Canada Uses Civil Anti-Spam Law in Bid to Fine Malware Purveyors

May 30, 2019
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Canadian government regulators are using the country’s powerful new anti-spam law to pursue hefty fines of up to a million dollars against Canadian citizens suspected of helping to spread malicious software.

In March 2019, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) — Canada’s equivalent of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), executed a search warrant in tandem with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) at the home of a Toronto software developer behind the Orcus RAT, a product that’s been marketed on underground forums and used in countless malware attacks since its creation in 2015.

The CRTC was flexing relatively new administrative muscles gained from the passage of Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), which covers far more than just junk email. Section 7 of CASL deals with the alteration of transmission data, including botnet activity. Section 8 involves the surreptitious installation of computer programs on computers or networks including malware and spyware.

And Section 9 prohibits an individual or organization from aiding, inducing, procuring or causing to be procured the doing of any of the above acts.

CRTC Director Neil Barratt said this allows his agency to target intermediaries who, through their actions or through inaction, facilitate the commission of CASL violations. Businesses found to be in violation of CASL can be fined up to $10 million; individuals can face up to a $1 million fine.

“We’re dealing with a lower burden of proof than a criminal conviction, and CASL gives us a little more leeway to get bad actors off our networks in Canada and to ultimately improve security for people here and hopefully elsewhere,” Barratt said in an interview with KrebsOnSecurity.

“CASL defines spam as commercial electronic messages without consent or the installation of software without consent or the intercepting of electronic messages,” Barratt said. “The installation of software is under Section 8, and this is one of the first major investigations under that statute.” Continue reading →

Should Failing Phish Tests Be a Fireable Offense?

May 29, 2019
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Would your average Internet user be any more vigilant against phishing scams if he or she faced the real possibility of losing their job after falling for one too many of these emails? Recently, I met someone at a conference who said his employer had in fact terminated employees for such repeated infractions. As this was the first time I’d ever heard of an organization actually doing this, I asked some phishing experts what they thought (spoiler alert: they’re not fans of this particular teaching approach).

John LaCour is founder and chief technology officer of PhishLabs, a Charleston, S.C. based firm that helps companies educate and test employees on how not to fall for phishing scams. The company’s training courses offer customers a way to track how many employees open the phishing email tests and how many fall for the lure.

LaCour says enacting punitive measures for employees who repeatedly fall for phishing tests is counterproductive.

“We’ve heard from some of our clients in the financial industry that have similar programs where there are real consequences when people fail the tests, but it’s pretty rare across all types of businesses to have a policy that extreme,” LaCour said.

“There are a lot of things that organizations can do that aren’t as draconian and still have the desired effect of making security posture stronger,” he said. “We’ve seen companies require classroom training on the first failure, to a manager has to sit through it with you on the second time, to revoking network access in some cases.”

LaCour said one of the most common mistakes he sees is companies that purchase a tool to launch simulated phishing campaigns just to play “gotcha” with employees.

“It really demotivates people, and it doesn’t really teach them anything about how to be more diligent about phishing attacks,” he said. “Each phishing simulation program needs to be accompanied by a robust training program, where you teach employees what to do when they see something phishy. Otherwise, it just creates resentment among employees.”

Rohyt Belani, CEO of Leesburg, Va.-based security firm Cofense (formerly PhishMe), said anti-phishing education campaigns that employ strongly negative consequences for employees who repeatedly fall for phishing tests usually create tension and distrust between employees and the company’s security team.

“It can create an environment of animosity for the security team because they suddenly become viewed as working for Human Resources instead of trying to improve security,” Belani said. “Threatening people usually backfires, and they end up becoming more defiant and uncooperative.”

Cofense provides a phish reporting system and encourages customers to have their employees flag suspected phishing attacks (and tests), and Belani said those employee reports can often stymie real phishing attacks.

