“Stole $24 Million But Still Can’t Keep a Friend”

January 15, 2019

Unsettling new claims have emerged about Nicholas Truglia, a 21-year-old Manhattan resident accused of hijacking cell phone accounts to steal tens of millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies from victims. The lurid details, made public in a civil lawsuit filed this week by one of his alleged victims, paints a chilling picture of a man addicted to thievery and all its trappings. The documents suggest that Truglia stole from his father and even a dead man — all the while lamenting that his fabulous new wealth brought him nothing but misery.

The unflattering profile was laid out in a series of documents tied to a lawsuit lodged by Michael Terpin, a cryptocurrency investor who co-founded the first angel investor group for bitcoin enthusiasts in 2013. Terpin alleges that crooks stole almost $24 million worth of cryptocurrency after fraudulently executing a “SIM swap” on his mobile phone account at AT&T in early 2018. Terpin also is pursuing a $200 million civil lawsuit against AT&T in connection with the theft.

Authorities arrested Truglia on November 14, 2018 on suspicion of using SIM swaps to steal approximately $1 million worth of cryptocurrencies from a different Silicon Valley executive. But Terpin’s civil lawsuit (PDF) maintains that evidence was revealed at Truglia’s bail hearing that he had texted his father and multiple friends to brag about the $24 million hack on the day of Terpin’s theft, allegedly offering to take friends to the Super Bowl with “porn star escorts.”

Terpin’s lawsuit includes a large number of supporting documents, including an affidavit filed by Chris David, a 25-year-old New York City resident who claims to have been an acquaintance of Truglia’s until he began to unravel the source of his new friend’s overnight riches.

In his affidavit (PDF), David describes himself as a self-employed private jet broker who met Truglia in a fitness center attached to Truglia’s luxury apartment building. Truglia allegedly struck up a conversation about booking private jets with his cryptocurrency. When the two met again a few days later, David says Truglia showed him accounts on his mobile phone and computer indicating he had over $7 million in cash in a JP Morgan account and more than $12 million in various cryptocurrencies.

“At the same time, Nick showed me two thumb drives (Trezors),” David recounted. “One had over $40 million in cash value of various cryptos, and the other one had over $20 million cash value of various cryptos.”

David said Truglia initially explained his wealth by saying he’d made the money by mining cryptocurrencies, but that Truglia later would admit he stole the funds.

“Over the next few months, Nick and I socialized at nightclubs, local bars, the gym, and in his apartment playing video games,” David recounted. “Gradually, I got to know Nick. He does not have a job or visible means of support. His typical day is to get up late, go to the gym, eat at the deli across the street, play video games late into the night and he had no friends. Nick was an egotistical braggart about his life and wealth. For example, once at a crowded lounge, he said: ‘Chris, I have more money than all of the people here tonight.'”

David started documenting Truglia’s activities after he and several of his friends were arrested for allegedly stealing Truglia’s laptop, mobile phone and Trezor drive. That incident, recounted in this New York Post story  and in David’s own testimony, indicates that Truglia later recanted the accusation and chalked it up to confusion resulting from a heavy night of drinking.

According to David, when Truglia wasn’t bragging about his wealth he was displaying it openly: He lived in a $6,000 per month apartment, wore a Rolex watch which he claimed cost $100,000, and boasted he was going to purchase a $250,000 McLaren sports car. David also said he recorded conversations with Truglia in which the latter admitted to stealing $24 million from Terpin.

David said he even witnessed Truglia attempting a SIM swap at a Times Square AT&T store in August 2018. Here’s David’s account of that hijack effort, which allegedly failed when Truglia declined to pay the target’s overdue phone bill:

The affidavit states that later in the month David took screen shots of a now-defunct Twitter account that Truglia allegedly used (@erupts), which included six different messages about what the theft of $24 million had wrought.

Tweets from the account @erupts, allegedly penned by Nicholas Truglia.

“Stole 24 million but still can’t keep a friend,” reads another tweet allegedly tied to Truglia’s account:

David says Truglia even acknowledged stealing $15,000 after hacking into his own father’s accounts. According to David, Truglia’s dad asked to be repaid, and that his son agreed to return the money — but in bitcoin. In the image below — which David claims was a screenshot he took of a mobile phone chat conversation between Truglia and his father — the elder expresses mystification and frustration about how to complete the transaction.

A screen shot David says he took of an alleged chat conversation between Truglia and his father regarding repayment of $15,000.

