Mexican Politician Removed Over Alleged Ties to Romanian ATM Skimmer Gang

February 19, 2021
37 Comments

The leader of Mexico’s Green Party has been removed from office following allegations that he received money from a Romanian ATM skimmer gang that stole hundreds of millions of dollars from tourists visiting Mexico’s top tourist destinations over the past five years. The scandal is the latest fallout stemming from a three-part investigation into the organized crime group by KrebsOnSecurity in 2015.

One of the Bluetooth-enabled PIN pads pulled from a compromised ATM in Mexico. The two components on the left are legitimate parts of the machine. The fake PIN pad made to be slipped under the legit PIN pad on the machine, is the orange component, top right. The Bluetooth and data storage chips are in the middle.

Jose de la Peña Ruiz de Chávez, who leads the Green Ecologist Party of Mexico (PVEM), was dismissed this month after it was revealed that his were among 79 bank accounts seized as part of an ongoing law enforcement investigation into a Romanian organized crime group that owned and operated an ATM network throughout the country.

In 2015, KrebsOnSecurity traveled to Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula to follow up on reports about a massive spike in ATM skimming activity that appeared centered around some of the nation’s primary tourist areas.

That three-part series concluded that Intacash, an ATM provider owned and operated by a group of Romanian citizens, had been paying technicians working for other ATM companies to install sophisticated Bluetooth-based skimming devices inside cash machines throughout the Quintana Roo region of Mexico, which includes Cancun, Cozumel, Playa del Carmen and Tulum.

Continue reading →

U.S. Indicts North Korean Hackers in Theft of $200 Million

February 17, 2021
77 Comments

The U.S. Justice Department today unsealed indictments against three men accused of working with the North Korean regime to carry out some of the most damaging cybercrime attacks over the past decade, including the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures, the global WannaCry ransomware contagion of 2017, and the theft of roughly $200 million and attempted theft of more than $1.2 billion from banks and other victims worldwide.

Investigators with the DOJ, U.S. Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security told reporters on Wednesday the trio’s activities involved extortion, phishing, direct attacks on financial institutions and ATM networks, as well as malicious applications that masqueraded as software tools to help people manage their cryptocurrency holdings.

Prosecutors say the hackers were part of an effort to circumvent ongoing international financial sanctions against the North Korean regime. The group is thought to be responsible for the attempted theft of approximately $1.2 billion, although it’s unclear how much of that was actually stolen.

Confirmed thefts attributed to the group include the 2016 hacking of the SWIFT payment system for Bangladesh Bank, which netted thieves $81 million; $6.1 million in a 2018 ATM cash out scheme targeting a Pakistani bank; and a total of $112 million in virtual currencies stolen between 2017 and 2020 from cryptocurrency companies in Slovenia, Indonesia and New York.

“The scope of the criminal conduct by the North Korean hackers was extensive and longrunning, and the range of crimes they have committed is staggering,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Tracy L. Wilkison for the Central District of California. “The conduct detailed in the indictment are the acts of a criminal nation-state that has stopped at nothing to extract revenge and obtain money to prop up its regime.”

The indictments name Jon Chang Hyok (a.k.a “Alex/Quan Jiang”), Kim Il (a.k.a. “Julien Kim”/”Tony Walker”), and Park Jin Hyok (a.k.a. Pak Jin Hek/Pak Kwang Jin). U.S. prosecutors say the men were members of the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB), an intelligence division of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) that manages the state’s clandestine operations.

The Justice Department says those indicted were members of a DPRK-sponsored cybercrime group variously identified by the security community as the Lazarus Group and Advanced Persistent Threat 38 (APT 38). The government alleges the men reside in North Korea but were frequently stationed by the DPRK in other countries, including China and Russia.

Park was previously charged in 2018 in connection with the WannaCry and Sony Pictures attacks. But today’s indictments expanded the range of crimes attributed to Park and his alleged co-conspirators, including cryptocurrency thefts, phony cryptocurrency investment schemes and apps, and efforts to launder the proceeds of their crimes.

