WeLeakInfo Leaked Customer Payment Info

March 15, 2021
20 Comments

A little over a year ago, the FBI and law enforcement partners overseas seized WeLeakInfo[.]com, a wildly popular service that sold access to more than 12 billion usernames and passwords stolen from thousands of hacked websites. In an ironic turn of events, a lapsed domain registration tied to WeLeakInfo let someone plunder and publish account data on 24,000 customers who paid to access the service with a credit card.

For several years, WeLeakInfo was the largest of several services selling access to hacked passwords. Prosecutors said it had indexed, searchable information from more than 10,000 data breaches containing over 12 billion indexed records — including names, email addresses, usernames, phone numbers, and passwords for online accounts.

For a small fee, you could enter an email address and see every password ever associated with that address in a previous breach. Or the reverse — show me all the email accounts that ever used a specific password (see screenshot above). It was a fantastic tool for launching targeted attacks against people, and that’s exactly how the service was viewed by many of its customers.

Now, nearly 24,000 WeLeakInfo’s customers are finding that the personal and payment data they shared with WeLeakInfo over its five-year-run has been leaked online.

WeLeakInfo’s service fees.

In a post on the database leaking forum Raidforums, a regular contributor using the handle “pompompurin” said he stole the WeLeakInfo payment logs and other data after noticing the domain wli[.]design was no longer listed as registered.

“Long story short: FBI let one of weleakinfo’s domains expire that they used for the emails/payments,” pompompurin wrote. “I registered that domain, & was able to [password] reset the stripe.com account & get all the Data. [It’s] only from people that used stripe.com to checkout. If you used paypal or [bitcoin] ur all good.”

Cyber threat intelligence firm Flashpoint obtained a copy of the data leaked by pompompurin, and said it includes partial credit card data, email addresses, full names, IP addresses, browser user agent string data, physical addresses, phone numbers, and amount paid. One forum member commented that they found their own payment data in the logs.

How WeLeakInfo stacked up against its competitors (according to WLI).

According to DomainTools [an advertiser on this site] Wli[.]design was registered on Aug. 24, 2016 with Dynadot, the domain registrar which also was used to register WeLeakInfo.com. On March 12, wli[.]design was moved to another registrar — Namecheap.

Pompompurin released several screenshots of himself logged in to the WeLeakInfo account at stripe.com, an online payment processor. Under “management and ownership” was listed a Gerald Murphy from Fintona, U.K.

Shortly after WeLeakInfo’s domain was seized by authorities in Jan. 2020, the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) arrested two individuals in connection with the service, including a 22-year-old from Fintona.


Continue reading →

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, March 2021 Edition

March 9, 2021
37 Comments

On the off chance you were looking for more security to-dos from Microsoft today…the company released software updates to plug more than 82 security flaws in Windows and other supported software. Ten of these earned Microsoft’s “critical” rating, meaning they can be exploited by malware or miscreants with little or no help from users.

Top of the heap this month (apart from the ongoing, global Exchange Server mass-compromise) is a patch for an Internet Explorer bug that is seeing active exploitation. The IE weakness — CVE-2021-26411 — affects both IE11 and newer EdgeHTML-based versions, and it allows attackers to run a file of their choice by getting you to view a hacked or malicious website in IE.

The IE flaw is tied to a vulnerability that was publicly disclosed in early February by researchers at ENKI who claim it was one of those used in a recent campaign by nation-state actors to target security researchers. In the ENKI blog post, the researchers said they will publish proof-of-concept (PoC) details after the bug has been patched.

“As we’ve seen in the past, once PoC details become publicly available, attackers quickly incorporate those PoCs into their attack toolkits,” said Satnam Narang, staff research engineer at Tenable. “We strongly encourage all organizations that rely on Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge (EdgeHTML-Based) to apply these patches as soon as possible.”

This is probably a good place to quote Ghacks.net’s Martin Brinkman: This is the last patch hurrah for the legacy Microsoft Edge web browser, which is being retired by Microsoft.