“So what happens a lot of times is a person may click on link in a real phishing email, and three seconds later realize, ‘Oops, I shouldn’t have clicked, let me report it anyway’,” Belani said. “But if that person knew there was a punitive angle to doing so, they’re more likely not to report it and to say, ‘You know what, I didn’t do it. Where’s the proof I clicked on the link?'” Continue reading →

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First American Financial Corp. Leaked Hundreds of Millions of Title Insurance Records

May 24, 2019
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The Web site for Fortune 500 real estate title insurance giant First American Financial Corp. [NYSE:FAF] leaked hundreds of millions of documents related to mortgage deals going back to 2003, until notified this week by KrebsOnSecurity. The digitized records — including bank account numbers and statements, mortgage and tax records, Social Security numbers, wire transaction receipts, and drivers license images — were available without authentication to anyone with a Web browser.

First American Financial Corp. Image: Linkedin.

Santa Ana, Calif.-based First American is a leading provider of title insurance and settlement services to the real estate and mortgage industries. It employs some 18,000 people and brought in more than $5.7 billion in 2018.

Earlier this week, KrebsOnSecurity was contacted by a real estate developer in Washington state who said he’d had little luck getting a response from the company about what he found, which was that a portion of its Web site (firstam.com) was leaking tens if not hundreds of millions of records. He said anyone who knew the URL for a valid document at the Web site could view other documents just by modifying a single digit in the link.

And this would potentially include anyone who’s ever been sent a document link via email by First American.

KrebsOnSecurity confirmed the real estate developer’s findings, which indicate that First American’s Web site exposed approximately 885 million files, the earliest dating back more than 16 years. No authentication was required to read the documents.

Many of the exposed files are records of wire transactions with bank account numbers and other information from home or property buyers and sellers. Ben Shoval, the developer who notified KrebsOnSecurity about the data exposure, said that’s because First American is one of the most widely-used companies for real estate title insurance and for closing real estate deals — where both parties to the sale meet in a room and sign stacks of legal documents.

“Closing agencies are supposed to be the only neutral party that doesn’t represent someone else’s interest, and you’re required to have title insurance if you have any kind of mortgage,” Shoval said.

“The title insurance agency collects all kinds of documents from both the buyer and seller, including Social Security numbers, drivers licenses, account statements, and even internal corporate documents if you’re a small business. You give them all kinds of private information and you expect that to stay private.”

Shoval shared a document link he’d been given by First American from a recent transaction, which referenced a record number that was nine digits long and dated April 2019. Modifying the document number in his link by numbers in either direction yielded other peoples’ records before or after the same date and time, indicating the document numbers may have been issued sequentially.

The earliest document number available on the site – 000000075 — referenced a real estate transaction from 2003. From there, the dates on the documents get closer to real time with each forward increment in the record number.

A redacted screenshot of one of many millions of sensitive records exposed by First American’s Web site.

As of the morning of May 24, firstam.com was returning documents up to the present day (885,000,000+), including many PDFs and post-dated forms for upcoming real estate closings. By 2 p.m. ET Friday, the company had disabled the site that served the records. It’s not yet clear how long the site remained in its promiscuous state, but archive.org shows documents available from the site dating back to at least March 2017.

First American wouldn’t comment on the overall number of records potentially exposed via their site, or how long those records were publicly available. But a spokesperson for the company did share the following statement:

“First American has learned of a design defect in an application that made possible unauthorized access to customer data.  At First American, security, privacy and confidentiality are of the highest priority and we are committed to protecting our customers’ information. The company took immediate action to address the situation and shut down external access to the application. We are currently evaluating what effect, if any, this had on the security of customer information. We will have no further comment until our internal review is completed.”

