Happy 13th Birthday, KrebsOnSecurity!

December 29, 2022
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KrebsOnSecurity turns 13 years old today. That’s a crazy long time for an independent media outlet these days, but then again I’m bound to keep doing this as long as they keep letting me. Heck, I’ve been doing this so long I briefly forgot which birthday this was!

Thanks to your readership and support, I was able to spend more time in 2022 on some deep, meaty investigative stories — the really satisfying kind with the potential to effect positive change. Some of that work is highlighted in the 2022 Year in Review review below.

Until recently, I was fairly active on Twitter, regularly tweeting to more than 350,000 followers about important security news and stories here. For a variety of reasons, I will no longer be sharing these updates on Twitter. I seem to be doing most of that activity now on Mastodon, which appears to have absorbed most of the infosec refugees from Twitter, and in any case is proving to be a far more useful, civil and constructive place to post such things. I will also continue to post on LinkedIn about new stories in 2023.

Here’s a look at some of the more notable cybercrime stories from the past year, as covered by KrebsOnSecurity and elsewhere. Several strong themes emerged from 2022’s crop of breaches, including the targeting or impersonating of employees to gain access to internal company tools; multiple intrusions at the same victim company; and less-than-forthcoming statements from victim firms about what actually transpired.

JANUARY

You just knew 2022 was going to be The Year of Crypto Grift when two of the world’s most popular antivirus makers — Norton and Avira — kicked things off by installing cryptocurrency mining programs on customer computers. This bold about-face dumbfounded many longtime Norton users because antivirus firms had spent years broadly classifying all cryptomining programs as malware.

Suddenly, hundreds of millions of users — many of them old enough to have bought antivirus from Peter Norton himself back in the day — were being encouraged to start caring about and investing in crypto. Big Yellow and Avira weren’t the only established brands cashing in on crypto hype as a way to appeal to a broader audience: The venerable electronics retailer RadioShack wasted no time in announcing plans to launch a cryptocurrency exchange.

By the second week of January, Russia had amassed more than 100,000 troops along its southern border with Ukraine. The Kremlin breaks with all tradition and announces that — at the request of the United States — it has arrested 14 people suspected of working for REvil, one of the more ruthless and profitable Russian ransomware groups.

Security and Russia experts dismiss the low-level arrests as a kind of “ransomware diplomacy,” a signal to the United States that if it doesn’t enact severe sanctions against Russia for invading Ukraine, Russia will continue to cooperate on ransomware investigations.

The Jan. 19th story IRS Will Soon Require Selfies For Online Access goes immediately viral for pointing out something that apparently nobody has noticed on the U.S. Internal Revenue Service website for months: Anyone seeking to create an account to view their tax records online would soon be required to provide biometric data to a private company in Virginia — ID.me.

Facing a backlash from lawmakers and the public, the IRS soon reverses course, saying video selfies will be optional and that any biometric data collected will be destroyed after verification.

FEBRUARY

Super Bowl Sunday watchers are treated to no fewer than a half-dozen commercials for cryptocurrency investing. Matt Damon sells his soul to Crypto.com, telling viewers that “fortune favors the brave” — basically, “only cowards would fail to buy cryptocurrency at this point.” Meanwhile, Crypto.com is trying to put space between it and recent headlines that a breach led to $30 million being stolen from hundreds of customer accounts. A single bitcoin is trading at around $45,000.

Larry David, the comedian who brought us years of awkward hilarity with hits like Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, plays the part of the “doofus, crypto skeptic” in a lengthy Super Bowl ad for FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange then valued at over $20 billion that is pitched as a “safe and easy way to get into crypto.” [Last month, FTX imploded and filed for bankruptcy; the company’s founder now faces civil and criminal charges from three different U.S. agencies].

On Feb. 24, Russia invades Ukraine, and fault lines quickly begin to appear in the cybercrime underground. Cybercriminal syndicates that previously straddled Russia and Ukraine with ease are forced to reevaluate many comrades who are suddenly working for The Other Side.

Many cybercriminals who operated with impunity from Russia and Ukraine prior to the war chose to flee those countries following the invasion, presenting international law enforcement agencies with rare opportunities to catch most-wanted cybercrooks. One of those is Mark Sokolovsky, a 26-year-old Ukrainian man who operated the popular “Raccoon” malware-as-a-service offering; Sokolovsky was busted in March after fleeing Ukraine’s mandatory military service orders.

