Krebs on Security

Microsoft Patches Plug 23 Security Holes

August 13, 2013

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Simple Hack Threatens Outdated Joomla Sites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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Security Vendors: Do No Harm, Heal Thyself

July 26, 2013

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Security companies would do well to build their products around the physician’s code: “First, do no harm.” The corollary to that oath borrows from another medical mantra: “Security vendor, heal thyself. And don’t take forever to do it! ”

On Thursday, Symantec quietly released security updates to fix serious vulnerabilities in its Symantec Web Gateway, a popular line of security appliances designed to help “protect organizations against multiple types of Web-borne malware.” Symantec issued the updates more than five months after receiving notice of the flaws from Vienna, Austria based SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab, which said attackers could chain together several of the flaws to completely compromise the appliances.

“An attacker can get unauthorized access to the appliance and plant backdoors or access configuration files containing credentials for other systems (eg. Active Directory/LDAP credentials) which can be used in further attacks,” SEC Consult warned in an advisory published in coordination with the patches from Symantec. “Since all web traffic passes through the appliance, interception of HTTP as well as the plain text form of HTTPS traffic (if SSL Deep Inspection feature in use), including sensitive information like passwords and session cookies is possible.”

Big Yellow almost certainly dodged a bullet with this coordinated disclosure, and it should be glad that the bugs weren’t found by a researcher at NATO, for example; Earlier this month, security vendor McAfee disclosed multiple vulnerabilities in its ePolicy Orchestrator, a centralized security management product. The researcher in that case said he would disclose his findings within 30 days of notifying the company, and McAfee turned around an advisory in less than a week.

Interestingly, Google’s security team is backing a new seven-day security deadline that would allow researchers to make serious vulnerabilities public a week after notifying a company. Google says a week-long disclosure timeline is appropriate for critical vulnerabilities that are under active exploitation, and that its standing recommendation is that companies should fix critical vulnerabilities in 60 days, or, if a fix is not possible, they should notify the public about the risk and offer workarounds.

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Hacker Ring Stole 160 Million Credit Cards

July 25, 2013

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U.S. federal authorities have indicted five men — four Russians and a Ukrainian – for allegedly perpetrating many of the biggest cybercrimes of the past decade, including the theft of more than 160 million credit card numbers from major U.S. retailers, banks and card processors.

The gang is thought to be responsible for the 2007 breach at credit card processor Heartland Payment Systems that exposed some 130 million card numbers, as well as the 2011 breach at Global Payments that involved nearly a million accounts and cost the company almost $100 million.

Federal prosecutors in New Jersey today called the case the largest hacking scheme ever prosecuted in the U.S. Justice Department officials said the men were part of a gang run by Albert “Soupnazi” Gonzalez, a hacker arrested in 2008 who is currently serving a 20-year-prison sentence for his role in many of the breaches, including the theft of some 90 million credit cards from retailer TJX.

One of the accused, 27-year-0ld Dmitriy Smilianets, is in U.S. custody. Vladimir Drinkman, 32 of Syktyvkar, Russia, is awaiting extradition to the United States. Three others named in the indictments remain at large, including Aleksandr Kalinin, 26 of St. Petersburg; 32-year-old Roman Kotov from Moscow; and Mikhail Rytikov, 26, of Odessa, Ukraine.

According to the government’s indictment, other high-profile heists tied to this gang include compromises at:

Hannaford Brothers Co: 2007, 4.2 million card numbers

Carrefour S.A.: 2007, 2 million card numbers

Commidea Ltd.: 2008, 30 million card numbers

Euronet: 2010, 2 million card numbers

Visa, Inc.: 2011, 800,000 card numbers

Discover Financial Services: 500,000 Diners card numbers

In addition, the group is being blamed for breaking into and planting malware on the networks of NASDAQ, 7-Eleven, JetBlue, JCPenny, Wet Seal, Dexia, Dow Jones, and Ingenicard.

