Microsoft Patch Tuesday, December 2021 Edition

December 14, 2021
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Microsoft, Adobe, and Google all issued security updates to their products today. The Microsoft patches include six previously disclosed security flaws, and one that is already being actively exploited. But this month’s Patch Tuesday is overshadowed by the “Log4Shell” 0-day exploit in a popular Java library that web server administrators are now racing to find and patch amid widespread exploitation of the flaw.

Log4Shell is the name picked for a critical flaw disclosed Dec. 9 in the popular logging library for Java called “log4j,” which is included in a huge number of Java applications. Publicly released exploit code allows an attacker to force a server running a vulnerable log4j library to execute commands, such as downloading malicious software or opening a backdoor connection to the server.

According to researchers at Lunasec, many, many services are vulnerable to this exploit.

“Cloud services like Steam, Apple iCloud, and apps like Minecraft have already been found to be vulnerable,” Lunasec wrote. “Anybody using Apache Struts is likely vulnerable. We’ve seen similar vulnerabilities exploited before in breaches like the 2017 Equifax data breach. An extensive list of responses from impacted organizations has been compiled here.”

“If you run a server built on open-source software, there’s a good chance you are impacted by this vulnerability,” said Dustin Childs of Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative. “Check with all the vendors in your enterprise to see if they are impacted and what patches are available.”

Part of the difficulty in patching against the Log4Shell attack is identifying all of the vulnerable web applications, said Johannes Ullrich, an incident handler and blogger for the SANS Internet Storm Center. “Log4Shell will continue to haunt us for years to come. Dealing with log4shell will be a marathon,” Ullrich said. “Treat it as such.” SANS has a good walk-through of how simple yet powerful the exploit can be.

John Hultquist, vice president of intelligence analysis at Mandiant, said the company has seen Chinese and Iranian state actors leveraging the log4j vulnerability, and that the Iranian actors are particularly aggressive, having taken part in ransomware operations that may be primarily carried out for disruptive purposes rather than financial gain.

“We anticipate other state actors are doing so as well, or preparing to,” Hultquist said. “We believe these actors will work quickly to create footholds in desirable networks for follow-on activity, which may last for some time. In some cases, they will work from a wish list of targets that existed long before this vulnerability was public knowledge. In other cases, desirable targets may be selected after broad targeting.”

Researcher Kevin Beaumont had a more lighthearted take on Log4Shell via Twitter:

“Basically the perfect ending to cybersecurity in 2021 is a 90s style Java vulnerability in an open source module, written by two volunteers with no funding, used by large cybersecurity vendors, undetected until Minecraft chat got pwned, where nobody knows how to respond properly.”

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has joined with the FBI, National Security Agency (NSA) and partners abroad in publishing an advisory to help organizations mitigate Log4Shell and other Log4j-related vulnerabilities.

Continue reading →

Inside Ireland’s Public Healthcare Ransomware Scare

December 13, 2021
27 Comments

The consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers recently published lessons learned from the disruptive and costly ransomware attack in May 2021 on Ireland’s public health system. The unusually candid post-mortem found that nearly two months elapsed between the initial intrusion and the launching of the ransomware. It also found affected hospitals had tens of thousands of outdated Windows 7 systems, and that the health system’s IT administrators failed to respond to multiple warning signs that a massive attack was imminent.

PWC’s timeline of the days leading up to the deployment of Conti ransomware on May 14.

Ireland’s Health Service Executive (HSE), which operates the country’s public health system, got hit with Conti ransomware on May 14, 2021. A timeline in the report (above) says the initial infection of the “patient zero” workstation happened on Mar. 18, 2021, when an employee on a Windows computer opened a booby-trapped Microsoft Excel document in a phishing email that had been sent two days earlier.

Less than a week later, the attacker had established a reliable backdoor connection to the employee’s infected workstation. After infecting the system, “the attacker continued to operate in the environment over an eight week period until the detonation of the Conti ransomware on May 14, 2021,” the report states.

According to PWC’s report (PDF), there were multiple warnings about a serious network intrusion, but those red flags were either misidentified or not acted on quickly enough:

  • On Mar. 31, 2021, the HSE’s antivirus software detected the execution of two software tools commonly used by ransomware groups — Cobalt Strike and Mimikatz — on the Patient Zero Workstation. But the antivirus software was set to monitor mode, so it did not block the malicious commands.”
  • On May 7, the attacker compromised the HSE’s servers for the first time, and over the next five days the intruder would compromise six HSE hospitals. On May 10, one of the hospitals detected malicious activity on its Microsoft Windows Domain Controller, a critical “keys to the kingdom” component of any Windows enterprise network that manages user authentication and network access.
  • On 10 May 2021, security auditors first identified evidence of the attacker compromising systems within Hospital C and Hospital L. Hospital C’s antivirus software detected Cobalt Strike on two systems but failed to quarantine the malicious files.
  • On May 13, the HSE’s antivirus security provider emailed the HSE’s security operations team, highlighting unhandled threat events dating back to May 7 on at least 16 systems. The HSE Security Operations team requested that the Server team restart servers.

