Krebs on Security

Washington Post Site Hacked After Successful Phishing Campaign

August 15, 2013

The Washington Post acknowledged today that a sophisticated phishing attack against its newsroom reporters led to the hacking of its Web site, which was seeded with code that redirected readers to the Web site of the Syrian Electronic Army hacker group. According to information obtained by KrebsOnSecurity, the hack began with a phishing campaign launched over the weekend that ultimately hooked one of the paper’s lead sports writers.

This phishing page used by the Syrian Electronic Army spoofed The Post’s’ internal email login page.

On Tuesday morning, KrebsOnSecurity obtained information indicating that a phishing campaign targeting the Post’s newsroom had been successful, and that the attackers appear to have been seeking email access to Post reporters who had Twitter accounts. The Post did not respond to requests for comment.

Update, August 16, 10:07 a.m. ET: Post spokesperson Kris Coratti finally responded, stating that the phishing attack and the site compromise were two separate incidents, and that one did not necessarily lead to the other. She emphasized that the site hack was the result of an attack on Outbrain, a third-party content recommendation site.

Original story:

But in a brief acknowledgment published today, The Post allowed that it had in fact been hacked, and in an update to that statement added that the source of the compromise was a phishing attack apparently launched by the SEA. From that message:

“A few days ago, The Syrian Electronic Army, allegedly, subjected Post newsroom employees to a sophisticated phishing attack to gain password information. The attack resulted in one staff writer’s personal Twitter account being used to send out a Syrian Electronic Army message. For 30 minutes this morning, some articles on our web site were redirected to the Syrian Electronic Army’s site. The Syrian Electronic Army, in a Tweet, claimed they gained access to elements of our site by hacking one of our business partners, Outbrain. We have taken defensive measures and removed the offending module. At this time, we believe there are no other issues affecting The Post site.”

According to sources, Post sports writer Jason Reid was among those who fell for a phishing scam that spoofed The Posts’s internal Outlook Web Access email portal (see screenshot above). Reid’s hacked email account was then used to send additional — likely malware-laced — phishing emails to other newsroom employees (see screenshot below). Reid did not respond to requests for comment.

Washington Post top brass huddle via email after the successful phishing attack.

Other well-known Posties came close to be tricked by the phishing attack. One of those nearly-phished was veteran Post staffer Gene Weingarten, one of the Post’s Pulitzer Prize winning editors and writers. Reached via email for comment, Weingarten was characteristically self-effacing about the whole ordeal (full disclosure: Gene edited my very first story to appear in The Washington Post, a 1996 Style section piece about living in the late President Gerald Ford‘s house, titled, “My Gerry Built Home“).

“I was phished….one of four, but I never entered any creds,” Weingarten wrote. “I’m stupid, but not THAT stupid.”

This type of phishing attack bears the hallmark of the SEA, which has taken credit for hijacking the Twitter accounts of several news outlets, perhaps most famously that of The Associated Press earlier this year. That campaign — which culminated in an unauthorized tweet sent from the AP’s Twitter account falsely claiming that bombs had exploded in the White House — briefly sent the Dow Industrial Average down 140 points.

As this incident highlights, phishing attacks and the phishers themselves are growing in sophistication. A survey released last month by Verizon Communications Inc. found nearly every incident of online espionage in 2012 involved some sort of phishing attack.

Update, August 16, 11:00 a.m. ET: One astute reader pointed out that the numeric Internet address (31.170.164.145) connected to the domain (site88[dot]net – see first screen shot above) used in the phishing attack against the Post this past weekend resides on the same subnet and hosting provider as blogs and Web sites belonging to some of the top Syrian Electronic Army members, including:

thepro[dot]sy (31.170.162.145)

victor[dot[thepro[dot]sy (31.170.162.145)

blog[dot]thepro[dot]sy (31.170.161.41)

Personalized Exploit Kit Targets Researchers

August 15, 2013

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As documented time and again on this blog, cybercrooks are often sloppy or lazy enough to leave behind important clues about who and where they are. But from time to time, cheeky crooks will dream up a trap designed to look like they’re being sloppy when in fact they’re trying to trick security researchers into being sloppy and infecting their computers with malware.