Continue reading

Courts Hand Down Hard Jail Time for DDoS

January 14, 2019

Seldom do people responsible for launching crippling cyberattacks face justice, but increasingly courts around the world are making examples of the few who do get busted for such crimes. On Friday, a 34-year-old Connecticut man received a whopping 10-year prison sentence for carrying out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against a number of hospitals in 2014. Also last week, a 30-year-old in the United Kingdom was sentenced to 32 months in jail for using an army of hacked devices to crash large portions of Liberia’s Internet access in 2016.

Daniel Kaye. Photo: National Crime Agency

Daniel Kaye, an Israel-U.K. dual citizen, admitted attacking an African phone company in 2016, and to inadvertently knocking out Internet access for much of the country in the process. Kaye launched the attack using a botnet powered by Mirai, a malware strain that enslaves hacked Internet of Things (IoT) devices like poorly-secured Internet routers and Web-based cameras for use in large-scale cyberattacks.

According to court testimony, Kaye was hired in 2015 to attack Lonestar, Liberia’s top mobile phone and Internet provider. Kaye pocketed $10,000 for the attack, which was alleged to have been paid for by an individual working for Cellcom, Lonestar’s competitor in the region. As reported by Israeli news outlet Haaretz, Kaye testified that the attack was ordered by the CEO of Cellcom Liberia.

In February 2017, authorities in the United Kingdom arrested Kaye and extradited him to Germany to face charges of knocking more than 900,000 Germans offline in a Mirai attack in November 2016. Prosecutors withheld Kaye’s full name throughout the trial in Germany, but in July 2017 KrebsOnSecurity published findings that named Kaye as the likely culprit. Kaye ultimately received a suspended sentence for the attack in Germany, and was sent back to the U.K. to face charges there.

The July 2017 KrebsOnSecurity investigation also linked Kaye to the development and sale of a sophisticated piece of spyware named GovRAT, which is documented to have been used in numerous cyber espionage campaigns against governments, financial institutions, defense contractors and more than 100 corporations.

The U.K.’s National Crime Agency called Kaye perhaps the most significant cyber criminal yet caught in Britain. A report on the trial from the BBC says Kaye wept as he was taken away to jail. Continue reading

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Secret Service: Theft Rings Turn to Fuze Cards

January 10, 2019

Street thieves who specialize in cashing out stolen credit and debit cards increasingly are hedging their chances of getting caught carrying multiple counterfeit cards by relying on Fuze Cards, a smartcard technology that allows users to store dozens of cards on a single device, the U.S. Secret Service warns.

A Fuze card can store up to 30 credit/debit cards. Image: Fuzecard.com

Launched in May 2017, the Fuze Card is a data storage device that looks like a regular credit card but can hold account data for up to 30 credit cards. The Fuze Card displays no credit card number on either side, instead relying on a small display screen on the front that cardholders can use to change which stored card is to be used to complete a transaction.

After the user chooses the card data to be used, the card data is made available in the dynamic magnetic stripe on the back of the card or via the embedded smart chip. Fuze cards also can be used at ATMs to withdraw funds.

An internal memo the U.S. Secret Service shared with financial industry partners states that Secret Service field offices in New York and St. Louis are currently working criminal investigations where Fuze Cards have been used by fraud rings.

The memo, a copy of which was obtained by KrebsOnSecurity, states that card theft rings are using Fuze Cards to avoid raising suspicions that may arise when shuffling through multiple counterfeit cards at the register.

“The transaction may also appear as a declined transaction but the fraudster, with the push of a button, is changing the card numbers being used,” the memo notes.

Fraud rings often will purchase data on thousands of credit and debit cards stolen from hacked point-of-sale devices or obtained via physical card skimmers. The data can be encoded onto any card with a magnetic stripe, and then used to buy high-priced items at retail outlets — or to withdrawn funds from ATMs (if the fraudsters also have the cardholder’s PIN).

But getting caught holding dozens of counterfeit or stolen cards is tough to explain to authorities. Hence, the allure of the Fuze Card, which may appear to the casual observer to be just another credit card in one’s wallet. Continue reading

Patch Tuesday, January 2019 Edition

January 9, 2019

Microsoft on Tuesday released updates to fix roughly four dozen security issues with its Windows operating systems and related software. All things considered, this first Patch Tuesday of 2019 is fairly mild, bereft as it is of any new Adobe Flash updates or zero-day exploits. But there are a few spicy bits to keep in mind. Read on for the gory details. Continue reading

Dirt-Cheap, Legit, Windows Software: Pick Two

January 8, 2019

Buying heavily discounted, popular software from second-hand sources online has always been something of an iffy security proposition. But purchasing steeply discounted licenses for cloud-based subscription products like recent versions of Microsoft Office can be an extremely risky transaction, mainly because you may not have full control over who has access to your data.