By then it was too late. At just after midnight Ireland time on May 14, the attacker executed the Conti ransomware within the HSE. The attack disrupted services at several Irish hospitals and resulted in the near complete shutdown of the HSE’s national and local networks, forcing the cancellation of many outpatient clinics and healthcare services. The number of appointments in some areas dropped by up to 80 percent.”

Conti initially demanded USD $20 million worth of virtual currency in exchange for a digital key to unlock HSE servers compromised by the group. But perhaps in response to the public outcry over the HSE disruption, Conti reversed course and gave the HSE the decryption keys without requiring payment.

Still, the work to restore infected systems would take months. The HSE ultimately enlisted members of the Irish military to bring in laptops and PCs to help restore computer systems by hand. It wasn’t until September 21, 2021 that the HSE declared 100 percent of its servers were decrypted.

As bad as the HSE ransomware attack was, the PWC report emphasizes that it could have been far worse. For example, it is unclear how much data would have been unrecoverable if a decryption key had not become available as the HSE’s backup infrastructure was only periodically backed up to offline tape.

The attack also could have been worse, the report found:

  • if there had been intent by the Attacker to target specific devices within the HSE environment (e.g. medical devices);
  • if the ransomware took actions to destroy data at scale;
  • if the ransomware had auto-propagation and persistence capabilities, for example by using an exploit to propagate across domains and trust-boundaries to medical devices (e.g. the EternalBlue exploit used by the WannaCry and NotPetya15 attacks);
  • if cloud systems had also been encrypted such as the COVID-19 vaccination system

The PWC report contains numerous recommendations, most of which center around hiring new personnel to lead the organization’s redoubled security efforts. But it is clear that the HSE has an enormous amount of work ahead to grow in security maturity. For example, the report notes the HSE’s hospital network had over 30,000 Windows 7 workstations that were deemed end of life by the vendor.

“The HSE assessed its cybersecurity maturity rating as low,” PWC wrote. “For example, they do not have a CISO or a Security Operations Center established.” Continue reading →

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Canada Charges Its “Most Prolific Cybercriminal”

December 8, 2021
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A 31-year-old Canadian man has been arrested and charged with fraud in connection with numerous ransomware attacks against businesses, government agencies and private citizens throughout Canada and the United States. Canadian authorities describe him as “the most prolific cybercriminal we’ve identified in Canada,” but so far they’ve released few other details about the investigation or the defendant. Helpfully, an email address and nickname apparently connected to the accused offer some additional clues.

Matthew Philbert, in 2016.

Matthew Philbert of Ottawa, Ontario was charged with fraud and conspiracy in a joint law enforcement action by Canadian and U.S. authorities dubbed “Project CODA.” The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) on Tuesday said the investigation began in January 2020 when the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) contacted them regarding ransomware attacks that were based in Canada.

“During the course of this investigation, OPP investigators determined an individual was responsible for numerous ransomware attacks affecting businesses, government agencies and private individuals throughout Canada as well as cyber-related offenses in the United States,” reads an OPP statement.

“A quantity of evidentiary materials was seized and held for investigation, including desktop and laptop computers, a tablet, several hard drives, cellphones, a Bitcoin seed phrase and a quantity of blank cards with magnetic stripes,” the statement continues.

The U.S. indictment of Philbert (PDF) is unusually sparse, but it does charge him with conspiracy, suggesting the defendant was part of a group. In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, OPP Detective Inspector Matt Watson declined to say whether other defendants were being sought in connection with the investigation, but said the inquiry is ongoing.

“I will say this, Philbert is the most prolific cybercriminal we’ve identified to date in Canada,” Watson said. “We’ve identified in excess of a thousand of his victims. And a lot of these were small businesses that were just holding on by their fingernails during COVID.”

A DARK CLOUD

There is a now-dormant Myspace account for a Matthew Philbert from Orleans, a suburb of Ottawa, Ontario. The information tied to the Myspace account matches the age and town of the defendant. The Myspace account was registered under the nickname “Darkcloudowner,” and to the email address dark_cl0ud6@hotmail.com.