Also nabbed on the lam is Vyacheslav “Tank” Penchukov, a senior Ukrainian member of a transnational cybercrime group that stole tens of millions of dollars over nearly a decade from countless hacked businesses. Penchukov was arrested after leaving Ukraine to meet up with his wife in Switzerland.

Tank, seen here performing as a DJ in Ukraine in an undated photo from social media.

Ransomware group Conti chimes in shortly after the invasion, vowing to attack anyone who tries to stand in Mother Russia’s way. Within hours of that declaration several years worth of internal chat logs stolen from Conti were leaked online. The candid employee conversations provide a rare glimpse into the challenges of running a sprawling criminal enterprise with more than 100 salaried employees. The records also reveal how Conti dealt with its own internal breaches and attacks from private security firms and foreign governments.

Faced with an increasing brain drain of smart people fleeing the country, Russia floats a new strategy to address a worsening shortage of qualified information technology experts: Forcing tech-savvy people within the nation’s prison population to perform low-cost IT work for domestic companies.

Chipmaker NVIDIA says a cyberattack led to theft of information on more than 71,000 employees. Credit for that intrusion is quickly claimed by LAPSUS$, a group of 14-18 year-old cyber hooligans mostly from the United Kingdom who specialized in low-tech but highly successful methods of breaking into companies: Targeting employees directly over their mobile phones.

LAPSUS$ soon employs these skills to siphon source code and other data from some of the world’s biggest technology firms, including Microsoft, Okta, Samsung, T-Mobile and Uber, among many others. Continue reading →

The Equifax Breach Settlement Offer is Real, For Now

December 20, 2022
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Millions of people likely just received an email or snail mail notice saying they’re eligible to claim a class action payment in connection with the 2017 megabreach at consumer credit bureau Equifax. Given the high volume of reader inquiries about this, it seemed worth pointing out that while this particular offer is legit (if paltry), scammers are likely to soon capitalize on public attention to the settlement money.

One reader’s copy of their Equifax Breach Settlement letter. They received a check for $6.97.

In 2017, Equifax disclosed a massive, extended data breach that led to the theft of Social Security Numbers, dates of birth, addresses and other personal information on nearly 150 million people. Following a public breach response perhaps best described as a giant dumpster fire, the big-three consumer credit reporting bureau was quickly hit with nearly two dozen class-action lawsuits.

In exchange for resolving all outstanding class action claims against it, Equifax in 2019 agreed to a settlement that includes up to $425 million to help people affected by the breach.

Affected consumers were eligible to apply for at least three years of credit monitoring via all three major bureaus simultaneously, including Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Or, if you didn’t want to take advantage of the credit monitoring offers, you could opt for a cash payment of up to $125.

The settlement also offered reimbursement for the time you may have spent remedying identity theft or misuse of your personal information caused by the breach, or purchasing credit monitoring or credit reports. This was capped at 20 total hours at $25 per hour ($500), with total cash reimbursement payments not to exceed $20,000 per consumer.

Those who did file a claim probably started receiving emails or other communications earlier this year from the Equifax Breach Settlement Fund, which has been messaging class participants about methods of collecting their payments.

How much each recipient receives appears to vary quite a bit, but probably most people will have earned a payment on the smaller end of that $125 scale — like less than $10. Those who received higher amounts likely spent more time documenting actual losses and/or explaining how the breach affected them personally. Continue reading →

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Hacked Ring Cams Used to Record Swatting Victims

December 19, 2022
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Photo: BrandonKleinPhoto / Shutterstock.com

Two U.S. men have been charged with hacking into the Ring home security cameras of a dozen random people and then “swatting” them — falsely reporting a violent incident at the target’s address to trick local police into responding with force. Prosecutors say the duo used the compromised Ring devices to stream live video footage on social media of police raiding their targets’ homes, and to taunt authorities when they arrived.