For the second month in a row, Microsoft has patched scary flaws in the DNS servers on Windows Server 2008 through 2019 versions that could be used to remotely install software of the attacker’s choice. All five of the DNS bugs quashed in today’s patch batch earned a CVSS Score (danger metric) of 9.8 — almost as bad as it gets.

“There is the outside chance this could be wormable between DNS servers,” warned Trend Micro’s Dustin Childs. Continue reading →

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Warning the World of a Ticking Time Bomb

March 9, 2021
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Globally, hundreds of thousand of organizations running Exchange email servers from Microsoft just got mass-hacked, including at least 30,000 victims in the United States. Each hacked server has been retrofitted with a “web shell” backdoor that gives the bad guys total, remote control, the ability to read all email, and easy access to the victim’s other computers. Researchers are now racing to identify, alert and help victims, and hopefully prevent further mayhem.

On Mar. 5, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that at least 30,000 organizations and hundreds of thousands globally had been hacked. The same sources who shared those figures say the victim list has grown considerably since then, with many victims compromised by multiple cybercrime groups.

Security experts are now trying to alert and assist these victims before malicious hackers launch what many refer to with a mix of dread and anticipation as “Stage 2,” when the bad guys revisit all these hacked servers and seed them with ransomware or else additional hacking tools for crawling even deeper into victim networks.

But that rescue effort has been stymied by the sheer volume of attacks on these Exchange vulnerabilities, and by the number of apparently distinct hacking groups that are vying for control over vulnerable systems.

A security expert who has briefed federal and military advisors on the threat says many victims appear to have more than one type of backdoor installed. Some victims had three of these web shells installed. One was pelted with eight distinct backdoors. This initially caused a major overcount of potential victims, and required a great deal of de-duping various victim lists.

The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said many in the cybersecurity community recently saw a large spike in attacks on thousands of Exchange servers that was later linked to a profit-motivated cybercriminal group.

“What we thought was Stage 2 actually was one criminal group hijacking like 10,000 exchange servers,” said one source who’s briefed U.S. national security advisors on the outbreak.

On Mar. 2, when Microsoft released updates to plug the four Exchange flaws being attacked, it attributed the hacking activity to a previously unidentified Chinese cyber espionage group it called “Hafnium.” Microsoft said Hafnium had been using the Exchange flaws to conduct a series of low-and-slow attacks against specific strategic targets, such as non-governmental organization (NGOs) and think tanks.

But by Feb. 26, that relatively stealthy activity was morphing into the indiscriminate mass-exploitation of all vulnerable Exchange servers. That means even Exchange users that patched the same day Microsoft released security updates may have had servers seeded with backdoors.

Many experts who spoke to KrebsOnSecurity said they believe different cybercriminal groups somehow learned of Microsoft’s plans to ship fixes for the Exchange flaws a week earlier than they’d hoped (Microsoft originally targeted today, Patch Tuesday, as the release date).

The vulnerability scanning activity also ramped up markedly after Microsoft released its updates on Mar. 2. Security researchers love to tear apart patches for clues about the underlying security holes, and one major concern is that various cybercriminal groups may have already worked out how to exploit the flaws independently.

AVERTING MASS-RANSOMWARE

Security experts now are desperately trying to reach tens of thousands of victim organizations with a single message: Whether you have patched yet or have been hacked, backup any data stored on those servers immediately.

Every source I’ve spoken with about this incident says they fully expect profit-motivated cybercriminals to pounce on victims by mass-deploying ransomware. Given that so many groups now have backdoor web shells installed, it would be trivial to unleash ransomware on the lot of them in one go. Also, compromised Exchange servers can be a virtual doorway into the rest of the victim’s network.

“With the number of different threat actors dropping [web] shells on servers increasing, ransomware is inevitable,” said Allison Nixon, chief research officer at Unit221B, a New York City-based cyber investigations firm.

So far there are no signs of victims of this mass-hack being ransomed. But that may well change if the exploit code used to break into these vulnerable Exchange servers goes public. And nobody I’ve interviewed seems to think working exploit code is going to stay unpublished for much longer.

