Android 7.0+ Phones Can Now Double as Google Security Keys

April 11, 2019
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Google this week made it easier for Android users to enable strong 2-factor authentication (2FA) when logging into Google’s various services. The company announced that all phones running Android 7.0 and higher can now be used as Security Keys, an additional authentication layer that helps thwart phishing sites and password theft.

As first disclosed by KrebsOnSecurity last summer, Google maintains it has not had any of its 85,000+ employees successfully phished on their work-related accounts since early 2017, when it began requiring all employees to use physical Security Keys in place of passwords and one-time codes.

The most commonly used Security Keys are inexpensive USB-based devices that offer an alternative approach to 2FA, which requires the user to log in to a Web site using something they know (the password) and something they have (e.g. a one-time token, key fob or mobile device).

But Google said starting this week, any mobile phone running Android 7.0+ (Nougat) can serve the same function as a USB-based security key. Once a user has enrolled their Android phone as a Security Key, the user will need to approve logins via a prompt sent to their phone after submitting their username and password at a Google login page.

Many readers have expressed confusion or skepticism about how Security Keys can prevent users from getting hooked by phishing sites or clever man-in-the-middle attacks. This capability was described in far greater visual detail in this video last year by Christiaan Brand, product manager at Google Cloud.

But the short version is that even if a user who has enrolled a Security Key for authentication tries to log in at a site pretending to be Google, the company’s systems simply refuse to request the Security Key if the user isn’t on an official Google site, and the login attempt fails.

“It puts you in this mode….[in] which is there is no other way to log in apart from the Security Key,” Brand said. “No one can trick you into a downgrade attack, no one can trick you into anything different. You need to provide a security key or you don’t get into your account.”

Google says built-in security keys are available on phones running Android 7.0+ (Nougat) with Google Play Services, enabling existing phones to act as users’ primary 2FA method for work (G Suite, Cloud Identity, and GCP) and personal Google accounts to sign in on a Bluetooth-enabled Chrome OS, macOS X, or Windows 10 device with a Chrome browser. Continue reading →

Patch Tuesday Lowdown, April 2019 Edition

April 9, 2019
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Microsoft today released fifteen software updates to fix more than 70 unique security vulnerabilities in various flavors of its Windows operating systems and supported software, including at least two zero-day bugs. These patches apply to Windows, Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge browsers, Office, Sharepoint and Exchange. Separately, Adobe has issued security updates for Acrobat/Reader and Flash Player.

According to security firm Rapid 7, two of the vulnerabilities — CVE-2019-0803 and CVE-2019-0859 — are already being exploited in the wild. They can result in unauthorized elevation of privilege, and affect all supported versions of Windows.

“An attacker must already have local access to an affected system to use these to gain kernel-level code execution capabilities,” Rapid7 researcher Greg Wiseman observed. “However, one of the 32 Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities patched today could potentially be used with them in an exploit chain to obtain full control of a system.”

Aside from these zero-day privilege escalation flaws, Wiseman said, it’s a fairly standard Patch Tuesday.

“Which of course still means that there are bugs that should be patched as soon as possible, such as the eight vulnerabilities classified as critical in the scripting engine used by Microsoft browsers, and CVE-2019-0822 (an RCE in Microsoft Office that can be exploited by convincing a user to open a malicious file).”

Adobe’s Patch Tuesday includes security updates for its Flash Player and AIR software,  as well as Adobe Reader and Acrobat.

Flash updates are installed along with other monthly Windows patch rollups for consumers, and auto-installed by Google Chrome, but users may need to reboot the operating system (in the case of IE/Edge) or the browser (in Chrome) for the new updates to take effect.

Adobe’s actions also sound the death knell for Adobe Shockwave Player, which has at long last reached end-of-life.

That means no more security updates for Shockwave, which has always been something of an ugly stepchild to Flash. That is to say, Shockwave never really got the security attention Flash has received but nevertheless has been just as vulnerable and often lagging months or years behind Flash in terms of updates. Continue reading →

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A Year Later, Cybercrime Groups Still Rampant on Facebook

April 8, 2019
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Almost exactly one year ago, KrebsOnSecurity reported that a mere two hours of searching revealed more than 100 Facebook groups with some 300,000 members openly advertising services to support all types of cybercrime, including spam, credit card fraud and identity theft. Facebook responded by deleting those groups. Last week, a similar analysis led to the takedown of 74 cybercrime groups operating openly on Facebook with more than 385,000 members.