A Nuclear Exploit Pack administrative panel made to serve malware.

According to Peter Kruse, a partner and cybercrime specialist with CSIS Security Group, that’s what happened late last month when a Twitter user “Paunchbighecker” started messaging security researchers on Twitter. Paunch the nickname of a Russian hacker who for the past few years has sold the wildly popular Blackhole exploit kit, a crimeware package designed to be stitched into hacked or malicious sites and foist browser exploits on visitors. The person behind Paunchbighecker Twitter account probably figured that invoking Paunch’s name and reputation would add to the allure of his scam.

The Paunchbighecker Twitter account appears to have been created on July 30 for the sole purpose of sending tweets to several security researchers, including this author, Mikko Hypponen of Finnish security firm F-Secure, French malware researcher Kafeine, Polish security researcher tachion24, and SecObsecurity. Strangely enough, the other Twitter account that received messages from this user belongs to Sauli Niinistö, the current president of Finland.

The link that Paunchbighecker sent to researchers displays what appears to be the back-end administrative panel for a Nuclear Pack exploit kit. In fact, the landing page was a fake merely made to look like a Nuclear pack statistics panel. Rather, embedded inside the page itself is a series of active Java exploits.

Update, 1:56 p.m.: Security researcher Kafeine said he does not believe this was an attack against security researchers, but rather an intentional leak of badguy credentials. Furthermore, Kafeine notes that visitors to the site link in the Twitter messages would have to take an additional step in order to infect their own computers.

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Buying Battles in the War on Twitter Spam

August 14, 2013

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The success of social networking community Twitter has given rise to an entire shadow economy that peddles dummy Twitter accounts by the thousands, primarily to spammers, scammers and malware purveyors. But new research on identifying bogus accounts has helped Twitter to drastically deplete the stockpile of existing accounts for sale, and holds the promise of driving up costs for both vendors of these shady services and their customers.

Image: Twitterbot.info

Twitter prohibits the sale and auto-creation of accounts, and the company routinely suspends accounts created in violation of that policy. But according to researchers from George Mason University, the International Computer Science Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, Twitter traditionally has done so only after these fraudulent accounts have been used to spam and attack legitimate Twitter users.

Seeking more reliable methods of detecting auto-created accounts before they can be used for abuse, the researchers approached Twitter last year for the company’s blessing to purchase credentials from a variety of Twitter account merchants. Permission granted, the researchers spent more than $5,000 over ten months buying accounts from at least 27 different underground sellers.

In a report to be presented at the USENIX security conference in Washington, D.C. today, the research team details its experience in purchasing more than 121,000 fraudulent Twitter accounts of varying age and quality, at prices ranging from $10 to $200 per one thousand accounts.

The research team quickly discovered that nearly all fraudulent Twitter account merchants employ a range of countermeasures to evade the technical hurdles that Twitter erects to stymie the automated creation of new accounts.

“Our findings show that merchants thoroughly understand Twitter’s existing defenses against automated registration, and as a result can generate thousands of accounts with little disruption in availability or instability in pricing,” the paper reads. “We determine that merchants can provide thousands of accounts within 24 hours at a price of $0.02 – $0.10 per account.”

SPENDING MONEY TO MAKE MONEY

For example, to fulfill orders for fraudulent Twitter accounts, merchants typically pay third-party services to help solve those squiggly-letter CAPTCHA challenges. I’ve written here and here about these virtual sweatshops, which rely on low-paid workers in China, India and Eastern Europe who earn pennies per hour deciphering the puzzles.

The Twitter account sellers also must verify new accounts with unique email addresses, and they tend to rely on services that sell cheap, auto-created inboxes at Hotmail, Yahoo and Mail.ru, the researchers found. “The failure of email confirmation as a barrier directly stems from pervasive account abuse tied to web mail providers,” the team wrote. “60 percent of the accounts were created with Hotmail, followed by yahoo.com and mail.ru.”

Bulk-created accounts at these Webmail providers are among the cheapest of the free email providers, probably because they lack additional account creation verification mechanisms required by competitors like Google, which relies on phone verification. Compare the prices at this bulk email merchant: 1,000 Yahoo accounts can be had for $10 (1 cent per account), and the same number Hotmail accounts go for $12. In contrast, it costs $200 to buy 1,000 Gmail accounts.