Prosecutors in Los Angeles allege 20-year-old James Thomas Andrew McCarty, a.k.a. “Aspertaine,” of Charlotte, N.C., and Kya Christian Nelson, a.k.a. “ChumLul,” 22, of Racine, Wisc., conspired to hack into Yahoo email accounts belonging to victims in the United States. From there, the two allegedly would check how many of those Yahoo accounts were associated with Ring accounts, and then target people who used the same password for both accounts.

An indictment unsealed this week says that in the span of just one week in November 2020, McCarty and Nelson identified and swatted at least a dozen different victims across the country.

“The defendants then allegedly accessed without authorization the victims’ Ring devices and transmitted the audio and video from those devices on social media during the police response,” reads a statement from Martin Estrada, the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California. “They also allegedly verbally taunted responding police officers and victims through the Ring devices during several of the incidents.”

James Thomas Andrew McCarty.

The indictment charges that McCarty continued his swatting spree in 2021 from his hometown in Kayenta, Ariz., where he called in bomb threats or phony hostage situations on more than two dozen occasions.

The Telegram and Discord aliases allegedly used by McCarty — “Aspertaine” and “Couch,” among others — correspond to an identity that was active in certain channels dedicated to SIM-swapping, a crime that involves stealing wireless phone numbers and hijacking the online financial and social media accounts tied to those numbers.

Aspertaine bragged on Discord that he’d amassed more than $330,000 in virtual currency. On Telegram, the Aspertaine/Couch alias frequented several popular SIM-swapping channels, where they initially were active as a “holder” — a SIM-swapping group member who agrees to hold SIM cards used in the heist after an account takeover is completed. Aspertaine later claimed more direct involvement in individual SIM-swapping attacks.

In September, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news about a wide-ranging federal investigation into “violence-as-a-service” offerings on Telegram and other social media networks, wherein people can settle scores by hiring total strangers to carry out physical attacks such as brickings, shootings, and firebombings at a target’s address.

The story observed that SIM swappers were especially enamored of these “IRL” or “In Real Life” violence services, which they frequently used to target one another in response to disagreements over how stolen money should be divided amongst themselves. And a number of Aspertaine’s peers on these SIM-swapping channels claimed they’d been ripped off after Aspertaine took more than a fair share from them. Continue reading →

Six Charged in Mass Takedown of DDoS-for-Hire Sites

December 14, 2022
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The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) today seized four-dozen domains that sold “booter” or “stresser” services — businesses that make it easy and cheap for even non-technical users to launch powerful Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks designed knock targets offline. The DOJ also charged six U.S. men with computer crimes related to their alleged ownership of the popular DDoS-for-hire services.

The booter service OrphicSecurityTeam[.]com was one of the 48 DDoS-for-hire domains seized by the Justice Department this week.

The DOJ said the 48 domains it seized helped paying customers launch millions of digital sieges capable of knocking Web sites and even entire network providers offline.

Booter services are advertised through a variety of methods, including Dark Web forums, chat platforms and even youtube.com. They accept payment via PayPal, Google Wallet, and/or cryptocurrencies, and subscriptions can range in price from just a few dollars to several hundred per month. The services are generally priced according to the volume of traffic to be hurled at the target, the duration of each attack, and the number of concurrent attacks allowed.

Prosecutors in Los Angeles say the booter sites supremesecurityteam[.]com and royalstresser[.]com were the brainchild of Jeremiah Sam Evans Miller, a.k.a. “John the Dev,” a 23-year-old from San Antonio, Texas. Miller was charged this week with conspiracy and violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The complaint against Miller alleges Royalstresser launched nearly 200,000 DDoS attacks between November 2021 and February 2022.

Defendant Angel Manuel Colon Jr., a.k.a Anonghost720 and Anonghost1337, is a 37-year-old from Belleview, Fla. Colon is suspected of running the booter service securityteam[.]io. He was also charged with conspiracy and CFAA violations. The feds say the SecurityTeam stresser service conducted 1.3 million attacks between 2018 and 2022, and attracted some 50,000 registered users.

Charged with conspiracy were Corey Anthony Palmer, 22, of Lauderhill, Fla, for his alleged ownership of booter[.]sx; and Shamar Shattock, 19, of Margate, Fla., for allegedly operating the booter service astrostress[.]com, which had more than 30,000 users and blasted out some 700,000 attacks.

