Following the Money, Part II

May 18, 2010
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A leading Russian politician has accused a prominent Moscow businessman of running an international spam and online pharmacy operation while serving as an anti-spam adviser to the Russian government. Russian investigators now say they plan to create a special task force to look into the allegations.

In an open letter to investigators at the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) of the Russian Federation, Ilya V. Ponomarev, a deputy of the Russian State Duma’s Hi-Tech Development Subcommittee, in March called for a criminal inquiry into the activities of one Pavel Vrublevsky, an individual I interviewed last year in an investigative report on rogue security software (a translated PDF version of Ponomarev’s letter is here).

Vrublevsky is founder and general director of ChronoPay, an online payment processor widely accepted in Russia to handle a number of domestic transactions, including payment for Russian airline and lottery tickets. ChronoPay also specializes in handling “high risk” online merchants, such as pharmacy, adult and Internet gaming sites. Last year, The Washington Post published a story I wrote that showed Chronopay was processing payments for a large number of sites pushing rogue anti-virus products, or “scareware.”

According to Ponomarev, Vrublevsky also is known online as “Redeye,” and is the creator of Crutop.nu, a large adult Webmaster forum that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission last year said was a place “where criminals share techniques and strategies with one another,” and a Russian language Web site “that features a variety of discussion forums that focus on making money from spam.”

In his letter to A.V. Anichin, the deputy minister and chief of the Russian MVD Investigations Committee, Ponomarev said the primary analysis of Vrublevsky’s activities shows the extent of the problem which escapes attention of law-enforcement bodies.

“They include trade in pornography on the Internet that contains scenes of cruel violence, real rape, zoophilia, etc. (etu-cash.com, cash.pornocruto.es), unlawful banking business focused on laundering of money generated by a range of criminal activities in order to escape taxes using fethard.biz and acceptance of payments for illegal sale of music files mp3 which violates author’s rights of performers and illegal trade in drug-containing and controlled prescribed drastic preparations via on-line chemistry networks (rx-promotion.com, spampromo.com), and illegal mass spam distribution all over the world, as well as sale of malicious software under the guise of anti-virus software.”

Ponomarev notes that Vrublevsky is a key member of the anti-spam working group of the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communication. Ponomarev also said that the MVD had instituted a criminal investigation into Vrublevsky in 2007, only to abandon the case when the chief investigator quit and reportedly went to work for Vrublevsky.

“We have here a merger between a criminal element and the government power which is unacceptable and inadmissible in any civilized society,” Ponomarev wrote.

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Teach a Man to Phish…

May 17, 2010
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Phishing may not be the most sophisticated form of cyber crime, but it can be a lucrative trade for those who decide to make it their day jobs. Indeed, data secretly collected from an international phishing operation over  18 months suggests that criminals who pursue a career in phishing can reap millions of dollars a year, even if they only manage to snag just a few victims per scam.

Phishers often set up their fraudulent sites using ready-made “phish kits” — collections of HTML, text and images that mimic the content found at major banks and e-commerce sites. Typically, phishers stitch the kits into the fabric of hacked, legitimate sites, which they then outfit with a “backdoor” that allows them to get back into the site at any time.

About a year and a half ago, investigators at Charleston, S.C. based PhishLabs found that one particular backdoor that showed up time and again in phishing attacks referenced an image at a domain name that was about to expire. When that domain finally came up for grabs, PhishLabs registered it, hoping that they could use it to keep tabs on new phishing sites being set up with the same kit.

The trick worked: PhishLabs collected data on visits to the site for roughly 15 months, and tracked some 1,767 Web sites that were hacked and seeded with the phishing kit that tried to pull content from the domain that PhishLabs had scooped up.

PhishLabs  determined that most of the phishing sites were likely set up by a single person — a man in Lagos, Nigeria that PhishLabs estimates was responsible for about 1,100 of the phishing sites the company tracked over the 15 month experiment.

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Stolen Laptop Exposes Personal Data on 207,000 Army Reservists

May 13, 2010
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A laptop stolen from a government contractor last month contained names, addresses and Social Security numbers of more than 207,000 U.S. Army reservists, Krebsonsecurity.com has learned.

The U.S. Army Reserve Command began alerting affected reservists on May 7 via e-mail. Col. Jonathan Dahms, chief public affairs for the Army Reserve, said the personal data was contained on a CD-Rom in a laptop that was stolen from the Morrow, Ga. offices of Serco Inc., a government contractor based in Reston, Va.

