Krebs on Security

Trump Hotels Hit By 3rd Card Breach in 2 Years

July 19, 2017

Maybe some of you missed this amid all the breach news recently (I know I did), but Trump International Hotels Management LLC last week announced its third credit-card data breach in the past two years. I thought it might be useful to see these events plotted on a timeline, because it suggests that virtually anyone who used a credit card at a Trump property in the past two years likely has had their card data stolen and put on sale in the cybercrime underground as a result.

On May 2, 2017, KrebsOnSecurity broke the story that travel industry giant Sabre Corp. experienced a significant breach of its payment and customer data tied to bookings processed through a reservations system that serves more than 32,000 hotels and other lodging establishments. Last week, Trump International Hotels disclosed the SABRE breach impacted at least 13 Trump Hotel properties between August 2016 and March 2017. Trump Hotels said it was first notified of the breach on June 5.

A timeline of Trump Hotels’ credit card woes over the past two years. Click to enlarge.

According to Verizon‘s latest annual Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), malware attacks on point-of-sale systems used at front desk and hotel restaurant systems “are absolutely rampant” in the hospitality sector. Accommodation was the top industry for point-of-sale intrusions in this year’s data, with 87% of breaches within that pattern.

Other hotel chains that disclosed this past week getting hit in the Sabre breach include 11 Hard Rock properties (another chain hit by multiple card breach incidents); Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts; and at least two dozen Loews Hotels in the United States and Canada.

ANALYSIS/RANT

Given its abysmal record of failing to protect customer card data, you might think the hospitality industry would be anxious to assuage guests who may already be concerned that handing over their card at the hotel check-in desk also means consigning that card to cybercrooks (e.g. at underground carding shops like Trumps Dumps).

However, so far this year I’ve been hard-pressed to find any of the major hotel chains that accept more secure chip-based cards, which are designed to make card data stolen by point-of-sale malware and skimmers much more difficult to turn into counterfeit cards. I travel quite a bit — at least twice a month — and I have yet to experience a single U.S.-based hotel in the past year asking me to dip my chip-based card as opposed to swiping it.

A carding shop that sells stolen credit cards and invokes 45’s likeness and name. No word yet on whether this cybercriminal store actually sold any cards stolen from Trump Hotel properties.

True, chip cards alone aren’t going to solve the whole problem. Hotels and other merchants that implement the ability to process chip cards still need to ensure the data is encrypted at every step of the transaction (known as “point-to-point” or “end-to-end” encryption). Investing in technology like tokenization — which allows merchants to store a code that represents the customer’s card data instead of the card data itself — also can help companies become less of a target.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so irksome if those of us concerned about security or annoyed enough at getting our cards replaced three or four times a year due to fraud could stay at a major hotel chain in the United States and simply pay with cash. But alas, we’re talking about an industry that essentially requires customers to pay by credit card.

Well, at least I’ll continue to accrue reward points on my credit card that I can use toward future rounds of Russian roulette with the hotel’s credit card systems.

It’s bad enough that cities and states routinely levy huge taxes on lodging establishments (the idea being the tax is disproportionately paid by people who don’t vote or live in the area); now we have the industry-wide “carder tax” conveniently added to every stay.

What’s the carder tax you ask? It’s the sense of dread and the incredulous “really?” that wells up when one watches his chip card being swiped yet again at the check-out counter.

It’s the time wasted on the phone with your bank trying to sort out whether you really made all those fraudulent purchases, and then having to enter your new card number at all those sites and services where the old one was stored. It’s that awkward moment when the waiter says in front of your date or guests that your card has been declined. Continue reading →

Experts in Lather Over ‘gSOAP’ Security Flaw

July 18, 2017

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Axis Communications — a maker of high-end security cameras whose devices can be found in many high-security areas — recently patched a dangerous coding flaw in virtually all of its products that an attacker could use to remotely seize control over or crash the devices.

The problem wasn’t specific to Axis, which seems to have reacted far more quickly than competitors to quash the bug. Rather, the vulnerability resides in open-source, third-party computer code that has been used in countless products and technologies (including a great many security cameras), meaning it may be some time before most vulnerable vendors ship out a fix — and even longer before users install it. cam2cam

At issue is a flaw in a bundle of reusable code (often called a “code library“) known as gSOAP, a widely-used toolkit that software or device makers can use so that their creations can talk to the Internet (or “parse XML” for my geek readers). By some estimates, there are hundreds — if not thousands — of security camera types and other so-called “Internet of Things”(IoT) devices that rely upon the vulnerable gSOAP code.

By exploiting the bug, an attacker could force a vulnerable device to run malicious code, block the owner from viewing any video footage, or crash the system. Basically, lots of stuff you don’t want your pricey security camera system to be doing.