Two other alleged booter site operators were charged in Alaska. John M. Dobbs, 32, of Honolulu, HI is charged with aiding and abetting violations of the CFAA related to the operation of IPStresser[.]com, which he allegedly ran for nearly 13 years until last month. During that time, IPstresser launched approximately 30 million DDoS attacks and garnered more than two million registered users.

Joshua Laing, 32, of Liverpool, NY, also was charged with CFAA infractions tied to his alleged ownership of the booter service TrueSecurityServices[.]io, which prosecutors say had 18,000 users and conducted over 1.2 million attacks between 2018 and 2022.

Purveyors of stressers and booters claim they are not responsible for how customers use their services, and that they aren’t breaking the law because — like most security tools — stresser services can be used for good or bad purposes. For example, all of the above-mentioned booter sites contained wordy “terms of use” agreements that required customers to agree they will only stress-test their own networks — and that they won’t use the service to attack others.

Dobbs, the alleged administrator of IPStresser, gave an interview to ZDNet France in 2015, in which he asserted that he was immune from liability because his clients all had to submit a digital signature attesting that they wouldn’t use the site for illegal purposes.

“Our terms of use are a legal document that protects us, among other things, from certain legal consequences,” Dobbs told ZDNet. “Most other sites are satisfied with a simple checkbox, but we ask for a digital signature in order to imply real consent from our customers.”

But the DOJ says these disclaimers usually ignore the fact that most booter services are heavily reliant on constantly scanning the Internet to commandeer misconfigured devices that are critical for maximizing the size and impact of DDoS attacks.

“None of these sites ever required the FBI to confirm that it owned, operated, or had any property right to the computer that the FBI attacked during its testing (as would be appropriate if the attacks were for a legitimate or authorized purpose),” reads an affidavit (PDF) filed by Elliott Peterson, a special agent in the FBI’s Anchorage field office. Continue reading →

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, December 2022 Edition

December 14, 2022
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Microsoft has released its final monthly batch of security updates for 2022, fixing more than four dozen security holes in its various Windows operating systems and related software. The most pressing patches include a zero-day in a Windows feature that tries to flag malicious files from the Web, a critical bug in PowerShell, and a dangerous flaw in Windows 11 systems that was detailed publicly prior to this week’s Patch Tuesday.

The security updates include patches for Azure, Microsoft Edge, Office, SharePoint Server, SysInternals, and the .NET framework. Six of the update bundles earned Microsoft’s most dire “critical” rating, meaning they fix vulnerabilities that malware or malcontents can use to remotely commandeer an unpatched Windows system — with little to no interaction on the part of the user.

The bug already seeing exploitation is CVE-2022-44698, which allows attackers to bypass the Windows SmartScreen security feature. The vulnerability allows attackers to craft documents that won’t get tagged with Microsoft’s “Mark of the Web,” despite being downloaded from untrusted sites.

“This means no Protected View for Microsoft Office documents, making it easier to get users to do sketchy things like execute malicious macros, said Greg Wiseman, product manager at security firm Rapid7. This is the second Mark of the Web flaw Microsoft has patched in as many months; both were first publicly detailed over the past two months on Twitter by security researcher Will Dormann. Continue reading →

FBI’s Vetted Info Sharing Network ‘InfraGard’ Hacked

December 13, 2022
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InfraGard, a program run by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to build cyber and physical threat information sharing partnerships with the private sector, this week saw its database of contact information on more than 80,000 members go up for sale on an English-language cybercrime forum. Meanwhile, the hackers responsible are communicating directly with members through the InfraGard portal online — using a new account under the assumed identity of a financial industry CEO that was vetted by the FBI itself.

On Dec. 10, 2022, the relatively new cybercrime forum Breached featured a bombshell new sales thread: The user database for InfraGard, including names and contact information for tens of thousands of InfraGard members.

The FBI’s InfraGard program is supposed to be a vetted Who’s Who of key people in private sector roles involving both cyber and physical security at companies that manage most of the nation’s critical infrastructures — including drinking water and power utilities, communications and financial services firms, transportation and manufacturing companies, healthcare providers, and nuclear energy firms.

“InfraGard connects critical infrastructure owners, operators, and stakeholders with the FBI to provide education, networking, and information-sharing on security threats and risks,” the FBI’s InfraGard fact sheet reads.

