Convicted SIM Swapper Gets 3 Years in Jail

November 20, 2020
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A 21-year-old Irishman who pleaded guilty to charges of helping to steal millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies from victims has been sentenced to just under three years in prison. The defendant is part of an alleged conspiracy involving at least eight others in the United States who stand accused of theft via SIM swapping, a crime that involves convincing mobile phone company employees to transfer ownership of the target’s phone number to a device the attackers control.

Conor Freeman of Dublin took part in the theft of more than two million dollars worth of cryptocurrency from different victims throughout 2018. Freeman was named as a member of a group of alleged SIM swappers called “The Community” charged last year with wire fraud in connection with SIM swapping attacks that netted in excess of $2.4 million.

Among the eight others accused are three former wireless phone company employees who allegedly helped the gang hijack mobile numbers tied to their targets. Prosecutors say the men would identify people likely to have significant cryptocurrency holdings, then pay their phone company cohorts to transfer the victim’s mobile service to a new SIM card — the smart chip in each phone that ties a customer’s device to their number.

A fraudulent SIM swap allows the bad guys to intercept a target’s incoming phone calls and text messages. This is dangerous because a great many sites and services still allow customers to reset their passwords simply by clicking on a link sent via SMS. From there, attackers can gain access to any accounts that allow password resets via SMS or automated calls, from email and social media profiles to virtual currency trading platforms.

Like other accused members of The Community, Freeman was an active member of OGUsers, a forum that caters to people selling access to hijacked social media and other online accounts. But unlike others in the group, Freeman used his real name (username: Conor), and disclosed his hometown and date of birth to others on the forum. At least twice in the past few years OGUsers was hacked, and its database of profiles and user messages posted online.

According to a report in The Irish Times, Freeman spent approximately €130,000, which he had converted into cash from the stolen cryptocurrency. Conor posted on OGUsers that he spent approximately $14,000 on a Rolex watch. The rest was handed over to the police in the form of an electronic wallet that held the equivalent of more than $2 million. Continue reading →

Trump Fires Security Chief Christopher Krebs

November 18, 2020
534 Comments

President Trump on Tuesday fired his top election security official Christopher Krebs (no relation). The dismissal came via Twitter two weeks to the day after Trump lost an election he baselessly claims was stolen by widespread voting fraud.

Chris Krebs. Image: CISA.

Krebs, 43, is a former Microsoft executive appointed by Trump to head the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. As part of that role, Krebs organized federal and state efforts to improve election security, and to dispel disinformation about the integrity of the voting process.

Krebs’ dismissal was hardly unexpected. Last week, in the face of repeated statements by Trump that the president was robbed of re-election by buggy voting machines and millions of fraudulently cast ballots, Krebs’ agency rejected the claims as “unfounded,” asserting that “the November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.”

In a statement on Nov. 12, CISA declared “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

But in a tweet Tuesday evening, Trump called that assessment “highly inaccurate,” alleging there were “massive improprieties and fraud — including dead people voting, Poll watchers not allowed into polling locations, ‘glitches’ in the voting machines that changed votes from Trump to Biden, late voting, and many more.”

Twitter, as it has done with a remarkable number of the president’s tweets lately, flagged the statements as disputed.

By most accounts, Krebs was one of the more competent and transparent leaders in the Trump administration. But that same transparency may have cost him his job: Krebs’ agency earlier this year launched “Rumor Control,” a blog that sought to address many of the conspiracy theories the president has perpetuated in recent days.

Sen. Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, said Krebs had done “a remarkable job during a challenging time,” and that the “creative and innovative campaign CISA developed to promote cybersecurity should serve as a model for other government agencies.”

Sen. Angus King, an Independent from Maine and co-chair of a commission to improve the nation’s cyber defense posture, called Krebs “an incredibly bright, high-performing, and dedicated public servant who has helped build up new cyber capabilities in the face of swiftly-evolving dangers.”

“By firing Mr. Krebs for simply doing his job, President Trump is inflicting severe damage on all Americans – who rely on CISA’s defenses, even if they don’t know it,” King said in a written statement. “If there’s any silver lining in this unjust decision, it’s this: I hope that President-elect Biden will recognize Chris’s contributions, and consult with him as the Biden administration charts the future of this critically important agency.” Continue reading →

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Be Very Sparing in Allowing Site Notifications

November 17, 2020
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An increasing number of websites are asking visitors to approve “notifications,” browser modifications that periodically display messages on the user’s mobile or desktop device. In many cases these notifications are benign, but several dodgy firms are paying site owners to install their notification scripts and then selling that communications pathway to scammers and online hucksters.