When that happens, the exploits will get folded into publicly available exploit testing kits, effectively making it simple for any attacker to find and compromise a decent number of victims who haven’t already patched. Continue reading →

A Basic Timeline of the Exchange Mass-Hack

March 8, 2021
89 Comments

Sometimes when a complex story takes us by surprise or knocks us back on our heels, it pays to revisit the events in a somewhat linear fashion. Here’s a brief timeline of what we know leading up to last week’s mass-hack, when hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Exchange Server systems got compromised and seeded with a powerful backdoor Trojan horse program.

When did Microsoft find out about attacks on previously unknown vulnerabilities in Exchange?

Pressed for a date when it first became aware of the problem, Microsoft told KrebsOnSecurity it was initially notified “in early January.” So far the earliest known report came on Jan. 5, from a principal security researcher for security testing firm DEVCORE who goes by the handle “Orange Tsai.” DEVCORE is credited with reporting two of the four Exchange flaws that Microsoft patched on Mar. 2.

Reston, Va.-based Volexity first identified attacks on the flaws on Jan. 6, and officially informed Microsoft about it on Feb. 2. Volexity now says it can see attack traffic going back to Jan. 3. Microsoft credits Volexity with reporting the same two Exchange flaws as DEVCORE.

Danish security firm Dubex says it first saw clients hit on Jan. 18, and reported their incident response findings to Microsoft on Jan. 27.

In a blog post on their discovery, Please Leave an Exploit After the Beep, Dubex said the victims it investigated in January had a “web shell” backdoor installed via the “unifying messaging” module, a component of Exchange that allows an organization to store voicemail and faxes along with emails, calendars, and contacts in users’ mailboxes.

“A unified messaging server also allows users access to voicemail features via smartphones, Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Web App,” Dubex wrote. “Most users and IT departments manage their voicemail separately from their email, and voicemail and email exist as separate inboxes hosted on separate servers. Unified Messaging offers an integrated store for all messages and access to content through the computer and the telephone.”

Dubex says Microsoft “escalated” their issue on Feb. 8, but never confirmed the zero-day with Dubex prior to the emergency patch plea on Mar. 2. “We never got a ‘real’ confirmation of the zero-day before the patch was released,” said Dubex’s Chief Technology Officer Jacob Herbst.

How long have the vulnerabilities exploited here been around?

On Mar. 2, Microsoft patched four flaws in Exchange Server 2013 through 2019. Exchange Server 2010 is no longer supported, but the software giant made a “defense in depth” exception and gave Server 2010 users a freebie patch, too. That means the vulnerabilities the attackers exploited have been in the Microsoft Exchange Server code base for more than ten years.

The timeline also means Microsoft had almost two months to push out the patch it ultimately shipped Mar. 2, or else help hundreds of thousands of Exchange customers mitigate the threat from this flaw before attackers started exploiting it indiscriminately.

Here’s a rough timeline as we know it so far: Continue reading →

At Least 30,000 U.S. Organizations Newly Hacked Via Holes in Microsoft’s Email Software

March 5, 2021
154 Comments

At least 30,000 organizations across the United States — including a significant number of small businesses, towns, cities and local governments — have over the past few days been hacked by an unusually aggressive Chinese cyber espionage unit that’s focused on stealing email from victim organizations, multiple sources tell KrebsOnSecurity. The espionage group is exploiting four newly-discovered flaws in Microsoft Exchange Server email software, and has seeded hundreds of thousands of victim organizations worldwide with tools that give the attackers total, remote control over affected systems.

On March 2, Microsoft released emergency security updates to plug four security holes in Exchange Server versions 2013 through 2019 that hackers were actively using to siphon email communications from Internet-facing systems running Exchange.

Microsoft said the Exchange flaws are being targeted by a previously unidentified Chinese hacking crew it dubbed “Hafnium,” and said the group had been conducting targeted attacks on email systems used by a range of industry sectors, including infectious disease researchers, law firms, higher education institutions, defense contractors, policy think tanks, and NGOs.

In the three days since then, security experts say the same Chinese cyber espionage group has dramatically stepped up attacks on any vulnerable, unpatched Exchange servers worldwide.