In response to information shared by KrebsOnSecurity, the FBI said it is aware of a potential false account associated with the InfraGard Portal and that it is actively looking into the matter.

“This is an ongoing situation, and we are not able to provide any additional information at this time,” the FBI said in a written statement.

KrebsOnSecurity contacted the seller of the InfraGard database, a Breached forum member who uses the handle “USDoD” and whose avatar is the seal of the U.S. Department of Defense.

USDoD’s InfraGard sales thread on Breached.

USDoD said they gained access to the FBI’s InfraGard system by applying for a new account using the name, Social Security Number, date of birth  and other personal details of a chief executive officer at a company that was highly likely to be granted InfraGard membership.

The CEO in question — currently the head of a major U.S. financial corporation that has a direct impact on the creditworthiness of most Americans — told KrebsOnSecurity they were never contacted by the FBI seeking to vet an InfraGard application.

USDoD told KrebsOnSecurity their phony application was submitted in November in the CEO’s name, and that the application included a contact email address that they controlled — but also the CEO’s real mobile phone number.

“When you register they said that to be approved can take at least three months,” USDoD said. “I wasn’t expected to be approve[d].”

But USDoD said that in early December, their email address in the name of the CEO received a reply saying the application had been approved (see redacted screenshot to the right). While the FBI’s InfraGard system requires multi-factor authentication by default, users can choose between receiving a one-time code via SMS or email.

“If it was only the phone I will be in [a] bad situation,” USDoD said. “Because I used the person[‘s] phone that I’m impersonating.”

USDoD said the InfraGard user data was made easily available via an Application Programming Interface (API) that is built into several key components of the website that help InfraGard members connect and communicate with each other.

USDoD said after their InfraGard membership was approved, they asked a friend to code a script in Python to query that API and retrieve all available InfraGard user data.

“InfraGard is a social media intelligence hub for high profile persons,” USDoD said. “They even got [a] forum to discuss things.”

To prove they still had access to InfraGard as of publication time Tuesday evening, USDoD sent a direct note through InfraGard’s messaging system to an InfraGard member whose personal details were initially published as a teaser on the database sales thread.

That InfraGard member, who is head of security at a major U.S. technology firm, confirmed receipt of USDoD’s message but asked to remain anonymous for this story.

USDoD acknowledged that their $50,000 asking price for the InfraGard database may be a tad high, given that it is a fairly basic list of people who are already very security-conscious. Also, only about half of the user accounts contain an email address, and most of the other database fields — like Social Security Number and Date of Birth — are completely empty.

“I don’t think someone will pay that price, but I have to [price it] a bit higher to [negotiate] the price that I want,” they explained. Continue reading →

New Ransom Payment Schemes Target Executives, Telemedicine

December 8, 2022
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Ransomware groups are constantly devising new methods for infecting victims and convincing them to pay up, but a couple of strategies tested recently seem especially devious. The first centers on targeting healthcare organizations that offer consultations over the Internet and sending them booby-trapped medical records for the “patient.” The other involves carefully editing email inboxes of public company executives to make it appear that some were involved in insider trading.

Alex Holden is founder of Hold Security, a Milwaukee-based cybersecurity firm. Holden’s team gained visibility into discussions among members of two different ransom groups: CLOP (a.k.a. “Cl0p” a.k.a. “TA505“), and a newer ransom group known as Venus.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) warned that Venus ransomware attacks were targeting a number of U.S. healthcare organizations. First spotted in mid-August 2022, Venus is known for hacking into victims’ publicly-exposed Remote Desktop services to encrypt Windows devices.

Holden said the internal discussions among the Venus group members indicate this gang has no problem gaining access to victim organizations.

“The Venus group has problems getting paid,” Holden said. “They are targeting a lot of U.S. companies, but nobody wants to pay them.”

Which might explain why their latest scheme centers on trying to frame executives at public companies for insider trading charges. Venus indicated it recently had success with a method that involves carefully editing one or more email inbox files at a victim firm — to insert messages discussing plans to trade large volumes of the company’s stock based on non-public information.

