java Web site so you can download the latest version of Java 7, which will not only support the latest features in the Java runtime, but also include the latest bug and vulnerability fixes. Apple’s last supported version of Java is Java SE 6, and since handing the reigns over to Oracle, has progressively stepped back from supporting the runtime in OS X.”

Broken record alert: If you really need and use Java for specific Web sites or applications, take a few minutes to update this software. Oracle likes to remind everyone that 3 billion devices worldwide run Java, and that 89 percent of desktops run some form of Java (that roughly matches what vulnerability management firm Secunia found last year). But that huge install base — combined with a hit parade of security bugs and a component that plugs straight into the Web browser — makes Java software a perennial favorite target of malware and malcontents alike.

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Thousands of Sites Hacked Via vBulletin Hole

October 14, 2013

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Attackers appear to have compromised tens of thousands of Web sites using a security weakness in sites powered by the forum software vBulletin, security experts warn.

Attack tool for exploiting vulnerable vBulletin forums.

In a blog post in late August, vBulletin maker ~~Jelsoft~~ Internet Brands Inc. warned users that failing to remove the “/install” and “/core/install” directories on sites running 4.x and 5.x versions of the forum software could render them easily hackable. But apparently many vBulletin-based sites didn’t get that memo: According to Web site security firm Imperva, more than 35,000 sites were recently hacked via this vulnerability.

The security weakness lets attackers quickly discover which forums are vulnerable, and then use automated, open-source exploit tools to add administrator accounts to vulnerable sites.

Imperva said the compromised sites appear to have been hacked by one of two sets of exploit tools that have been released publicly online. The first was apparently used in a mass Website defacement campaign. A Google search for forums with the the rather conspicuously-named administrator account added in that attack (“Th3H4ck”) shows that many of the hack sites also are hosting malware. Among the sites apparently compromised is a support forum for the National Runaway Safeline and a site selling vBulletin add-ons.

The second tool does effectively the same thing, except with a bit more stealth: The administrator account that gets added to hacked forums is more innocuously named “supportvb”. Here’s a Google search that offers a rough idea of the forums compromised with this exploit, which was apparently authored or at least publicly released by this guy.

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Nordstrom Finds Cash Register Skimmers

October 10, 2013

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Scam artists who deploy credit and debit card skimmers most often target ATMs, yet thieves can also use inexpensive, store-bought skimming devices to compromise modern-day cash registers. Just this past weekend, for instance, department store chain Nordstrom said it found a half-dozen of these skimmers affixed to registers at a store in Florida.

The fraud devices in this case resemble small keyloggers that are sold by dozens of stores for approximately $30 to $40 apiece. These hardware keyloggers are essentially Ps/2 connectors that are about an inch in length. The tiny data storage devices are usually purple in color to match the color-coded standard for keyboards, and are made to be inserted between the male end of a PS/2 keyboard connector and the female receptor on a computer.

Skimming devices found on six registers at a Nordstrom department store in Florida last week.

According to an alert circulated by the police department in Aventura, Florida, on the afternoon of Saturday, Oct. 5, 2013, three male subjects were captured on closed-circuit cameras at Nordstrom tampering with registers in the store. Authorities there say the footage showed two of the men worked to distract sales staff, while the third took pictures of the register and removed the rear access panel to the register and took additional photographs.

Several hours later, three different males returned to the store and performed the same routine: Two of them again distracted sales staff while the third male removed the back panel to the register and installed the above pictured device. The Aventura Police Department said Nordstrom located a total of six devices attached to their registers.

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‘Bulletproof’ Hoster Santrex Calls It Quits

October 9, 2013

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Santrex, a Web hosting provider that has courted cybercrime forums and created a haven for a nest of malicious Web sites, announced last week that it is shutting its doors for good, citing “internal network issues and recent downtime.”

Google’s take on the world’s most densely malicious networks over the past 12 months.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer company. Rarely has a Web hosting firm so doggedly cornered the market on so-called “bulletproof hosting” services. These are essentially mini-ISPs that specialize in offering services that are largely immune from takedown requests and pressure from Western law enforcement agencies.

If there were a Hall of Infamy for hosting providers, Santrex would be near the top. That’s hardly an exaggeration: According to Google — which tracks top malicious hosts via its safebrowsing program — Santrex was among the Internet’s top three most malicious hosts over the past year. Google’s data indicates that nearly 90 percent of the sites on Santrex’s network tried to foist malicious software on visitors, or hosted malware that was used in attacks against other Web sites.

I first read about the news of Santrex’s demise in a thread at vpsboard.com titled “Ding! Dong! Santrex is Dead!” I followed up with Santrex via its Web site, and asked for confirmation that the closure was for real. I received a reply from Mikkel Thomsen, a sales rep at Santrex, who stated simply that, “Yes we are no longer offering any services.”

My guess is that after years of turning a blind eye to abuse complaints about malware and dodgy customers on its network, Santrex found that most — if not all — of its assigned Internet address space was listed on one blacklist or another. A search for “Santrex” on the forum webhostingtalk.com, for example, shows that more users know this ISP by different name: “Scamtrex.”