Last week, KrebsOnSecurity heard from a reader who’d just purchased a copy of Microsoft Office 2016 Professional Plus from a seller on eBay for less than $4. Let’s call this Red Flag #1, as a legitimately purchased license of Microsoft Office 2016 is still going to cost between $70 and $100. Nevertheless, almost 350 other people had made the same purchase from this seller over the past year, according to eBay, and there appear to be many auctioneers just like this one.

After purchasing the item, the buyer said he received the following explanatory (exclamatory?) email from the seller — “Newhotsale68” from Vietnam:

Hello my friend!
Thank you for your purchase:)

Very important! Office365 is a subscription product and does not require any KEY activation. Account + password = free lifetime use

1. Log in with the original password and the official website will ask you to change your password!

2. Be sure to remember the modified new password. Once you forget your password, you will lose Office365!

3. After you change your password, log on to the official website to start downloading and installing Office365!

Your account information:

* USERMANE : (sent username)
Password Initial: (sent password)
Microsoft Office 365 access link:

Http://portal.office.com/

Sounds legit, right?

This merchant appears to be reselling access to existing Microsoft Office accounts, because in order to use this purchase the buyer must log in to Microsoft’s site using someone else’s username and password! Let’s call this Red Flag #2.

More importantly, the buyer can’t change the email address associated with the license, which means whoever owns that address can likely still assume control over any licenses tied to it. We’ll call this Ginormous Red Flag #3. Continue reading

Apple Phone Phishing Scams Getting Better

January 3, 2019

A new phone-based phishing scam that spoofs Apple Inc. is likely to fool quite a few people. It starts with an automated call that display’s Apple’s logo, address and real phone number, warning about a data breach at the company. The scary part is that if the recipient is an iPhone user who then requests a call back from Apple’s legitimate customer support Web page, the fake call gets indexed in the iPhone’s “recent calls” list as a previous call from the legitimate Apple Support line.

Jody Westby is the CEO of Global Cyber Risk LLC,  a security consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. Westby said earlier today she received an automated call on her iPhone warning that multiple servers containing Apple user IDs had been compromised (the same scammers had called her at 4:34 p.m. the day before, but she didn’t answer that call). The message said she needed to call a 1-866 number before doing anything else with her phone.

Here’s what her iPhone displayed about the identity of the caller when they first tried her number at 4:34 p.m. on Jan. 2, 2019:

What Westby’s iPhone displayed as the scam caller’s identity. Note that it lists the correct Apple phone number, street address and Web address (minus the https://).

Note in the above screen shot that it lists Apple’s actual street address, their real customer support number, and the real Apple.com domain (albeit without the “s” at the end of “http://”). The same caller ID information showed up when she answered the scammers’ call this morning.

Westby said she immediately went to the Apple.com support page (https://www.support.apple.com) and requested to have a customer support person call her back. The page displayed a “case ID” to track her inquiry, and just a few minutes later someone from the real Apple Inc. called her and referenced that case ID number at the start of the call.

Westby said the Apple agent told her that Apple had not contacted her, that the call was almost certainly a scam, and that Apple would never do that — all of which she already knew. But when Westby looked at her iPhone’s recent calls list, she saw the legitimate call from Apple had been lumped together with the scam call that spoofed Apple:

The fake call spoofing Apple — at 11:44 a.m. — was lumped in the same recent calls list as the legitimate call from Apple. The call at 11:47 was the legitimate call from Apple. The call listed at 11:51 a.m. was the result of Westby accidentally returning the call from the scammers, which she immediately disconnected.

The call listed at 11:51 a.m. was the result of Westby accidentally returning the call from the scammers, which she immediately disconnected.

“I told the Apple representative that they ought to be telling people about this, and he said that was a good point,” Westby said. “This was so convincing I’d think a lot of other people will be falling for it.” Continue reading

Cloud Hosting Provider DataResolution.net Battling Christmas Eve Ransomware Attack

January 2, 2019

Cloud hosting provider Dataresolution.net is struggling to bring its systems back online after suffering a ransomware infestation on Christmas Eve, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The company says its systems were hit by the Ryuk ransomware, the same malware strain that crippled printing and delivery operations for multiple major U.S. newspapers over the weekend.

San Juan Capistrano, Calif. based Data Resolution LLC serves some 30,000 businesses worldwide, offering software hosting, business continuity systems, cloud computing and data center services.

