How the U.S. Govt. Shutdown Harms Security

January 23, 2019

The ongoing partial U.S. federal government shutdown is having a tangible, negative impact on cybercrime investigations, according to interviews with federal law enforcement investigators and a report issued this week by a group representing the interests of FBI agents. Even if lawmakers move forward on new proposals to reopen the government, sources say the standoff is likely to have serious repercussions for federal law enforcement agencies for years to come.

One federal agent with more than 20 years on the job told KrebsOnSecurity the shutdown “is crushing our ability to take the fight to cyber criminals.”

“The talent drain after this is finally resolved will cost us five years,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. “Literally everyone I know who is able to retire or can find work in the private sector is actively looking, and the smart private companies are aware and actively recruiting. As a nation, we are much less safe from a cyber security posture than we were a month ago.”

The source said his agency can’t even get agents and analysts the higher clearances needed for sensitive cases because everyone who does the clearance processing is furloughed.

“Investigators who are eligible to retire or who simply wish to walk away from their job aren’t retiring or quitting now because they can’t even be processed out due to furlough of the organization’s human resources people,” the source said. “These are criminal investigations involving national security. It’s also a giant distraction and people aren’t as focused.”

The source’s comments echoed some of the points made in a 72-page report (PDF) released this week by the FBI Agents Association, a group that advocates on behalf of active and retired FBI special agents.

“Today we have no funds for making Confidential Human Source payments,” reads a quote from the FBIAA report, attributed to an agent in the FBI’s northeast region. “In my situation, I have two sources that support our national security cyber mission that no longer have funding. They are critical sources providing tripwires and intelligence that protect the United States against our foreign adversaries. The loss in productivity and pertinent intelligence is immeasurable.”

My federal law enforcement source mentioned his agency also was unable to pay confidential informants for their help with ongoing investigations.

“We are having the same problems like not being able to pay informants, no travel, critical case coordination meetings postponed, and no procurements to further the mission,” the source said.

The extended shutdown directly affects more than 800,000 workers, many of them furloughed or required to work without pay. Some federal employees, now missing at least two back-to-back paychecks, are having trouble keeping food on the table. CNN reports that FBI field offices across the country are opening food banks to help support special agents and staff struggling without pay.

An extended lack of pay is forcing many agents to seek side hustles and jobs, despite rules that seek to restrict such activity, according to media reports. Missing multiple paychecks also can force investigators to take on additional debt. This is potentially troublesome because excess debt down the road can lead to problems keeping one’s security clearances.

Excessive debt is a threat to clearances because it can make people more susceptible to being drawn into illegal activities or taking bribes for money, which in turn may leave them vulnerable to extortion. Indeed, this story from Clearancejobs.com observes that the shutdown may be inadvertently creating new recruiting opportunities for foreign intelligence operatives.

“If you are a hostile intelligence service human intelligence (HUMINT) targeting officer you are hoping this situation lasts a long time and has a multitude of unintended consequences affecting the cleared government employee population,” writes Christopher Burgess. Continue reading

Bomb Threat, Sextortion Spammers Abused Weakness at GoDaddy.com

January 22, 2019

Two of the most disruptive and widely-received spam email campaigns over the past few months — including an ongoing sextortion email scam and a bomb threat hoax that shut down dozens of schools, businesses and government buildings late last year — were made possible thanks to an authentication weakness at GoDaddy.com, the world’s largest domain name registrar, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

Perhaps more worryingly, experts warn this same weakness that let spammers hijack domains tied to GoDaddy also affects a great many other major Internet service providers, and is actively being abused to launch phishing and malware attacks which leverage dormant Web site names currently owned and controlled by some of the world’s most trusted corporate names and brands.

In July 2018, email users around the world began complaining of receiving spam which began with a password the recipient used at some point in the past and threatened to release embarrassing videos of the recipient unless a bitcoin ransom was paid. On December 13, 2018, a similarly large spam campaign was blasted out, threatening that someone had planted bombs within the recipient’s building that would be detonated unless a hefty bitcoin ransom was paid by the end of the business day.

Experts at Cisco Talos and other security firms quickly drew parallels between the two mass spam campaigns, pointing to a significant overlap in Russia-based Internet addresses used to send the junk emails. Yet one aspect of these seemingly related campaigns that has been largely overlooked is the degree to which each achieved an unusually high rate of delivery to recipients.