Finally, the researchers discovered that Twitter account merchants very often spread their new account registrations across thousands of Internet addresses to avoid Twitter’s IP address blacklisting and throttling. They concluded that some of the larger account sellers have access to large botnets of hacked PCs that can be used as proxies during the registration process.

“Our analysis leads us to believe that account merchants either own or rent access to thousands of compromised hosts to evade IP defenses,” the researchers wrote.

Damon McCoy, an assistant professor of computer science at GMU and one of the authors of the study, said the top sources of the proxy IP addresses were computers in developing countries like India, Ukraine, Thailand, Mexico and Vietnam. “These are countries where the price to buy installs [installations of malware that turns PCs into bots] is relatively low,” McCoy said.

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Microsoft Patches Plug 23 Security Holes

August 13, 2013

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Microsoft has issued security updates to fix at least 23 distinct vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. Three of the patch bundles released today address flaws rated “critical,” meaning that malware or miscreants can use them to break into Windows PCs without any help from users.

Leading the critical updates is a cumulative patch for Internet Explorer (MS13-059) that affects every version of the browser on nearly all supported versions of Windows. In its advisory, Microsoft warns it is highly likely that attackers will soon develop exploit code to attack the flaws addressed in this patch. Indeed, according to Ross Barrett, manager of security engineering at Rapid7, the IE patch addresses a vulnerability first demonstrated at the Pwn2Own contest at the CanSecWest conference in March of this year.

Another critical update, MS13-060, is a browse-and-get-owned font vulnerability that affects users on Windows XP and Server 2003. The final critical patch, MS13-061, tackles several flaws in Microsoft Exchange that stem from a third-party component from Oracle called Outside In.

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Simple Hack Threatens Outdated Joomla Sites

August 12, 2013

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If you run a site powered by the Joomla content management system and haven’t yet applied a critical update for this software released less than two weeks ago, please take a moment to do that: A trivial exploit could let users inject malicious content into your site, turning it into a phishing or malware trap for visitors.

The patch released on July 31, 2013 applies to Joomla 2.5.13 and earlier 2.5.x versions, as well as Joomla 3.1.4 and earlier 3.x versions. Joomla credits discovery of the bug to Web security firm Versafe, which says a simple exploit targeting the vulnerability is already in use. Joomla versions 2.5.14 and 3.1.5. fix a serious bug that allows unprivileged users to upload arbitrary .PHP files just by adding a “.” (period) to the end of PHP filenames.

For 2.5.x and 3.x versions of Joomla, it is possible for anyone with access to the media manager to upload and execute arbitrary code simply by appending a period to the end of the file name they would like to run. For sites powered by unsupported versions of Joomla (1.5.x, and a cursory Google search indicates that there are tens of thousands of these 1.5.x sites currently online), attackers do not even need to have an account on the Joomla server for this hack to work.

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$1.5 million Cyberheist Ruins Escrow Firm

August 7, 2013

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A $1.5 million cyberheist against a California escrow firm earlier this year has forced the company to close and lay off its entire staff. Meanwhile, the firm’s remaining money is in the hands of a court-appointed state receiver who is preparing for a lawsuit against the victim’s bank to recover the stolen funds.

The heist began in December 2012 with a roughly $432,215 fraudulent wire sent from the accounts of Huntington Beach, Calif. based Efficient Services Escrow Group to a bank in Moscow. In January, the attackers struck again, sending two more fraudulent wires totaling $1.1 million to accounts in the Heilongjiang Province of China, a northern region in China on the border with Russia.

This same province was the subject of a 2011 FBI alert on cyberheist activity. The FBI warned that cyber thieves had in the previous year alone stolen approximately $20 million from small to mid-sized businesses through fraudulent wire transfers sent to Chinese economic and trade companies.

Efficient Services and its bank were able to recover the wire to Russia, but the two wires to China totaling $1.1 million were long gone. Under California law, escrow and title companies are required to immediately report any lost funds. When Efficient reported the incident to state regulators, the California Department of Corporations gave the firm three days to come up with money to replace the stolen funds.