Notification prompts in Firefox (left) and Google Chrome.

When a website you visit asks permission to send notifications and you approve the request, the resulting messages that pop up appear outside of the browser. For example, on Microsoft Windows systems they typically show up in the bottom right corner of the screen — just above the system clock. These so-called “push notifications” rely on an Internet standard designed to work similarly across different operating systems and web browsers.

But many users may not fully grasp what they are consenting to when they approve notifications, or how to tell the difference between a notification sent by a website and one made to appear like an alert from the operating system or another program that’s already installed on the device.

This is evident by the apparent scale of the infrastructure behind a relatively new company based in Montenegro called PushWelcome, which advertises the ability for site owners to monetize traffic from their visitors. The company’s site currently is ranked by Alexa.com as among the top 2,000 sites in terms of Internet traffic globally.

Website publishers who sign up with PushWelcome are asked to include a small script on their page which prompts visitors to approve notifications. In many cases, the notification approval requests themselves are deceptive — disguised as prompts to click “OK” to view video material, or as “CAPTCHA” requests designed to distinguish automated bot traffic from real visitors.

An ad from PushWelcome touting the money that websites can make for embedding their dodgy push notifications scripts.

Approving notifications from a site that uses PushWelcome allows any of the company’s advertising partners to display whatever messages they choose, whenever they wish to, and in real-time. And almost invariably, those messages include misleading notifications about security risks on the user’s system, prompts to install other software, ads for dating sites, erectile disfunction medications, and dubious investment opportunities.

That’s according to a deep analysis of the PushWelcome network compiled by Indelible LLC, a cybersecurity firm based in Portland, Ore. Frank Angiolelli, vice president of security at Indelible, said rogue notifications can be abused for credential phishing, as well as foisting malware and other unwanted applications on users.

“This method is currently being used to deliver something akin to adware or click fraud type activity,” Angiolelli said. “The concerning aspect of this is that it is so very undetected by endpoint security programs, and there is a real risk this activity can be used for much more nefarious purposes.”

Sites affiliated with PushWelcome often use misleading messaging to trick people into approving notifications.

Continue reading →

Patch Tuesday, November 2020 Edition

November 10, 2020
35 Comments

Adobe and Microsoft each issued a bevy of updates today to plug critical security holes in their software. Microsoft’s release includes fixes for 112 separate flaws, including one zero-day vulnerability that is already being exploited to attack Windows users. Microsoft also is taking flak for changing its security advisories and limiting the amount of information disclosed about each bug.

Some 17 of the 112 issues fixed in today’s patch batch involve “critical” problems in Windows, or those that can be exploited by malware or malcontents to seize complete, remote control over a vulnerable Windows computer without any help from users.

Most of the rest were assigned the rating “important,” which in Redmond parlance refers to a vulnerability whose exploitation could “compromise the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of user data, or of the integrity or availability of processing resources.”

A chief concern among all these updates this month is CVE-2020-17087, which is an “important” bug in the Windows kernel that is already seeing active exploitation. CVE-2020-17087 is not listed as critical because it’s what’s known as a privilege escalation flaw that would allow an attacker who has already compromised a less powerful user account on a system to gain administrative control. In essence, it would have to be chained with another exploit.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what Google researchers described witnessing recently. On Oct. 20, Google released an update for its Chrome browser which fixed a bug (CVE-2020-15999) that was seen being used in conjunction with CVE-2020-17087 to compromise Windows users.

If you take a look at the advisory Microsoft released today for CVE-2020-17087 (or any others from today’s batch), you might notice they look a bit more sparse. That’s because Microsoft has opted to restructure those advisories around the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) format to more closely align the format of the advisories with that of other major software vendors.

But in so doing, Microsoft has also removed some useful information, such as the description explaining in broad terms the scope of the vulnerability, how it can be exploited, and what the result of the exploitation might be. Microsoft explained its reasoning behind this shift in a blog post.

Not everyone is happy with the new format. Bob Huber, chief security officer at Tenable, praised Microsoft for adopting an industry standard, but said the company should consider that folks who review Patch Tuesday releases aren’t security practitioners but rather IT counterparts responsible for actually applying the updates who often aren’t able (and shouldn’t have to) decipher raw CVSS data.

