NCR Barred Mint, QuickBooks from Banking Platform During Account Takeover Storm

November 3, 2019
43 Comments

Banking industry giant NCR Corp. [NYSE: NCR] late last month took the unusual step of temporarily blocking third-party financial data aggregators Mint and QuickBooks Online from accessing Digital Insight, an online banking platform used by hundreds of financial institutions. That ban, which came in response to a series of bank account takeovers in which cybercriminals used aggregation sites to surveil and drain consumer accounts, has since been rescinded. But the incident raises fresh questions about the proper role of digital banking platforms in fighting password abuse.

Part of a communication NCR sent Oct. 25 to banks on its Digital Insight online banking platform.

On Oct. 29, KrebsOnSecurity heard from a chief security officer at a U.S.-based credit union and Digital Insight customer who said his institution just had several dozen customer accounts hacked over the previous week.

My banking source said the attackers appeared to automate the unauthorized logins, which took place over a week in several distinct 12-hour periods in which a new account was accessed every five to ten minutes.

Most concerning, the source said, was that in many cases the aggregator service did not pass through prompts sent by the credit union’s site for multi-factor authentication, meaning the attackers could access customer accounts with nothing more than a username and password.

“The weird part is sometimes the attackers are getting the multi-factor challenge, and sometimes they aren’t,” said the source, who added that he suspected a breach at Mint and/QuickBooks because NCR had just blocked the two companies from accessing bank Web sites on its platform.

In a statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity, NCR said that on Friday, Oct. 25, the company notified Digital Insight customers “that the aggregation capabilities of certain third-party product were being temporarily suspended.”

“The notification was sent while we investigated a report involving a single user and a third-party product that aggregates bank data,” reads their statement, which was sent to customers on Oct. 29. After confirming that the incident was contained, NCR restored connectivity that is used for account aggregation. “As we noted, the criminals are getting aggressive and creative in accessing tools to access online information, NCR continues to evaluate and proactively defend against these activities.””

What were these sophisticated methods? NCR wouldn’t say, but it seems clear the hacked accounts are tied to customers re-using their online banking passwords at other sites that got hacked.

As I noted earlier this year in The Risk of Weak Online Banking Passwords, if you bank online and choose weak or re-used passwords, there’s a decent chance your account could be pilfered by cyberthieves — even if your bank offers multi-factor authentication as part of its login process. Continue reading →

Breaches at NetworkSolutions, Register.com, and Web.com

October 30, 2019
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Top domain name registrars NetworkSolutions.com, Register.com and Web.com are asking customers to reset their passwords after discovering an intrusion in August 2019 in which customer account information was accessed.

A notice to customers at notice.web.com.

“On October 16, 2019, Web.com determined that a third-party gained unauthorized access to a limited number of its computer systems in late August 2019, and as a result, account information may have been accessed,” Web.com said in a written statement. “No credit card data was compromised as a result of this incident.”

Jacksonville, Fla.-based Web.com said the information exposed includes “contact details such as name, address, phone numbers, email address and information about the services that we offer to a given account holder.”

The “such as” wording made me ask whether the company has any reason to believe passwords — scrambled or otherwise — were accessed.

A spokesperson for Web.com later clarified that the company does not believe customer passwords were accessed.

“We encrypt account passwords and do not believe this information is vulnerable as a specific result of this incident. As an added precautionary measure, customers will be required to reset passwords the next time they log in to their accounts. As with any online service or platform, it is also good security practice to change passwords often and use a unique password for each service.”

Both Network Solutions and Register.com are owned by Web.com. Network Solutions is now the world’s fifth-largest domain name registrar, with almost seven million domains in its stable, according to domainstate.com; Register.com listed at #17 with 1.7 million domains. Continue reading →

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Takeaways from the $566M BriansClub breach

October 29, 2019
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Reporting on the exposure of some 26 million stolen credit cards leaked from a top underground cybercrime store highlighted some persistent and hard truths. Most notably, that the world’s largest financial institutions tend to have a much better idea of which merchants and bank cards have been breached than do the thousands of smaller banks and credit unions across the United States. Also, a great deal of cybercrime seems to be perpetrated by a relatively small number of people.