Prosecutors in California also today unsealed an indictment against Ghaleb Alaumary, a 37-year-old from Mississauga, Ontario who pleaded guilty in November 2020 to charges of laundering tens of millions of dollars stolen by the DPRK hackers.

The accused allegedly developed and marketed a series of cryptocurrency applications that were advertised as tools to help people manage their crypto holdings. In reality, prosecutors say, the programs were malware or downloaded malware after the applications were installed.

A joint cyber advisory from the FBI, the Treasury and DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) delves deeper into these backdoored cryptocurrency apps, a family of malware activity referred to as “AppleJeus. “Hidden Cobra” is the collective handle assigned to the hackers behind the AppleJeus malware.

“In most instances, the malicious application—seen on both Windows and Mac operating systems—appears to be from a legitimate cryptocurrency trading company, thus fooling individuals into downloading it as a third-party application from a website that seems legitimate,” the advisory reads. “In addition to infecting victims through legitimate-looking websites, HIDDEN COBRA actors also use phishing, social networking, and social engineering techniques to lure users into downloading the malware.” Continue reading →

Advertisement

Bluetooth Overlay Skimmer That Blocks Chip

February 15, 2021
80 Comments

As a total sucker for anything skimming-related, I was interested to hear from a reader working security for a retail chain in the United States who recently found Bluetooth-enabled skimming devices placed over top of payment card terminals at several stores. Interestingly, these skimmers interfered with the terminal’s ability to read chip-based cards, forcing customers to swipe the stripe instead.

The payment card skimmer overlay transmitted stolen data via Bluetooth, physically blocked chip-based transactions, and included a PIN pad overlay.

Here’s a closer look at the electronic gear jammed into these overlay skimmers. It includes a hidden PIN pad overlay that captures, stores and transmits via Bluetooth data from cards swiped through the machine, as well as PINs entered on the device:

The hidden magnetic stripe reader is in the bottom left, just below the Bluetooth circuit board. A PIN pad overlay (center) intercepts any PINs entered by customers; the cell phone battery (right) powers all of the components.

My reader source shared these images on condition that the retailer in question not be named. But it’s worth pointing out these devices can be installed on virtually any customer-facing payment terminal in the blink of eye. Continue reading →

What’s most interesting about the Florida water system hack? That we heard about it at all.

February 10, 2021
61 Comments

Stories about computer security tend to go viral when they bridge the vast divide between geeks and luddites, and this week’s news about a hacker who tried to poison a Florida town’s water supply was understandably front-page material. But for security nerds who’ve been warning about this sort of thing for ages, the most surprising aspect of the incident seems to be that we learned about it at all.

Spend a few minutes searching Twitter, Reddit or any number of other social media sites and you’ll find countless examples of researchers posting proof of being able to access so-called “human-machine interfaces” — basically web pages designed to interact remotely with various complex systems, such as those that monitor and/or control things like power, water, sewage and manufacturing plants.

And yet, there have been precious few known incidents of malicious hackers abusing this access to disrupt these complex systems. That is, until this past Monday, when Florida county sheriff Bob Gualtieri held a remarkably clear-headed and fact-filled news conference about an attempt to poison the water supply of Oldsmar, a town of around 15,000 not far from Tampa.

Gualtieri told the media that someone (they don’t know who yet) remotely accessed a computer for the city’s water treatment system (using Teamviewer) and briefly increased the amount of sodium hydroxide (a.k.a. lye used to control acidity in the water) to 100 times the normal level.

“The city’s water supply was not affected,” The Tampa Bay Times reported. “A supervisor working remotely saw the concentration being changed on his computer screen and immediately reverted it, Gualtieri said. City officials on Monday emphasized that several other safeguards are in place to prevent contaminated water from entering the water supply and said they’ve disabled the remote-access system used in the attack.”

In short, a likely inexperienced intruder somehow learned the credentials needed to remotely access Oldsmar’s water system, did little to hide his activity, and then tried to change settings by such a wide margin that the alterations would be hard to overlook.