Three days later, with Efficient no closer to recovering the funds, the state stepped in and shut it down.

Up until the past few weeks, the firm’s remaining funds have been tied up in a conservatorship established by the state, effectively barring the company’s owners from accessing any of its money. In early July, the state appointed a receiver to help wind up the company’s finances.

The court-appointed receiver — Peter A. Davidson of Ervin Cohen & Jessup LLP in Beverly Hills — said he and the company are contemplating their options for recovering more of the lost funds from the bank — Irvine, Calif. based First Foundation.

“We’re exploring what choices we have to recover funds for those who had escrows and are owed money,” Davidson said. “We filed a claim with the insurance company and we’re looking at our options for possibly dealing with the bank.”

Davidson said the bank’s business customer logins were protected by a username, password and a dynamic token code, but that the one-time token wasn’t working at the time of the fraud.

First Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.

Efficient’s co-owner Daniel J. Crenshaw said the bank produced a report shortly after the heist concluding that the missing funds were stolen not in a cyberheist but instead embezzled by an employee of Efficient Services. Crenshaw said the bank later backed away from that claim, after the state appointed a local forensics expert to examine the controller’s computer; sure enough, they discovered that the system had been compromised by a remote access Trojan prior to the heist.

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Firefox Zero-Day Used in Child Porn Hunt?

August 4, 2013

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A claimed zero-day vulnerability in Firefox 17 has some users of the latest Mozilla Firefox browser (Firefox 22) shrugging their shoulders. Indeed, for now it appears that this flaw is not a concern for regular, up-to-date Firefox end users. But several experts say the vulnerability was instead exposed and used in tandem with a recent U.S. law enforcement effort to discover the true Internet addresses of people believed to be browsing child porn sites via the Tor Browser — an online anonymity tool powered by Firefox 17.

Freedom Hosting’s entry on the Tor network’s The Hidden Wiki page.

Tor software protects users by bouncing their communications across a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world. As the Tor homepage notes, it prevents anyone who might be watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets users access sites that are blocked by Internet censors.

The Tor Browser bundle also is the easiest way to find Web sites that do not want to be easily taken down, such as the Silk Road (a.k.a. the “eBay of hard drugs“) and sites peddling child pornography.

On Saturday, Aug. 3, 2013, Independent.ie, an Irish news outlet, reported that U.S. authorities were seeking the extradition of Eric Eoin Marques, a 28-year-old with Irish and American citizenship reportedly dubbed by the FBI as “the largest facilitator of child porn on the planet.” According to the Independent, Marques was arrested on a Maryland warrant that includes charges of distributing and promoting child porn online.

The Tor Project’s blog now carries a post noting that at approximately midnight on August 4th “a large number of hidden service addresses disappeared from the Tor Network, sites that appear to have been tied to an organization called Freedom Hosting — a hosting service run on the Tor Network allegedly by Marques.

Hidden services can be used to run a variety of Web services that are not directly reachable from a normal Internet connection — from FTP and IRC servers to Web sites. As such, the Tor Network is a robust tool for journalists, whistleblowers, dissidents and others looking to publish information in a way that is not easily traced back to them.

“There are rumors that a hosting company for hidden services is suddenly offline and/or has been breached and infected with a javascript exploit,” writes “phobos,” a Tor Project blogger. Phobos notes that the person, or persons, who run Freedom Hosting are in no way affiliated or connected to The Tor Project, Inc., the organization coordinating the development of the Tor software and research, and continues:

“The current news indicates that someone has exploited the software behind Freedom Hosting. From what is known so far, the breach was used to configure the server in a way that it injects some sort of javascript exploit in the web pages delivered to users. This exploit is used to load a malware payload to infect user’s computers. The malware payload could be trying to exploit potential bugs in Firefox 17 ESR, on which our Tor Browser is based. We’re investigating these bugs and will fix them if we can.”

Even if the claimed vulnerability is limited to Firefox version 17, such a flaw would impact far more than just Tor bundle users. Mozilla says it has been notified of a potential security vulnerability in Firefox 17, which is currently the extended support release (ESR) version of Firefox. Last year, Mozilla began offering an annual ESR of Firefox for enterprises and others who didn’t want to have to keep up with the browser’s new rapid release cycle.