In September, an anonymous source sent KrebsOnSecurity a link to a nearly 10 gb set of files that included data for approximately 26 million credit and debit cards stolen from hundreds — if not thousands — of hacked online and brick-and-mortar businesses over the past four years.

The data was taken from BriansClub, an underground “carding” store that has (ab)used this author’s name, likeness and reputation in its advertising since 2015. The card accounts were stolen by hackers or “resellers” who make a living breaking into payment card systems online and in the real world. Those resellers then share the revenue from any cards sold through BriansClub.

KrebsOnSecurity shared a copy of the BriansClub card database with Gemini Advisory, a New York-based company that monitors BriansClub and dozens of other carding shops to learn when new cards are added.

Gemini estimates that the 26 million cards — 46 percent credit cards and 54 percent debit cards — represent almost one-third of the existing 87 million credit and debit card accounts currently for sale in the underground.

“While many of these cards were added in previous years, more than 21.6 million will not expire until after October 2019, offering cybercriminal buyers ample opportunity to cash out these records,” Gemini wrote in an analysis of the BriansClub data shared with this author.

Cards stolen from U.S. residents made up the bulk of the data set (~24 million of the 26+ million cards), and as a result these far more plentiful cards were priced much lower than cards from banks outside the U.S. Between 2016 and 2019, cards stolen from U.S.-based bank customers fetched between $12.76 and $16.80 apiece, while non-U.S. cards were priced between $17.04 and $35.70 during the same period.

Image: Gemini Advisory.

Unfortunately for cybercrime investigators, the person who hacked BriansClub has not released (at least not to this author) any information about the BriansClub users, payments, vendors or resellers. [Side note: This hasn’t stopped an unscrupulous huckster from approaching several of my financial industry sources with unlikely offers of said data in exchange for bitcoin].

But the database does have records of which cards were sold and which resellers (identified only by a unique number) supplied those cards, Gemini found.

“While neither the vendor nor the buyer usernames appeared in this database, they were each assigned ID numbers,” Gemini wrote. “This allowed analysts to determine how prolific certain threat actors were on BriansClub and derive relevant metrics from this data.”

According to Gemini, there were 142 resellers and more than 50,000 buyers of the card data sold through BriansClub. These buyers purchased at least 9 million of the 27.2 million cards available. Continue reading →

Cachet Financial Reeling from MyPayrollHR Fraud

October 24, 2019
69 Comments

When New York-based cloud payroll provider MyPayrollHR unexpectedly shuttered its doors last month and disappeared with $26 million worth of customer payroll deposits, its payment processor Cachet Financial Services ended up funding the bank accounts of MyPayrollHR client company employees anyway, graciously eating a $26 million loss which it is now suing to recover.

But on Oct. 23 — less than 24 hours before another weekly payroll rush — Pasadena, Calif.-based Cachet threw much of its customer base into disarray when it said its bank was no longer willing to risk another MyPayrollHR debacle, and that customers would need to wire payroll deposits instead of relying on the usual method of automated clearinghouse (ACH) payments (essentially bank-to-bank checks).

Cachet processes some $150 billion in payroll payments annually for more than 110,000 employers. But payroll experts say this week’s actions by Cachet’s bank may well soon put the 22-year-old company out of business.

“We apologize for the inconvenience of this message,” reads the communication from Cachet that went out to customers just after 6:30 PM ET on Oct. 23. It continued:

“Due to ongoing fraud protocol with our bank, they are requiring pre-funding via Direct Wire for all batches that were uploaded this week, unless employees were already paid or tax payments were already transmitted. This includes all batch files moving forward.”

All files that were uploaded today for collection and disbursement will not be processed. In order to process disbursement, we will need to receive a wire first thing tomorrow in order to release the disbursements.

All collections that were processed prior to today will be reviewed by the bank and disbursements will be released once the funds are cleared. Credit trans

Deadline for wires is 1 P.M. PST.

This will be the process until further notice. If you need a backup processor, please contact us.

If you require wire instructions, please respond to this email and they will be sent to you.

We welcome and anticipate your phone calls and inquiries. We remain committed to our clients and are determined to see this through. We appreciate and thank you for your patience and understanding.”

In a follow-up communication sent Thursday evening, Cachet said all debit transactions with a settlement date of Oct. 23 had been processed, but that any transactions uploaded after Oct. 23 were not being processed at all, and that wires are no longer being accepted.