“We imitate correspondence of the [CEO] with a certain insider who shares financial reports of his companies through which your victim allegedly trades in the stock market, which naturally is a criminal offense and — according to US federal laws [includes the possibility of up to] 20 years in prison,” one Venus member wrote to an underling.

“You need to create this file and inject into the machine(s) like this so that metadata would say that they were created on his computer,” they continued. “One of my clients did it, I don’t know how. In addition to pst, you need to decompose several files into different places, so that metadata says the files are native from a certain date and time rather than created yesterday on an unknown machine.”

Holden said it’s not easy to plant emails into an inbox, but it can be done with Microsoft Outlook .pst files, which the attackers may also have access to if they’d already compromised a victim network.

“It’s not going to be forensically solid, but that’s not what they care about,” he said. “It still has the potential to be a huge scandal — at least for a while — when a victim is being threatened with the publication or release of these records.”

The Venus ransom group’s extortion note. Image: Tripwire.com

Continue reading →

Judge Orders U.S. Lawyer in Russian Botnet Case to Pay Google

December 5, 2022
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In December 2021, Google filed a civil lawsuit against two Russian men thought to be responsible for operating Glupteba, one of the Internet’s largest and oldest botnets. The defendants, who initially pursued a strategy of counter suing Google for interfering in their sprawling cybercrime business, later brazenly offered to dismantle the botnet in exchange for payment from Google. The judge in the case was not amused, found for the plaintiff, and ordered the defendants and their U.S. attorney to pay Google’s legal fees.

A slide from a talk given in Sept. 2022 by Google researcher Luca Nagy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Gz6_I-wl0E&t=6s

Glupteba is a rootkit that steals passwords and other access credentials, disables security software, and tries to compromise other devices on the victim network — such as Internet routers and media storage servers — for use in relaying spam or other malicious traffic.

Collectively, the tens of thousands of systems infected with Glupteba on any given day feed into a number of major cybercriminal businesses: The botnet’s proprietors sell the credential data they steal, use the botnet to place disruptive ads on the infected computers, and mine cryptocurrencies. Glupteba also rents out infected systems as “proxies,” directing third-party traffic through the infected devices to disguise the origin of the traffic.

In June 2022, KrebsOnSecurity showed how the malware proxy services RSOCKS and AWMProxy were entirely dependent on the Glupteba botnet for fresh proxies, and that the founder of AWMProxy was Dmitry Starovikov — one of the Russian men named in Google’s lawsuit.

Google sued Starovikov and 15 other “John Doe” defendants, alleging violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark and unfair competition law, and unjust enrichment.

In June, Google and the named defendants agreed that the case would proceed as a nonjury action because Google had withdrawn its claim for damages — seeking only injunctive relief to halt the operations of the botnet.

The defendants, who worked for a Russian firm called “Valtron” that was also named in the lawsuit, told Google that they were interested in settling. The defendants said they could potentially help Google by taking the botnet offline.

Another slide from Google researcher Luca Nagy’s September 2022 talk on Glupteba.

But the court expressed frustration that the defendants were unwilling to consent to a permanent injunction, and at the same time were unable to articulate why an injunction forbidding them from engaging in unlawful activities would pose a problem.

“The Defendants insisted that they were not engaged in criminal activity, and that any alleged activity in which they were engaged was legitimate,” U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote wrote. “Nevertheless, the Defendants resisted entry of a permanent injunction, asserting that Google’s use of the preliminary injunction had disrupted their normal business operations.”

While the defendants represented that they had the ability to dismantle the Glupteba botnet, when it came time for discovery — the stage in a lawsuit where both parties can compel the production of documents and other information pertinent to their case — the attorney for the defendants told the court his clients had been fired by Valtron in late 2021, and thus no longer had access to their work laptops or the botnet.

The lawyer for the defendants — New York-based cybercrime defense attorney Igor Litvak — told the court he first learned about his clients’ termination from Valtron on May 20, a fact Judge Cote said she found “troubling” given statements he made to the court after that date representing that his clients still had access to the botnet.