Researchers at Cisco Talos discovered the groups using the same sophisticated methods I employed last year — running a search on Facebook.com for terms unambiguously tied to fraud, such as “spam” and “phishing.” Talos said most of the groups were less than a year old, and that Facebook deleted the groups after being notified by Cisco.

Talos also re-confirmed my findings that Facebook still generally ignores individual abuse reports about groups that supposedly violate its ‘community standards,’ which specifically forbid the types of activity espoused by the groups that Talos flagged.

“Talos initially attempted to take down these groups individually through Facebook’s abuse reporting functionality,” the researchers found. “While some groups were removed immediately, other groups only had specific posts removed.”

But Facebook deleted all offending groups after researchers told Facebook’s security team they were going to publish their findings.  This is precisely what I experienced a year ago.

Not long after Facebook deleted most of the 120 cybercrime groups I reported to it back in April 2018, many of the groups began reemerging elsewhere on the social network under similar names with the same members.

Instead of reporting those emergent groups directly to people at Facebook’s public relations arm — something most mere mortals aren’t able to do — KrebsOnSecurity decided to report the re-offenders via Facebook’s regular abuse reporting procedures.

What did we find? KrebsOnSecurity received a series of replies saying that Facebook had reviewed my reports but that none of the groups were found to have violated its standards. KrebsOnSecurity later found that reporting the abusive Facebook groups to a quarter-million followers on Twitter was the fastest way to get them disabled. Continue reading →

Alleged Chief of Romanian ATM Skimming Gang Arrested in Mexico

April 4, 2019
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An alleged top boss of a Romanian crime syndicate that U.S. authorities say is responsible for deploying card-skimming devices at Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) throughout North America was arrested in Mexico last week on firearms charges. The arrest comes months after the accused allegedly ordered the execution of a former bodyguard who was trying to help U.S. authorities bring down the group’s lucrative skimming operations.

On Mar. 31, police in Cancun, Mexico arrested two Romanian men, identified only as 42-year-old “Florian N” and 37-year-old “Adrian Nicholae N,” 37, for the possession of an illegal firearm and cash totaling nearly 500,000 pesos (~USD $26,000) in both American and Mexican denominations.

An uncaptioned photo published by the Mexican police. According to multiple sources, the individual on the left is Intacash boss Florian Tudor, along with his deputy Nicholae Cosmin.

The two men’s faces were partially obscured in the mugshots released to Mexican media. But according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation, the older man arrested (pictured on the left) is Florian “The Shark” Tudor, reputed to be in charge of a relatively new ATM company based in Mexico called Intacash. The man on the right has been identified as Nicolae Cosmin, Tudor’s deputy.

Intacash was the central focus of a three–part investigation KrebsOnSecurity published in September 2015. That story tracked the activities of a crime gang that was bribing and otherwise coercing ATM technicians to install sophisticated Bluetooth-based skimmers inside cash machines throughout popular tourist destinations in and around Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula — including Cancun, Cozumel, Playa del Carmen and Tulum.

Meanwhile, Intcash’s machines were about the only ATMs in top tourist spots in Mexico that weren’t getting compromised with these bluetooth skimming devices.

Law enforcement and ATM industry sources cited in that story said they believe Intacash is controlled by Romanian nationals and that its key principals were the ones paying ATM technicians to compromise machines at competing ATM providers.

As I discovered in reporting that series, it was possible to tell which ATMs were compromised in Mexico’s top tourist spots just by approaching each with a smart phone and looking for the presence of a Bluetooth signal beaconing out a wireless network with the name “Free2Move”.

This functionality allowed the crime syndicate to siphon credit and debit card details and PINs from hacked ATMs wirelessly, without ever again having to touch the compromised machines (see the video below for more on that investigation).

In April 2018, KrebsOnSecurity heard from a Romanian person who claimed to have been working for Intacash. This individual seemed extremely concerned for their safety, but at the same time eager to share details about the company’s operations and owners.

The source shared photographs of Intacash’s chief deputies, as well as screenshots of card data allegedly hoovered up by the company’s various skimming operations. The source repeatedly told me the Romanian gang was paying large sums of money to Mexican authorities to stay off their radar.