The hackers broke into their targets using SQL injection attacks, which take advantage of weak server configurations to inject malicious code into the database behind the public-facing Web server. Once inside, the attackers can upload software and siphon data.

The government’s indictment alleges that the thieves were at times overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data yielded by their SQL attacks. On Aug. 12, 2007, Kalinin allegedly sent Gonzalez an instant message that he’d just gained access to 30 SQL servers on NASDAQ’s network, but hadn’t yet cracked the administrator passwords that secured the data inside. “These [databases] are hell big and I think most of info is trading histories.” On Jan. 9, 2008, after Gonzalez offered to help attack the trading floor’s computer systems, Kalinin allegedly messaged back, “NASDAQ is owned.”

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Haunted by the Ghosts of ZeuS & DNSChanger

July 25, 2013

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One of the challenges in malware research is separating the truly novel innovations in malcoding from new nasties that merely include nominal or superficial tweaks. This dynamic holds true for both malware researchers and purveyors, albeit for different reasons. Researchers wish to avoid being labeled alarmist in calling special attention to what appears to be an emerging threat that turns out to be old news; the bad guys just want to avoid getting scammed into paying for an old malware kit dressed up as the new next big thing.

Source: RSA

On Tuesday, RSA Security somewhat breathlessly announced that it had spotted KINS, a ZeuS Trojan variant that looked like “a new professional-grade banking Trojan” that was likely to emerge as the “next Trojan epiphany” in the cybercrime underground. RSA said the emergence of KINS was notable because the reigning ZeuS Trojan derivative – the Citadel Trojan — had long ago been taken off the market, and that crooks were anxiously awaiting the development and sale of a new botnet creation kit based on the leaked ZeuS source code.

“Since December 2012, when the spokesperson of the Citadel team took the Trojan off the semi-open underground market, cyber criminals have been scrambling to find a replacement,” RSA’s Limor Kessem wrote. “In early February 2013, RSA fraud intelligence researchers began tracing hints about a new crimeware tool called ‘KINS’. At the time, the information about the Trojan just a rumor, but in sporadic comments, fraudsters were associating a Trojan named KINS with the Citadel source code, looking for its developer in order to reach out to him and purchase KINS. The rumors were soon hushed and ties to Citadel were denied, mostly in what appeared as a case of fearful fraudsters who did not want to be denied the possibility to buy the next Trojan.”

But according to Fox-IT, a security research and consulting group based in The Netherlands, KINS has been used in private since at least December 2011 to attack financial institutions in Europe, specifically Germany and The Netherlands. Fox-IT says KINS is short for “Kasper Internet Non-Security,” which is likely the malware author’s not-so-subtle dig at the security suite offered by Russian antivirus maker Kaspersky.

Source: Fox-IT

In its own analysis of the banking Trojan malware, Fox-IT said KINS is fully based on the leaked ZeuS source code, and includes only minor additions. What’s more, Fox-IT notes, many of the users of KINS have already migrated to yet another ZeuS variant, suggesting that perhaps they were unsatisfied with the product and that it didn’t deliver as advertised.

“While the technical additions are interesting, they are far from ground breaking,” wrote Michael Sandee, principal security expert at Fox-IT. “With an array of fairly standard features, and relatively simple additions to the standard ZeuS, such as reporting of installed security product information, the malware platform does not bring anything really new. There are however some features of this malware, not aimed at the functionality for the person using it, but aimed at complicating malware analysis.”

OLD MALWARE, NEW PAINTJOB?

From the bad-guy perspective, this infighting over malware innovation is on display in a new malware offering that surfaced today on a semi-private forum: The seller is pitching a resurrected and modified version of the DNSChanger Trojan, a global contagion that once infected millions of PCs. The DNSChanger botnet, which hooked into infected systems quite deeply and spread to both Windows and Mac computers, was eradicated only by a worldwide, concerted digital quarantine and vaccination effort — combined with the arrest of its creators.

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