I should emphasize that these documents were merely available from First American’s Web site; I do not have any information on whether this fact was known to fraudsters previously, nor do I have any information to suggest the documents were somehow mass-harvested (although a low-and-slow or distributed indexing of this data would not have been difficult for even a novice attacker). Continue reading →

Legal Threats Make Powerful Phishing Lures

May 22, 2019
65 Comments

Some of the most convincing email phishing and malware attacks come disguised as nastygrams from a law firm. Such scams typically notify the recipient that he/she is being sued, and instruct them to review the attached file and respond within a few days — or else. Here’s a look at a recent spam campaign that peppered more than 100,000 business email addresses with fake legal threats harboring malware.

On or around May 12, at least two antivirus firms began detecting booby-trapped Microsoft Word files that were sent along with some variation of the following message:

{Pullman & Assoc. | Wiseman & Assoc.| Steinburg & Assoc. | Swartz & Assoc. | Quartermain & Assoc.} <legal@wpslaw.com>

Hi,

The following {e-mail | mail} is to advise you that you are being charged by the city.

Our {legal team | legal council | legal departement} has prepared a document explaining the {litigation | legal dispute | legal contset}.

Please download and read the attached encrypted document carefully.

You have 7 days to reply to this e-mail or we will be forced to step forward with this action.

Note: The password for the document is 123456

The template above was part of a phishing kit being traded on the underground, and the user of this kit decides which of the options in brackets actually get used in the phishing message.

Yes, the spelling/grammar is poor and awkward (e.g., the salutation), but so is the overall antivirus detection rate of the attached malicious Word document. This phishing kit included five booby-trapped Microsoft Word documents to choose from, and none of those files are detected as malicious by more than three of the five dozen or so antivirus products that scanned the Word docs on May 22 — 10 days after they were spammed out.

According to both Fortinet and Sophos, the attached Word documents include a trojan that is typically used to drop additional malware on the victim’s computer. Previous detections of this trojan have been associated with ransomware, but the attackers in this case can use the trojan to install malware of their choice.

Also part of the phishing kit was a text document containing some 100,000 business email addresses — most of them ending in Canadian (.ca) domains — although there were also some targets at companies in the northeastern United States. If only a tiny fraction of the recipients of this scam were unwary enough to open the attachment, it would still be a nice payday for the phishers. Continue reading →

Account Hijacking Forum OGusers Hacked

May 18, 2019
72 Comments

Ogusers[.]com — a forum popular among people involved in hijacking online accounts and conducting SIM swapping attacks to seize control over victims’ phone numbers — has itself been hacked, exposing the email addresses, hashed passwords, IP addresses and private messages for nearly 113,000 forum users.

On May 12, the administrator of OGusers explained an outage to forum members by saying a hard drive failure had erased several months’ worth of private messages, forum posts and prestige points, and that he’d restored a backup from January 2019. Little did the administrators of OGusers know at the time, but that May 12 incident coincided with the theft of the forum’s user database, and the wiping of forum hard drives.

On May 16, the administrator of rival hacking community RaidForums announced he’d uploaded the OGusers database for anyone to download for free.

The administrator of the hacking community Raidforums on May 16 posted the database of passwords, email addresses, IP addresses and private messages of more than 113,000 users of Ogusers[.]com.

“On the 12th of May 2019 the forum ogusers.com was breached [and] 112,988 users were affected,” the message from RaidForums administrator Omnipotent reads. “I have uploaded the data from this database breach along with their website source files. Their hashing algorithm was the default salted MD5 which surprised me, anyway the website owner has acknowledged data corruption but not a breach so I guess I’m the first to tell you the truth. According to his statement he didn’t have any recent backups so I guess I will provide one on this thread lmfao.”

The database, a copy of which was obtained by KrebsOnSecurity, appears to hold the usernames, email addresses, hashed passwords, private messages and IP address at the time of registration for approximately 113,000 users (although many of these nicknames are likely the same people using different aliases). Continue reading →

Feds Target $100M ‘GozNym’ Cybercrime Network

May 16, 2019
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Law enforcement agencies in the United States and Europe today unsealed charges against 11 alleged members of the GozNym malware network, an international cybercriminal syndicate suspected of stealing $100 million from more than 41,000 victims with the help of a stealthy banking trojan by the same name.