The last time I heard from that source was June 2018, just after a like-minded associate at Intacash was found shot dead in his car. The associate, 44-year-old Sorinel Constantin Marcu, was already wanted on a warrant from Interpol, the international criminal police organization.

In 2014, a Romanian court issued a criminal warrant for Marcu on allegations of attempted murder back in his hometown of Craiova, Romanian’s 6th-largest city. But Marcu was able to flee to Mexico before he could be tried. The court later convicted Marcu in abstentia, leveling a sentence of eight years in prison.

On  the evening of June 11, 2018, Marcu was shot in the head, reportedly while trying to kidnap a businessman in Mexico, according to multiple media accounts. A street surveillance video of the incident published by Romanian daily Gazeta de SUD shows a Dodge Nitro allegedly driven by Marcu hitting the businessman’s parked car.

The businessman manages to flee, and the passenger in Marcu’s vehicle briefly starts after him, before returning to the picture a few seconds later. Marcu’s passenger gets back in the vehicle, which then moves out of view of the security camera.

“Later, one of the businessman’s guards came out of the house and shot several gun shots in the car driven by Marcu, and he was killed on the spot,” Gazeta reported. Continue reading →

Canadian Police Raid ‘Orcus RAT’ Author

April 2, 2019
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Canadian police last week raided the residence of a Toronto software developer behind “Orcus RAT,” a product that’s been marketed on underground forums and used in countless malware attacks since its creation in 2015. Its author maintains Orcus is a legitimate Remote Administration Tool that is merely being abused, but security experts say it includes multiple features more typically seen in malware known as a Remote Access Trojan.

An advertisement for Orcus RAT.

As first detailed by KrebsOnSecurity in July 2016, Orcus is the brainchild of John “Armada” Revesz, a Toronto resident who until recently maintained and sold the RAT under the company name Orcus Technologies.

In an “official press release” posted to pastebin.com on Mar. 31, 2019, Revesz said his company recently was the subject of an international search warrant executed jointly by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).

“In this process authorities seized numerous backup hard drives [containing] a large portion of Orcus Technologies business, and practices,” Revesz wrote. “Data inclusive on these drives include but are not limited to: User information inclusive of user names, real names, financial transactions, and further. The arrests and searches expand to an international investigation at this point, including countries as America, Germany, Australia, Canada and potentially more.”

Reached via email, Revesz declined to say whether he was arrested in connection with the search warrant, a copy of which he shared with KrebsOnSecurity. In response to an inquiry from this office, the RCMP stopped short of naming names, but said “we can confirm that our National Division Cybercrime Investigative Team did execute a search warrant at a Toronto location last week.”

The RCMP said the raid was part of an international coordinated effort with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Australian Federal Police, as part of “a series of ongoing, parallel investigations into Remote Access Trojan (RAT) technology. This type of malicious software (malware) enables remote access to Canadian computers, without their users’ consent and can lead to the subsequent installation of other malware and theft of personal information.”

“The CRTC executed a warrant under Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) and the RCMP National Division executed a search warrant under the Criminal Code respectively,” reads a statement published last week by the Canadian government. “Tips from international private cyber security firms triggered the investigation.”

Revesz maintains his software was designed for legitimate use only and for system administrators seeking more powerful, full-featured ways to remotely manage multiple PCs around the globe. He’s also said he’s not responsible for how licensed customers use his products, and that he actively kills software licenses for customers found to be using it for online fraud.

Yet the list of features and plugins advertised for this RAT 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.

“It can also implement a watchdog that restarts the server component or even trigger a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) if the someone tries to kill its process,” wrote researchers at security firm Fortinet in a Dec. 2017 analysis of the RAT. “This makes it harder for targets to remove it from their systems. These are, of course, on top of the obviously ominous features such as password retrieval and key logging that are normally seen in Remote Access Trojans.”

As KrebsOnSecurity noted in 2016, in conjunction with his RAT Revesz also sold and marketed a bulletproof “dynamic DNS service” that promised not to keep any records of customer activity. Continue reading →

Annual Protest Raises $250K to Cure Krebs

March 31, 2019
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For the second year in a row, denizens of a large German-language online forum have donated more than USD $250,000 to cancer research organizations in protest of a story KrebsOnSecurity published in 2018 that unmasked the creators of Coinhive, a now-defunct cryptocurrency mining service that was massively abused by cybercriminals. Krebs is translated as “cancer” in German.

