‘Biggest Cybercriminal Takedown in History’

November 9, 2011
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The proprietors of shadowy online businesses that have become synonymous with cybercrime in recent years were arrested in their native Estonia on Tuesday and charged with running a sophisticated click fraud scheme that infected with malware more than four million computers in over 100 countries — including an estimated 500,000 PCs in the United States. The law enforcement action, dubbed “Operation Ghost Click,” was the result  of a multi-year investigation, and is being called the “biggest cybercriminal takedown in history.”

Vladimir Tsastsin, in undated photo.

Estonian authorities arrested six men, including Vladimir Tsastsin, 31, the owner of several Internet companies that have been closely associated with the malware community for many years. Tsastsin previously headed EstDomains Inc. a domain name registrar that handled the registrations for tens of thousands of domains associated with the far-flung Russian Business Network.

Reporting for The Washington Post in September 2008, I detailed how Tsastsin’s prior convictions in Estonia for credit card fraud, money laundering and forgery violated the registrar agreement set forth by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which bars convicted felons from serving as officers of a registrar. ICANN later agreed, and revoked EstDomains’ ability to act as a domain registrar, citing Tsastsin’s criminal history.

Also arrested were Timur Gerassimenko, 31; Dmitri Jegorov, 33; Valeri Aleksejev, 31; Konstantin Poltev, 28 (quoted in the above-linked stories as the spokesperson for EstDomains); and Anton Ivanvov, 26. All six men were arrested and taken into custody this week by the Estonian Police and Border Guard. A seventh defendant, a 31-year-old Russian national named Andrey Taame, is still at large.

Source: FBI

Indictments returned against the defendants in the U.S. District Court for the South District of New York detail how the defendants allegedly used a strain of malware generically known as DNS Changer to hijack victim computers for the purposes of redirecting Web browsers to ads that generated pay-per-click revenue for the defendants and their clients. U.S. authorities allege that the men made more than $14 million through click hijacking and advertisement replacement fraud.

DNS Changer most often comes disguised as a video “codec” supposedly needed to view adult movies. It infects systems at the boot sector level, hooking into the host computer at a very low level and making it often very challenging to remove. This malware family didn’t just infect Microsoft Windows systems: Several versions of DNS changer would just as happily infect Mac systems as well. Other variants of the malware even hijacked DNS settings on wireless home routers. The FBI has posted several useful links to help users learn whether their systems are infected with DNS Changer.

Feike Hacquebord, senior threat researcher for security vendor Trend Micro, called the arrest the “biggest cybercriminal takedown in history.” In a blog post published today, Hacquebord and Trend detail the multi-year takedown, which involved a number of front companies, but principally an entity that Tsastsin founded named Rove Digital:

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Adobe, Apple, Microsoft & Mozilla Issue Critical Patches

November 9, 2011
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Adobe, Apple, Microsoft and Mozilla all released updates on Tuesday to fix critical security flaws in their products. Adobe issued a patch that corrects four vulnerabilities in Shockwave Player, while Redmond pushed updates to address four Windows flaws. Apple slipped out an update that mends at least 17 security holes in its version of Java, and Mozilla issued yet another major Firefox release, Firefox 8.

The only “critical” patch from Microsoft this month is a dangerous Windows flaw that could be triggered remotely to install malicious software just by sending the target system specially crafted packets of data. Microsoft says this vulnerability may be difficult to reliably exploit, but it should be patched immediately. Information on the other three flaws fixed this week is here. The fixes are available via Windows Updates for most supported versions of the operating system, including XP, Vista and Windows 7. Continue reading →

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How Much Is Your Identity Worth?

November 8, 2011
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How much does it cost for thieves to discover the data that unlocks identity for creditors, such as your Social Security number, birthday, or mother’s maiden name? Would it surprise you to learn that crooks are selling this data to any and all comers for pennies on the dollar?

superget.info home page

At least, that’s the going price at superget.info. This fraudster-friendly site has been operating since July 2010, and markets the ability to look up SSNs, birthdays and other sensitive information on millions of Americans. Registration is free, and accounts are funded via WebMoney and Liberty Reserve, virtual currencies that are popular in the cybercriminal underground.