Large-scale spam campaigns often are conducted using newly-registered or hacked email addresses, and/or throwaway domains. The trouble is, spam sent from these assets is trivial to block because anti-spam and security systems tend to discard or mark as spam any messages that appear to come from addresses which have no known history or reputation attached to them.

However, in both the sextortion and bomb threat spam campaigns, the vast majority of the email was being sent through Web site names that had already existed for some time, and indeed even had a trusted reputation. Not only that, new research shows many of these domains were registered long ago and are still owned by dozens of Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies. 

That’s according to Ron Guilmette, a dogged anti-spam researcher. Researching the history and reputation of thousands of Web site names used in each of the extortionist spam campaigns, Guilmette made a startling discovery: Virtually all of them had at one time received service from GoDaddy.com, a Scottsdale, Ariz. based domain name registrar and hosting provider.

Guilmette told KrebsOnSecurity he initially considered the possibility that GoDaddy had been hacked, or that thousands of the registrar’s customers perhaps had their GoDaddy usernames and passwords stolen.

But as he began digging deeper, Guilmette came to the conclusion that the spammers were exploiting an obscure — albeit widespread — weakness among hosting companies, cloud providers and domain registrars that was first publicly detailed in 2016.

EARLY WARNING SIGNS

In August 2016, security researcher Matthew Bryant wrote about a weakness that could be used to hijack email service for 20,000 established domain names at a U.S. based hosting provider. A few months later, Bryant warned that the same technique could be leveraged to send spam from more than 120,000 trusted domains across multiple providers. And Guilmette says he now believes the attack method detailed by Bryant also explains what’s going on in the more recent sextortion and bomb threat spams.

Grasping the true breadth of Bryant’s prescient discovery requires a brief and simplified primer on how Web sites work. Your Web browser knows how to find a Web site name like example.com thanks to the global Domain Name System (DNS), which serves as a kind of phone book for the Internet by translating human-friendly Web site names (example.com) into numeric Internet address that are easier for computers to manage.

When someone wants to register a domain at a registrar like GoDaddy, the registrar will typically provide two sets of DNS records that the customer then needs to assign to his domain. Those records are crucial because they allow Web browsers to figure out the Internet address of the hosting provider that’s serving that Web site domain. Like many other registrars, GoDaddy lets new customers use their managed DNS services for free for a period of time (in GoDaddy’s case it’s 30 days), after which time customers must pay for the service.

The crux of Bryant’s discovery was that the spammers in those 2016 campaigns learned that countless hosting firms and registrars would allow anyone to add a domain to their account without ever validating that the person requesting the change actually owned the domain. Here’s what Bryant wrote about the threat back in 2016:

“In addition to the hijacked domains often having past history and a long age, they also have WHOIS information which points to real people unrelated to the person carrying out the attack. Now if an attacker launches a malware campaign using these domains, it will be harder to pinpoint who/what is carrying out the attack since the domains would all appear to be just regular domains with no observable pattern other than the fact that they all use cloud DNS. It’s an attacker’s dream, troublesome attribution and an endless number of names to use for malicious campaigns.”

SAY WHAT?

For a more concrete example of what’s going on here, we’ll look at just one of the 4,000+ domains that Guilmette found were used in the Dec. 13, 2018 bomb threat hoax. Virtualfirefox.com is a domain registered via GoDaddy in 2013 and currently owned by The Mozilla Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation — the makers of the popular Firefox Web browser.

The domain’s registration has been renewed each year since its inception, but the domain itself has sat dormant for some time. When it was initially set up, it took advantage of two managed DNS servers assigned to it by GoDaddy — ns17.domaincontrol.com, and ns18.domaincontrol.com.

GoDaddy is a massive hosting provider, and it has more than 100 such DNS servers to serve the needs of its clients. To hijack this domain, the attackers in the December 2018 spam campaign needed only to have created a free account at GoDaddy that was assigned the exact same DNS servers handed out to Virtualfirefox.com (ns17.domaincontrol.com and ns18.domaincontrol.com). After that, the attackers simply claim ownership over the domain, and tell GoDaddy to allow the sending of email with that domain from an Internet address they control.

Mozilla spokesperson Ellen Canale said Mozilla took ownership of virtualfirefox.com in September 2017 after a trademark dispute, but that the DNS nameserver for the record was not reset until January of 2019.