A search in DomainTools on that email address reveals multiple domains registered to a Matthew Philbert and to the Ottawa phone number 6138999251 [DomainTools is a frequent advertiser on this site]. That same phone number is tied to a Facebook account for a 31-year-old Matthew Philbert from Orleans, who describes himself as a self-employed “broke bitcoin baron.”

Mr. Philbert did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

According to cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, that dark_cl0ud6@hotmail.com address has been used in conjunction with the handle “DCReavers2” to register user accounts on a half-dozen English-language cybercrime forums since 2008, including Hackforums, Blackhatworld, and Ghostmarket.

Perhaps the earliest and most important cybercrime forum DCReavers2 frequented was Darkode, where he was among the first two-dozen members. Darkode was taken down in 2015 as part of an FBI investigation sting operation, but screenshots of the community saved by this author show that DCReavers2 was already well known to the Darkode founders when his membership to the forum was accepted in May 2009.

DCReavers2 was just the 22nd account to register on the Darkode cybercrime forum.

Most of DCReavers’s posts on Darkode appear to have been removed by forum administrators early on (likely at DCReavers’ request), but the handful of posts that survived the purge show that more than a decade ago DCReavers2 was involved in running botnets, or large collections of hacked computers.

“My exploit pack is hosted there with 0 problems,” DCReaver2 says of a shady online provider that another member asked about in May 2010. Continue reading →

Who Is the Network Access Broker ‘Babam’?

December 3, 2021
33 Comments

Rarely do cybercriminal gangs that deploy ransomware gain the initial access to the target themselves. More commonly, that access is purchased from a cybercriminal broker who specializes in acquiring remote access credentials — such as usernames and passwords needed to remotely connect to the target’s network. In this post we’ll look at the clues left behind by “Babam,” the handle chosen by a cybercriminal who has sold such access to ransomware groups on many occasions over the past few years.

Since the beginning of 2020, Babam has set up numerous auctions on the Russian-language cybercrime forum Exploit, mainly selling virtual private networking (VPN) credentials stolen from various companies. Babam has authored more than 270 posts since joining Exploit in 2015, including dozens of sales threads. However, none of Babam’s posts on Exploit include any personal information or clues about his identity.

But in February 2016, Babam joined Verified, another Russian-language crime forum. Verified was hacked at least twice in the past five years, and its user database posted online. That information shows that Babam joined Verified using the email address “operns@gmail.com.” The latest Verified leak also exposed private messages exchanged by forum members, including more than 800 private messages that Babam sent or received on the forum over the years.

In early 2017, Babam confided to another Verified user via private message that he is from Lithuania. In virtually all of his forum posts and private messages, Babam can be seen communicating in transliterated Russian rather than by using the Cyrillic alphabet. This is common among cybercriminal actors for whom Russian is not their native tongue.

Cyber intelligence platform Constella Intelligence told KrebsOnSecurity that the operns@gmail.com address was used in 2016 to register an account at filmai.in, which is a movie streaming service catering to Lithuanian speakers. The username associated with that account was “bo3dom.”

A reverse WHOIS search via DomainTools.com says operns@gmail.com was used to register two domain names: bonnjoeder[.]com back in 2011, and sanjulianhotels[.]com (2017). It’s unclear whether these domains ever were online, but the street address on both records was “24 Brondeg St.” in the United Kingdom. [Full disclosure: DomainTools is a frequent advertiser on this website.]

A reverse search at DomainTools on “24 Brondeg St.” reveals one other domain: wwwecardone[.]com. The use of domains that begin with “www” is fairly common among phishers, and by passive “typosquatting” sites that seek to siphon credentials from legitimate websites when people mistype a domain, such as accidentally omitting the “.” after typing “www”.

A banner from the homepage of the Russian language cybercrime forum Verified.

Searching DomainTools for the phone number in the WHOIS records for wwwecardone[.]com  — +44.0774829141 — leads to a handful of similar typosquatting domains, including wwwebuygold[.]com and wwwpexpay[.]com. A different UK phone number in a more recent record for the wwwebuygold[.]com domain — 44.0472882112 — is tied to two more domains – howtounlockiphonefree[.]com, and portalsagepay[.]com. All of these domains date back to between 2012 and 2013.

