How to Opt Out of Equifax Revealing Your Salary History

November 13, 2017
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A KrebsOnSecurity series on how easy big-three credit bureau Equifax makes it to get detailed salary history data on tens of millions of Americans apparently inspired a deeper dive on the subject by Fast Company, which examined how this Equifax division has been one of the company’s best investments. In this post, I’ll show you how to opt out of yet another Equifax service that makes money at the expense of your privacy.

My original report showed how the salary history for tens of millions of employees at some of the world’s largest corporations was available to anyone armed with an employee’s Social Security number and date of birth — information that was stolen on 145.5 million Americans in the recent breach at Equifax.

Equifax took down their salary portal — a service from the company’s Workforce Solutions division known as The Work Number (formerly “TALX“) — just a few hours after my story went live on Oct. 8. The company explained that the site was being disabled for routine maintenance, but Equifax didn’t fully reopen the portal until Nov. 2, following the addition of unspecified “security improvements.”

Fast Company writer Joel Winston’s story examines how some 70,000 companies — including Amazon, AT&T, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, Twitter and Wal-Mart — actually pay Equifax to collect, organize, and re-sell their employees’ personal income information and work history.

“A typical employee at Facebook (which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp) may require verification of his employment through TALX when he leases an apartment, updates his immigration status, applies for a loan or public aid, or applies for a new job,” Winston writes. “If his new prospective employer is among the 70,000 approved entities in Equifax’s verifier network with a “permissible purpose,” that company can purchase his employment and income information for about $20.”

While this may sound like a nice and legitimate use of salary data, the point of my original report was that this salary data is also available to anyone who has the Social Security number and date of birth on virtually any person who once worked at a company that uses this Equifax service.

In May 2017, KrebsOnSecurity broke the story of how this same Equifax Workforce portal was abused for an entire year by identity thieves involved in tax refund fraud with the Internal Revenue Service. Fraudsters used SSN and DOB data to reset the 4-digit PINs given to customer employees as a password, and then steal W-2 tax data after successfully answering personal questions about those employees.

Curiously, Equifax claims they have no evidence that anyone was harmed as a result of the year-long pattern of tax fraud related to how easy it was to coax salary and payroll data out of its systems.

“We do not know of any specific fraud incidents linked with the Work Number,” Equifax spokeswoman Marisa Salcines told Fast Company.

This statement sounds suspiciously like what big-three credit bureau Experian told lawmakers in 2014 after they were hauled up to Capitol Hill to explain another breach that was scooped by KrebsOnSecurity: That a Vietnamese man who ran an identity theft service which catered to tax refund fraudsters had access for nine months to more than 200 million consumer records maintained by Experian.

Experian’s suits told lawmakers that no consumers were harmed even as the U.S. Secret Service was busy arresting customers of this identity theft service — nearly all of whom were involved in tax refund fraud and other forms of consumer ID theft. Continue reading →

Hack of Attack-for-Hire Service vDOS Snares New Mexico Man

November 10, 2017
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A New Mexico man is facing federal hacking charges for allegedly using the now defunct attack-for-hire service vDOS to launch damaging digital assaults aimed at knocking his former employer’s Web site offline. Prosecutors were able to bring the case in part because vDOS got massively hacked last year, and its customer database of payments and targets leaked to this author and to the FBI.

Prosecutors in Minnesota have charged John Kelsey Gammell, 46, with using vDOS and other online attack services to hurl a year’s worth of attack traffic at the Web sites associated with Washburn Computer Group, a Minnesota-based company where Gammell used to work.

vDOS as it existed on Sept. 8, 2016.

vDOS existed for nearly four years, and was known as one of the most powerful and effective pay-to-play tools for launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The vDOS owners used a variety of methods to power their service, including at least one massive botnet consisting of tens of thousands of hacked Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as compromised Internet routers and security cameras. vDOS also was used in numerous DDoS attacks against this site.

Investigators allege that although Gammell used various methods to hide his identity, email addresses traced back to him were found in the hacked user and target databases from vDOS.

More importantly, prosecutors say, someone began taunting Washburn via Yahoo and Gmail messages while the attacks were underway, asking how everything was going at the company and whether the IT department needed any help.