“With this new format, end users are completely blind to how a particular CVE impacts them,” Huber said. “What’s more, this makes it nearly impossible to determine the urgency of a given patch. It’s difficult to understand the benefits to end-users. However, it’s not too difficult to see how this new format benefits bad actors. They’ll reverse engineer the patches and, by Microsoft not being explicit about vulnerability details, the advantage goes to attackers, not defenders. Without the proper context for these CVEs, it becomes increasingly difficult for defenders to prioritize their remediation efforts.” Continue reading →

Ransomware Group Turns to Facebook Ads

November 10, 2020
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It’s bad enough that many ransomware gangs now have blogs where they publish data stolen from companies that refuse to make an extortion payment. Now, one crime group has started using hacked Facebook accounts to run ads publicly pressuring their ransomware victims into paying up.

On the evening of Monday, Nov. 9, an ad campaign apparently taken out by the Ragnar Locker Team began appearing on Facebook. The ad was designed to turn the screws to the Italian beverage vendor Campari Group, which acknowledged on Nov. 3 that its computer systems had been sidelined by a malware attack.

On Nov. 6, Campari issued a follow-up statement saying “at this stage, we cannot completely exclude that some personal and business data has been taken.”

“This is ridiculous and looks like a big fat lie,” reads the Facebook ad campaign from the Ragnar crime group. “We can confirm that confidential data was stolen and we talking about huge volume of data.”

The ad went on to say Ragnar Locker Team had offloaded two terabytes of information and would give the Italian firm until 6 p.m. EST today (Nov. 10) to negotiate an extortion payment in exchange for a promise not to publish the stolen files.

The Facebook ad blitz was paid for by Hodson Event Entertainment, an account tied to Chris Hodson, a deejay based in Chicago. Contacted by KrebsOnSecurity, Hodson said his Facebook account indeed was hacked, and that the attackers had budgeted $500 for the entire campaign.

“I thought I had two-step verification turned on for all my accounts, but now it looks like the only one I didn’t have it set for was Facebook,” Hodson said.

Hodson said a review of his account shows the unauthorized campaign reached approximately 7,150 Facebook users, and generated 770 clicks, with a cost-per-result of 21 cents. Of course, it didn’t cost the ransomware group anything. Hodson said Facebook billed him $35 for the first part of the campaign, but apparently detected the ads as fraudulent sometime this morning before his account could be billed another $159 for the campaign. Continue reading →

Body Found in Canada Identified as Neo-Nazi Spam King

November 8, 2020
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The body of a man found shot inside a burned out vehicle in Canada three years ago has been identified as that of Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a prolific spammer and neo-Nazi who led a failed anti-government march on Washington, D.C. in 1999, according to news reports.

Homicide detectives said they originally thought the man found June 14, 2017 in a torched SUV on a logging road in Squamish, British Columbia was a local rock climber known to others in the area as a politically progressive vegan named Jesse James.

Davis Wolfgang Hawke. Image: Spam Kings, by Brian McWilliams.

But according to a report from CTV News, at a press conference late last month authorities said new DNA evidence linked to a missing persons investigation has confirmed the man’s true identity as Davis Wolfgang Hawke.

A key subject of the book Spam Kings by Brian McWilliams, Hawke was a Jewish-born American who’d legally changed his name from Andrew Britt Greenbaum. For many years, Hawke was a big time purveyor of spam emails hawking pornography and male enhancement supplements, such as herbal Viagra.

Hawke had reportedly bragged about the money he earned from spam, but told friends he didn’t trust banks and decided to convert his earnings into gold and platinum bars. That sparked rumors that he had possibly buried his ill-gotten gains on his parents’ Massachusetts property.

In 2005, AOL won a $12.8 million lawsuit against him for relentlessly spamming its users. A year later, AOL won a court judgment authorizing them to dig on that property, although no precious metals were ever found. Continue reading →

Why Paying to Delete Stolen Data is Bonkers

November 4, 2020
30 Comments

Companies hit by ransomware often face a dual threat: Even if they avoid paying the ransom and can restore things from scratch, about half the time the attackers also threaten to release sensitive stolen data unless the victim pays for a promise to have the data deleted. Leaving aside the notion that victims might have any real expectation the attackers will actually destroy the stolen data, new research suggests a fair number of victims who do pay up may see some or all of the stolen data published anyway.

The findings come in a report today from Coveware, a company that specializes in helping firms recover from ransomware attacks. Coveware says nearly half of all ransomware cases now include the threat to release exfiltrated data.

“Previously, when a victim of ransomware had adequate backups, they would just restore and go on with life; there was zero reason to even engage with the threat actor,” the report observes. “Now, when a threat actor steals data, a company with perfectly restorable backups is often compelled to at least engage with the threat actor to determine what data was taken.”

Coveware said it has seen ample evidence of victims seeing some or all of their stolen data published after paying to have it deleted; in other cases, the data gets published online before the victim is even given a chance to negotiate a data deletion agreement.