The original registration records for the iPhone, Sagepay and Gold domains share an email address: devrian26@gmail.com. A search on the username “bo3dom” using Constella’s service reveals an account at ipmart-forum.com, a now-defunct forum concerned with IT products, such as mobile devices, computers and online gaming. That search shows the user bo3dom registered at ipmart-forum.com with the email address devrian27@gmail.com, and from an Internet address in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Devrian27@gmail.com was used to register multiple domains, including wwwsuperchange.ru back in 2008 (notice again the suspect “www” as part of the domain name). Gmail’s password recovery function says the backup email address for devrian27@gmail.com is bo3*******@gmail.com. Gmail accepts the address bo3domster@gmail.com as the recovery email for that devrian27 account.

According to Constella, the bo3domster@gmail.com address was exposed in multiple data breaches over the years, and in each case it used one of two passwords: “lebeda1” and “a123456“.

Searching in Constella for accounts using those passwords reveals a slew of additional “bo3dom” email addresses, including bo3dom@gmail.com.  Pivoting on that address in Constella reveals that someone with the name Vytautas Mockus used it to register an account at mindjolt.com, a site featuring dozens of simple puzzle games that visitors can play online.

At some point, mindjolt.com apparently also was hacked, because a copy of its database at Constella says the bo3dom@gmail.com used two passwords at that site: lebeda1 and a123456.

A reverse WHOIS search on “Vytautas Mockus” at DomainTools shows the email address devrian25@gmail.com was used in 2010 to register the domain name perfectmoney[.]co. This is one character off of perfectmoney[.]com, which is an early virtual currency that was quite popular with cybercriminals at the time. The phone number tied to that domain registration was “86.7273687“.

A Google search for “Vytautas Mockus” says there’s a person by that name who runs a mobile food service company in Lithuania called “Palvisa.” A report on Palvisa (PDF) purchased from Rekvizitai.vz — an official online directory of Lithuanian companies — says Palvisa was established in 2011 by a Vytautaus Mockus, using the phone number 86.7273687, and the email address bo3dom@gmail.com. The report states that Palvisa is active, but has had no employees other than its founder.

Reached via the bo3dom@gmail.com address, the 36-year-old Mr. Mockus expressed mystification as to how his personal information wound up in so many records. “I am not involved in any crime,” Mockus wrote in reply.

A rough mind map of the connections mentioned in this story.

Continue reading →

The Internet is Held Together With Spit & Baling Wire

November 26, 2021
37 Comments

A visualization of the Internet made using network routing data. Image: Barrett Lyon, opte.org.

Imagine being able to disconnect or redirect Internet traffic destined for some of the world’s biggest companies — just by spoofing an email. This is the nature of a threat vector recently removed by a Fortune 500 firm that operates one of the largest Internet backbones.

Based in Monroe, La., Lumen Technologies Inc. [NYSE: LUMN] (formerly CenturyLink) is one of more than two dozen entities that operate what’s known as an Internet Routing Registry (IRR). These IRRs maintain routing databases used by network operators to register their assigned network resources — i.e., the Internet addresses that have been allocated to their organization.

The data maintained by the IRRs help keep track of which organizations have the right to access what Internet address space in the global routing system. Collectively, the information voluntarily submitted to the IRRs forms a distributed database of Internet routing instructions that helps connect a vast array of individual networks.

There are about 70,000 distinct networks on the Internet today, ranging from huge broadband providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon to many thousands of enterprises that connect to the edge of the Internet for access. Each of these so-called “Autonomous Systems” (ASes) make their own decisions about how and with whom they will connect to the larger Internet.

Regardless of how they get online, each AS uses the same language to specify which Internet IP address ranges they control: It’s called the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP. Using BGP, an AS tells its directly connected neighbor AS(es) the addresses that it can reach. That neighbor in turn passes the information on to its neighbors, and so on, until the information has propagated everywhere [1].

A key function of the BGP data maintained by IRRs is preventing rogue network operators from claiming another network’s addresses and hijacking their traffic. In essence, an organization can use IRRs to declare to the rest of the Internet, “These specific Internet address ranges are ours, should only originate from our network, and you should ignore any other networks trying to lay claim to these address ranges.”

In the early days of the Internet, when organizations wanted to update their records with an IRR, the changes usually involved some amount of human interaction — often someone manually editing the new coordinates into an Internet backbone router. But over the years the various IRRs made it easier to automate this process via email.

For a long time, any changes to an organization’s routing information with an IRR could be processed via email as long as one of the following authentication methods was successfully used:

-CRYPT-PW: A password is added to the text of an email to the IRR containing the record they wish to add, change or delete (the IRR then compares that password to a hash of the password);

-PGPKEY: The requestor signs the email containing the update with an encryption key the IRR recognizes;

-MAIL-FROM: The requestor sends the record changes in an email to the IRR, and the authentication is based solely on the “From:” header of the email.