The court ultimately suspended the discovery process against Google, saying there was reason to believe the defendants sought discovery only “to learn whether they could circumvent the steps Google has taken to block the malware.” Continue reading →

ConnectWise Quietly Patches Flaw That Helps Phishers

December 1, 2022
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ConnectWise, which offers a self-hosted, remote desktop software application that is widely used by Managed Service Providers (MSPs), is warning about an unusually sophisticated phishing attack that can let attackers take remote control over user systems when recipients click the included link. The warning comes just weeks after the company quietly patched a vulnerability that makes it easier for phishers to launch these attacks.

A phishing attack targeting MSP customers using ConnectWise.

ConnectWise Control is extremely popular among MSPs that manage, protect and service large numbers of computers remotely for client organizations. Their product provides a dynamic software client and hosted server that connects two or more computers together, and provides temporary or persistent remote access to those client systems.

When a support technician wants to use it to remotely administer a computer, the ConnectWise website generates an executable file that is digitally signed by ConnectWise and downloadable by the client via a hyperlink.

When the remote user in need of assistance clicks the link, their computer is then directly connected to the computer of the remote administrator, who can then control the client’s computer as if they were seated in front of it.

While modern Microsoft Windows operating systems by default will ask users whether they want to run a downloaded executable file, many systems set up for remote administration by MSPs disable that user account control feature for this particular application.

In October, security researcher Ken Pyle alerted ConnectWise that their client executable file gets generated based on client-controlled parameters. Meaning, an attacker could craft a ConnectWise Control client download link that would bounce or proxy the remote connection from the MSP’s servers to a server that the attacker controls.

This is dangerous because many organizations that rely on MSPs to manage their computers often set up their networks so that only remote assistance connections coming from their MSP’s networks are allowed.

Using a free ConnectWise trial account, Pyle showed the company how easy it was to create a client executable that is cryptographically signed by ConnectWise and can bypass those network restrictions by bouncing the connection through an attacker’s ConnectWise Control server.

“You as the attacker have full control over the link’s parameters, and that link gets injected into an executable file that is downloaded by the client through an unauthenticated Web interface,” said Pyle, a partner and exploit developer at the security firm Cybir. “I can send this link to a victim, they will click this link, and their workstation will connect back to my instance via a link on your site.”

A composite of screenshots researcher Ken Pyle put together to illustrate the ScreenConnect vulnerability.

On Nov. 29, roughly the same time Pyle published a blog post about his findings, ConnectWise issued an advisory warning users to be on guard against a new round email phishing attempts that mimic legitimate email alerts the company sends when it detects unusual activity on a customer account.

“We are aware of a phishing campaign that mimics ConnectWise Control New Login Alert emails and has the potential to lead to unauthorized access to legitimate Control instances,” the company said.

ConnectWise said it released software updates last month that included new protections against the misdirection vulnerability that Pyle reported.  But the company said there is no reason to believe the phishers they warned about are exploiting any of the issues reported by Pyle. Continue reading →

U.S. Govt. Apps Bundled Russian Code With Ties to Mobile Malware Developer

November 28, 2022
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A recent scoop by Reuters revealed that mobile apps for the U.S. Army and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were integrating software that sends visitor data to a Russian company called Pushwoosh, which claims to be based in the United States. But that story omitted an important historical detail about Pushwoosh: In 2013, one of its developers admitted to authoring the Pincer Trojan, malware designed to surreptitiously intercept and forward text messages from Android mobile devices.

Pushwoosh says it is a U.S. based company that provides code for software developers to profile smartphone app users based on their online activity, allowing them to send tailor-made notifications. But a recent investigation by Reuters raised questions about the company’s real location and truthfulness.

The Army told Reuters it removed an app containing Pushwoosh in March, citing “security concerns.” The Army app was used by soldiers at one of the nation’s main combat training bases.

Reuters said the CDC likewise recently removed Pushwoosh code from its app over security concerns, after reporters informed the agency Pushwoosh was not based in the Washington D.C. area — as the company had represented — but was instead operated from Novosibirsk, Russia.

Pushwoosh’s software also was found in apps for “a wide array of international companies, influential nonprofits and government agencies from global consumer goods company Unilever and the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) to the politically powerful U.S. gun lobby, the National Rifle Association (NRA), and Britain’s Labour Party.”

The company’s founder Max Konev told Reuters Pushwoosh “has no connection with the Russian government of any kind” and that it stores its data in the United States and Germany.