“Unlike negotiating for a decryption key, negotiating for the suppression of stolen data has no finite end,” the report continues. “Once a victim receives a decryption key, it can’t be taken away and does not degrade with time. With stolen data, a threat actor can return for a second payment at any point in the future. The track records are too short and evidence that defaults are selectively occurring is already collecting.”

Image: Coveware Q3 2020 report.

The company said it advises clients never to pay a data deletion ransom, but rather to engage competent privacy attorneys, perform an investigation into what data was stolen, and notify any affected customers according to the advice of counsel and application data breach notification laws.

Fabian Wosar, chief technology officer at computer security firm Emsisoft, said ransomware victims often acquiesce to data publication extortion demands when they are trying to prevent the public from learning about the breach.

“The bottom line is, ransomware is a business of hope,” Wosar said. “The company doesn’t want the data to be dumped or sold. So they pay for it hoping the threat actor deletes the data. Technically speaking, whether they delete the data or not doesn’t matter from a legal point of view. The data was lost at the point when it was exfiltrated.”

Ransomware victims who pay for a digital key to unlock servers and desktop systems encrypted by the malware also are relying on hope, Wosar said, because it’s also not uncommon that a decryption key fails to unlock some or all of the infected machines.

“When you look at a lot of ransom notes, you can actually see groups address this very directly and have texts that say stuff along the lines of, Yeah, you are fucked now. But if you pay us, everything can go back to before we fucked you.'”

Two Charged in SIM Swapping, Vishing Scams

November 3, 2020
34 Comments

Two young men from the eastern United States have been hit with identity theft and conspiracy charges for allegedly stealing bitcoin and social media accounts by tricking employees at wireless phone companies into giving away credentials needed to remotely access and modify customer account information.

Prosecutors say Jordan K. Milleson, 21 of Timonium, Md. and 19-year-old Kingston, Pa. resident Kyell A. Bryan hijacked social media and bitcoin accounts using a mix of voice phishing or “vishing” attacks and “SIM swapping,” a form of fraud that involves bribing or tricking employees at mobile phone companies.

Investigators allege the duo set up phishing websites that mimicked legitimate employee portals belonging to wireless providers, and then emailed and/or called employees at these providers in a bid to trick them into logging in at these fake portals.

According to the indictment (PDF), Milleson and Bryan used their phished access to wireless company employee tools to reassign the subscriber identity module (SIM) tied to a target’s mobile device. A SIM card is a small, removable smart chip in mobile phones that links the device to the customer’s phone number, and their purloined access to employee tools meant they could reassign any customer’s phone number to a SIM card in a mobile device they controlled.

That allowed them to seize control over a target’s incoming phone calls and text messages, which were used to reset the password for email, social media and cryptocurrency accounts tied to those numbers.

Interestingly, the conspiracy appears to have unraveled over a business dispute between the two men. Prosecutors say on June 26, 2019, “Bryan called the Baltimore County Police Department and falsely reported that he, purporting to be a resident of the Milleson family residence, had shot his father at the residence.” Continue reading →

FBI, DHS, HHS Warn of Imminent, Credible Ransomware Threat Against U.S. Hospitals

October 28, 2020
80 Comments

On Monday, Oct. 26, KrebsOnSecurity began following up on a tip from a reliable source that an aggressive Russian cybercriminal gang known for deploying ransomware was preparing to disrupt information technology systems at hundreds of hospitals, clinics and medical care facilities across the United States. Today, officials from the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security hastily assembled a conference call with healthcare industry executives warning about an “imminent cybercrime threat to U.S. hospitals and healthcare providers.”

The agencies on the conference call, which included the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), warned participants about “credible information of an increased and imminent cybercrime threat to US hospitals and healthcare providers.”

The agencies said they were sharing the information “to provide warning to healthcare providers to ensure that they take timely and reasonable precautions to protect their networks from these threats.”

The warning came less than two days after this author received a tip from Alex Holden, founder of Milwaukee-based cyber intelligence firm Hold Security. Holden said he saw online communications this week between cybercriminals affiliated with a Russian-speaking ransomware group known as Ryuk in which group members discussed plans to deploy ransomware at more than 400 healthcare facilities in the U.S.

One participant on the government conference call today said the agencies offered few concrete details of how healthcare organizations might better protect themselves against this threat actor or purported malware campaign.

“They didn’t share any IoCs [indicators of compromise], so it’s just been ‘patch your systems and report anything suspicious’,” said a healthcare industry veteran who sat in on the discussion.