Of these, MAIL-FROM has long been considered insecure, for the simple reason that it’s not difficult to spoof the return address of an email. And virtually all IRRs have disallowed its use since at least 2012, said Adam Korab, a network engineer and security researcher based in Houston.

All except Level 3 Communications, a major Internet backbone provider acquired by Lumen/CenturyLink.

“LEVEL 3 is the last IRR operator which allows the use of this method, although they have discouraged its use since at least 2012,” Korab told KrebsOnSecurity. “Other IRR operators have fully deprecated MAIL-FROM.”

Importantly, the name and email address of each Autonomous System’s official contact for making updates with the IRRs is public information.

Korab filed a vulnerability report with Lumen demonstrating how a simple spoofed email could be used to disrupt Internet service for banks, telecommunications firms and even government entities.

“If such an attack were successful, it would result in customer IP address blocks being filtered and dropped, making them unreachable from some or all of the global Internet,” Korab said, noting that he found more than 2,000 Lumen customers were potentially affected. “This would effectively cut off Internet access for the impacted IP address blocks.”

The recent outage that took Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp offline for the better part of a day was caused by an erroneous BGP update submitted by Facebook. That update took away the map telling the world’s computers how to find its various online properties.

Now consider the mayhem that would ensue if someone spoofed IRR updates to remove or alter routing entries for multiple e-commerce providers, banks and telecommunications companies at the same time.

“Depending on the scope of an attack, this could impact individual customers, geographic market areas, or potentially the [Lumen] backbone,” Korab continued. “This attack is trivial to exploit, and has a difficult recovery. Our conjecture is that any impacted Lumen or customer IP address blocks would be offline for 24-48 hours. In the worst-case scenario, this could extend much longer.”

Lumen told KrebsOnSecurity that it continued offering MAIL-FROM: authentication because many of its customers still relied on it due to legacy systems. Nevertheless, after receiving Korab’s report the company decided the wisest course of action was to disable MAIL-FROM: authentication altogether.

“We recently received notice of a known insecure configuration with our Route Registry,” reads a statement Lumen shared with KrebsOnSecurity. “We already had mitigating controls in place and to date we have not identified any additional issues. As part of our normal cybersecurity protocol, we carefully considered this notice and took steps to further mitigate any potential risks the vulnerability may have created for our customers or systems.”

Level3, now part of Lumen, has long urged customers to avoid using “Mail From” for authentication, but until very recently they still allowed it.

Continue reading →

Arrest in ‘Ransom Your Employer’ Email Scheme

November 22, 2021
36 Comments

In August, KrebsOnSecurity warned that scammers were contacting people and asking them to unleash ransomware inside their employer’s network, in exchange for a percentage of any ransom amount paid by the victim company. This week, authorities in Nigeria arrested a suspect in connection with the scheme — a young man who said he was trying to save up money to help fund a new social network.

Image: Abnormal Security.

The brazen approach targeting disgruntled employees was first spotted by threat intelligence firm Abnormal Security, which described what happened after they adopted a fake persona and responded to the proposal in the screenshot above.

“According to this actor, he had originally intended to send his targets—all senior-level executives—phishing emails to compromise their accounts, but after that was unsuccessful, he pivoted to this ransomware pretext,” Abnormal’s Crane Hassold wrote.

Abnormal Security documented how it tied the email back to a Nigerian man who acknowledged he was trying to save up money to help fund a new social network he is building called Sociogram. In June 2021, the Nigerian government officially placed an indefinite ban on Twitter, restricting it from operating in Nigeria after the social media platform deleted tweets by the Nigerian president.

Reached via LinkedIn, Sociogram founder Oluwaseun Medayedupin asked to have his startup’s name removed from the story, although he did not respond to questions about whether there were any inaccuracies in Hassold’s report.

“Please don’t harm Sociogram’s reputation,” Medayedupin pleaded. “I beg you as a promising young man.”

After he deleted his LinkedIn profile, I received the following message through the “contact this domain holder” link at KrebsOnSecurity’s domain registrar [curiously, the date of that missive reads “Dec. 31, 1969.”]. Apparently, Mr. Krebson is a clout-chasing monger.

A love letter from the founder of the ill-fated Sociogram.

Mr. Krebson also heard from an investigator representing the Nigeria Finance CERT on behalf of the Central Bank Of Nigeria. While the Sociogram founder’s approach might seem amateurish to some, the financial community in Nigeria did not consider it a laughing matter.