Superget lets users search for specific individuals by name, city, and state. Each “credit” costs USD$1, and a successful hit on a Social Security number or date of birth costs 3 credits each. The more credits you buy, the cheaper the searches are per credit: Six credits cost $4.99; 35 credits cost $20.99, and $100.99 buys you 230 credits. Customers with special needs can avail themselves of the “reseller plan,” which promises 1,500 credits for $500.99, and 3,500 credits for $1000.99.

“Our Databases are updated EVERY DAY,” the site’s owner enthuses. “About 99% nearly 100% US people could be found, more than any sites on the internet now.”

Customers who aren’t choosy about the identities they’re stealing can get a real bargain. Among the most trafficked commodities in the hacker underground are packages called “fullz infos,” which include the full identity information on dozens or hundreds of individuals.

The table at the right shows the bulk lookup price-per-identity in this class. In the “Fullz Info USA Type A” package, each record includes the subject’s first name, last name, middle name, email address, email password, physical address, phone number, date of birth, Social Security number, drivers license number, bank name, bank account number, bank routing number, the victim employer’s name, and the number of years that individual has been at his or her current job. The proprietor of this shop says he has more than 330,000 records of this type, and is adding 300-400 new records each day.

If you want the mother’s maiden name included in each of the bulk records, you’ll need to select “Fullz Info USA Type B”; the site’s owner says this package includes data from an older database, and perhaps that explains why the prices for these identities (pictured at left) are so much lower than those in the Type A category. The price in Type B starts at 16 cents per identity, and falls as low as nine cents per record for those requesting more than 20,000 fullz from this category.

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Microsoft Issues Stopgap Fix for ‘Duqu’ Flaw

November 4, 2011
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Microsoft has released an advisory and a stopgap fix for the zero-day vulnerability exploited by the “Duqu” Trojan, a highly targeted malware strain that some security experts say could be the most important cyber espionage threat since Stuxnet.

According to the advisory, the critical vulnerability resides in most supported versions of Windows, including Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. The problem stems from the way Windows parses certain font types. Microsoft says it is aware of targeted attacks exploiting this flaw, but that it believes few users have been affected.

Nevertheless, the flaw is a dangerous one. Microsoft said that an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could run arbitrary code, install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. The most likely vehicle for the exploit is a poisoned email attachment.

Microsoft is working on developing an official security update to fix the flaw. For now, it has released a point-and-click Fixit tool that allows Windows users to disable the vulnerable component. Enabling this tweak may cause fonts in some applications to display improperly. If you experience problems after applying the Fixit solution, you can always undo it by clicking “disable” image in the Microsoft advisory and following the prompts.

Update, Nov. 10, 9:22 a.m. ET: As several readers have noted, installing this FixIt may cause Windows Update to repeatedly ask prompt you to install two particular updates: KB972270, and KB982132. Uninstalling the FixIt seems to stop these incessant prompts, although it leaves the vulnerable Windows component exposed.

Are You on the Pwnedlist?

November 2, 2011
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2011 has been called the year of the data breach, with hacker groups publishing huge troves of stolen data online almost daily. Now a new site called pwnedlist.com lets users check to see if their email address or username and associated information may have been compromised.

Pwnedlist.com is the creation of Alen Puzic and Jasiel Spelman, two security researchers from DVLabs, a division of HP/TippingPoint. Enter a username or email address into the site’s search box, and it will check to see if the information was found in any of these recent public data dumps.

Puzic said the project stemmed from an effort to harvest mounds of data being leaked or deposited daily to sites like Pastebin and torrent trackers.

“I was trying to harvest as much data as I could, to see how many passwords I could possibly find, and it just happened to be that within two hours, I found about 30,000 usernames and passwords,” Puzic said. “That kind of got me thinking that I could do this every day, and if I could find over one million then maybe I could create a site that would help the everyday user find if they were compromised.”

Pwnedlist.com currently allows users to search through nearly five million emails and usernames that have been dumped online. The site also frequently receives large caches of account data that people directly submit to its database. Puzic said it is growing at a rate of about 40,000 new compromised accounts each week.

Puzic said information contained in these data donations often make it simple to learn which organization lost the information.