However, others on the call said IoCs may be of little help for hospitals that have already been infiltrated by Ryuk. That’s because the malware infrastructure used by the Ryuk gang is often unique to each victim, including everything from the Microsoft Windows executable files that get dropped on the infected hosts to the so-called “command and control” servers used to transmit data between and among compromised systems.

Nevertheless, cybersecurity incident response firm Mandiant today released a list of domains and Internet addresses used by Ryuk in previous attacks throughout 2020 and up to the present day. Mandiant refers to the group by the threat actor classification “UNC1878,” and aired a webcast today detailing some of Ryuk’s latest exploitation tactics.

Charles Carmakal, senior vice president for Mandiant, told Reuters that UNC1878 is one of most brazen, heartless, and disruptive threat actors he’s observed over the course of his career.

“Multiple hospitals have already been significantly impacted by Ryuk ransomware and their networks have been taken offline,” Carmakal said. Continue reading →

Security Blueprints of Many Companies Leaked in Hack of Swedish Firm Gunnebo

October 28, 2020
26 Comments

In March 2020, KrebsOnSecurity alerted Swedish security giant Gunnebo Group that hackers had broken into its network and sold the access to a criminal group which specializes in deploying ransomware. In August, Gunnebo said it had successfully thwarted a ransomware attack, but this week it emerged that the intruders stole and published online tens of thousands of sensitive documents — including schematics of client bank vaults and surveillance systems.

The Gunnebo Group is a Swedish multinational company that provides physical security to a variety of customers globally, including banks, government agencies, airports, casinos, jewelry stores, tax agencies and even nuclear power plants. The company has operations in 25 countries, more than 4,000 employees, and billions in revenue annually.

Acting on a tip from Milwaukee, Wis.-based cyber intelligence firm Hold Security, KrebsOnSecurity in March told Gunnebo about a financial transaction between a malicious hacker and a cybercriminal group which specializes in deploying ransomware. That transaction included credentials to a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) account apparently set up by a Gunnebo Group employee who wished to access the company’s internal network remotely.

Five months later, Gunnebo disclosed it had suffered a cyber attack targeting its IT systems that forced the shutdown of internal servers. Nevertheless, the company said its quick reaction prevented the intruders from spreading the ransomware throughout its systems, and that the overall lasting impact from the incident was minimal.

Earlier this week, Swedish news agency Dagens Nyheter confirmed that hackers recently published online at least 38,000 documents stolen from Gunnebo’s network. Linus Larsson, the journalist who broke the story, says the hacked material was uploaded to a public server during the second half of September, and it is not known how many people may have gained access to it.

Larsson quotes Gunnebo CEO Stefan Syrén saying the company never considered paying the ransom the attackers demanded in exchange for not publishing its internal documents. What’s more, Syrén seemed to downplay the severity of the exposure.

“I understand that you can see drawings as sensitive, but we do not consider them as sensitive automatically,” the CEO reportedly said. “When it comes to cameras in a public environment, for example, half the point is that they should be visible, therefore a drawing with camera placements in itself is not very sensitive.”

It remains unclear whether the stolen RDP credentials were a factor in this incident. But the password to the Gunnebo RDP account — “password01” — suggests the security of its IT systems may have been lacking in other areas as well.

After this author posted a request for contact from Gunnebo on Twitter, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Rasmus Jansson, an account manager at Gunnebo who specializes in protecting client systems from electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks or disruption, short bursts of energy that can damage electrical equipment.

Jansson said he relayed the stolen credentials to the company’s IT specialists, but that he does not know what actions the company took in response. Reached by phone today, Jansson said he quit the company in August, right around the time Gunnebo disclosed the thwarted ransomware attack. He declined to comment on the particulars of the extortion incident.

Ransomware attackers often spend weeks or months inside of a target’s network before attempting to deploy malware across the network that encrypts servers and desktop systems unless and until a ransom demand is met.

That’s because gaining the initial foothold is rarely the difficult part of the attack. In fact, many ransomware groups now have such an embarrassment of riches in this regard that they’ve taken to hiring external penetration testers to carry out the grunt work of escalating that initial foothold into complete control over the victim’s network and any data backup systems  — a process that can be hugely time consuming.

But prior to launching their ransomware, it has become common practice for these extortionists to offload as much sensitive and proprietary data as possible. In some cases, this allows the intruders to profit even if their malware somehow fails to do its job. In other instances, victims are asked to pay two extortion demands: One for a digital key to unlock encrypted systems, and another in exchange for a promise not to publish, auction or otherwise trade any stolen data. Continue reading →