On Friday, Nigerian police arrested Medayedupin. The investigator says formal charges will be levied against the defendant sometime this week.

KrebsOnSecurity spoke with a fraud investigator who is performing the forensic analysis of the devices seized from Medayedupin’s home. The investigator spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for his physical safety.

The investigator — we’ll call him “George” — said the 23-year-old Medayedupin lives with his extended family in an extremely impoverished home, and that the young man told investigators he’d just graduated from college but turned to cybercrime at first with ambitions of merely scamming the scammers.

George’s team confirmed that Medayedupin had around USD $2,000 to his name, which he’d recently stolen from a group of Nigerian fraudsters who were scamming people for gift cards. Apparently, he admitted to creating a phishing website that tricked a member of this group into providing access to the money they’d made from their scams.

Medayedupin reportedly told investigators that for almost a week after he started emailing his ransom-your-employer scheme, nobody took him up on the offer. But after his name appeared in the news media, he received thousands of inquiries from people interested in his idea. Continue reading →

The ‘Zelle Fraud’ Scam: How it Works, How to Fight Back

November 19, 2021
76 Comments

One of the more common ways cybercriminals cash out access to bank accounts involves draining the victim’s funds via Zelle, a “peer-to-peer” (P2P) payment service used by many financial institutions that allows customers to quickly send cash to friends and family. Naturally, a great deal of phishing schemes that precede these bank account takeovers begin with a spoofed text message from the target’s bank warning about a suspicious Zelle transfer. What follows is a deep dive into how this increasingly clever Zelle fraud scam typically works, and what victims can do about it.

Last week’s story warned that scammers are blasting out text messages about suspicious bank transfers as a pretext for immediately calling and scamming anyone who responds via text. Here’s what one of those scam messages looks like:

Anyone who responds “yes,” “no” or at all will very soon after receive a phone call from a scammer pretending to be from the financial institution’s fraud department. The caller’s number will be spoofed so that it appears to be coming from the victim’s bank.

To “verify the identity” of the customer, the fraudster asks for their online banking username, and then tells the customer to read back a passcode sent via text or email. In reality, the fraudster initiates a transaction — such as the “forgot password” feature on the financial institution’s site — which is what generates the authentication passcode delivered to the member.

Ken Otsuka is a senior risk consultant at CUNA Mutual Group, an insurance company that provides financial services to credit unions. Otsuka said a phone fraudster typically will say something like, “Before I get into the details, I need to verify that I’m speaking to the right person. What’s your username?”

“In the background, they’re using the username with the forgot password feature, and that’s going to generate one of these two-factor authentication passcodes,” Otsuka said. “Then the fraudster will say, ‘I’m going to send you the password and you’re going to read it back to me over the phone.'”

The fraudster then uses the code to complete the password reset process, and then changes the victim’s online banking password. The fraudster then uses Zelle to transfer the victim’s funds to others.

An important aspect of this scam is that the fraudsters never even need to know or phish the victim’s password. By sharing their username and reading back the one-time code sent to them via email, the victim is allowing the fraudster to reset their online banking password.

Otsuka said in far too many account takeover cases, the victim has never even heard of Zelle, nor did they realize they could move money that way.

“The thing is, many credit unions offer it by default as part of online banking,” Otsuka said. “Members don’t have to request to use Zelle. It’s just there, and with a lot of members targeted in these scams, although they’d legitimately enrolled in online banking, they’d never used Zelle before.” [Curious if your financial institution uses Zelle? Check out their partner list here].

Otsuka said credit unions offering other peer-to-peer banking products have also been targeted, but that fraudsters prefer to target Zelle due to the speed of the payments.

“The fraud losses can escalate quickly due to the sheer number of members that can be targeted on a single day over the course of consecutive days,” Otsuka said.

To combat this scam Zelle introduced out-of-band authentication with transaction details. This involves sending the member a text containing the details of a Zelle transfer – payee and dollar amount – that is initiated by the member. The member must authorize the transfer by replying to the text.

Unfortunately, Otsuka said, the scammers are defeating this layered security control as well. Continue reading →

Tech CEO Pleads to Wire Fraud in IP Address Scheme

November 17, 2021
24 Comments

The CEO of a South Carolina technology firm has pleaded guilty to 20 counts of wire fraud in connection with an elaborate network of phony companies set up to obtain more than 735,000 Internet Protocol (IP) addresses from the nonprofit organization that leases the digital real estate to entities in North America.