Cachet’s financial institution, Wilmington, Del. based The Bancorp Bank (NASDAQ: TBBK), did not respond to requests for comment.

Cachet also did not respond to requests for comment. But in an email Thursday evening, the company sought to offer customers a range of alternatives — including other providers — to help process payrolls this week.

Steve Friedl, an IT consultant in the payroll service bureau industry, said the Cachet announcement has sent payroll providers scrambling to cut and mail or courier paper checks to client employees.  But he said many payroll providers also use Cachet to process tax withholdings for client employees, and that this, too, could be disrupted by the funding changes.

“There’s a lot of same day stuff that goes on in the payroll industry that depends on people being honest and having money available at certain times,” Friedl said. “When that’s not possible because a bank in that process says it doesn’t want to be stuck in the middle that can create problems for a lot of people who are then stuck in the middle.”

Another payroll expert at a company that uses Cachet but who asked not to be named said, “everyone I know at payroll providers is scrambling to get it done another way this week” as a result of the decision by Cachet’s bank.

“Those bureaus will do whatever they can to keep their clients happy because something like this can quickly put them out of business,” the source said. “Unlike what happened with MyPayrollHR — which harmed consumers directly — the payment service bureaus are the ones potentially getting hurt here.” Continue reading →

Ransomware Hits B2B Payments Firm Billtrust

October 22, 2019
39 Comments

Business-to-business payments provider Billtrust is still recovering from a ransomware attack that began last week.  The company said it is in the final stages of bringing all of its systems back online from backups.

With more than 550 employees, Lawrence Township, N.J.-based Billtrust is a cloud-based service that lets customers view invoices, pay, or request bills via email or fax. In an email sent to customers today, Billtrust said it was consulting with law enforcement officials and with an outside security firm to determine the extent of the breach.

“Our standard security and back-up procedures have been and remain instrumental in our ability to execute the ongoing restoration of services,” the email reads. “Out of an abundance of caution, we cannot disclose the precise ransomware strains but will do so as soon as prudently possible.

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity on Monday evening, Billtrust CEO Steven Pinado said the company became aware of a malware intrusion on Thursday, Oct. 17.

“We’re aware of the malware and have been able to stop the activity within our systems,” Pinado said. “We immediately started focusing on control, remediation and protection. The impact of that was several systems were no longer available to our customers. We’ve been fighting the fight, working on restoring services and also digging into the root cause.”

A report from BleepingComputer cites an unnamed source saying the ransomware strain that hit Billtrust was the BitPaymer ransomware, but that information could not be confirmed.

One of Billtrust’s customers has published a day-by-day chronology of the attack and communications from the company here (h/t @gossithedog). Continue reading →

Avast, NordVPN Breaches Tied to Phantom User Accounts

October 21, 2019
62 Comments

Antivirus and security giant Avast and virtual private networking (VPN) software provider NordVPN each today disclosed months-long network intrusions that — while otherwise unrelated — shared a common cause: Forgotten or unknown user accounts that granted remote access to internal systems with little more than a password.

Based in the Czech Republic, Avast bills itself as the most popular antivirus vendor on the market, with over 435 million users. In a blog post today, Avast said it detected and addressed a breach lasting between May and October 2019 that appeared to target users of its CCleaner application, a popular Microsoft Windows cleanup and repair utility.

Avast said it took CCleaner downloads offline in September to check the integrity of the code and ensure it hadn’t been injected with malware. The company also said it invalidated the certificates used to sign previous versions of the software and pushed out a re-signed clean update of the product via automatic update on October 15. It then disabled and reset all internal user credentials.

“Having taken all these precautions, we are confident to say that our CCleaner users are protected and unaffected,” Avast’s Jaya Baloo wrote.

This is not the first so-called “supply chain” attack on Avast: In September 2018, researchers at Cisco Talos and Morphisec disclosed that hackers had compromised the computer cleanup tool for more than a month, leading to some 2.27 million downloads of the corrupt CCleaner version.

Avast said the intrusion began when attackers used stolen credentials for a VPN service that was configured to connect to its internal network, and that the attackers were not challenged with any sort of multi-factor authentication — such as a one-time code generated by a mobile app.

