Why Were the Russians So Set Against This Hacker Being Extradited?

November 18, 2019
48 Comments

The Russian government has for the past four years been fighting to keep 29-year-old alleged cybercriminal Aleksei Burkov from being extradited by Israel to the United States. When Israeli authorities turned down requests to send him back to Russia — supposedly to face separate hacking charges there — the Russians then imprisoned an Israeli woman for seven years on trumped-up drug charges in a bid to trade prisoners. That effort failed as well, and Burkov had his first appearance in a U.S. court last week. What follows are some clues that might explain why the Russians are so eager to reclaim this young man.

Aleksei Burkov, seated second from right, attends a hearing in Jerusalem in 2015. Andrei Shirokov / Tass via Getty Images.

On the surface, the charges the U.S. government has leveled against Burkov may seem fairly unremarkable: Prosecutors say he ran a credit card fraud forum called CardPlanet that sold more than 150,000 stolen cards.

However, a deep dive into the various pseudonyms allegedly used by Burkov suggests this individual may be one of the most connected and skilled malicious hackers ever apprehended by U.S. authorities, and that the Russian government is probably concerned that he simply knows too much.

Burkov calls himself a specialist in information security and denies having committed the crimes for which he’s been charged. But according to denizens of several Russian-language cybercrime forums that have been following his case in the Israeli news media, Burkov was by all accounts an elite cybercrook who primarily operated under the hacker alias “K0pa.”

This is the same nickname used by an individual who served as co-administrator of perhaps the most exclusive Russian-language hacking forums ever created, including Mazafaka and DirectConnection.

A screen shot from the Mazafaka cybercrime forum, circa 2011.

Since their inception in the mid-aughts, both of these forums have been among the most difficult to join — admitting only native Russian speakers and requiring each applicant to furnish a non-refundable cash deposit and “vouches” or guarantees from at least three existing members. Also, neither forum was accessible or even visible to anyone without a special encryption certificate supplied by forum administrators that allowed the sites to load properly in a Web browser.

DirectConnection, circa 2011. The identity shown at the bottom of this screenshot — Severa — belonged to Peter Levashov, a prolific spammer who pleaded guilty in the United States last year to operating the Kelihos spam botnet.

Notably, some of the world’s most-wanted cybercriminals were members of these two highly exclusive forums, and many of those individuals have already been arrested, extradited and tried for various cybercrime charges in the United States over the years. Those include convicted credit card fraudsters Vladislav “Badb” Horohorin and Sergey “zo0mer” Kozerev, as well as the infamous spammer and botnet master Peter “Severa” Levashov.

A user database obtained by KrebsOnSecurity several years back indicates K0pa relied on the same email address he used to register at Mazafaka and DirectConnection to register the user account “Botnet” on Spamdot, which for years was the closely-guarded stomping ground of the world’s most prolific spammers and virus writers, as well as hackers who created services catering to both professions.

As a reporter for The Washington Post in 2008, I wrote about the core offering that K0pa/Botnet advertised on Spamdot and other exclusive forums: A botnet-based anonymity service called FraudCrew. This service sold access to hacked computers, which FraudCrew customers used for the purposes of hiding their real location online while conducting cybercriminal activities.

FraudCrew, a botnet-based anonymity service offered by K0pa.

K0pa also was a top staff member at Verified, among the oldest and most venerated of Russian language cybercrime forums. Specifically, K0pa’s role at Verified was in maintaining its blacklist, a dispute resolution process designed to weed out “dishonest” cybercriminals who seek only to rip off less experienced crooks. From this vantage point, K0pa would have held considerable sway on the forum, and almost certainly played a key role in vetting new applicants to the site. Continue reading →

Orcus RAT Author Charged in Malware Scheme

November 13, 2019
33 Comments

In July 2016, KrebsOnSecurity published a story identifying a Toronto man as the author of the Orcus RAT, a software product that’s been marketed on underground forums and used in countless malware attacks since its creation in 2015. This week, Canadian authorities criminally charged him with orchestrating an international malware scheme.

An advertisement for Orcus RAT.

The accused, 36-year-old John “Armada” Revesz, has maintained that Orcus is a legitimate “Remote Administration Tool” aimed at helping system administrators remotely manage their computers, and that he’s not responsible for how licensed customers use his product.

In my 2016 piece, however, several sources noted that Armada and his team were marketing it more like a Remote Access Trojan, providing ongoing technical support and help to customers who’d purchased Orcus but were having trouble figuring out how to infect new machines or hide their activities online.