In 2018, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), which oversees IP addresses assigned to entities in the U.S., Canada, and parts of the Caribbean, notified Charleston, S.C. based Micfo LLC that it intended to revoke 735,000 addresses.

ARIN said they wanted the addresses back because the company and its owner — 38-year-old Amir Golestan — had obtained them under false pretenses. A global shortage of IPv4 addresses has massively driven up the price of these resources over the years: At the time of this dispute, a single IP address could fetch between $15 and $25 on the open market.

Micfo responded by suing ARIN to try to stop the IP address seizure. Ultimately, ARIN and Micfo settled the dispute in arbitration, with Micfo returning most of the addresses that it hadn’t already sold.

But the legal tussle caught the attention of South Carolina U.S. Attorney Sherri Lydon, who in May 2019 filed criminal wire fraud charges against Golestan, alleging he’d orchestrated a network of shell companies and fake identities to prevent ARIN from knowing the addresses were all going to the same buyer.

Each of those shell companies involved the production of notarized affidavits in the names of people who didn’t exist. As a result, Lydon was able to charge Golestan with 20 counts of wire fraud — one for each payment made by the phony companies that bought the IP addresses from ARIN.

Amir Golestan, CEO of Micfo.

On Nov. 16, just two days into his trial, Golestan changed his “not guilty” plea, agreeing to plead guilty to all 20 wire fraud charges. KrebsOnSecurity interviewed Golestan about his case at length last year, but he has not responded to requests for comment on his plea change.

By 2013, a number of Micfo’s customers had landed on the radar of Spamhaus, a group that many network operators rely upon to help block junk email. But shortly after Spamhaus began blocking Micfo’s IP address ranges, Micfo shifted gears and began reselling IP addresses mainly to companies marketing “virtual private networking” or VPN services that help customers hide their real IP addresses online.

In a 2020 interview, Golestan told KrebsOnSecurity that Micfo was at one point responsible for brokering roughly 40 percent of the IP addresses used by the world’s largest VPN providers. Throughout that conversation, Golestan maintained his innocence, even as he explained that the creation of the phony companies was necessary to prevent entities like Spamhaus from interfering with his business going forward.

Stephen Ryan, an attorney representing ARIN, said Golestan changed his plea after the court heard from a former Micfo employee and public notary who described being instructed by Golestan to knowingly certify false documents.

“Her testimony made him appear bullying and unsavory,” Ryan said. “Because it turned out he had also sued her to try to prevent her from disclosing the actions he’d directed.”

Golestan’s rather sparse plea agreement (first reported by The Wall Street Journal) does not specify any sort of leniency he might gain from prosecutors for agreeing to end the trial prematurely. But it’s worth noting that a conviction on a single act of wire fraud can result in fines and up to 20 years in prison. Continue reading →

Hoax Email Blast Abused Poor Coding in FBI Website

November 13, 2021
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) confirmed today that its fbi.gov domain name and Internet address were used to blast out thousands of fake emails about a cybercrime investigation. According to an interview with the person who claimed responsibility for the hoax, the spam messages were sent by abusing insecure code in an FBI online portal designed to share information with state and local law enforcement authorities.

The phony message sent late Thursday evening via the FBI’s email system. Image: Spamhaus.org

Late in the evening on Nov. 12 ET, tens of thousands of emails began flooding out from the FBI address eims@ic.fbi.gov, warning about fake cyberattacks. Around that time, KrebsOnSecurity received a message from the same email address.

“Hi its pompompurin,” read the missive. “Check headers of this email it’s actually coming from FBI server. I am contacting you today because we located a botnet being hosted on your forehead, please take immediate action thanks.”

A review of the email’s message headers indicated it had indeed been sent by the FBI, and from the agency’s own Internet address. The domain in the “from:” portion of the email I received — eims@ic.fbi.gov — corresponds to the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services division (CJIS).

According to the Department of Justice, “CJIS manages and operates several national crime information systems used by the public safety community for both criminal and civil purposes. CJIS systems are available to the criminal justice community, including law enforcement, jails, prosecutors, courts, as well as probation and pretrial services.”

In response to a request for comment, the FBI confirmed the unauthorized messages, but declined to offer further information.

“The FBI and CISA [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] are aware of the incident this morning involving fake emails from an @ic.fbi.gov email account,” reads the FBI statement. “This is an ongoing situation and we are not able to provide any additional information at this time. The impacted hardware was taken offline quickly upon discovery of the issue. We continue to encourage the public to be cautious of unknown senders and urge you to report suspicious activity to www.ic3.gov or www.cisa.gov.”

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Pompompurin said the hack was done to point out a glaring vulnerability in the FBI’s system.