“We found that the internal network was successfully accessed with compromised credentials through a temporary VPN profile that had erroneously been kept enabled and did not require 2FA,” Baloo wrote. Continue reading →

When Card Shops Play Dirty, Consumers Win

October 16, 2019
30 Comments

Cybercrime forums have been abuzz this week over news that BriansClub — one of the underground’s largest shops for stolen credit and debit cards — has been hacked, and its inventory of 26 million cards shared with security contacts in the banking industry. Now it appears this brazen heist may have been the result of one of BriansClub’s longtime competitors trying to knock out a rival.

And advertisement for BriansClub that for years has used my name and likeness to peddle stolen cards.

Last month, KrebsOnSecurity was contacted by an anonymous source who said he had the full database of 26M cards stolen from BriansClub, a carding site that has long used this author’s name and likeness in its advertising. The stolen database included cards added to the site between mid-2015 and August 2019.

This was a major event in the underground, as experts estimate the total number of stolen cards leaked from BriansClub represent almost 30 percent of the cards on the black market today.

The purloined database revealed BriansClub sold roughly 9.1 million stolen credit cards, earning the site and its resellers a cool $126 million in sales over four years.

In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, the administrator of BriansClub acknowledged that the data center serving his site had been hacked earlier in the year (BriansClub claims this happened in February), but insisted that all of the cards stolen by the hacker had been removed from BriansClub store inventories.

However, as I noted in Tuesday’s story, multiple sources confirmed they were able to find plenty of card data included in the leaked database that was still being offered for sale at BriansClub.

Perhaps inevitably, the admin of BriansClub took to the cybercrime forums this week to defend his business and reputation, re-stating his claim that all cards included in the leaked dump had been cleared from store shelves.

The administrator of BriansClub, who’s appropriated the name and likeness of Yours Truly for his advertising, fights to keep his business alive.

Meanwhile, some of BriansClub’s competitors gloated about the break-in. According to the administrator of Verified, one of the longest running Russian language cybercrime forums, the hack of BriansClub was perpetrated by a fairly established ne’er-do-well who uses the nickname “MrGreen” and runs a competing card shop by the same name. Continue reading →

“BriansClub” Hack Rescues 26M Stolen Cards

October 15, 2019
49 Comments

“BriansClub,” one of the largest underground stores for buying stolen credit card data, has itself been hacked. The data stolen from BriansClub encompasses more than 26 million credit and debit card records taken from hacked online and brick-and-mortar retailers over the past four years, including almost eight million records uploaded to the shop in 2019 alone.

An ad for BriansClub has been using my name and likeness for years to peddle millions of stolen credit cards.

Last month, KrebsOnSecurity was contacted by a source who shared a plain text file containing what was claimed to be the full database of cards for sale both currently and historically through BriansClub[.]at, a thriving fraud bazaar named after this author. Imitating my site, likeness and namesake, BriansClub even dubiously claims a copyright with a reference at the bottom of each page: “© 2019 Crabs on Security.”

Multiple people who reviewed the database shared by my source confirmed that the same credit card records also could be found in a more redacted form simply by searching the BriansClub Web site with a valid, properly-funded account.

All of the card data stolen from BriansClub was shared with multiple sources who work closely with financial institutions to identify and monitor or reissue cards that show up for sale in the cybercrime underground.

The leaked data shows that in 2015, BriansClub added just 1.7 million card records for sale. But business would pick up in each of the years that followed: In 2016, BriansClub uploaded 2.89 million stolen cards; 2017 saw some 4.9 million cards added; 2018 brought in 9.2 million more.

Between January and August 2019 (when this database snapshot was apparently taken), BriansClub added roughly 7.6 million cards.

Most of what’s on offer at BriansClub are “dumps,” strings of ones and zeros that — when encoded onto anything with a magnetic stripe the size of a credit card — can be used by thieves to purchase electronics, gift cards and other high-priced items at big box stores.

As shown in the table below (taken from this story), many federal hacking prosecutions involving stolen credit cards will for sentencing purposes value each stolen card record at $500, which is intended to represent the average loss per compromised cardholder.

The black market value, impact to consumers and banks, and liability associated with different types of card fraud.