In each incident, the intruders have left behind a “web shell,” an easy-to-use, password-protected hacking tool that can be accessed over the Internet from any browser. The web shell gives the attackers administrative access to the victim’s computer servers.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, two cybersecurity experts who’ve briefed U.S. national security advisors on the attack told KrebsOnSecurity the Chinese hacking group thought to be responsible has seized control over “hundreds of thousands” of Microsoft Exchange Servers worldwide — with each victim system representing approximately one organization that uses Exchange to process email.

Microsoft’s initial advisory about the Exchange flaws credited Reston, Va. based Volexity for reporting the vulnerabilities. Volexity President Steven Adair said the company first saw attackers quietly exploiting the Exchange bugs on Jan. 6, 2021, a day when most of the world was glued to television coverage of the riot at the U.S. Capitol.

But Adair said that over the past few days the hacking group has shifted into high gear, moving quickly to scan the Internet for Exchange servers that weren’t yet protected by the security updates Microsoft released Tuesday.

“We’ve worked on dozens of cases so far where web shells were put on the victim system back on Feb. 28 [before Microsoft announced its patches], all the way up to today,” Adair said. “Even if you patched the same day Microsoft published its patches, there’s still a high chance there is a web shell on your server. The truth is, if you’re running Exchange and you haven’t patched this yet, there’s a very high chance that your organization is already compromised.”

Reached for comment, Microsoft said it is working closely with the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), other government agencies, and security companies, to ensure it is providing the best possible guidance and mitigation for its customers.

“The best protection is to apply updates as soon as possible across all impacted systems,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a written statement. “We continue to help customers by providing additional investigation and mitigation guidance. Impacted customers should contact our support teams for additional help and resources.”

Meanwhile, CISA has issued an emergency directive ordering all federal civilian departments and agencies running vulnerable Microsoft Exchange servers to either update the software or disconnect the products from their networks.

Adair said he’s fielded dozens of calls today from state and local government agencies that have identified the backdoors in their Exchange servers and are pleading for help. The trouble is, patching the flaws only blocks the four different ways the hackers are using to get in. But it does nothing to undo the damage that may already have been done.

A tweet from Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, responding to a tweet from White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters today the vulnerabilities found in Microsoft’s widely used Exchange servers were “significant,” and “could have far-reaching impacts.”

“We’re concerned that there are a large number of victims,” Psaki said.

Continue reading →

Three Top Russian Cybercrime Forums Hacked

March 4, 2021
55 Comments

Over the past few weeks, three of the longest running and most venerated Russian-language online forums serving thousands of experienced cybercriminals have been hacked. In two of the intrusions, the attackers made off with the forums’ user databases, including email and Internet addresses and hashed passwords. Members of all three forums are worried the incidents could serve as a virtual Rosetta Stone for connecting the real-life identities of the same users across multiple crime forums.

References to the leaked Mazafaka crime forum database were posted online in the past 48 hours.

On Tuesday, someone dumped thousands of usernames, email addresses and obfuscated passwords on the dark web apparently pilfered from Mazafaka (a.k.a. “Maza,” “MFclub“), an exclusive crime forum that has for more than a decade played host to some of the most experienced and infamous Russian cyberthieves.

At the top of a 35-page PDF leaked online is a private encryption key allegedly used by Maza administrators. The database also includes ICQ numbers for many users. ICQ, also known as “I seek you,” was an instant message platform trusted by countless early denizens of these older crime forums before its use fell out of fashion in favor of more private networks, such as Jabber and Telegram.

This is notable because ICQ numbers tied to specific accounts often are a reliable data point that security researchers can use to connect multiple accounts to the same user across many forums and different nicknames over time.

Cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 assesses that the leaked Maza database is legitimate.

“The file comprised more than 3,000 rows, containing usernames, partially obfuscated password hashes, email addresses and other contact details,” Intel 471 found, noting that Maza forum visitors are now redirected to a breach announcement page. “Initial analysis of the leaked data pointed to its probable authenticity, as at least a portion of the leaked user records correlated with our own data holdings.”

The attack on Maza comes just weeks after another major Russian crime forum got plundered. On Jan. 20, a longtime administrator of the Russian language forum Verified disclosed that the community’s domain registrar had been hacked, and that the site’s domain was redirected to an Internet server the attackers controlled.