Images posted to the decidedly not-safe-for-work German-language image forum pr0gramm[.]com. Members have posted thousands of thank you receipts from cancer research organizations that benefited from their fight cancer/krebs campaign.

On March 26, 2018, KrebsOnSecurity published Who and What is Coinhive, which showed the founder of Coinhive was the co-creator of the German image hosting and discussion forum pr0gramm[dot]com (not safe for work).  I undertook the research because Coinhive’s code at the time was found on tens of thousands of hacked Web sites, and Coinhive seemed uninterested in curbing widespread abuse of its platform.

Pr0gramm’s top members accused KrebsOnSecurity of violating their privacy, even though all of the research published about them was publicly available online. In protest, the forum’s leaders urged members to donate money to medical research in a bid to find a cure for Krebs (i.e. “cancer”).

All told, thousands of Pr0gramm’s members donated more than USD $250,000 to cancer cure efforts within days of that March 2018 story. This week, the Pr0gramm administrators rallied members to commemorate that successful fundraiser with yet another.

“As announced there will be a donation marathon at anniversary day of Krebsaction,” Pr0gramm’s administrators announced. “Today, March 27th, we’re firing the starting shot for the marathon. Please tag your donation bills properly if they shall be accounted. The official tag is ‘krebsspende.’

According to a running tally on Pr0gramm’s site, this year’s campaign has raised 252,000 euros for cancer research so far, or about USD $284,000. That brings the total that Pr0gramm members have donated to cancer research to more than a half-million dollars.

As a bonus, Coinhive announced last month that it was shutting down, citing a perfect storm of negative circumstances. Coinhive had made structural changes to its systems following my 2018 story so that it would no longer profit from accounts used on hacked Web sites. Perhaps more importantly, the value of the cryptocurrency Coinhive’s code helped to mine dropped precipitously over the past year.

Man Behind Fatal ‘Swatting’ Gets 20 Years

March 29, 2019
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Tyler Barriss, a 26-year-old California man who admitted making a phony emergency call to police in late 2017 that led to the shooting death of an innocent Kansas resident, has been sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.

Tyler Barriss, in an undated selfie.

Barriss has admitted to his role in the Kansas man’s death, as well as to dozens of other non-fatal “swatting” attacks. These dangerous hoaxes involve making false claims to emergency responders about phony hostage situations or bomb threats, with the intention of prompting a heavily-armed police response to the location of the claimed incident.

On Dec. 28, 2017, Barriss placed a call from California to police in Wichita, Kan., claiming that he was a local resident who’d just shot his father and was holding other family members hostage.

When Wichita officers responded to the address given by the caller — 1033 W. McCormick — they shot and killed 28-year-old Andrew Finch, a father of two who had done nothing wrong.

Barriss admitted setting that fatal swatting in motion after getting in the middle of a dispute between two Call of Duty online gamers, 18-year-old Casey Viner from Ohio and Shane Gaskill, 20, from Wichita. Viner and Gaskill are awaiting their own trials in connection with Finch’s death. Continue reading →

A Month After 2 Million Customer Cards Sold Online, Buca di Beppo Parent Admits Breach

March 29, 2019
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On Feb. 21, 2019, KrebsOnSecurity contacted Italian restaurant chain Buca di Beppo after discovering strong evidence that two million credit and debit card numbers belonging to the company’s customers were being sold in the cybercrime underground. Today, Buca’s parent firm announced it had remediated a 10-month breach of its payment systems at dozens of restaurants, including some locations of its other brands such as Earl of Sandwich and Planet Hollywood.

Some 2.1 million+ credit and debit card accounts stolen from dozens of Earl Enterprises restaurant locations went up for sale on a popular carding forum on Feb. 20, 2019.

In a statement posted to its Web site today, Orlando, Fla. based hospitality firm Earl Enterprises said a data breach involving malware installed on its point-of-sale systems allowed cyber thieves to steal card details from customers between May 23, 2018 and March 18, 2019.

Earl Enterprises did not respond to requests for specifics about how many customers total may have been impacted by the 10-month breach. The company’s statement directs concerned customers to an online tool that allows one to look up breached locations by city and state.