STOLEN BACK FAIR AND SQUARE

An extensive analysis of the database indicates BriansClub holds approximately $414 million worth of stolen credit cards for sale, based on the pricing tiers listed on the site. That’s according to an analysis by Flashpoint, a security intelligence firm based in New York City.

Allison Nixon, the company’s director of security research, said the data suggests that between 2015 and August 2019, BriansClub sold roughly 9.1 million stolen credit cards, earning the site $126 million in sales (all sales are transacted in bitcoin).

If we take just the 9.1 million cards that were confirmed sold through BriansClub, we’re talking about more than $4 billion in likely losses at the $500 average loss per card figure from the Justice Department.

Also, it seems likely the total number of stolen credit cards for sale on BriansClub and related sites vastly exceeds the number of criminals who will buy such data. Shame on them for not investing more in marketing!

There’s no easy way to tell how many of the 26 million or so cards for sale at BriansClub are still valid, but the closest approximation of that — how many unsold cards have expiration dates in the future — indicates more than 14 million of them could still be valid.

The archive also reveals the proprietor(s) of BriansClub frequently uploaded new batches of stolen cards — some just a few thousand records, and others tens of thousands.

That’s because like many other carding sites, BriansClub mostly resells cards stolen by other cybercriminals — known as resellers or affiliates — who earn a percentage from each sale. It’s not yet clear how that revenue is shared in this case, but perhaps this information will be revealed in further analysis of the purloined database. Continue reading →

Patch Tuesday Lowdown, October 2019 Edition

October 9, 2019
42 Comments

On Tuesday Microsoft issued software updates to fix almost five dozen security problems in Windows and software designed to run on top of it. By most accounts, it’s a relatively light patch batch this month. Here’s a look at the highlights.

Happily, only about 15 percent of the bugs patched this week earned Microsoft’s most dire “critical” rating. Microsoft labels flaws critical when they could be exploited by miscreants or malware to seize control over a vulnerable system without any help from the user.

Also, Adobe has kindly granted us another month’s respite from patching security holes in its Flash Player browser plugin.

Included in this month’s roundup is something Microsoft actually first started shipping in the third week of September, when it released an emergency update to fix a critical Internet Explorer zero-day flaw (CVE-2019-1367) that was being exploited in the wild. Continue reading →

Mariposa Botnet Author, Darkcode Crime Forum Admin Arrested in Germany

October 1, 2019
52 Comments

A Slovenian man convicted of authoring the destructive and once-prolific Mariposa botnet and running the infamous Darkode cybercrime forum has been arrested in Germany on request from prosecutors in the United States, who’ve recently re-indicted him on related charges.

NiceHash CTO Matjaž “Iserdo” Škorjanc, as pictured on the front page of a recent edition of the Slovenian daily Delo.si, is being held by German authorities on a US arrest warrant for operating the destructive “Mariposa” botnet and founding the infamous Darkode cybercrime forum.

The Slovenian Press Agency reported today that German police arrested Matjaž “Iserdo” Škorjanc last week, in response to a U.S.-issued international arrest warrant for his extradition.

In December 2013, a Slovenian court sentenced Škorjanc to four years and ten months in prison for creating the malware that powered the ‘Mariposa‘ botnet. Spanish for “Butterfly,” Mariposa was a potent crime machine first spotted in 2008. Very soon after its inception, Mariposa was estimated to have infected more than 1 million hacked computers — making it one of the largest botnets ever created.

An advertisement for the ButterFly Bot.

Škorjanc and his hacker handle Iserdo were initially named in a Justice Department indictment from 2011 (PDF) along with two other men who allegedly wrote and sold the Mariposa botnet code. But in June 2019, the DOJ unsealed an updated indictment (PDF) naming Škorjanc, the original two other defendants, and a fourth man (from the United States) in a conspiracy to make and market Mariposa and to run the Darkode crime forum.

More recently, Škorjanc served as chief technology officer at NiceHash, a Slovenian company that lets users sell their computing power to help others mine virtual currencies like bitcoin. In December 2017, approximately USD $52 million worth of bitcoin mysteriously disappeared from the coffers of NiceHash. Slovenian police are reportedly still investigating that incident.

The “sellers” page on the Darkode cybercrime forum, circa 2013.

Continue reading →