The locations of alleged GozNym cybercrime group members. Source: DOJ

The indictments unsealed in a Pennsylvania court this week stem from a slew of cyber heists carried out between October 2015 and December 2016. They’re also related to the 2016 arrest of Krasimir Nikolov, a 47-year-old Bulgarian man who was extradited to the United States to face charges for allegedly cashing out bank accounts that were compromised by the GozNym malware.

Prosecutors say Nikolov, a.k.a. “pablopicasso,” “salvadordali,” and “karlo,” was key player in the GozNym crime group who used stolen online banking credentials captured by GozNym malware to access victims’ online bank accounts and attempt to steal their money through electronic funds transfers into bank accounts controlled by fellow conspirators.

According to the indictment, the GozNym network exemplified the concept of ‘cybercrime as a service,’ in that the defendants advertised their specialized technical skills and services on underground, Russian-language, online criminal forums. The malware was dubbed GozNym because it combines the stealth of a previous malware strain called Nymaim with the capabilities of the powerful Gozi banking trojan.

The feds say the ringleader of the group was Alexander Konovolov, 35, of Tbilisi, Georgia, who controlled more than 41,000 victim computers infected with GozNym and recruited various other members of the cybercrime team.

Vladimir Gorin, a.k.a “Voland,”  “mrv,” and “riddler,” of Orenburg, Russia allegedly was a malware developer who oversaw the creation, development, management, and leasing of GozNym.

The indictment alleges 32-year-old Eduard Malancini, a.k.a. “JekaProf” and “procryptgroup” from Moldova, specialized in “crypting” or obfuscating the GozNym malware to evade detection by antivirus software.

Four other men named in the indictment were accused of recruiting and managing “money mules,” willing or unwitting people who can be used to receive stolen funds on behalf of the criminal syndicate. One of those alleged mule managers — Farkhad Rauf Ogly Manokhim (a.k.a. “frusa”) of Volograd, Russia was arrested in 2017 in Sri Lanka on an international warrant from the United States, but escaped and fled back to Russia while on bail awaiting extradition.

Also charged was 28-year-old Muscovite Konstantin Volchkov, a.k.a. “elvi,”  who allegedly provided the spamming service used to disseminate malicious links that tried to foist GozNym on recipients who clicked.

The malicious links referenced in those spam emails were served via the Avalanche bulletproof hosting service, a distributed, cloud-hosting network that for seven years was rented out to hundreds of fraudsters for use in launching malware and phishing attacks. Avalanche was dismantled in Dec. 2016 by a similar international law enforcement action.

The alleged administrator of the Avalanche bulletproof network — 36-year-old Gennady Kapkanov from Poltova, Ukraine — has eluded justice in prior scrapes with the law: During the Avalanche takedown in Dec. 2016, Kapkanov fired an assault rifle at Ukrainian police who were trying to raid his apartment. Continue reading →

A Tough Week for IP Address Scammers

May 15, 2019
35 Comments

In the early days of the Internet, there was a period when Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses (e.g. 4.4.4.4) were given out like cotton candy to anyone who asked. But these days companies are queuing up to obtain new IP space from the various regional registries that periodically dole out the prized digits. With the value of a single IP hovering between $15-$25, those registries are now fighting a wave of shady brokers who specialize in securing new IP address blocks under false pretenses and then reselling to spammers. Here’s the story of one broker who fought back in the courts, and lost spectacularly.

On May 14, South Carolina U.S. Attorney Sherri Lydon filed criminal wire fraud charges against Amir Golestan, alleging he and his Charleston, S.C. based company Micfo LLC orchestrated an elaborate network of phony companies and aliases to secure more than 735,000 IPs from the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), a nonprofit which oversees IP addresses assigned to entities in the U.S., Canada, and parts of the Caribbean.