“Also attached to this second email was an image of a mouse laughing,” the Justice Department indictment (PDF) alleges. “Grand jury subpoenas for subscriber information were subsequently served on Google…and Yahoo. Analysis of the results showed information connecting both accounts to an individual named John Gammell. Both email addresses were created using the cell phone number 612-205-8609.”

The complaint notes that the government subpoenaed AT&T for subscriber information and traced that back to Gammell as well, but phone number also is currently listed as the recovery number for a Facebook account tied to John K. Gammell.

That Facebook account features numerous references to the hacker collective known as Anonymous. This is notable because according to the government Gammell used two different accounts at vDOS: One named “AnonCunnilingus” and another called “anonrooster.” The email addresses this user supplied when signing up at vDOS (jkgammell@gmail.com and jkgammell@icloud.com) include other addresses quite clearly tied to multiple accounts for John K. Gammell.

John K. Gammell’s Facebook account.

Below is a snippet from a customer service ticket that the AnonCunnilingus account filed in Aug. 2015

“Dear Colleagues, this is Mr. Cunnilingus. You underestimate your capabilities. Contrary to your statement of “Notice!” It appears from our review that you are trying to stress test a DDoS protected host, vDOS stresser is not capable of taking DDoS protected hosts down which means you will not be able to drop this hosting using vDOS stresser…As they do not have my consent to use my internet, after their site being down for two days, they changed their IP and used rackspace DDoS mitigation and must now be removed from cyberspace. Verified by downbyeveryone. We will do much business. Thank you for your outstanding product 🙂 We Are Anonymous USA.”

Gammell has pleaded not guilty to the charges. He has not responded to requests for comment. The indictment states that Gammell allegedly attacked at least a half-dozen other companies over a year-long period between mid-2015 and July 2016, including several banks and two other companies at which he either previously worked or with whom he’d interviewed for a job. Continue reading →

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DDoS-for-Hire Service Launches Mobile App

November 9, 2017
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In May 2013 KrebsOnSecurity wrote about Ragebooter, a service that paying customers can use to launch powerful distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks capable of knocking individuals and Web sites offline. The owner of Ragebooter subsequently was convicted in 2016 of possessing child pornography, but his business somehow lived on while he was in prison. Now just weeks after Poland made probation, a mobile version of the attack-for-hire service has gone up for sale on the Google Play store.

In the story Ragebooter: ‘Legit’ DDoS Service, or Fed Backdoor, I profiled then 19-year-old Justin D. Poland from Memphis — who admitted to installing code on his Ragebooter service that allowed FBI investigators to snoop on his customers.

Last February, Poland was convicted of one felony count of possession of child pornography, after investigators reportedly found 2,600 child pornography images on one of his computers. Before his trial was over, Poland skipped town but his bondsman later located him at his mother’s house. He was sentenced to two years in jail.

Poland did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but on his Facebook account Poland said the images belonged to his former roommate — David Starliper — who’d allegedly used Poland’s computer. Starliper also was convicted of possessing child pornography and sentenced to two years in prison.

In September 2017, Poland began posting on his Facebook account that he had made parole and was getting ready to be released from prison. On Oct. 6, the first version of the Android edition of Ragebooter was put on sale at Google’s Play Store.

The mobile version of Ragebooter.

Poland’s Facebook page says he is the owner of ragebooter[dot]com, ragebooter[dot]net, and another site called vmdeploy[net]. The advertisement for Ragebooter’s new mobile app on Google Play says the developer’s email address is contact@rageservices[dot]net. The registration details for rageservices[dot]net are hidden, but the Web site lists some useful contact details.

One of them is a phone number registered in Memphis — 901-219-3644 — that is tied to a Facebook account for an Alex Slovak in Memphis. The other domain Poland mentions on his Facebook page — vmdeploy[dot]net — was registered to an Alex Czech from Memphis. It seems likely that Alex has been running Ragebooter while Poland was in prison. Mr. Slovak/Czech did not respond to requests for comment, but it is clear from his Facebook page that he is friends with Poland’s family. Continue reading →

Simple Banking Security Tip: Verbal Passwords

November 6, 2017
73 Comments

There was a time when I was content to let my bank authenticate me over the phone by asking for some personal identifiers (SSN/DOB) that are broadly for sale in the cybercrime underground. At some point, however, I decided this wasn’t acceptable for institutions that held significant chunks of our money, and I began taking our business away from those that wouldn’t let me add a simple verbal passphrase that needed to be uttered before any account details could be discussed over the phone.