“Usually, somewhere in the dump files there’s a readme.txt file or there’s some type of header made by hacker who caused the breach, and there’s an advertisement about who did the hack and which company was compromised,” Puzic said. “Other times it’s really obvious because all of the emails come from the same domain.”

Puzic said Pwnedlist.com doesn’t store the username, email address and password data itself; instead, it records a cryptographic hash of the information and then discards the plaintext data. As a result, a “hit” on any searched email or username only produces a binary “yes” or “no” answer about whether any hashes matching that data were found. It won’t return the associated password, nor does it offer any clues about from where the data was leaked.

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Jailed ChronoPay Co-Founder Denied Bail

November 1, 2011
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A Moscow court on Monday denied bail for Pavel Vrublevsky, a Russian businessman who was charged earlier this year with hiring hackers to launch costly online attacks against his rivals. The denial came even after Vrublevsky apparently admitted his role in the attacks, according to Russian news outlets.

Vrublevsky in 2004

Vrublevsky, 32, is probably best known as the co-founder of ChronoPay, a large online payment processor in Russia. He was arrested in June after Russian investigators secured the confession of a man who said he was hired by Vrublevsky to launch a debilitating cyber attack against Assist, a top ChronoPay competitor. The former ChronoPay executive reportedly wanted to sideline rival payment processing firms who were competing for a lucrative contract to process payments for Aeroflot, Russia’s largest airline. Aeroflot’s processing systems faltered for several days in the face of the attack, an outage that Aeroflot says cost the company about a million dollars a day.

Vrublevsky’s lawyers asked the court to release him pending a trial in December — offering to pay 30 million rubles (~ USD $1 million) — but the court denied the request.

Vrublevsky co-founded ChronoPay in 2003 along with Igor Gusev, another Russian businessman who is facing criminal charges in Russia stemming from his 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 last year indicate Vrublevsky co-ran a competing rogue Internet pharmacy — Rx-Promotion — although Vrublevsky publicly denies this.

Vrublevsky and Gusev have been locked in an increasingly heated and public battle to ruin the others’ business, a saga that I have chronicled in an ongoing series: Pharma Wars.

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Turning Hot Credit Cards into Hot Stuff

October 31, 2011
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Would that all cybercriminal operations presented such a tidy spreadsheet of the victim and perpetrator data as comprehensively as profsoyuz.biz, one of the longest-running criminal reshipping programs on the Internet.

Launched in 2006 under a slightly different domain name, profsoyuz.biz is marketed on invite-only forums to help credit card thieves “cash out” compromised credit and debit card accounts by purchasing and selling merchandise online. Most Western businesses will not ship to Russia and Eastern Europe due to high fraud rates in those areas. Underground businesses like Profsoyuz hire Americans to receive stolen merchandise and reship it to those embargoed regions. Then they charge vetted customers for access to those reshipping services.

Below is a screen shot of the administrative interface for Profsoyuz, which shows why its niche business is often called “Drops for Stuff” on the underground. The “Дроп” or “Drop” column lists Americans who are currently reshipping packages for the crime gang; the “Стафф” or “Stuff” column shows the items that are being purchased and reshipped with stolen credit card numbers.

Profsoyuz reshipping service admin panel.

The column marked “Холдер” or “Holder” indicates the cardholder — the name on the stolen credit card account that was used to purchase the stuff being sent to the drops. I rang Laura Kowaleski, listed as the person whose credit card was fraudulently used on Oct. 11, 2011 to buy a Star Wars Lego set for $189, plus $56 in shipping. She told me I reached her while she was in the process of filing a police report online, after reporting the unauthorized charge to her credit card company.

The Lego set was sent via FedEx to Oscar Padilla, a 37-year-old from Los Angeles. Padilla said he believed he was working for Transit Air Cargo Inc. (transitair.com), a legitimate shipping company in Santa Ana, Calif., and that he got hired in his current position after responding to a job offer on careerbuilder.com. However, the Web site used by the company that recruited him was transitac.com.

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Chasing APT: Persistence Pays Off

October 27, 2011
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The IT director for an international hedge fund received the bad news in a phone call from a stranger: Chinese hackers were running amok on the fund’s network. Not seeing evidence of the claimed intrusion, and unsure about the credibility of the caller, the IT director fired off an email to a reporter.