The laptop was one of three stolen from the Serco offices, but it was the only one that contained sensitive personal information, Dahms said.

Serco held the data on reservists as part of its contract with the U.S. Army’s Family and Morale, Welfare and Recreation division. As a result, Dahms said, some of the data on the missing laptop may belong to dependents and spouses of U.S. Army reservists.

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Phished Brands Seize on Teachable Moments

May 12, 2010
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Not long ago, most companies whose brands were being abused in phishing scams focused their efforts mainly on shuttering the counterfeit sites as quickly as possible. These days, an increasing number of phished brands are not only disabling the sites, but also seizing on the opportunity to teach would-be victims how to spot future scams.

Instead of simply dismantling a phishing site and leaving the potential phishing victims with a “Site not found” error, some frequent targets of phishing sites are setting up redirects to phishing education pages.

For the past 20 months, Jason Hong, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University‘s Human Computer Interaction Institute, has been measuring referrals from phishing sites to an education page set up by the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), an industry consortium. Hong said the site now receives close to 25,000 referrals per month from phishing sites that brand owners have modified.

The redirect process works like this: The brand owner or company whose customers are targeted by the phishing site verifies it as a scam site, and then the site’s ISP, hosting provider or domain registrar will redirect the phishing site to the APWG education page.

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Microsoft, Adobe Push Critical Security Updates

May 12, 2010
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Microsoft Corp. and Adobe Systems each released security updates on Tuesday. Microsoft issued two “critical” patches that address one security flaw apiece, while Adobe’s patches fix a whole mess of serious vulnerabilities in its software.

One of the critical updates pushed by Microsoft fixes a flaw in Outlook Express, Windows Mail and Windows Live Mail. On older versions of Windows (Windows XP for example) Outlook Express is installed by default, while Windows Mail and Windows Live Mail generally require users to affirmatively download and install the program.

The other MS patch addresses a vulnerability in Microsoft Office, but the problem may turn out to be more complex down the road for some users. The trouble is that the vulnerable component, Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications is used not only by Microsoft Office products, but it’s also a component that is potentially installed by many third-party software apps built to work with Windows.

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FBI Promises Action Against Money Mules

May 11, 2010
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The FBI’s top anti-cyber crime official today said the agency is planning a law enforcement action against so-called “money mules,” individuals willingly or unwittingly roped into helping organized computer crooks launder money stolen through online banking fraud.

Patrick Carney, acting chief of the FBI’s cyber criminal section, said mules are an integral component of an international crime wave that is costing U.S. banks and companies hundreds of millions of dollars. He said the agency hopes the enforcement action will help spread awareness that money mules are helping to perpetrate crimes.

“We want to make sure that public understands this is illegal activity and one of the best ways we can think of to give that message is to have some prosecutions,” Carney said at a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) symposium in Arlington, Va. today on combating commercial payments fraud. “We realize it’s not going to make the problem go away, but it should help raise awareness and send a signal.”

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A Stroll Down Victim Lane

May 10, 2010
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Last week I traveled to Cooperstown, N.Y. to deliver a keynote address about the scourge of online banking fraud that I’ve written about so frequently this past year. I flew into Albany, and in the short, 60 minute drive west to Cooperstown, I passed through tiny Duanesburg, a town whose middle school district is still out a half million dollars from e-banking fraud. On my way to Cooperstown, I also passed within a few minutes of several other recent victims — including a wrecking firm based on Schenectady that lost $70,000 last month when organized thieves raided its online bank account.

Alexander “Sandy” Jackson‘s world started crashing down on Apr. 20, the day he learned that more than $70,000 of company’s cash had been transferred to 10 complete strangers scattered about the United States. Since then, the owner of Jackson Demolition Service has spent a good deal of time trying to retrieve that money. So far, he and his bank have recovered about one-third of the amount stolen.

Oddly enough, Jackson first learned of the fraud after being contacted by an individual who received close to $5,000 of the firm’s money.

That individual was Montgomery, Ala. resident April Overton. In March, Overton responded to an e-mail from a company that said it found her resume on Careerbuilder.com, and would she be interested in a work-at-home job entering tax information on behalf of American tax filers? Overton said she accepted the job, and for more than a month worked several hours each day completing various tax forms with personal tax information sent to her via e-mail, forms that she then had to fax back to her employers, who claimed to be Tax World LLC, at www.taxreturnsworld.com.

“I was basically processing tax returns, and they’d have me log in to a site every morning between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 11:30 a.m., and would send me information, have me filing out [IRS Form] 1040 tax returns,” Overton said.