The company has not yet responded to requests for comment. But according to a status update shared by Data Resolution with affected customers on Dec. 29, 2018, the attackers broke in through a compromised login account on Christmas Eve and quickly began infecting servers with the Ryuk ransomware strain.

Part of an update on the outage shared with Data Resolution customers via Dropbox on Dec. 29, 2018.

The intrusion gave the attackers control of Data Resolution’s data center domain, briefly locking the company out of its own systems. The update sent to customers states that Data Resolution shut down its network to halt the spread of the infection and to work through the process of cleaning and restoring infected systems.

Data Resolution is assuring customers that there is no indication any data was stolen, and that the purpose of the attack was to extract payment from the company in exchange for a digital key that could be used to quickly unlock access to servers seized by the ransomware.

A snippet of an update that Data Resolution shared with affected customers on Dec. 31, 2018.

The Ryuk ransomware strain was first detailed in an August 2018 report by security firm CheckPoint, which says the malware may be tied to a sophisticated North Korean hacking team known as the Lazarus Group.

Ryuk reportedly was the same malware that infected the Los Angeles Times‘ Olympic printing plant over the weekend, an attack that led to the disruption of newspaper printing and delivery services for a number of publications that rely on the plant — including the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union Tribune.

A status update shared by Data Resolution with affected customers earlier today indicates the cloud hosting provider is still working to restore email access and multiple databases for clients. The update also said Data Resolution is in the process of restoring service for companies relying on it to host installations of Dynamics GP, a popular software package that many organizations use for accounting and payroll services.  Continue reading

Happy 9th Birthday, KrebsOnSecurity!

December 29, 2018

Hard to believe we’ve gone another revolution around the Sun: Today marks the 9th anniversary of KrebsOnSecurity.com!

This past year featured some 150 blog posts, but as usual the biggest contribution to this site came from the amazing community of readers here who have generously contributed their knowledge, wit and wisdom in more than 10,000 comments.

Speaking of generous contributions, more than 100 readers have expressed their support in 2018 via PayPal donations to this site. The majority of those funds go toward paying for subscription-based services that KrebsOnSecurity relies upon for routine data gathering and analysis. Thank you.

Your correspondence and tips have been invaluable, so by all means keep them coming. For the record, I’m reachable via a variety of means, including email, the contact form on this site, and of course Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter (direct messages are open to all). For more secure and discreet communications, please consider reaching out via Keybase, Wicker (krebswickr), or Signal (by request). Continue reading

Serial Swatter and Stalker Mir Islam Arrested for Allegedly Dumping Body in River

December 23, 2018

A 22-year-old man convicted of cyberstalking and carrying out numerous bomb threats and swatting attacks — including a 2013 swatting incident at my home — was arrested Sunday morning in the Philippines after allegedly helping his best friend dump the body of a housemate into a local river.

Suspects Troy Woody Jr. (left) and Mir Islam, were arrested in Manila this week for allegedly dumping the body of Woody’s girlfriend in a local river. Image:  Manila Police Dept.

Police in Manila say U.S citizens Mir Islam, 22, and Troy Woody Jr., 21, booked a ride from Grab — a local ride hailing service — and asked for the two of them to be picked up at Woody’s condominium in Mandaluyong City. When the driver arrived the two men stuffed a large box into the trunk of the vehicle.

According to the driver, Islam and Woody asked to be driven to a nearby shopping mall, but told the driver along the way to stop at a compound near the Pasig River in Manila, where the two men allegedly dumped the box before getting back in the hailed car.

The Inquirer reports that authorities recovered the box and identified the victim as Tomi Michelle Masters, 23, also a U.S. citizen from Indiana who was reportedly dating Woody and living in the same condo. Masters’ Instagram profile states that she was in a relationship with Woody.

Update, 12:30 p.m. ET, Dec. 24: Both men have since been charged with murder, according to a story today at the Filipino news site Tempo, and the police believe there was some kind of violent struggle between Masters and Woody.

“Police eventually recovered the box that contained the naked body of the victim that was wrapped in duct tape,” Tempo reports. The local police station head was quoted as saying “the victim was believed to have been killed in the Mandaluyong condominium she shared with Woody, her alleged boyfriend. He said medical examination showed scratch marks all over Woody’s body.”

Original story:

Brooklyn, NY native Islam, a.k.a. “Josh the God,” has a long rap sheet for computer-related crimes. He briefly rose to Internet infamy as one of the core members of UGNazi, an online mischief-making group that claimed credit for hacking and attacking a number of high-profile Web sites.