Follow-up reporting revealed that the list of features and plugins advertised for Orcus includes functionality that goes significantly beyond what one might see in a traditional remote administration tool, such as DDoS-for-hire capabilities, and the ability to disable the light indicator on webcams so as not to alert the target that the RAT is active.

Canadian investigators don’t appear to be buying Revesz’ claims. On Monday the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) announced it had charged Revesz with operating an international malware distribution scheme under the company name “Orcus Technologies.”

“An RCMP criminal investigation began in July 2016 after reports of a significant amount of computers were being infected with a ‘Remote Access Trojan’ type of virus,” the agency said in a statement.

The RCMP filed the charges eight months after executing a search warrant at Revesz’ home, where they seized several hard drives containing Orcus RAT customer names, financial transactions, and other information.

“The evidence obtained shows that this virus has infected computers from around the world, making thousands of victims in multiple countries,” the RCMP said.

Revesz did not respond to requests for comment. Continue reading →

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Patch Tuesday, November 2019 Edition

November 12, 2019
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Microsoft today released updates to plug security holes in its software, including patches to fix at least 74 weaknesses in various flavors of Windows and programs that run on top of it. The November updates include patches for a zero-day flaw in Internet Explorer that is currently being exploited in the wild, as well as a sneaky bug in certain versions of Office for Mac that bypasses security protections and was detailed publicly prior to today’s patches.

More than a dozen of the flaws tackled in this month’s release are rated “critical,” meaning they involve weaknesses that could be exploited to install malware without any action on the part of the user, except for perhaps browsing to a hacked or malicious Web site or opening a booby-trapped file attachment.

Perhaps the most concerning of those critical holes is a zero-day flaw in Internet Exploder Explorer (CVE-2019-1429) that has already seen active exploitation. Today’s updates also address two other critical vulnerabilities in the same Windows component that handles various scripting languages.

Microsoft also fixed a flaw in Microsoft Office for Mac (CVE-2019-1457) that could allow attackers to bypass security protections in some versions of the program.

Macros are bits of computer code that can be embedded into Office files, and malicious macros are frequently used by malware purveyors to compromise Windows systems. Usually, this takes the form of a prompt urging the user to “enable macros” once they’ve opened a booby-trapped Office document delivered via email. Thus, Office has a feature called “disable all macros without notification.”

But Microsoft says all versions of Office still support an older type of macros that do not respect this setting, and can be used as a vector for pushing malware. Will Dormann of the CERT/CC has reported that Office 2016 and 2019 for Mac will fail to prompt the user before executing these older macro types if the “Disable all macros without notification” setting is used. Continue reading →

Retailer Orvis.com Leaked Hundreds of Internal Passwords on Pastebin

November 11, 2019
28 Comments

Orvis, a Vermont-based retailer that specializes in high-end fly fishing equipment and other sporting goods, leaked hundreds of internal passwords on Pastebin.com for several weeks last month, exposing credentials the company used to manage everything from firewalls and routers to administrator accounts and database servers, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Orvis says the exposure was inadvertent, and that many of the credentials were already expired.

Based in Sunderland, VT. and founded in 1856, privately-held Orvis is the oldest mail-order retailer in the United States. The company has approximately 1,700 employees, 69 retail stores and 10 outlets in the US, and 18 retail stores in the UK.

In late October, this author received a tip from Wisconsin-based security firm Hold Security that a file containing a staggering number of internal usernames and passwords for Orvis had been posted to Pastebin.

Reached for comment about the source of the document, Orvis spokesperson Tucker Kimball said it was only available for a day before the company had it removed from Pastebin.

“The file contains old credentials, so many of the devices associated with the credentials are decommissioned and we took steps to address the remaining ones,” Kimball said. “We are leveraging our existing security tools to conduct an investigation to determine how this occurred.”

However, according to Hold Security founder Alex Holden, this enormous passwords file was actually posted to Pastebin on two separate occasions last month, the first being on Oct. 4, and the second Oct. 22. That finding was corroborated by 4iq.com, a company that aggregates information from leaked databases online.

Orvis did not respond to follow-up requests for comment via phone and email; the last two email messages sent by KrebsOnSecurity to Orvis were returned simply as “blocked.”

It’s not unusual for employees or contractors to post bits of sensitive data to public sites like Pastebin and Github, but the credentials file apparently published by someone working at or for Orvis is by far the most extreme example I’ve ever witnessed.