Interestingly, Micfo itself set this process in motion late last year when it sued ARIN. In December 2018, Micfo’s attorneys asked a federal court in Virginia to issue a temporary restraining order against ARIN, which had already told the company about its discovery of the phony front companies and was threatening to revoke some 735,000 IP addresses. That is, unless Micfo agreed to provide more information about its operations and customers.

At the time, many of the IP address blocks assigned to Micfo had been freshly resold to spammers. Micfo ultimately declined to provide ARIN the requested information, and as a result the court denied Micfo’s request (the transcript of that hearing is instructive and amusing).

But by virtue of the contract Micfo signed with ARIN, any further dispute had to be settled via arbitration. On May 13, that arbitration panel ordered Micfo to pay $350,000 for ARIN’s legal fees and to cough up any of those 735,000 IPs the company hadn’t already sold.

According to the criminal indictment in South Carolina, in 2017 and 2018 Golestan sold IP addresses using a third party broker:

“Golestan sold 65,536 IPv4 addresses for $13 each, for a total of $851,896,” the indictment alleges. “Golestan also organized a second transaction for another 65,536 IP addresses, for another approximately $1 million. During this same time period, Golestan had a contract to sell 327,680 IP addresses at $19 per address, for a total of $6.22 million” [this last transaction would be blocked.] Continue reading →

Microsoft Patches ‘Wormable’ Flaw in Windows XP, 7 and Windows 2003

May 14, 2019
47 Comments

Microsoft today is taking the unusual step of releasing security updates for unsupported but still widely-used Windows operating systems like XP and Windows 2003, citing the discovery of a “wormable” flaw that the company says could be used to fuel a fast-moving malware threat like the WannaCry ransomware attacks of 2017.

The May 2017 global malware epidemic WannaCry affected some 200,000 Windows systems in 150 countries. Source: Wikipedia.

The vulnerability (CVE-2019-0708) resides in the “remote desktop services” component built into supported versions of Windows, including Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Server 2008. It also is present in computers powered by Windows XP and Windows 2003, operating systems for which Microsoft long ago stopped shipping security updates.

Microsoft said the company has not yet observed any evidence of attacks against the dangerous security flaw, but that it is trying to head off a serious and imminent threat.

“While we have observed no exploitation of this vulnerability, it is highly likely that malicious actors will write an exploit for this vulnerability and incorporate it into their malware,” wrote Simon Pope, director of incident response for the Microsoft Security Response Center.

“This vulnerability is pre-authentication and requires no user interaction,” Pope said. “In other words, the vulnerability is ‘wormable,’ meaning that any future malware that exploits this vulnerability could propagate from vulnerable computer to vulnerable computer in a similar way as the WannaCry malware spread across the globe in 2017. It is important that affected systems are patched as quickly as possible to prevent such a scenario from happening.”

The WannaCry ransomware threat spread quickly across the world in May 2017 using a vulnerability that was particularly prevalent among systems running Windows XP and older versions of Windows. Microsoft had already released a patch for the flaw, but many older and vulnerable OSes were never updated. Europol estimated at the time that WannaCry spread to some 200,000 computers across 150 countries. Continue reading →

Nine Charged in Alleged SIM Swapping Ring

May 10, 2019
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Eight Americans and an Irishman have been charged with wire fraud this week for allegedly hijacking mobile phones through SIM-swapping, a form of fraud in which scammers bribe or trick employees at mobile phone stores into seizing control of the target’s phone number and diverting all texts and phone calls to the attacker’s mobile device. From there, the attackers simply start requesting password reset links via text message for a variety of accounts tied to the hijacked phone number.

All told, the government said this gang — allegedly known to its members as “The Community” — made more than $2.4 million stealing cryptocurrencies and extorting people for restoring access to social media accounts that were hijacked after a successful SIM-swap.