According to an analysis of that page, it appears the breach impacts virtually all 67 Buca di Beppo locations in the United States; a handful out of the total 31 Earl of Sandwich locations; and Planet Hollywood locations in Las Vegas, New York City and Orlando. Also impacted were Tequila Taqueria in Las Vegas; Chicken Guy! in Disney Springs, Fla.; and Mixology in Los Angeles.

KrebsOnsecurity contacted the executive team at Buca di Beppo in late February after determining most of this restaurant’s locations were likely involved a data breach that first surfaced on Joker’s Stash, an underground shop that sells huge new batches of freshly-stolen credit and debit cards on a regular basis. Continue reading →

Alleged Child Porn Lord Faces US Extradition

March 22, 2019
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In 2013, the FBI exploited a zero-day vulnerability in Firefox to seize control over a Dark Web network of child pornography sites. The alleged owner of that ring – 33-year-old Freedom Hosting operator Eric Eoin Marques – was arrested in Ireland later that year on a U.S. warrant and has been in custody ever since. This week, Ireland’s Supreme Court cleared the way for Marques to be extradited to the United States.

Eric Eoin Marques. Photo: Irishtimes.com

The FBI has called Marques the world’s largest facilitator of child porn. He is wanted on four charges linked to hidden child porn sites like “Lolita City” and “PedoEmpire,” which the government says were extremely violent, graphic and depicting the rape and torture of pre-pubescent children. Investigators allege that sites on Freedom Hosting had thousands of customers, and earned Marques more than $1.5 million.

For years Freedom Hosting had developed a reputation as a safe haven for hosting child porn. Marques allegedly operated Freedom Hosting as a turnkey solution for Web sites that hide their true location using Tor, an online anonymity tool.

The sites could only be accessed using the Tor Browser Bundle, which is built on the Firefox Web browser. On Aug. 4, 2013, U.S. federal agents exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in Firefox version 17 that allowed them to identify the true Internet addresses and computer names of people using Tor Browser to visit the child porn sites at Freedom Hosting.

Irish public media service RTE reported in 2013 that Marques briefly regained access to one of his hosting servers even after the FBI had seized control over it and changed the password, briefly locking the feds out of the system.

As Wired.com observed at the time, “in addition to the wrestling match over Freedom Hosting’s servers, Marques allegedly dove for his laptop when the police raided him, in an effort to shut it down.”

Marques, who holds dual Irish-US citizenship, was denied bail and held pending his nearly six-year appeal process to contest his extradition. FBI investigators told the courts they feared he would try to destroy evidence and/or flee the country. FBI agents testified that Marques had made inquiries about how to get a visa and entry into Russia and set up residence and citizenship there. Continue reading →

Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in Plain Text for Years

March 21, 2019
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Hundreds of millions of Facebook users had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by thousands of Facebook employees — in some cases going back to 2012, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Facebook says an ongoing investigation has so far found no indication that employees have abused access to this data.

Facebook is probing a series of security failures in which employees built applications that logged unencrypted password data for Facebook users and stored it in plain text on internal company servers. That’s according to a senior Facebook employee who is familiar with the investigation and who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

The Facebook source said the investigation so far indicates between 200 million and 600 million Facebook users may have had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by more than 20,000 Facebook employees. The source said Facebook is still trying to determine how many passwords were exposed and for how long, but so far the inquiry has uncovered archives with plain text user passwords dating back to 2012.

My Facebook insider said access logs showed some 2,000 engineers or developers made approximately nine million internal queries for data elements that contained plain text user passwords.

“The longer we go into this analysis the more comfortable the legal people [at Facebook] are going with the lower bounds” of affected users, the source said. “Right now they’re working on an effort to reduce that number even more by only counting things we have currently in our data warehouse.”

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Facebook software engineer Scott Renfro said the company wasn’t ready to talk about specific numbers — such as the number of Facebook employees who could have accessed the data.

Renfro said the company planned to alert affected Facebook users, but that no password resets would be required.

“We’ve not found any cases so far in our investigations where someone was looking intentionally for passwords, nor have we found signs of misuse of this data,” Renfro said. “In this situation what we’ve found is these passwords were inadvertently logged but that there was no actual risk that’s come from this. We want to make sure we’re reserving those steps and only force a password change in cases where there’s definitely been signs of abuse.”

A written statement from Facebook provided to KrebsOnSecurity says the company expects to notify “hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users.” Facebook Lite is a version of Facebook designed for low speed connections and low-spec phones.

Continue reading →