“So do you think this is legit, or is the guy trying to scare us?” the IT director asked in an email to KrebsOnSecurity.com, agreeing to discuss the incident if he and his company were not named. “He has sent me the logs for the connections to the infected server. I checked the firewall and am not seeing any active connections.”

The call, from Hermes Bojaxhi of Columbia, Md. based threat intelligence firm Cyber Engineering Services Inc. (CyberESI), was indeed legit, and a follow-up investigation by the hedge fund revealed that at least 15 PCs within the financial services company were compromised and were sending proprietary information to the attackers.

CyberESI knew about the incident because it was monitoring several hacked, legitimate servers that the attackers were using to siphon data from multiple victims. Bojaxhi said the hedge fund notification was one of several he made that week to Fortune 500 companies that also had been hacked and were communicating with the same compromised servers.

And it wasn’t his first call to the hedge fund.

“On that particular victim, I tried to reach out to them a month prior, but I was handed off to an administrative assistant,” Bojaxhi said. “We had 25 [victim organizations] to call that day. But when they popped back up on the radar a month later, I tried again.”

The hedge fund incident illustrates the complexities of defending against and detecting targeted attacks, even when victims are alerted to the problem by an outside party.

Joe Drissel, founder and CEO for CyberESI, said too many companies think of cyberattacks as automated threats that can be blocked with the proper mix of hardware and software.

“So many firms are stuck in a paradigm of drive-bys, not targeted attacks,” Drissel said. “There seems to be a real disconnect with what’s really happening on a daily basis. We’re trying to fight an asymmetrical war in a symmetrical way, sort of like we’re British soldiers [in Revolutionary War], all walking in line and they’re picking us off one by one. By the time we turn around and aim, they’re already gone.”

None of the first three Trojans installed on the hedge fund’s computers were initially detected by any of the 42 anti-virus products bundled into the scanning tools at Virustotal.com.

Drissel said victims that his company notifies sometimes mistakenly think his firm is involved in the attack, or that they’re somehow joking.

“One guy laughed and said, ‘Thank you for watching out for our company,’ but he didn’t call us back,” Drissel said of a conversation with a victim earlier this year, declining to name the victim. “We watched [the attackers] exfiltrate weapons systems data for the Defense Department out of their systems, and ended up having to text the same guy a file stolen off their servers. Fifteen minutes later, we got a call back from him, and they unplugged their entire corporate network.”

Some say that the attacks CyberESI notifies companies about — often referred to as the advanced persistent threat (APT) —  are over-hyped, and that the malware and exploits used in these incursions usually aren’t that sophisticated. APT attacks also are frequently associated with targets in the U.S. government and companies in the defense industry.

But most APT attackers tend to be only as sophisticated as they need to be, which often isn’t too sophisticated, said Gavin Reid, senior manager of Cisco’s computer security incident response team. Speaking at a conference in Warsaw, Poland this week, Reid said successful APT attacks need not use zero-day software flaws.

“People will say, ‘Well, this attack wasn’t very advanced, so it can’t be APT’, but I will tell you the folks who are behind some of this stuff are not going to use cool zero-day stuff if they can go in the underground economy and say, ‘Hey, I need [access to] an infected machine in this organization,’ and pay $50 in Paypal in order to get that,” Reid said.

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Who Else Was Hit by the RSA Attackers?

October 24, 2011
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The data breach disclosed in March by security firm RSA received worldwide attention because it highlighted the challenges that organizations face in detecting and blocking intrusions from targeted cyber attacks. The subtext of the story was that if this could happen to one of the largest and most integral security firms, what hope was there for organizations that aren’t focused on security?

Security experts have said that RSA wasn’t the only corporation victimized in the attack, and that dozens of other multinational companies were infiltrated using many of the same tools and Internet infrastructure. But so far, no one has been willing to talk publicly about which other companies may have been hit.  Today’s post features a never-before-published list of those victim organizations. The information suggests that more than 760 other organizations had networks that were compromised with some of the same resources used to hit RSA. Almost 20 percent of the current Fortune 100 companies are on this list.

Since the RSA incident was disclosed, lawmakers in the U.S. Congress have taken a renewed interest in so-called “advanced persistent threat” or APT attacks. Some of the industry’s top security experts have been summoned to Capitol Hill to brief lawmakers and staff about the extent of the damage. The information below was shared with congressional staff.