A note posted by a Verified forum administrator concerning the hack of its registrar in January.

“Our [bitcoin] wallet has been cracked. Luckily, we did not keep large amounts in it, but this is an unpleasant incident anyway. Once the circumstances became clear, the admin assumed that THEORETICALLY, all the forum’s accounts could have been compromised (the probability is low, but it is there). In our business, it’s better to play safe. So, we’ve decided to reset everyone’s codes. This is not a big deal. Simply write them down and use them from now on.”

A short time later, the administrator updated his post, saying:

“We are getting messages that the forum’s databases were filched after all when the forum was hacked. Everyone’s account passwords were forcibly reset. Pass this information to people you know. The forum was hacked through the domain registrar. The registrar was hacked first, then domain name servers were changed, and traffic was sniffed.”

On Feb. 15, the administrator posted a message purportedly sent on behalf of the intruders, who claimed they hacked Verified’s domain registrar between Jan. 16 and 20.

“It should be clear by now that the forum administration did not do an acceptable job with the security of this whole thing,” the attacker explained. “Most likely just out of laziness or incompetence, they gave up the whole thing. But the main surprise for us was that they saved all the user data, including cookies, referrers, ip addresses of the first registrations, login analytics, and everything else.”

Other sources indicate tens of thousands of private messages between Verified users were stolen, including information about bitcoin deposits and withdrawals and private Jabber contacts.

The compromise of Maza and Verified — and possibly a third major forum — has many community members concerned that their real-life identities could be exposed. Exploit — perhaps the next-largest and most popular Russian forum after Verified, also experienced an apparent compromise this week. Continue reading →

Microsoft: Chinese Cyberspies Used 4 Exchange Server Flaws to Plunder Emails

March 2, 2021
32 Comments

Microsoft Corp. today released software updates to plug four security holes that attackers have been using to plunder email communications at companies that use its Exchange Server products. The company says all four flaws are being actively exploited as part of a complex attack chain deployed by a previously unidentified Chinese cyber espionage group.

The software giant typically releases security updates on the second Tuesday of each month, but it occasionally deviates from that schedule when addressing active attacks that target newly identified and serious vulnerabilities in its products.

The patches released today fix security problems in Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, 2016 and 2019. Microsoft said its Exchange Online service — basically hosted email for businesses — is not impacted by these flaws.

Microsoft credited researchers at Reston, Va. based Volexity for reporting the attacks. Volexity President Steven Adair told KrebsOnSecurity it first spotted the attacks on Jan. 6, 2021.

Adair said while the exploits used by the group may have taken great skills to develop, they require little technical know-how to use and can give an attacker easy access to all of an organization’s email if their vulnerable Exchange Servers are directly exposed to the Internet.

“These flaws are very easy to exploit,” Adair said. “You don’t need any special knowledge with these exploits. You just show up and say ‘I would like to break in and read all their email.’ That’s all there is to it.” Continue reading →

Payroll/HR Giant PrismHR Hit by Ransomware?

March 2, 2021
39 Comments

PrismHR, a company that sells technology used by other firms to help more than 80,000 small businesses manage payroll, benefits, and human resources, has suffered what appears to be an ongoing ransomware attack that is disrupting many of its services.

Hopkinton, Mass.-based PrismHR handles everything from payroll processing and human resources to health insurance and tax forms for hundreds of “professional employer organizations” (PEOs) that serve more than two million employees. The company processes more than $80 billion payroll payments annually on behalf of PEOs and their clients.

Countless small businesses turn to PEOs in part because they simplify compliance with various state payroll taxes, and because PEOs are the easiest way for small businesses to pool their resources and obtain more favorable health insurance rates for their employees.

PrismHR has not yet responded to requests for comment. But in a notice sent to its PEO partners, PrismHR said it detected suspicious activity within its networks on Feb. 28, and that it disabled access to its platform for all users in an effort to contain the security incident.

The company said the disruption has affected 200 PEO clients across the country, and that the most immediate concern is helping PEOs ensure their customers can process payrolls this week.