“The system wasn’t capable of doing what the attacker wanted,” said Joe Weiss, managing partner at Applied Control Solutions, a consultancy for the control systems industry. “The system isn’t capable of going up by a factor of 100 because there are certain physics problems involved there. Also, the changes he tried to make wouldn’t happen instantaneously. The operators would have had plenty of time to do something about it.”

Weiss was just one of a half-dozen experts steeped in the cybersecurity aspects of industrial control systems that KrebsOnSecurity spoke with this week. While all of those interviewed echoed Weiss’s conclusion, most also said they were concerned about the prospects of a more advanced adversary.

Here are some of the sobering takeaways from those interviews:

  • There are approximately 54,000 distinct drinking water systems in the United States.
  • The vast majority of those systems serve fewer than 50,000 residents, with many serving just a few hundred or thousand.
  • Virtually all of them rely on some type of remote access to monitor and/or administer these facilities.
  • Many of these facilities are unattended, underfunded, and do not have someone watching the IT operations 24/7.
  • Many facilities have not separated operational technology (the bits that control the switches and levers) from safety systems that might detect and alert on intrusions or potentially dangerous changes.

So, given how easy it is to search the web for and find ways to remotely interact with these HMI systems, why aren’t there more incidents like the one in Oldsmar making the news? One reason may be that these facilities don’t have to disclose such events when they do happen. Continue reading →

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, February 2021 Edition

February 9, 2021
44 Comments

Microsoft today rolled out updates to plug at least 56 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software. One of the bugs is already being actively exploited, and six of them were publicized prior to today, potentially giving attackers a head start in figuring out how to exploit the flaws.

Nine of the 56 vulnerabilities earned Microsoft’s most urgent “critical” rating, meaning malware or miscreants could use them to seize remote control over unpatched systems with little or no help from users.

The flaw being exploited in the wild already — CVE-2021-1732 — affects Windows 10, Server 2016 and later editions. It received a slightly less dire “important” rating and mainly because it is a vulnerability that lets an attacker increase their authority and control on a device, which means the attacker needs to already have access to the target system.

Two of the other bugs that were disclosed prior to this week are critical and reside in Microsoft’s .NET Framework, a component required by many third-party applications (most Windows users will have some version of .NET installed). Continue reading →

Arrest, Raids Tied to ‘U-Admin’ Phishing Kit

February 8, 2021
17 Comments

Cyber cops in Ukraine carried out an arrest and several raids last week in connection with the author of a U-Admin, a software package used to administer what’s being called “one of the world’s largest phishing services.” The operation was carried out in coordination with the FBI and authorities in Australia, which was particularly hard hit by phishing scams perpetrated by U-Admin customers.

The U-Admin phishing panel interface. Image: fr3d.hk/blog

The Ukrainian attorney general’s office said it worked with the nation’s police force to identify a 39-year-old man from the Ternopil region who developed a phishing package and special administrative panel for the product.

“According to the analysis of foreign law enforcement agencies, more than 50% of all phishing attacks in 2019 in Australia were carried out thanks to the development of the Ternopil hacker,” the attorney general’s office said, noting that investigators had identified hundreds of U-Admin customers.

Brad Marden, superintendent of cybercrime operations for the Australian Federal Police (AFP), said their investigation into who was behind U-Admin began in late 2018, after Australian citizens began getting deluged with phishing attacks via mobile text messages that leveraged the software.

“It was rampant,” Marden said, noting that the AFP identified the suspect and referred the case to the Ukrainians for prosecution. “At one stage in 2019 we had a couple of hundred SMS phishing campaigns tied to just this particular actor. Pretty much every Australian received a half dozen of these phishing attempts.”

U-Admin, a.k.a. “Universal Admin,” is crimeware platform that first surfaced in 2016. U-Admin was sold by an individual who used the hacker handle “Kaktys” on multiple cybercrime forums.

According to this comprehensive breakdown of the phishing toolkit, the U-Admin control panel isn’t sold on its own, but rather it is included when customers contact the developer and purchase a set of phishing pages designed to mimic a specific brand — such as a bank website or social media platform.