Most financial institutions will let customers add verbal passwords or personal identification numbers (PINs) that are separate from any other PIN or online banking password you might use, although few will advertise this.

Even so, many institutions don’t properly train their customer support staff (or have high turnover in that department). This can allow clever and insistent crooks to coax customer service reps into validating the call with just the SSN and/or date of birth, or requiring the correct answers to so-called knowledge-based authentication (KBA) questions.

As noted in several stories here previously, identity thieves can reliably work around KBA because it involves answering  questions about things like previous loans, addresses and co-residents — information that can often be gleaned from online services or social media.

A few years ago, I began testing financial institutions that held our personal assets. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that most of them were happy to add a PIN or pass phrase to the account. But many of the customer service personnel at those institutions failed in their responses when I called in and said I didn’t remember the phrase and was there any other way they could verify that I was me?

Ultimately, I ended up moving our investments to an institution that consistently adhered to my requirements. Namely, that failing to provide the pass phrase required an in-person visit to a bank branch to continue the transaction, at which time ID would be requested. Their customer service folks consistently asked the right questions, and weren’t interested in being much helpful otherwise (I’m not going to name the institution for obvious reasons).

Not sure whether your financial institution supports verbal passwords? Ask them. If they agree to set one up for you, take a moment or two over the next few days to call in and see if you can get the customer service folks at that institution to talk about your account without hearing that password. Continue reading →

2nd Breach at Verticalscope Impacts Millions

November 3, 2017
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For the second time in as many years, hackers have compromised Verticalscope.com, a Canadian company that manages hundreds of popular Web discussion forums totaling more than 45 million user accounts. Evidence of the breach was discovered just before someone began using that illicit access as a commercial for a new paid search service that indexes consumer information exposed in corporate data breaches.

Toronto-based Verticalscope runs a network of sites that cater to automotive, pets, sports and technology markets. Verticalscope acknowledged in June 2016 that a hacking incident led to the siphoning of 45 million user accounts. Now, it appears the company may have been hit again, this time in a breach involving at least 2.7 million user accounts.

On Thursday, KrebsOnSecurity was contacted by Alex Holden, a security researcher and founder of Hold Security. Holden saw evidence of hackers selling access to Verticalscope.com and to a host of other sites operated by the company.

Holden said at first he suspected someone was merely trying to resell data stolen in the 2016 breach. But that was before he contacted one of the hackers selling the data and was given screen shots indicating that Verticalscope.com and several other properties were in fact compromised with a backdoor known as a “Web shell.”

A backdoor “Web shell” discovered on Verticalscope.com this week.

With a Web shell installed on a site, anyone can remotely administer the site, upload and delete content at will, or dump entire databases of information — such as usernames, passwords, email addresses and Internet addresses associated with each account.

Holden said the intruders obfuscated certain details in the screenshots that gave away exactly where the Web shells were hidden on Verticalscope.com, but that they forgot to blur out a few critical details — allowing him to locate at least two backdoors on Veriticalscope’s Web site. He also was able to do the same with a second screen shot the hackers shared which showed a similar backdoor shell on Toyotanation.com, one of Verticalscope’s most-visited forums.

Reached for comment about the claims, Verticalscope said the company had detected an intrusion on six of its Web sites, including Toyotanation.com.

“The intrusion granted access to each individual website files,” reads a statement shared by Verticalscope. “Out of an abundance of caution, we have removed the file manager, expired all passwords on the 6 websites in question, added the malicious file pattern and attack vector to our detection tools, and taken additional steps to lock down access.”