For instance, included in the Pastebin files from Orvis were plaintext usernames and passwords for just about every kind of online service or security product the company has used, including:

-Antivirus engines
-Data backup services
-Multiple firewall products
-Linux servers
-Cisco routers
-Netflow data
-Call recording services
-DNS controls
-Orvis wireless networks (public and private)
-Employee wireless phone services
-Oracle database servers
-Microsoft 365 services
-Microsoft Active Directory accounts and passwords
-Battery backup systems
-Security cameras
-Encryption certificates
-Mobile payment services
-Door and Alarm Codes
-FTP credentials
-Apple ID credentials
-Door controllers

By all accounts, this was a comprehensive goof: The Orvis credentials file even contained the combination to a locked safe in the company’ server room. Continue reading →

Study: Ransomware, Data Breaches at Hospitals tied to Uptick in Fatal Heart Attacks

November 7, 2019
53 Comments

Hospitals that have been hit by a data breach or ransomware attack can expect to see an increase in the death rate among heart patients in the following months or years because of cybersecurity remediation efforts, a new study posits. Health industry experts say the findings should prompt a larger review of how security — or the lack thereof — may be impacting patient outcomes.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University‘s Owen Graduate School of Management took the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) list of healthcare data breaches and used it to drill down on data about patient mortality rates at more than 3,000 Medicare-certified hospitals, about 10 percent of which had experienced a data breach.

As PBS noted in its coverage of the Vanderbilt study, after data breaches as many as 36 additional deaths per 10,000 heart attacks occurred annually at the hundreds of hospitals examined.

The researchers found that for care centers that experienced a breach, it took an additional 2.7 minutes for suspected heart attack patients to receive an electrocardiogram.

“Breach remediation efforts were associated with deterioration in timeliness of care and patient outcomes,” the authors found. “Remediation activity may introduce changes that delay, complicate or disrupt health IT and patient care processes.”

Leo Scanlon, former deputy chief information security officer at the HHS, said the findings in this report practically beg for a similar study to be done in the United Kingdom, whose healthcare system was particularly disrupted by the Wannacry virus, a global contagion in May 2017 that spread through a Microsoft Windows vulnerability prevalent in older healthcare systems.

“The exploitation of cybersecurity vulnerabilities is killing people,” Scanlon told KrebsOnSecurity. “There is a lot of possible research that might be unleashed by this study. I believe that nothing less than a congressional investigation will give the subject the attention it deserves.”

A post-mortem on the impact of WannaCry found the outbreak cost U.K. hospitals almost $100 million pounds and caused significant disruption to patient care, such as the cancellation of some 19,000 appointments — including operations — and the disruption of IT systems for at least a third of all U.K. National Health Service (NHS) hospitals and eight percent of general practitioners. In several cases, hospitals in the U.K. were forced to divert emergency room visitors to other hospitals.

But what isn’t yet known is how Wannacry affected mortality rates among heart attack and stroke patients whose ambulances were diverted to other hospitals because of IT system outages related to the malware. Or how many hospitals and practices experienced delays in getting test results back needed to make critical healthcare decisions.

Scanlon said although he’s asked around quite a bit over the years to see if any researchers have taken up the challenge of finding out, and that so far he hasn’t found anyone doing that analysis.

“A colleague who is familiar with large scale healthcare data sets told me that unless you are associated with a research institution, it would be almost impossible to pry that kind of data out of the institutions that have it,” Scanlon said. “The problem is this data is hard to come by — nobody likes to admit that death can be attributable to a non-natural cause like this — and is otherwise considered sensitive at a very high and proprietary level by the institutions that have the facts.”

A study published in the April 2017 edition of The New England Journal of Medicine would seem to suggest applying the approach used by the Vanderbilt researchers to measuring patient outcomes at U.K. hospitals in the wake of Wannacry might be worth carrying out.

In the NEJM study, morbidity and mortality data was used to show that there is a measurable impact when ambulances and emergency response teams are removed from normal service and redirected to standby during public events like marathons and other potential targets of terrorism.

The study found that “medicare beneficiaries who were admitted to marathon-affected hospitals with acute myocardial infarction or cardiac arrest on marathon dates had longer ambulance transport times before noon (4.4 minutes longer) and higher 30-day mortality than beneficiaries who were hospitalized on nonmarathon dates.” Continue reading →

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
50 Comments

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 →

Takeaways from the $566M BriansClub breach

October 29, 2019
27 Comments

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 →