But Reuters found that while Pushwoosh’s social media and U.S. regulatory filings present it as a U.S. company based variously in California, Maryland and Washington, D.C., the company’s employees are located in Novosibirsk, Russia.

Reuters also learned that the company’s address in California does not exist, and that two LinkedIn accounts for Pushwoosh employees in Washington, D.C. were fake.

“Pushwoosh never mentioned it was Russian-based in eight annual filings in the U.S. state of Delaware, where it is registered, an omission which could violate state law,” Reuters reported.

Pushwoosh admitted the LinkedIn profiles were fake, but said they were created by a marketing firm to drum up business for the company — not misrepresent its location.

Pushwoosh told Reuters it used addresses in the Washington, D.C. area to “receive business correspondence” during the coronavirus pandemic. A review of the Pushwoosh founder’s online presence via Constella Intelligence shows his Pushwoosh email address was tied to a phone number in Washington, D.C. that was also connected to email addresses and account profiles for over a dozen other Pushwoosh employees.

Pushwoosh was incorporated in Novosibirsk, Russia in 2016.

THE PINCER TROJAN CONNECTION

The dust-up over Pushwoosh came in part from data gathered by Zach Edwards, a security researcher who until recently worked for the Internet Safety Labs, a nonprofit organization that funds research into online threats.

Edwards said Pushwoosh began as Arello-Mobile, and for several years the two co-branded — appearing side by side at various technology expos. Around 2016, he said, the two companies both started using the Pushwoosh name.

A search on Pushwoosh’s code base shows that one of the company’s longtime developers is a 41-year-old from Novosibirsk named Yuri Shmakov. In 2013, KrebsOnSecurity interviewed Shmakov for the story, “Who Wrote the Pincer Android Trojan?” wherein Shmakov acknowledged writing the malware as a freelance project.

Shmakov told me that, based on the client’s specifications, he suspected it might ultimately be put to nefarious uses. Even so, he completed the job and signed his work by including his nickname in the app’s code.

“I was working on this app for some months, and I was hoping that it would be really helpful,” Shmakov wrote. “[The] idea of this app is that you can set it up as a spam filter…block some calls and SMS remotely, from a Web service. I hoped that this will be [some kind of] blacklist, with logging about blocked [messages/calls]. But of course, I understood that client [did] not really want this.”

Shmakov did not respond to requests for comment. His LinkedIn profile says he stopped working for Arello Mobile in 2016, and that he currently is employed full-time as the Android team leader at an online betting company.

In a blog post responding to the Reuters story, Pushwoosh said it is a privately held company incorporated under the state laws of Delaware, USA, and that Pushwoosh Inc. was never owned by any company registered in the Russian Federation.

“Pushwoosh Inc. used to outsource development parts of the product to the Russian company in Novosibirsk, mentioned in the article,” the company said. “However, in February 2022, Pushwoosh Inc. terminated the contract.”

However, Edwards noted that dozens of developer subdomains on Pushwoosh’s main domain still point to JSC Avantel, an Internet provider based in Novosibirsk, Russia.

WAR GAMES

Pushwoosh employees posing at a company laser tag event.

Edwards said the U.S. Army’s app had a custom Pushwoosh configuration that did not appear on any other customer implementation.

“It had an extremely custom setup that existed nowhere else,” Edwards said. “Originally, it was an in-app Web browser, where it integrated a Pushwoosh javascript so that any time a user clicked on links, data went out to Pushwoosh and they could push back whatever they wanted through the in-app browser.”

An Army Times article published the day after the Reuters story ran said at least 1,000 people downloaded the app, which “delivered updates for troops at the National Training Center on Fort Irwin, Calif., a critical waypoint for deploying units to test their battlefield prowess before heading overseas.”

In April 2022, roughly 4,500 Army personnel converged on the National Training Center for a war games exercise on how to use lessons learned from Russia’s war against Ukraine to prepare for future fights against a major adversary such as Russia or China.

Edwards said despite Pushwoosh’s many prevarications, the company’s software doesn’t appear to have done anything untoward to its customers or users.

“Nothing they did has been seen to be malicious,” he said. “Other than completely lying about where they are, where their data is being hosted, and where they have infrastructure.” Continue reading →