Verticalscope said the other forums impacted included Jeepforum.com — the company’s second most-popular site; and watchuseek.com, a forum for wristwatch enthusiasts. Continue reading →

Equifax Reopens Salary Lookup Service

November 2, 2017
58 Comments

Equifax has re-opened a Web site that lets anyone look up the salary history of a large portion of the American workforce using little more than a person’s Social Security number and their date of birth. The big-three credit bureau took the site down just hours after I wrote about it on Oct. 8, and began restoring the site eight days later saying it had added unspecified “security enhancements.”

The Work Number, Equifax’s salary and employment history portal.

At issue is a service provided by Equifax’s TALX division called The Work Number. The service is designed to provide automated employment and income verification for prospective employers, and tens of thousands of companies report employee salary data to it. The Work Number also allows anyone whose employer uses the service to provide proof of their income when purchasing a home or applying for a loan.

What’s needed to access your salary and employment history? Go here, and enter the employer name or employer code. After that, it asks for a “user ID.” This might sound like privileged information, but in most cases this is just the employees’s Social Security number (or a portion of it).

At the next step, the site asks visitors to “enter your PIN,” short for Personal Identification Number. However, in the vast majority of cases this appears to be little more than someone’s eight-digit date of birth. The formats differ by employer, but it’s usually either yyyy/mm/dd or mm/dd/yyyy, without the slashes.

Successful validation to the system produces two sets of data: An employee’s salary and employment history going back at least a decade, and a report listing all of the entities (ostensibly, the aforementioned “credentialed verifiers”) that have previously requested and viewed this information.

In a story in the financial industry publication National Mortgage News, Equifax said:  “As access to the employee portal is restored, individuals must be re-authenticated and establish a unique PIN. Therefore, the data exposed in the cyber incident will not be sufficient to access The Work Number.” Continue reading →

Fear the Reaper, or Reaper Madness?

October 27, 2017
18 Comments

Last week we looked at reports from China and Israel about a new “Internet of Things” malware strain called “Reaper” that researchers said infected more than a million organizations by targeting newfound security weaknesses in countless Internet routers, security cameras and digital video recorders (DVRs). Now some botnet experts are calling on people to stop the “Reaper Madness,” saying the actual number of IoT devices infected with Reaper right now is much smaller.

Arbor Networks said it believes the size of the Reaper botnet currently fluctuates between 10,000 and 20,000 bots total. Arbor notes that this can change any time.

Reaper was based in part on “Mirai,” IoT malware code designed to knock Web sites offline in high-powered data floods, and an IoT malware strain that powered most of the largest cyberattacks of the past year. So it’s worrisome to think someone may have just built an army of a million IoT drones that could be used in crippling, coordinated assaults capable of wiping most networks offline.

If criminals haven’t yet built a million-strong botnet using the current pool of vulnerable devices, they certainly have the capacity to do so.

“An additional 2 million hosts have been identified by the botnet scanners as potential Reaper nodes, but have not been subsumed into the botnet,” Arbor’s ASERT team wrote, explaining that the coders may have intentionally slowed the how quickly the malware can spread to keep it quiet and under the radar.

Arbor says Reaper is likely being built to serve as the machine powering a giant attack-for-hire service known as a “booter” or “stresser” service.

“Our current assessment of Reaper is that it is likely intended for use as a booter/stresser service primarily serving the intra-China DDoS-for-hire market,” Arbor wrote. “Reaper appears to be a product of the Chinese criminal underground; some of the general Reaper code is based on the Mirai IoT malware, but it is not an outright Mirai clone.” Continue reading →

Dell Lost Control of Key Customer Support Domain for a Month in 2017

October 24, 2017
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A Web site set up by PC maker Dell Inc. to help customers recover from malicious software and other computer maladies may have been hijacked for a few weeks this summer by people who specialize in deploying said malware, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

There is a program installed on virtually all Dell computers called “Dell Backup and Recovery Application.” It’s designed to help customers restore their data and computers to their pristine, factory default state should a problem occur with the device. That backup and recovery program periodically checks a rather catchy domain name — DellBackupandRecoveryCloudStorage.com — which until recently was central to PC maker Dell’s customer data backup, recovery and cloud storage solutions.

Sometime this summer, DellBackupandRecoveryCloudStorage.com was suddenly snatched away from a longtime Dell contractor for a month and exposed to some questionable content. More worryingly, there are signs the domain may have been pushing malware before Dell’s contractor regained control over it.