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Visa Warns of Fraud Attack from Criminal Group

May 8, 2010
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Visa is warning financial institutions that it has received reliable intelligence that an organized criminal group plans to attempt to move large amounts of fraudulent payments through a merchant account in Eastern Europe, possibly as soon as this weekend.

In an alert sent to banks, card issuers and processors this week, Visa said it “has received intelligence from a third-party entity indicating that a criminal group has plans to execute “a large batch settlement fraud scheme.”

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Fun with ATM Skimmers, Part III

May 7, 2010
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ATM skimmers, or devices that thieves secretly attach to cash machines in order to capture and ultimately clone ATM cards, have captured the imagination of many readers. Past posts on this blog about ATM skimmers have focused on their prevalence and stealth in attacking cash machines in the United States, but these devices also are a major problem in Europe as well.

According to the European ATM Security Team (EAST), a not-for-profit payment security organization, ATM crimes in Europe jumped 149 percent form 2007 to 2008, and most of that increase has been linked to a dramatic increase in ATM skimming attacks. During 2008, a total of 10,302 skimming incidents were reported in Europe. Below is a short video authorities in Germany released recently showing two men caught on camera there installing a skimmer and a pinhole camera panel above to record PINs.

EAST estimates that European ATM fraud losses in 2008 were nearly 500 million Euros, although roughly 80 percent of those losses resulted from fraud committed outside Europe by criminals using stolen card details. EAST believes this is because some 90 percent of European ATMs now are compliant with the so-called “chip and pin” or EMV (an initialism for Europay, Mastercard and VISA) standard.

ATM cards store account data on magnetic strips on the backs of the cards, and thieves have focused their attention on lifting the data from customer cards — either through handheld skimmers — or via magnetic strip readers on ATM skimmers. The data can then be re-encoded onto blank ATM cards, and used at ATM along with the victim’s PIN to withdraw cash. The EMV approach uses a secret algorithm embedded in the chip planted into each ATM card. The chip encodes the card data, making it harder (but certainly not impossible) for fraudsters to read information from them or clone them. RSA‘s Idan Aharoni wrote an informative post about this technology earlier this year.

Needless to say, U.S. based financial institutions do not require chip-and-PIN, and that may be a contributor to the high fraud rates in the United States. The U.S. Secret Service estimates that annual losses from ATM fraud totaled about $1 billion in 2008, or about $350,000 each day.

While many of the images below are not new, they showcase some of the actual ATM skimmers deployed against European cash machines (click any of the images to view a slideshow).

[EPSB]

Have you seen:

All-in-one Skimmers…ATM skimmers come in all shapes and sizes, and most include several components — such as a tiny spy cam hidden in a brochure rack, or fraudulent PIN pad overlay. The problem from the thief’s perspective is that the more components included in the skimmer kit, the greater the chance that he will get busted attaching or removing the devices from ATMs. Thus, the appeal of the all-in-one ATM skimmer: It stores card data using an integrated magnetic stripe reader, and it has a built-in hidden camera designed to record the PIN sequence after an unsuspecting customer slides his bank card into the compromised machine.

[/EPSB]

New Software Turns iPad into iSpy

May 6, 2010
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A new commercial software program marketed to employers, parents and suspicious spouses lets customers surreptitiously monitor their Apple iPads remotely and view a record of all e-mail and Web use on the devices.

The software-as-a-service is the latest offering from Jacksonville, Fla. based Retina-X Studios, a company whose  Mobile Spy products have long allowed people to remotely spy on iPhones, Blackberries and other smartphones. For $99.97 a year, customers get access to a Web interface that allows them to view a list of every Web site visited, every e-mail sent and received, as well as any contacts added to the iPad.

Mobile Spy pitches the product thusly:

Are your kids viewing pornography while you are alseep? [sic] Are your employees sending company secrets through their personal email? You will have the answers to all these questions answered. Logs are instantly uploaded and viewable inside your control panel.

The company said in a press release that it plans to roll out even more capabilities for its iPadspy product, such as the ability to record the target’s location (by tapping the built-in GPS), and rifle through photos and notes stored on the device.

I haven’t used the service (I don’t even own an iPad, sadly). But these kinds of services are a good reminder about the importance of physical security for your computers and gadgets: In most cases, once an attacker has physical access to a device, it’s game over.

The software only works on jailbroken iPads, as the iPad is not able to run more than one program at a time unless it’s jailbroken.