Cybersecurity threat intelligence firm Intel 471 describes U-Admin as an information stealing framework that uses several plug-ins in one location to help users pilfer victim credentials more efficiently. Those plug-ins include a phishing page generator, a victim tracker, and even a component to help manage money mules (for automatic transfers from victim accounts to people who were hired in advance to receive and launder stolen funds).

Perhaps the biggest selling point for U-Admin is a module that helps phishers intercept multi-factor authentication codes. This core functionality is what’s known as a “web inject,” because it allows phishers to inject content into the phishing page that prompts the victim to enter additional information. The video below, produced by the U-Admin developer, shows a few examples (click to enlarge). Continue reading →

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter Target Resellers of Hacked Accounts

February 4, 2021
17 Comments

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter this week all took steps to crack down on users involved in trafficking hijacked user accounts across their platforms. The coordinated action seized hundreds of accounts the companies say have played a major role in facilitating the trade and often lucrative resale of compromised, highly sought-after usernames.

At the center of the account ban wave are some of the most active members of OGUsers, a forum that caters to thousands of people selling access to hijacked social media and other online accounts.

Particularly prized by this community are short usernames, which can often be resold for thousands of dollars to those looking to claim a choice vanity name.

Facebook told KrebsOnSecurity it seized hundreds of accounts — mainly on Instagram — that have been stolen from legitimate users through a variety of intimidation and harassment tactics, including hacking, coercion, extortion, sextortion, SIM swapping, and swatting.

THE MIDDLEMEN

Facebook said it targeted a number of accounts tied to key sellers on OGUsers, as well as those who advertise the ability to broker stolen account sales.

Like most cybercrime forums, OGUsers is overrun with shady characters who are there mainly to rip off other members. As a result, some of the most popular denizens of the community are those who’ve earned a reputation as trusted “middlemen.”

These core members offer escrow services that – in exchange for a cut of the total transaction cost (usually five percent) — will hold the buyer’s funds until he is satisfied that the seller has delivered the credentials and any email account access needed to control the hijacked social media account.

For example, one of the most active accounts targeted in this week’s social network crackdown is the Instagram profile “Trusted,” self-described as “top-tier professional middleman/escrow since 2014.”

Trusted’s profile included several screenshots of his OGUsers persona, “Beam,” who warns members about an uptick in the number of new OGUsers profiles impersonating him and other middlemen on the forum. Beam currently has more reputation points or “vouches” than almost anyone on the forum, save for perhaps the current and former site administrators.

The now-banned Instagram account for the middleman @trusted/beam.

Helpfully, OGUsers has been hacked multiple times over the years, and its database of user details and private messages posted on competing crime forums. Those databases show Beam was just the 12th user account created on OGUsers back in 2014.

In his posts, Beam says he has brokered well north of 10,000 transactions. Indeed, the leaked OGUsers databases — which include private messages on the forum prior to June 2020 — offer a small window into the overall value of the hijacked social media account industry.

In each of Beam’s direct messages to other members who hired him as a middleman he would include the address of the bitcoin wallet to which the buyer was to send the funds. Just two of the bitcoin wallets Beam used for middlemanning over the past of couple of years recorded in excess of 6,700 transactions totaling more than 243 bitcoins — or roughly $8.5 million by today’s valuation (~$35,000 per coin). Beam would have earned roughly $425,000 in commissions on those sales.

Beam, a Canadian whose real name is Noah Hawkins, declined to be interviewed when contacted earlier this week. But his “Trusted” account on Instagram was taken down by Facebook today, as were “@Killer,” — a personal Instagram account he used under the nickname “noah/beam.” Beam’s Twitter account — @NH — has been deactivated by Twitter; it was hacked and stolen from its original owner back in 2014.

Reached for comment, Twitter confirmed that it worked in tandem with Facebook to seize accounts tied to top members of OGUsers, citing its platform manipulation and spam policy. Twitter said its investigation into the people behind these accounts is ongoing.

TikTok confirmed it also took action to target accounts tied to top OGUusers members, although it declined to say how many accounts were reclaimed.