Image: Wikipedia

The purpose of DellBackupandRecoveryCloudStorage.com is inscribed in the hearts of countless PCs that Dell shipped customers over the past few years. The domain periodically gets checked by the “Dell Backup and Recovery application,” which “enables the user to backup and restore their data with just a few clicks.”

This program comes in two versions: Basic and Premium, explains “Jesse L,” a Dell customer liaison and a blogger on the company’s site.

“The Basic version comes pre-installed on all systems and allows the user to create the system recovery media and take a backup of the factory installed applications and drivers,”Jesse L writes. “It also helps the user to restore the computer to the factory image in case of an OS issue.”

Dell customer liaison Jesse L. talks about how the program in question is by default installed on all Dell PCs.

In other words: If DellBackupandRecoveryCloudStorage.com were to fall into the wrong hands it could be used to foist malicious software on Dell users seeking solace and refuge from just such nonsense!

It’s not yet clear how or why DellBackupandRecoveryCloudStorage.com got away from SoftThinks.com —  an Austin, Tex.-based software backup and imaging solutions provider that originally registered the domain back in mid-2013 and has controlled it for most of the time since. But someone at SoftThinks apparently forgot to renew the domain in mid-June 2017.

SoftThinks lists Dell among some of its “great partners” (see screenshot below). It hasn’t responded to requests for comment. Some of its other partners include Best Buy and Radio Shack.

Some of SoftThinks’ partners. Source: SoftThinks.com

From early June to early July 2017, DellBackupandRecoveryCloudStorage.com was the property of Dmitrii Vassilev of  “TeamInternet.com,” a company listed in Germany that specializes in selling what appears to be typosquatting traffic. Team Internet also appears to be tied to a domain monetization business called ParkingCrew.

If you’re not sure what typosquatting is, think of what sometimes happens when you’re typing out a URL in the browser’s address field and you fat-finger a single character and suddenly get redirected to the kind of content that makes you look around quickly to see if anyone saw you looking at it. For more on Team Internet, see this enlightening Aug. 2017 post from Chris Baker at internet infrastructure firm Dyn.  Continue reading →

Reaper: Calm Before the IoT Security Storm?

October 23, 2017
46 Comments

It’s been just over a year since the world witnessed some of the world’s top online Web sites being taken down for much of the day by “Mirai,” a zombie malware strain that enslaved “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices such as wireless routers, security cameras and digital video recorders for use in large-scale online attacks.

Now, experts are sounding the alarm about the emergence of what appears to be a far more powerful strain of IoT attack malware — variously named “Reaper” and “IoTroop” — that spreads via security holes in IoT software and hardware. And there are indications that over a million organizations may be affected already.

Reaper isn’t attacking anyone yet. For the moment it is apparently content to gather gloom to itself from the darkest reaches of the Internet. But if history is any teacher, we are likely enjoying a period of false calm before another humbling IoT attack wave breaks.

On Oct. 19, 2017, researchers from Israeli security firm CheckPoint announced they’ve been tracking the development of a massive new IoT botnet “forming to create a cyber-storm that could take down the Internet.” CheckPoint said the malware, which it called “IoTroop,” had already infected an estimated one million organizations.

The discovery came almost a year to the day after the Internet witnessed one of the most impactful cyberattacks ever — against online infrastructure firm Dyn at the hands of “Mirai,” an IoT malware strain that first surfaced in the summer of 2016. According to CheckPoint, however, this new IoT malware strain is “evolving and recruiting IoT devices at a far greater pace and with more potential damage than the Mirai botnet of 2016.”

Unlike Mirai — which wriggles into vulnerable IoT devices using factory-default or hard-coded usernames and passwords — this newest IoT threat leverages at least nine known security vulnerabilities across nearly a dozen different device makers, including AVTECH, D-Link, GoAhead, Netgear, and Linksys, among others (click each vendor’s link to view security advisories for the flaws).

This graphic from CheckPoint charts a steep, recent rise in the number of Internet addresses trying to spread the new IoT malware variant, which CheckPoint calls “IoTroop.”