“I could’ve 1000% used this to send more legit looking emails, trick companies into handing over data etc.,” Pompompurin said. “And this would’ve never been found by anyone who would responsibly disclose, due to the notice the feds have on their website.”

Pompompurin says the illicit access to the FBI’s email system began with an exploration of its Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal (LEEP), which the bureau describes as “a gateway providing law enforcement agencies, intelligence groups, and criminal justice entities access to beneficial resources.”

The FBI’s Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal (LEEP).

“These resources will strengthen case development for investigators, enhance information sharing between agencies, and be accessible in one centralized location!,” the FBI’s site enthuses.

Until sometime this morning, the LEEP portal allowed anyone to apply for an account. Helpfully, step-by-step instructions for registering a new account on the LEEP portal also are available from the DOJ’s website. [It should be noted that “Step 1” in those instructions is to visit the site in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, an outdated web browser that even Microsoft no longer encourages people to use for security reasons.]

Much of that process involves filling out forms with the applicant’s personal and contact information, and that of their organization. A critical step in that process says applicants will receive an email confirmation from eims@ic.fbi.gov with a one-time passcode — ostensibly to validate that the applicant can receive email at the domain in question.

But according to Pompompurin, the FBI’s own website leaked that one-time passcode in the HTML code of the web page.

A screenshot shared by Pompompurin. Image: KrebOnSecurity.com

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SMS About Bank Fraud as a Pretext for Voice Phishing

November 10, 2021
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Most of us have probably heard the term “smishing” — which is a portmanteau for traditional phishing scams sent through SMS text messages. Smishing messages usually include a link to a site that spoofs a popular bank and tries to siphon personal information. But increasingly, phishers are turning to a hybrid form of smishing — blasting out linkless text messages about suspicious bank transfers as a pretext for immediately calling and scamming anyone who responds via text.

KrebsOnSecurity recently heard from a reader who said his daughter received an SMS that said it was from her bank, and inquired whether she’d authorized a $5,000 payment from her account. The message said she should reply “Yes” or “No,” or 1 to decline future fraud alerts.

Since this seemed like a reasonable and simple request — and she indeed had an account at the bank in question — she responded, “NO.”

Seconds later, her mobile phone rang.

“When she replied ‘no,’ someone called immediately, and the caller ID said ‘JP Morgan Chase’,” reader Kris Stevens told KrebsOnSecurity. “The person on the phone said they were from the fraud department and they needed to help her secure her account but needed information from her to make sure they were talking to the account owner and not the scammer.”

Thankfully, Stevens said his daughter had honored the gold rule regarding incoming phone calls about fraud: When In Doubt, Hang up, Look up, and Call Back.

“She knows the drill so she hung up and called Chase, who confirmed they had not called her,” he said. “What was different about this was it was all very smooth. No foreign accents, the pairing of the call with the text message, and the fact that she does have a Chase account.”

The remarkable aspect of these phone-based phishing scams is typically the attackers never even try to log in to the victim’s bank account. The entirety of the scam takes place over the phone.

We don’t know what the fraudsters behind this clever hybrid SMS/voice phishing scam intended to do with the information they might have coaxed from Stevens’ daughter. But in previous stories and reporting on voice phishing schemes, the fraudsters used the phished information to set up new financial accounts in the victim’s name, which they then used to receive and forward large wire transfers of stolen funds.

Even many security-conscious people tend to focus on protecting their online selves, while perhaps discounting the threat from less technically sophisticated phone-based scams. In 2020 I told the story of “Mitch” — the tech-savvy Silicon Valley executive who got voice phished after he thought he’d turned the tables on the scammers.

Unlike Stevens’ daughter, Mitch didn’t hang up with the suspected scammers. Rather, he put them on hold. Then Mitch called his bank on the other line and asked if their customer support people were in fact engaged in a separate conversation with him over the phone.

The bank replied that they were indeed speaking to the same customer on a different line at that very moment. Feeling better, Mitch got back on the line with the scammers. What Mitch couldn’t have known at that point was that a member of the fraudster’s team simultaneously was impersonating him on the phone with the bank’s customer service people.

So don’t be Mitch. Don’t try to outsmart the crooks. Just remember this anti-fraud mantra, and maybe repeat it a few times in front of your friends and family: When in doubt, hang up, look up, and call back. If you believe the call might be legitimate, look up the number of the organization supposedly calling you, and call them back.

And I suppose the same time-honored advice about not replying to spam email goes doubly for unsolicited text messages: When in doubt, it’s best not to respond.