“We are actively investigating this information and we will provide additional information when it becomes available,” Michael Coates, director of security assurance at Mozilla, wrote in a brief blog post this evening.

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Pavel Vrublevsky Sentenced to 2.5 Years

August 2, 2013

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Pavel Vrublevsky, the owner of Russian payments firm ChronoPay and the subject of an upcoming book by this author, was sentenced to two-and-half years in a Russian penal colony this week after being found guilty of hiring botmasters to attack a rival payment processing firm.

ChronoPay founder and owner Pavel Vrublevsky, in handcuffs, at his sentencing. Source: Novayagazeta.ru

Vrublevsky was accused of hiring Igor and Dmitri Artimovich in 2010 to use their Festi spam botnet to attack Assist, a competing payments firm. Prosecutors allege that the resulting outage at Assist prevented Russian airline Aeroflot from selling tickets for several days, costing the company millions of dollars.

According to Russian prosecutors, Vrublevsky directed ChronoPay’s chief security officer Maxim Permyakov to pay $20,000 and hire the Artimovich brothers to launch the attacks. The Artimovich brothers also were found guilty and sentenced to 2.5 years. Permyakov received a slightly lighter sentence of two years after reportedly assisting investigators in the case.

Earlier this year, I signed a deal with Sourcebooks Inc. to publish several years worth of research on the business of spam, fake antivirus and rogue Internet pharmacies, shadow economies and that were aided immensely by ChronoPay and — according to my research — by Vrublevsky himself.

Vrublevsky co-founded ChronoPay in 2003 along with Igor Gusev, another Russian businessman who is facing criminal charges in Russia. Those charges stem from Gusev’s alleged leadership role at GlavMed and SpamIt, sister programs that until recently were the world’s largest rogue online pharmacy affiliate networks. Huge volumes of internal documents leaked from ChronoPay in 2010 indicate Vrublevsky ran a competing rogue Internet pharmacy — Rx-Promotion — although Vrublevsky publicly denies this.

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Mail from the (Velvet) Cybercrime Underground

July 30, 2013

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Over the past six months, “fans” of this Web site and its author have shown their affection in some curious ways. One called in a phony hostage situation that resulted in a dozen heavily armed police surrounding my home. Another opened a $20,000 new line of credit in my name. Others sent more than $1,000 in bogus PayPal donations from hacked accounts. Still more admirers paid my cable bill for the next three years using stolen credit cards. Malware authors have even used my name and likeness to peddle their wares.

“Flycracker,” the administrator of thecc.bz crime forum, hatches plan to send drugs to my home.

But the most recent attempt to embarrass and fluster this author easily takes the cake as the most elaborate: Earlier this month, the administrator of an exclusive cybercrime forum hatched and executed a plan to purchase heroin, have it mailed to my home, and then spoof a phone call from one of my neighbors alerting the local police. Thankfully, I had already established a presence on his forum and was able to monitor the scam in real time and alert my local police well in advance of the delivery.

This would-be smear campaign was the brainchild of a fraudster known variously online as “Fly,” “Flycracker,” and MUXACC1 (muxa is transliterated Russian for “муха” which means “fly”). Fly is the administrator of the fraud forum “thecc[dot]bz,” an exclusive and closely guarded Russian language board dedicated to financial fraud and identity theft.

On July 14, Flycracker posted a new forum discussion thread titled, “Krebs Fund,” in which he laid out his plan: He’d created a bitcoin wallet for the exclusive purpose of accepting donations from other members. The goal: purchase heroin in my name and address from a seller on the Silk Road, an online black market that is only reachable via the Tor network. In the screenshot pictured above, Flycracker says to fellow members:

“Guys, it became known recently that Brian Krebs is a heroin addict and he desperately needs the smack, so we have started the “Helping Brian Fund”, and shortly we will create a bitcoin wallet called “Drugs for Krebs” which we will use to buy him the purest heroin on the Silk Road. My friends, his withdrawal is very bad, let’s join forces to help the guy! We will save Brian from the acute heroin withdrawal and the world will get slightly better!”