Prior to its demise, it appears that Santrex played one last scam on its customers and the rest of the world. Santrex was founded in the United Kingdom in 2009. According to documents obtained from Companies House, the entity which maintains records on U.K. firms, Santrex was declared insolvent by a U.K. court as far back as April 22 of this year.

Apparently, the hosting provider neglected to pay its bills to Bellcom UK Ltd., a London-based data center infrastructure provider. The court ordered Santrex’s assets to be liquidated. Perhaps that explains Santrex’s problems with the “internal network issues and recent downtime,” they cited in their emails to customers.

Santrex was declared insolvent on Apr. 22, 2013. Source: Companies House.

Rest in pieces, Santrex. You will not be missed.

Adobe, Microsoft Push Critical Security Fixes

October 8, 2013

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Adobe and Microsoft today each issued software updates to fix critical security issues in their products. Microsoft released eight patch bundles to address 26 different vulnerabilities in Windows and other software – including not just one but two zero-day bugs in Internet Explorer. Adobe’s patches fix a single critical vulnerability present in both Adobe Acrobat and Reader.

Four of the eight patch bulletins from Microsoft earned its most dire “critical” rating, meaning the updates fix problems deemed so severe that miscreants or malware could use them to break into vulnerable systems without any help from users. The patches impact a broad range of Microsoft products, including Windows, IE, SharePoint, .NET Framework, Office and Silverlight.

Front and center in the Microsoft patch batch is MS13-080, which addresses the zero-day IE vulnerability (CVE-2013-3893) that Microsoft first warned about on Sept. 17, as well as nine other security flaws in the default Windows Web browser. Amping up the threat level on this flaw, exploit code allowing attackers to leverage the flaw was released publicly last week as a module for the Metasploit exploit framework, a penetration testing toolkit.

Microsoft late last month released a stopgap “Fix It” solution to block exploits against the zero-day flaw, and the good news is that if you already applied that solution, you don’t need to undo those changes before applying this update. The bad news is that this isn’t the only zero-day vulnerability fixed in the IE patch bundle: Researchers at Trustwave Spiderlabs say they’ve confirmed that attackers are already exploiting one of the other flaws fixed in this IE update (CVE-2013-3897).

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Feds Arrest Alleged Top Silk Road Drug Seller

October 7, 2013

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Federal authorities last week arrested a Washington state man accused of being one of the most active and sought-after drug dealers on the online black market known as the “Silk Road.” Meanwhile, new details about the recent coordinated takedown of the Silk Road became public, as other former buyers and sellers on the fraud bazaar pondered who might be next and whether competing online drug markets will move in to fill the void.

NOD’s feedback from Silk Road buyers, according to the government.

A complaint unsealed Oct. 2 by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle alleges that Steven Lloyd Sadler, 40, of Bellevue, Wash., used the nickname “NOD” on the Silk Road, and was among the “top one percent of sellers” on the Silk Road, selling high-quality cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine in small, individual-use amounts to hundreds of buyers around the world.

Investigators with the FBI and U.S. Post Office inspectors say they tracked dozens of packages containing drugs allegedly shipped by Sadler and a woman who was living with him at the time of his arrest. Authorities tied Sadler to the Silk Road after intercepting a package of cocaine and heroin destined for an Alaskan resident. That resident agreed to cooperate with authorities in the hopes of reducing his own sentence, and said he’d purchased the drugs from NOD via the Silk Road.

Agents in Seattle sought and were granted permission to place GPS tracking devices on Sadler’s car and that of his roommate, Jenna White, also charged in this case. Investigators allege that the tracking showed the two traveled to at least 38 post offices in the Seattle area during the surveillance period.

Interestingly, the investigators used the feedback on NOD’s Silk Road seller profile to get a sense of the volume of drugs he sold. Much like eBay sellers, merchants on the Silk Road are evaluated by previous buyers, who are encouraged to leave feedback about the quality of the seller’s goods and services. According to the government, NOD had 1,400 reviews for individual sales/purchases of small amounts of drugs, including: 2,269.5 grams of cocaine, 593 grams of heroin and 105 grams of meth. The complaint notes that these amounts don’t count sales going back more than five months prior to the investigation, when NOD first created his Silk Road vendor account.

Cryptome has published a copy of the complaint (PDF) against Sadler. A copy of Sadler’s case docket is here. NOD’s reputation on the Silk Road also was discussed for several months on this Reddit thread.

Many readers of last week’s story on the Silk Road takedown have been asking what is known about the locations of the Silk Road servers that were copied by the FBI. It’s still unclear how agents gained access to those servers, but a civil forfeiture complaint released by the Justice Department shows that they were aware of five, geographically dispersed servers that were supporting the Silk Road, either by directly hosting the site and/or hosting the Bitcoin wallets that the Silk Road maintains for buyers and sellers.