“The outage may extend throughout today and possibly later, with potential impact on payroll processing,” Prism explained in a template email it suggested PEO partners share with their customers. “We are committed to ensuring everyone receives their pay as timely and as accurately as possible. For this payroll period, we will use estimates from the last available payroll period. Once the software platform is back online, we will perform a reconciliation and correct any discrepancies as soon as possible.”

Jacob Cloran is co-founder of Decimal, a company that does accounting for small businesses, many of whom rely on PEOs affected by the PrismHR outage. Decimal itself uses a PEO that relies on PrismHR.

“We don’t have a good option to run our payroll this week, and the message we’ve received from our PEO doesn’t give me a lot of confidence we’ll be able to do that,” Cloran said.

Cloran said while there are other cloud-based companies that work with multiple PEOs, PrismHR is by far the largest.

“Prism is the only real option on the PEO software market,” he said. “Everyone I know who has tried any of the others ends up back at Prism. It’s the best of all bad available options.” Continue reading →

Is Your Browser Extension a Botnet Backdoor?

March 1, 2021
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A company that rents out access to more than 10 million Web browsers so that clients can hide their true Internet addresses has built its network by paying browser extension makers to quietly include its code in their creations. This story examines the lopsided economics of extension development, and why installing an extension can be such a risky proposition.

Singapore-based Infatica[.]io is part of a growing industry of shadowy firms trying to woo developers who maintain popular browser extensions — desktop and mobile device software add-ons available for download from Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla designed to add functionality or customization to one’s browsing experience.

Some of these extensions have garnered hundreds of thousands or even millions of users. But here’s the rub: As an extension’s user base grows, maintaining them with software updates and responding to user support requests tends to take up an inordinate amount of the author’s time. Yet extension authors have few options for earning financial compensation for their work.

So when a company comes along and offers to buy the extension — or pay the author to silently include some extra code — that proposal is frequently too good to pass up.

For its part, Infatica seeks out authors with extensions that have at least 50,000 users. An extension maker who agrees to incorporate Infatica’s computer code can earn anywhere from $15 to $45 each month for every 1,000 active users.

An Infatica graphic explaining the potential benefits for extension owners.

Infatica’s code then uses the browser of anyone who has that extension installed to route Web traffic for the company’s customers, including marketers or anyone able to afford its hefty monthly subscription charges.

The end result is when Infatica customers browse to a web site, that site thinks the traffic is coming from the Internet address tied to the extension user, not the customer’s.

Infatica prices its service based on the volume of web traffic a customer is seeking to anonymize, from $360 a month for 40 gigabytes all the way to $20,000 a month for 10,000 gigabytes of data traffic pushed through millions of residential computers.

THE ECONOMICS OF EXTENSIONS

Hao Nguyen is the developer behind ModHeader, an extension used by more than 400,000 people to test the functionality of websites by making it easier for users to modify the data shared with those sites. When Nguyen found himself spending increasing amounts of his time and money supporting the extension, he tried including ads in the program to help offset costs.

ModHeader users protested loudly against the change, and Nguyen removed the ads — which he said weren’t making him much money anyway.

“I had spent at least 10 years building this thing and had no luck monetizing it,” he told KrebsOnSecurity.

Nguyen said he ignored multiple requests from different companies offering to pay him to insert their code, mainly because the code gave those firms the ability to inject whatever they wanted into his program (and onto his users’ devices) at any time.

Then came Infatica, whose code was fairly straightforward by comparison, he said. It restricted the company to routing web requests through his users’ browsers, and did not try to access more sensitive components of the user’s browser experience, such as stored passwords and cookies, or viewing the user’s screen.

More importantly, the deal would net him at least $1,500 a month, and possibly quite a bit more.

“I gave Infatica a try but within a few days I got a lot of negative user reviews,” he said. “They didn’t like that the extension might be using their browser as a proxy for going to not so good places like porn sites.”