Both Mirai and IoTroop are computer worms; they are built to spread automatically from one infected device to another. Researchers can’t say for certain what IoTroop will be used for but it is based at least in part on Mirai, which was made to launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

While DDoS attacks target a single Web site or Internet host, they often result in widespread collateral Internet disruption. IoT malware spreads by scanning the Internet for other vulnerable devices, and sometimes this scanning activity is so aggressive that it constitutes an unintended DDoS on the very home routers, Web cameras and DVRs that the bot code is trying to subvert and recruit into the botnet.

However, according to research released Oct. 20 by Chinese security firm Netlab 360, the scanning performed by the new IoT malware strain (Netlab calls it the more memorable “Reaper”) is not very aggressive, and is intended to spread much more deliberately than Mirai. Netlab’s researchers say Reaper partially borrows some Mirai source code, but is significantly different from Mirai in several key behaviors, including an evolution that allows Reaper to more stealthily enlist new recruits and more easily fly under the radar of security tools looking for suspicious activity on the local network. Continue reading →

What You Should Know About the ‘KRACK’ WiFi Security Weakness

October 16, 2017
139 Comments

Researchers this week published information about a newfound, serious weakness in WPA2 — the security standard that protects all modern Wi-Fi networks. What follows is a short rundown on what exactly is at stake here, who’s most at-risk from this vulnerability, and what organizations and individuals can do about it.

wifi

Short for Wi-Fi Protected Access II, WPA2 is the security protocol used by most wireless networks today. Researchers have discovered and published a flaw in WPA2 that allows anyone to break this security model and steal data flowing between your wireless device and the targeted Wi-Fi network, such as passwords, chat messages and photos.

“The attack works against all modern protected Wi-Fi networks,” the researchers wrote of their exploit dubbed “KRACK,” short for “Key Reinstallation AttaCK.”

“Depending on the network configuration, it is also possible to inject and manipulate data,” the researchers continued. “For example, an attacker might be able to inject ransomware or other malware into websites. The weaknesses are in the Wi-Fi standard itself, and not in individual products or implementations. Therefore, any correct implementation of WPA2 is likely affected.”

What that means is the vulnerability potentially impacts a wide range of devices including those running operating systems from Android, Apple, Linux, OpenBSD and Windows.

As scary as this attack sounds, there are several mitigating factors at work here. First off, this is not an attack that can be pulled off remotely: An attacker would have to be within range of the wireless signal between your device and a nearby wireless access point.

More importantly, most sensitive communications that might be intercepted these days, such as interactions with your financial institution or browsing email, are likely already protected end-to-end with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption that is separate from any encryption added by WPA2 — i.e., any connection in your browser that starts with “https://”.

Also, the public announcement about this security weakness was held for weeks in order to give Wi-Fi hardware vendors a chance to produce security updates. The Computer Emergency Readiness Team has a running list of hardware vendors that are known to be affected by this, as well as links to available advisories and patches.

“There is no evidence that the vulnerability has been exploited maliciously, and Wi-Fi Alliance has taken immediate steps to ensure users can continue to count on Wi-Fi to deliver strong security protections,” reads a statement published today by a Wi-Fi industry trade group. “This issue can be resolved through straightforward software updates, and the Wi-Fi industry, including major platform providers, has already started deploying patches to Wi-Fi users. Users can expect all their Wi-Fi devices, whether patched or unpatched, to continue working well together.”

Sounds great, but in practice a great many products on the CERT list are currently designated “unknown” as to whether they are vulnerable to this flaw. I would expect this list to be updated in the coming days and weeks as more information comes in.

Some readers have asked if MAC address filtering will protect against this attack. Every network-capable device has a hard-coded, unique “media access control” or MAC address, and most Wi-Fi routers have a feature that lets you only allow access to your network for specified MAC addresses.

However, because this attack compromises the WPA2 protocol that both your wireless devices and wireless access point use, MAC filtering is not a particularly effective deterrent against this attack. Also, MAC addresses can be spoofed fairly easily.

To my mind, those most at risk from this vulnerability are organizations that have not done a good job separating their wireless networks from their enterprise, wired networks. Continue reading →