Six of those charged this week in Michigan federal court were alleged to have been members of The Community of serial SIM swappers. They face a fifteen count indictment, including charges of wire fraud, conspiracy and aggravated identity theft (a charge that carries a mandatory two-year sentence). A separate criminal complaint unsealed this week charges three former employees of mobile phone providers for collaborating with The Community’s members.

Several of those charged have been mentioned by this blog previously. In August 2018, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that police in Florida arrested 25-year-old Pasco County, Fla. city employee Ricky Joseph Handschumacher, charging him with grand theft and money laundering. As I reported in that story, “investigators allege Handschumacher was part of a group of at least nine individuals scattered across multiple states who for the past two years have drained bank accounts via an increasingly common scheme involving mobile phone SIM swaps.”

This blog also has featured several stories about the escapades of Ryan Stevenson, a 26-year-old West Haven, Conn. man who goes by the hacker name “Phobia.” Most recently, I wrote about how Mr. Stevenson earned a decent number of bug bounty rewards and public recognition from top telecom companies for finding and reporting security holes in their Web sites — all the while secretly operating a service that leveraged these same flaws to sell their customers’ personal data to people who were active in the SIM swapping community.

One of the six men charged in the conspiracy — Colton Jurisic, 20 of, Dubuque, Iowa — has been more well known under his hacker alias “Forza,” and “ForzaTheGod.” In December 2016, KrebsOnSecurity heard from a woman who had her Gmail, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts hijacked after a group of individuals led by Forza taunted her on Twitter as they took over her phone account.

“They failed to get [her three-letter Twitter account name, redacted] because I had two-factor authentication turned on for twitter, combined with a new phone number of which they were unaware,” the source said in an email to KrebsOnSecurity in 2016. “@forzathegod had the audacity to even tweet me to say I was about to be hacked.” Continue reading →

What’s Behind the Wolters Kluwer Tax Outage?

May 7, 2019
78 Comments

Early in the afternoon on Friday, May, 3, I asked a friend to relay a message to his security contact at CCH, the cloud-based tax division of the global information services firm Wolters Kluwer in the Netherlands. The message was that the same file directories containing new versions of CCH’s software were open and writable by any anonymous user, and that there were suspicious files in those directories indicating some user(s) abused that access.

Shortly after that report, the CCH file directory for tax software downloads was taken offline. As of this publication, several readers have reported outages affecting multiple CCH Web sites. These same readers reported being unable to access their clients’ tax data in CCH’s cloud because of the ongoing outages. A Reddit thread is full of theories.

One of the many open and writable directories on CCH’s site before my report on Friday.

I do not have any information on whether my report about the world-writable file server had anything to do with the outages going on now at CCH. Nor did I see any evidence that any client data was exposed on the site.

What I did see in those CCH directories were a few odd PHP and text files, including one that seemed to be promoting two different and unrelated Russian language discussion forums.

I sent Wolters Kluwer an email asking how long the file server had been so promiscuous (allowing anyone to upload files to the server), and what the company was doing to validate the integrity of the software made available for download by CCH tax customers.

Marisa Westcott, vice president of marketing and communications at Wolters Kluwer, told KrebsOnSecurity on Friday that she would “check with the team to see if we can get some answers to your questions.”

But subsequent emails and phone calls have gone unreturned. Calls to the company’s main support number (800-739-9998) generate the voice message, “We are currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please try your call again later.”

On Tuesday morning, Wolters Kluwer released an update on the extensive outage via Twitter, saying:

“Since yesterday, May 6, we are experiencing network and service interruptions affecting certain Wolters Kluwer platforms and applications. Out of an abundance of caution, we proactively took offline a number of other applications and we immediately began our investigation and remediation efforts. The secure use of our products and services is our top priority. we have ben able to restore network and services for a number – but not all — of our systems.”

Accounting Today reports today that a PR representative from Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting, which makes the CCH products, confirmed the outage was the result of a malware attack: Continue reading →