On June 25, 2012, Islam and nearly two-dozen others were caught up in an FBI dragnet dubbed Operation Card Shop. The government accused Islam of being a founding member of carders[dot]org — a credit card fraud forum — trafficking in stolen credit card information, and possessing information for more than 50,000 credit cards.

JoshTheGod’s (Mir Islam’s ) Twitter feed, in April 2012 warning fellow carding forum carderprofit members that the forum was being run by the FBI.

In June 2016, Islam was sentenced to a year in prison for an impressive array of crimes, including stalking people online and posting their personal data on the Internet. Islam also pleaded guilty to reporting phony bomb threats and fake hostage situations at the homes of celebrities and public officials (as well as this author). Continue reading

Feds Charge Three in Mass Seizure of Attack-for-hire Services

December 20, 2018

Authorities in the United States this week brought criminal hacking charges against three men as part of an unprecedented, international takedown targeting 15 different “booter” or “stresser” sites — attack-for-hire services that helped paying customers launch tens of thousands of digital sieges capable of knocking Web sites and entire network providers offline.

The seizure notice appearing on the homepage this week of more than a dozen popular “booter” or “stresser” DDoS-for-hire Web sites.

As of Thursday morning, a seizure notice featuring the seals of the U.S. Justice Department, FBI and other law enforcement agencies appeared on the booter sites, including:

anonsecurityteam[.]com
booter[.]ninja
bullstresser[.]net
critical-boot[.]com
defcon[.]pro
defianceprotocol[.]com
downthem[.]org
layer7-stresser[.]xyz
netstress[.]org
quantumstress[.]net
ragebooter[.]com
request[.]rip
str3ssed[.]me
torsecurityteam[.]org
vbooter[.]org

Booter sites are dangerous because they help lower the barriers to cybercrime, allowing even complete novices to launch sophisticated and crippling attacks with the click of a button.

Cameron Schroeder, assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, called this week’s action the largest simultaneous seizure of booter service domains ever.

“This is the biggest action U.S. law enforcement has taken against booter services, and we’re doing this in cooperation with a large number of industry and foreign law enforcement partners,” Schroeder said.

Booter services are typically advertised through a variety of methods, including Dark Web forums, chat platforms and even youtube.com. They accept payment via PayPal, Google Wallet, and/or cryptocurrencies, and subscriptions can range in price from just a few dollars to several hundred per month. The services are priced according to the volume of traffic to be hurled at the target, the duration of each attack, and the number of concurrent attacks allowed.

Purveyors of stressers and booters claim they are not responsible for how customers use their services, and that they aren’t breaking the law because — like most security tools — stresser services can be used for good or bad purposes. For example, all of the above-mentioned booter sites contained wordy “terms of use” agreements that required customers to agree they will only stress-test their own networks — and that they won’t use the service to attack others.

But experts say today’s announcement shreds that virtual fig leaf, and marks several important strategic shifts in how authorities intend to prosecute booter service operators going forward.

“This action is predicated on the fact that running a booter service itself is illegal,” said Allison Nixon, director of security research at Flashpoint, a security firm based in New York City. “That’s a slightly different legal argument than has been made in the past against other booter owners.”

For one thing, the booter services targeted in this takedown advertised the ability to “resolve” or determine the true Internet address of a target. This is especially useful for customers seeking to harm targets whose real address is hidden behind mitigation services like Cloudflare (ironically, the same provider used by some of these booter services to withstand attacks by competing booter services).

Some resolvers also allowed customers to determine the Internet address of a target using nothing more than the target’s Skype username.

“You don’t need to use a Skype resolver just to attack yourself,” assistant U.S. Attorney Schroeder said. “Clearly, the people running these booter services know their services are being used not by people targeting their own infrastructure, and have built in capabilities that specifically allow customers to attack others.”

Another important distinction between this week’s coordinated action and past booter site takedowns was that the government actually tested each service it dismantled to validate claims about attack firepower and to learn more about how each service conducted assaults.

In a complaint unsealed today, the Justice Department said that although FBI agents identified at least 60 different booter services operating between June and December 2018, they discovered not all were fully operational and capable of launching attacks. Hence, the 15 services seized this week represent those that the government was able to use to conduct successful, high-volume attacks against their own test sites.

“This is intended to send a very clear message to all booter operators that they’re not going to be allowed to operate openly anymore,” Nixon said. “The message is that if you’re running a DDoS-for-hire service that can attack an Internet address in such a way that the FBI can purchase an attack against their own test servers, you’re probably going to get in trouble.” Continue reading