“As part of our ongoing work to find and stop inauthentic behavior, we recently reclaimed a number of TikTok usernames that were being used for account squatting,” TikTok said in a written statement. “We will continue to focus on staying ahead of the ever-evolving tactics of bad actors, including cooperating with third parties and others in the industry.” Continue reading →

‘ValidCC,’ a Major Payment Card Bazaar and Looter of E-Commerce Sites, Shuttered

February 2, 2021
17 Comments

ValidCC, a dark web bazaar run by a cybercrime group that for more than six years hacked online merchants and sold stolen payment card data, abruptly closed up shop last week. The proprietors of the popular store said their servers were seized as part of a coordinated law enforcement operation designed to disconnect and confiscate its infrastructure.

ValidCC, circa 2017.

There are dozens of online shops that sell so-called “card not present” (CNP) payment card data stolen from e-commerce stores, but most source the data from other criminals. In contrast, researchers say ValidCC was actively involved in hacking and pillaging hundreds of online merchants — seeding the sites with hidden card-skimming code that siphoned personal and financial information as customers went through the checkout process.

Cybersecurity firm Group-IB published a report last year detailing the activities of ValidCC, noting the gang behind the crime shop was responsible for plundering nearly 700 e-commerce sites. Group-IB dubbed the gang “UltraRank,” which it said had additionally compromised at least 13 third-party suppliers whose software components are used by countless online stores across Europe, Asia, North and Latin America.

Group-IB believes UltraRank is responsible for a slew of hacks that other security firms previously attributed to at least three distinct cybercrime groups.

“Over five years….UltraRank changed its infrastructure and malicious code on numerous occasions, as a result of which cybersecurity experts would wrongly attribute its attacks to other threat actors,” Group-IB wrote. “UltraRank combined attacks on single targets with supply chain attacks.”

ValidCC’s front man on multiple forums — a cybercriminal who uses the hacker handle “SPR” — told customers on Jan. 28 that the shop would close for good following what appeared to be a law enforcement takedown of its operations. SPR claims his site lost access to a significant inventory — more than 600,000 unsold stolen payment card accounts.

“As a result, we lost the proxy and destination backup servers,” SPR explained. “Besides, now it’s impossible to open and decrypt the backend. The database is in the hands of the police, but it’s encrypted.”

ValidCC had thousands of users, some of whom held significant balances of bitcoin stored in the shop when it ceased operations. SPR claims the site took in approximately $100,000 worth of virtual currency deposits each day from customers.

Many of those customers took to the various crime forums where the shop has a presence to voice suspicions that the proprietors had simply decided to walk away with their money at a time when Bitcoin was near record-high price levels.

SPR countered that ValidCC couldn’t return balances because it no longer had access to its own ledgers.

“We don’t know anything!,” SPR pleaded. “We don’t know users’ balances, or your account logins or passwords, or the [credit cards] you purchased, or anything else! You are free to think what you want, but our team has never conned or let anyone down since the beginning of our operations! Nobody would abandon a dairy cow and let it die in the field! We did not take this decision lightly!” Continue reading →

U.K. Arrest in ‘SMS Bandits’ Phishing Service

February 1, 2021
21 Comments

Authorities in the United Kingdom have arrested a 20-year-old man for allegedly operating an online service for sending high-volume phishing campaigns via mobile text messages. The service, marketed in the underground under the name “SMS Bandits,” has been responsible for blasting out huge volumes of phishing lures spoofing everything from COVID-19 pandemic relief efforts to PayPal, telecommunications providers and tax revenue agencies.

The U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) declined to name the suspect, but confirmed that the Metropolitan Police Service’s cyber crime unit had detained an individual from Birmingham in connection to a business that supplied “criminal services related to phishing offenses.”

The proprietors of the phishing service were variously known on cybercrime forums under handles such as SMSBandits, “Gmuni,” “Bamit9,” and “Uncle Munis.” SMS Bandits offered an SMS phishing (a.k.a. “smishing”) service for the mass sending of text messages designed to phish account credentials for different popular websites and steal personal and financial data for resale.

Image: osint.fans

Sasha Angus is a partner at Scylla Intel, a cyber intelligence startup that did a great deal of research into the SMS Bandits leading up to the arrest. Angus said the phishing lures sent by the SMS Bandits were unusually well-done and free of grammar and spelling mistakes that often make it easy to spot a phony message.