“This oversight created a state where the DNS pointed to a server controlled by a third party, leaving it vulnerable to misuse,” Canale said. “We’ve reviewed the configuration of both our registrar and nameservers and have found no indication of misuse. In addition to addressing the immediate problem, we have reviewed the entire catalog of properties we own to ensure they are properly configured.”

According to both Guilmette and Bryant, this type of hijack is possible because GoDaddy — like many other managed DNS providers — does little to check whether someone with an existing account (free or otherwise) who is claiming ownership over a given domain actually controls that domain name.

Contacted by KrebsOnSecurity, GoDaddy acknowledged the authentication weakness documented by Guilmette.

“After investigating the matter, our team confirmed that a threat actor(s) abused our DNS setup process,” the company said in an emailed statement.

“We’ve identified a fix and are taking corrective action immediately,” the statement continued. “While those responsible were able to create DNS entries on dormant domains, at no time did account ownership change nor was customer information exposed.” Continue reading

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773M Password ‘Megabreach’ is Years Old

January 17, 2019

My inbox and Twitter messages positively lit up today with people forwarding stories from Wired and other publications about a supposedly new trove of nearly 773 million unique email addresses and 21 million unique passwords that were posted to a hacking forum. A story in The Guardian breathlessly dubbed it “the largest collection ever of breached data found.” But in an interview with the apparent seller, KrebsOnSecurity learned that it is not even close to the largest gathering of stolen data, and that it is at least two to three years old.

The dump, labeled “Collection #1” and approximately 87GB in size, was first detailed earlier today by Troy Hunt, who operates the HaveIBeenPwned breach notification service. Hunt said the data cache was likely “made up of many different individual data breaches from literally thousands of different sources.”

KrebsOnSecurity sought perspective on this discovery from Alex Holden, CTO of Hold Security, a company that specializes in trawling underground spaces for intelligence about malicious actors and their stolen data dumps. Holden said the data appears to have first been posted to underground forums in October 2018, and that it is just a subset of a much larger tranche of passwords being peddled by a shadowy seller online.

Here’s a screenshot of a subset of that seller’s current offerings, which total almost 1 Terabyte of stolen and hacked passwords:

The 87GB “Collection1” archive is one of but many similar tranches of stolen passwords being sold by a particularly prolific ne’er-do-well in the underground.

As we can see above, Collection #1 offered by this seller is indeed 87GB in size. He also advertises a Telegram username where he can be reached — “Sanixer.” So, naturally, KrebsOnSecurity contacted Sanixer via Telegram to find out more about the origins of Collection #1, which he is presently selling for the bargain price of just $45.

Sanixer said Collection#1 consists of data pulled from a huge number of hacked sites, and was not exactly his “freshest” offering. Rather, he sort of steered me away from that archive, suggesting that — unlike most of his other wares — Collection #1 was at least 2-3 years old. His other password packages, which he said are not all pictured in the above screen shot and total more than 4 terabytes in size, are less than a year old, Sanixer explained.

By way of explaining the provenance of Collection #1, Sanixer said it was a mix of “dumps and leaked bases,” and then he offered an interesting screen shot of his additional collections. Click on the image below and notice the open Web browser tab behind his purloined password trove (which is apparently stored at Mega.nz): Troy Hunt’s published research on this 773 million Collection #1.

Sanixer says Collection #1 was from a mix of sources. A description of those sources can be seen in the directory tree on the left side of this screenshot.

Holden said the habit of collecting large amounts of credentials and posting it online is not new at all, and that the data is far more useful for things like phishing, blackmail and other indirect attacks — as opposed to plundering inboxes. Holden added that his company had already derived 99 percent of the data in Collection #1 from other sources.

“It was popularized several years ago by Russian hackers on various Dark Web forums,” he said. “Because the data is gathered from a number of breaches, typically older data, it does not present a direct danger to the general user community. Its sheer volume is impressive, yet, by account of many hackers the data is not greatly useful.”

A core reason so many accounts get compromised is that far too many people have the nasty habit(s) of choosing poor passwords, re-using passwords and email addresses across multiple sites, and not taking advantage of multi-factor authentication options when they are available.

If this Collection #1 has you spooked, changing your password(s) certainly can’t hurt — unless of course you’re in the habit of re-using passwords. Please don’t do that. As we can see from the offering above, your password is probably worth way more to you than it is to cybercriminals (in the case of Collection #1, just .000002 cents per password). Continue reading

“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

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