Two of those servers were located in Iceland, one in Latvia, another in Romania, and apparently one in the United States. See the map above.

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Adobe To Announce Source Code, Customer Data Breach

October 3, 2013

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Adobe Systems Inc. is expected to announce today that hackers broke into its network and stole source code for an as-yet undetermined number of software titles, including its ColdFusion Web application platform, and possibly its Acrobat family of products. The company said hackers also accessed nearly three million customer credit card records, and stole login data for an undetermined number of Adobe user accounts.

A screen shot of purloined source code stolen from Adobe, shared with the company by KrebsOnSec

KrebsOnSecurity first became aware of the source code leak roughly one week ago, when this author — working in conjunction with fellow researcher Alex Holden, CISO of Hold Security LLC — discovered a massive 40 GB source code trove stashed on a server used by the same cyber criminals believed to have hacked into major data aggregators earlier this year, including LexisNexis, Dun & Bradstreet and Kroll. The hacking team’s server contained huge repositories of uncompiled and compiled code that appeared to be source code for ColdFusion and Adobe Acrobat.

Shortly after that discovery, KrebsOnSecurity shared several screen shots of the code repositories with Adobe. Today, Adobe responded with confirmation that it has been working on an investigation into a potentially broad-ranging breach into its networks since Sept. 17, 2013.

In an interview with this publication earlier today, Adobe confirmed that the company believes that hackers accessed a source code repository sometime in mid-August 2013, after breaking into a portion of Adobe’s network that handled credit card transactions for customers. Adobe believes the attackers stole credit card and other data on approximately 2.9 million customers, and that the bad guys also accessed an as-yet-undetermined number of user names and passwords that customers use to access various parts of the Adobe customer network.

ColdFusion source code repository found on hacker’s server.

Adobe said the credit card numbers were encrypted and that the company does not believe decrypted credit card numbers left its network. Nevertheless, the company said that later today it will begin the process of notifying affected customers — which include many Revel and Creative Cloud account users — via email that they need to reset their passwords.

In an interview prior to sending out a news alert on the company’s findings, Adobe’s Chief Security Officer Brad Arkin said the information shared by this publication “helped steer our investigation in a new direction.” Arkin said the company has undertaken a rigorous review of the ColdFusion code shipped since the code archive was compromised, and that it is confident that the source code for ColdFusion code that shipped following the incident “maintained its integrity.”

“We are in the early days of what we expect will be an extremely long and thorough response to this incident,” Arkin said. The company is expected to publish an official statement this afternoon outlining the broad points of its investigation so far.

Arkin said Adobe is still in the process of determining what source code for other products may have been accessed by the attackers, and conceded that Adobe Acrobat may have been among the products the bad guys touched. Indeed, one of the screen shots this publication shared with Adobe indicates that the attackers also had access to Acrobat code, including what appears to be code for as-yet unreleased Acrobat components (see screen grab above).

“We’re still at the brainstorming phase to come up with ways to provide higher level of assurance for the integrity of our products, and that’s going to be a key part of our response,” Arkin said. He noted that the company was in the process of looking for anomalous check-in activity on its code repositories and for other things that might seem out of place.

“We are looking at malware analysis and exploring the different digital assets we have. Right now the investigation is really into the trail of breadcrumbs of where the bad guys touched.”

The revelations come just two days after KrebsOnSecurity published a story indicating that the same attackers apparently responsible for this breach were also involved in the intrusions into the networks of the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), a congressionally-funded non-profit organization that provides training, investigative support and research to agencies and entities involved in the prevention, investigation and prosecution of cybercrime. As noted in that story, the attackers appear to have initiated the intrusion into the NW3C using a set of attack tools that leveraged security vulnerabilities in Adobe’s ColdFusion Web application server.

While Adobe many months ago issued security updates to plug all of the ColdFusion vulnerabilities used by the attackers, many networks apparently run outdated versions of the software, leaving them vulnerable to compromise. This indeed may have also been the vector that attackers used to infiltrate Adobe’s own networks; Arkin said the company has not yet determined whether the servers that were breached were running ColdFusion, but acknowledged that the attackers appear to have gotten their foot in the door through “some type of out-of-date” software.

Stay tuned for further updates on this rapidly-moving story.

Update 4:38 p.m. ET: Adobe has released a statement about these incidents here and here. A separate customer security alert for users affected by this breach is here. Also, in a hopefully unrelated announcement, Adobe says it will be releasing critical security updates next Tuesday for Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader.

Update, Oct. 5, 4:35 p.m. ET: Rakshith Naresh, a product manager at Adobe, said in a Tweet yesterday that the breach did not involve ColdFusion vulnerabilities.

Update, Oct. 9, 12:50 p.m. ET: Naresh’s Tweet stating that the breach didn’t involve ColdFusion servers was deleted at some point. I followed up with Adobe via email: An Adobe spokesperson said the company’s investigation is still ongoing, and that “at this time we have not identified the initial attack vector to include or exclude a ColdFusion server.”

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