“Just by virtue of these guys being native English speakers, the quality of their phishing kits and lures were considerably better than most,” Angus said.

According to Scylla, the SMS Bandits made a number of operational security (or “opsec”) mistakes that made it relatively easy to find out who they were in real life, but the technical side SMS Bandits’ operation was rather advanced.

“They were launching fairly high-volume smishing campaigns from SMS gateways, but overall their opsec was fairly lousy,” Angus said. “But on the telecom front they were using fairly sophisticated tactics.”

The proprietor of the SMS Bandits, telling the world he lives in Birmingham.

For example, the SMS Bandits automated systems to check whether the phone number list provided by their customers was indeed tied to actual mobile numbers, and not landlines that might tip off telecommunications companies about mass spam campaigns.

“The telcos are monitoring for malicious SMS messages on a number of fronts,” Angus said. “One way to tip off an SMS gateway or wireless provider is to start blasting text messages to phone numbers that can’t receive them.” Continue reading →

The Taxman Cometh for ID Theft Victims

January 29, 2021
43 Comments

The unprecedented volume of unemployment insurance fraud witnessed in 2020 hasn’t abated, although news coverage of the issue has largely been pushed off the front pages by other events. But the ID theft problem is coming to the fore once again: Countless Americans will soon be receiving notices from state regulators saying they owe thousands of dollars in taxes on benefits they never received last year.

One state’s experience offers a window into the potential scope of the problem. Hackers, identity thieves and overseas criminal rings stole over $11 billion in unemployment benefits from California last year, or roughly 10 percent of all such claims the state paid out in 2020, the state’s labor secretary told reporters this week. Another 17 percent of claims — nearly $20 billion more – are suspected fraud.

California’s experience is tracked at a somewhat smaller scale in dozens of other states, where chronically underfunded and technologically outdated unemployment insurance systems were caught flat-footed by an avalanche of fraudulent claims. The scammers typically use stolen identity data to claim benefits, and then have the funds credited to an online account that they control.

States are required to send out 1099-G forms reporting taxable income by Jan. 31, and under federal law unemployment benefits are considered taxable income. Unfortunately, many states have not reconciled their forms with confirmed incidences of fraudulent unemployment insurance claims, meaning many people are being told they owe a great deal more in taxes than they actually do.

In a notice posted Jan. 28, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service urged taxpayers who receive forms 1099-G for unemployment benefits they didn’t actually get because of ID theft to contact their appropriate state agency and request a corrected form.

But the IRS’s advice ignores two rather inconvenient realities. The first is that the same 1099-G forms which states are sending to their citizens also are reported to the IRS — typically at the same time the notices are mailed to residents. The other is that many state agencies are completely overwhelmed right now.

Karl Fava, a certified public accountant in Michigan, told KrebsOnSecurity two of his clients have received 1099-G forms from Michigan regarding thousands of dollars in unemployment payments that they had neither requested nor received.

Fava said Michigan recently stood up a website where victims of unemployment insurance fraud who’ve received incorrect 1099-Gs can report it, but said he’s not confident the state will issue corrected notices before the April 15 tax filing deadline.

“In both cases, the recipients contacted the state but couldn’t get any help,” Fava said. “We’re not getting a lot of traction in resolving this issue. But the fact that they’ve now created a web page where people can input information about receiving these tells you they have to know how prevalent this is.”

Fava said for now he’s advising his clients who are dealing with this problem to acknowledge the amount of fraudulent income on their federal tax returns, but also to subtract an equal amount on the return and note that the income reported by the state was due to fraud.

“That way, things can be consistent with what the IRS already knows,” Fava said. “Not to acknowledge an issue like this on a federal return is just asking for a notice from the IRS.”

The Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent office of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that champions taxpayer advocacy issues, said it recently became aware that some taxpayers are receiving 1099-Gs that include reported income due to unemployment insurance identity theft. The office said it is hearing about a lot of such issues in Ohio particularly, but that the problem is happening nationally. Continue reading →