Below is a list of companies whose networks were shown to have been phoning home to some of the same control infrastructure that was used in the attack on RSA. The first victims appear to have begun communicating with the attacker’s control networks as early as November 2010.

A few caveats are in order here. First, many of the network owners listed are Internet service providers, and are likely included because some of their subscribers were hit. Second, it is not clear how many systems in each of these companies or networks were compromised, for how long those intrusions persisted, or whether the attackers successfully stole sensitive information from all of the victims. Finally, some of these organizations (there are several antivirus firms mentioned  below) may be represented because they  intentionally compromised internal systems in an effort to reverse engineer malware used in these attacks.

Among the more interesting names on the list are Abbott Labs, the Alabama Supercomputer Network, Charles Schwabb & Co., Cisco Systems, eBay, the European Space Agency, Facebook, Freddie Mac, Google, the General Services Administration, the Inter-American Development Bank, IBM, Intel Corp., the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Motorola Inc., Northrop Grumman, Novell, Perot Systems, PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP, Research in Motion (RIM) Ltd., Seagate Technology, Thomson Financial, Unisys Corp., USAA, Verisign, VMWare, Wachovia Corp., and Wells Fargo & Co.

At the end of the victim list is a pie chart that shows the geographic distribution of the command and control networks used to coordinate the attacks. The chart indicates that the overwhelming majority of the C&Cs are located in or around Beijing, China.

302-DIRECT-MEDIA-ASN
8e6 Technologies, Inc.
AAPT AAPT Limited
ABBOTT Abbot Labs
ABOVENET-CUSTOMER – Abovenet Communications, Inc
ACCNETWORKS – Advanced Computer Connections
ACEDATACENTERS-AS-1 – Ace Data Centers, Inc.
ACSEAST – ACS Inc.
ACS-INTERNET – Affiliated Computer Services
ACS-INTERNET – Armstrong Cable Services
ADELPHIA-AS – Road Runner HoldCo LLC
Administracion Nacional de Telecomunicaciones
AERO-NET – The Aerospace Corporation
AHP – WYETH-AYERST/AMERICAN HOME PRODUCTS
AIRLOGIC – Digital Magicians, Inc.
AIRTELBROADBAND-AS-AP Bharti Airtel Ltd., Telemedia Services
AIS-WEST – American Internet Services, LLC.
AKADO-STOLITSA-AS _AKADO-Stolitsa_ JSC
ALCANET Corporate ALCANET Access
ALCANET-DE-AS Alcanet International Deutschland GmbH
ALCATEL-NA – Alcanet International NA
ALCHEMYNET – Alchemy Communications, Inc.
Alestra, S. de R.L. de C.V.
ALLIANCE-GATEWAY-AS-AP Alliance Broadband Services Pvt. Ltd.,Alliance Gateway AS,Broadband Services Provider,Kolkata,India
ALMAZAYA Almazaya gateway L.L.C
AMAZON-AES – Amazon.com, Inc.
AMERITECH-AS – AT&T Services, Inc.
AMNET-AU-AP Amnet IT Services Pty Ltd
ANITEX-AS Anitex Autonomus System
AOL-ATDN – AOL Transit Data Network
API-DIGITAL – API Digital Communications Group, LLC
APOLLO-AS LATTELEKOM-APOLLO
APOLLO-GROUP-INC – University of Phoenix
APT-AP AS
ARLINGTONVA – Arlington County Government

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Critical Java Update Fixes 20 Flaws

October 20, 2011
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Oracle Corp. released a critical update to plug at least 20 security holes in versions of its ubiquitous Java software. Nearly all of the Java vulnerabilities can be exploited remotely to compromise vulnerable systems with little or no help from users.

If you use Java, take some time to update the program now. According to a report released this month by Microsoft, the most commonly observed exploits in the first half of 2011 were those targeting Java flaws. The report also notes that Java exploits were responsible for between one-third and one-half of all exploits observed in each of the four most recent quarters.

Methods for exploiting one of the flaws fixed by this update were detailed at a recent security conference in Buenos Aires, where researchers demonstrated a method for intercepting encrypted SSL and TLS traffic.

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