Together, forum members raised more than 2 bitcoins – currently equivalent to about USD $200. At first, Fly tried to purchase a gram of heroin from a Silk Road vendor named 10toes, an anonymous seller who had excellent and plentiful feedback from previous buyers as a purveyor of reliably good heroin appropriate for snorting or burning and inhaling (see screnshot below).

Flycracker discussing the purchase of a gram of heroin from Silk Road seller “10toes.”

For some reason, that transaction with 10toes fell through, and Flycracker turned to another Silk Road vendor — Maestro — from whom he purchased a dozen baggies of heroin of “HIGH and consistent quality,” to be delivered to my home in Northern Virginia earlier today. The purchase was made using a new Silk Road account named “briankrebs7,” and cost 1.6532 bitcoins (~USD $165).

Flycracker ultimately bought 10 small bags of smack from Silk Road seller “Maestro.” The seller threw in two extra bags for free (turns out he actually threw in three extra bags).

In the screen shot below, Fly details the rest of his plan:

“12 sacks of heroin [the seller gives 2 free sacks for a 10-sacks order] are on the road, can anyone make a call [to the police] from neighbors, with a record? Seller said the package will be delivered after 3 days, on Tuesday. If anyone calls then please say that drugs are hidden well.”

Last week, I alerted the FBI about this scheme, and contacted a Fairfax County Police officer who came out and took an official report about it. The cop who took the report just shook his head incredulously, and kept saying he was trying to unplug himself from various accounts online with the ultimate goal of being “off the Internet and Google” by the time he retired. Before he left, the officer said he would make a notation on my report so that any officer dispatched to respond to complaints about drugs being delivered via mail to my home would prompted to review my report.

FOLLOWING THE MONEY

I never doubted Flycracker”s resolve for a minute, but I still wanted to verify his claims about having made the purchase. On that front I received assistance from Sara Meiklejohn, a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego who’s been analyzing the role of bitcoin and anonymity on the Silk Road. Meiklejohn confirmed that the bitcoin wallet linked to in Fly’s forum thread was indeed used to deposit two bitcoins into a purse controlled by anonymous individuals who help manage commerce on the Silk Road.

Meiklejohn and fellow researcher Damon McCoy, an assistant professor of computer science at George Mason University, have been mapping out a network of bitcoin wallets that are used exclusively by the curators of the Silk Road. If you wish to transact with merchants on the Silk Road, you need to fund your account with bitcoins. The act of adding credits appears to be handled by a small number of bitcoin purses.

“All Silk Road purchases are handled internally by Silk Road, which means money trades hands from the Silk Road account of the buyer to the Silk Road account of the seller,” explained Meiklejohn, author of the paper, A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names, to be released in October 2013 at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference in Barcelona, Spain.

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Don’t Get Sucker Pumped

July 29, 2013

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Gas pump skimmers are getting craftier. A new scam out of Oklahoma that netted thieves $400,000 before they were caught is a reminder of why it’s usually best to pay with credit versus debit cards when filling up the tank.

The U.S. Attorney’s office in Muskogee, Okla. says two men indicted this month for skimming would rent a vehicle, check into a local hotel and place skimming devices on gas pumps at Murphy’s filling stations located in the parking lots of Wal-Mart retail stores. The fraud devices included a card skimmer and a fake PIN pad overlay designed to capture PINs from customers who paid at the pump with a debit card.

A PIN pad overlay device for gas pumps. Photo; NewsOn6.com

According to their indictment (PDF), defedants Kevin Konstantinov and Elvin Alisuretove would leave the skimming devices in place for between one and two months. Then they’d collect the skimmers and use the stolen data to create counterfeit cards, visiting multiple ATMs throughout the region and withdrawing large amounts of cash. Investigators say some of the card data stolen in the scheme showed up in fraudulent transactions in Eastern Europe and Russia.

As the Oklahoma case shows, gas pump skimmers have moved from analog, clunky things to the level of workmanship and attention to detail that is normally only seen in ATM skimmers. Investigators in Oklahoma told a local news station that the skimmer technology used in this case was way more sophisticated than anything they’ve seen previously.

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