Again he relented, and removed the Infatica code. Continue reading →

How $100M in Jobless Claims Went to Inmates

February 25, 2021
48 Comments

The U.S. Labor Department’s inspector general said this week that roughly $100 million in fraudulent unemployment insurance claims were paid in 2020 to criminals who are already in jail. That’s a tiny share of the estimated tens of billions of dollars in jobless benefits states have given to identity thieves in the past year. To help reverse that trend, many states are now turning to a little-known private company called ID.me. This post examines some of what that company is seeing in its efforts to stymie unemployment fraud.

These prisoners tried to apply for jobless benefits. Personal information from the inmate IDs has been redacted. Image: ID.me

A new report (PDF) from the Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that from March through October of 2020, some $3.5 billion in fraudulent jobless benefits — nearly two-thirds of the phony claims it reviewed — was paid out to individuals with Social Security numbers filed in multiple states. Almost $100 million went to more than 13,000 ineligible people who are currently in prison.

The OIG acknowledges that the total losses from all states is likely to be tens of billions of dollars. Indeed, just one state — California — disclosed last month that hackers, identity thieves and overseas criminal rings stole more than $11 billion in jobless benefits from the state last year. That’s roughly 10 percent of all claims.

Bloomberg Law reports that in response to a flood of jobless claims that exploit the lack of information sharing among states, the Labor Dept. urged the states to use a federally funded hub designed to share applicant data and detect fraudulent claims filed in more than one state. But as the OIG report notes, participation in the hub is voluntary, and so far only 32 of 54 state or territory workforce agencies in the U.S. are using it.

Much of this fraud exploits weak authentication methods used by states that have long sought to verify applicants using static, widely available information such as Social Security numbers and birthdays. Many states also lacked the ability to tell when multiple payments were going to the same bank accounts.

To make matters worse, as the Coronavirus pandemic took hold a number of states dramatically pared back the amount of information required to successfully request a jobless benefits claim.

77,000 NEW (AB)USERS EACH DAY

In response, 15 states have now allied with McLean, Va.-based ID.me to shore up their authentication efforts, with six more states under contract to use the service in the coming months. That’s a minor coup for a company launched in 2010 with the goal of helping e-commerce sites validate the identities of customers for the purposes of granting discounts for veterans, teachers, students, nurses and first responders.

ID.me says it now has more than 36 million people signed up for accounts, with roughly 77,000 new users signing up each day. Naturally, a big part of that growth has come from unemployed people seeking jobless benefits.

To screen out fraudsters, ID.me requires applicants to supply a great deal more information than previously requested by the states, such as images of their driver’s license or other government-issued ID, copies of utility or insurance bills, and details about their mobile phone service.

When an applicant doesn’t have one or more of the above — or if something about their application triggers potential fraud flags — ID.me may require a recorded, live video chat with the person applying for benefits.

This has led to some fairly amusing attempts to circumvent their verification processes, said ID.me founder and CEO Blake Hall. For example, it’s not uncommon for applicants appearing in the company’s video chat to don disguises. The Halloween mask worn by the applicant pictured below is just one example.

Image: ID.me

Hall said the company’s service is blocking a significant amount of “first party” fraud — someone using their own identity to file in multiple states where they aren’t eligible — as well as “third-party” fraud, where people are tricked into giving away identity data that thieves then use to apply for benefits.

“There’s literally every form of attack, from nation states and organized crime to prisoners,” Hall said. “It’s like the D-Day of fraud, this is Omaha Beach we’re on right now. The amount of fraud we are fighting is truly staggering.”

According to ID.me, a major driver of phony jobless claims comes from social engineering, where people have given away personal data in response to romance or sweepstakes scams, or after applying for what they thought was a legitimate work-from-home job.

“A lot of this is targeting the elderly,” Hall said. “We’ve seen [videos] of people in nursing homes, where folks off camera are speaking for them and holding up documents.”

“We had one video where the person applying said, ‘I’m here for the prize money,'” Hall continued. “Another elderly victim started weeping when they realized they weren’t getting a job and were the victim of a job scam. In general though, the job scam stuff hits younger people harder and the romance and prize money stuff hits elderly people harder.”

Many other phony claims are filed by people who’ve been approached by fraudsters promising them a cut of any unemployment claims granted in their names.

“That person is told to just claim that they had their identity stolen when and if law enforcement ever shows up,” Hall said.
Continue reading →