Genivia, the company that maintains gSOAP, released an update on June 21, 2017 that fixes the flaw. In short order, Axis released a patch to plug the gSOAP hole in nearly 250 of its products.

Genivia chief executive Robert Van Engelen said his company has already reached out to all of its customers about the issue. He said a majority of customers use the gSOAP software to develop products, but that mostly these are client-side applications or non-server applications that are not affected by this software crash issue.

“It’s a crash, not an exploit as far as we know,” Van Engelen said. “I estimate that over 85% of the applications are unlikely to be affected by this crash issue.”

Still, there are almost certainly dozens of other companies that use the vulnerable gSOAP code library and haven’t (or won’t) issue updates to fix this flaw, says Stephen Ridley, chief technology officer and founder of Senrio — the security company that discovered and reported the bug. What’s more, because the vulnerable code is embedded within device firmware (the built-in software that powers hardware), there is no easy way for end users to tell if the firmware is affected without word one way or the other from the device maker.

“It is likely that tens of millions of products — software products and connected devices — are affected by this,” Ridley said.

“Genivia claims to have more than 1 million downloads of gSOAP (most likely developers), and IBM, Microsoft, Adobe and Xerox as customers,” the Senrio report reads. “On Sourceforge, gSOAP was downloaded more than 1,000 times in one week, and 30,000 times in 2017. Once gSOAP is downloaded and added to a company’s repository, it’s likely used many times for different product lines.”
Continue reading →

Porn Spam Botnet Has Evil Twitter Twin

July 16, 2017

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Last month KrebsOnSecurity published research into a large distributed network of apparently compromised systems being used to relay huge blasts of junk email promoting “online dating” programs — affiliate-driven schemes traditionally overrun with automated accounts posing as women. New research suggests that another bot-promoting botnet of more than 80,000 automated female Twitter accounts has been pimping the same dating scheme and prompting millions of clicks from Twitter users in the process.

One of the 80,000+ Twitter bots ZeroFOX found that were enticing male Twitter users into viewing their profile pages.

Not long after I published Inside a Porn-Pimping Spam Botnet, I heard from researchers at ZeroFOX, a security firm that helps companies block attacks coming through social media.

Zack Allen, manager of threat operations at ZeroFOX, said he had a look at some of the spammy, adult-themed domains being promoted by the botnet in my research and found they were all being promoted through a botnet of bogus Twitter accounts.

Those phony Twitter accounts all featured images of attractive or scantily-clad women, and all were being promoted via suggestive tweets, Allen said.

Anyone who replied was ultimately referred to subscription-based online dating sites run by Deniro Marketing, a company based in California. This was the same company that was found to be the beneficiary of spam from the porn botnet I’d written about in June. Deniro did not respond to requests for comment.

“We’ve been tracking this thing since February 2017, and we concluded that the social botnet controllers are probably not part of Deniro Marketing, but most likely are affiliates,” Allen said.

ZeroFOX found more than 86,262 Twitter accounts were responsible for more than 8.6 million posts on Twitter promoting porn-based sites, many of them promoting domains in a swath of Internet address space owned by Deniro Marketing (ASN19884).

Allen said 97.4% of bot display names had the pattern “Firstname Surname” with the first letters of each name capitalized, and each name separated by a single whitespace character that corresponded to common female names.

An analysis of the Twitter bot names used in the scheme. Graphic: ZeroFOX.

The accounts advertise adult content by routinely injecting links from their twitter profiles to a popular hashtag, or by @-mentioning a popular user or influencer on Twitter. Those profile links are shortened with Google’s goo.gl link shortening service, which then redirects to a free hosting domain in the dot-tk (.tk) domain space (.tk is the country code for Tokelau — a group of atolls in the South Pacific).

From there the system is smart enough to redirect users back to Twitter if they appear to be part of any automated attempt to crawl the links (e.g. by using site download and mirroring tools like cURL), the researchers found. They said this was likely a precaution on the part of the spammers to avoid detection by automated scanners looking for bot activity on Twitter. Requests from visitors who look like real users responding to tweets are redirected to the porn spam sites.

Because the links promoted by those spammy Twitter accounts all abused short link services from Twitter and Google, the researchers were able to see that this entire botnet has generated more than 30 million unique clicks from February to June 2017. Continue reading →

Thieves Used Infrared to Pull Data from ATM ‘Insert Skimmers’

July 13, 2017

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A greater number of ATM skimming incidents now involve so-called “insert skimmers,” wafer-thin fraud devices made to fit snugly and invisibly inside a cash machine’s card acceptance slot. New evidence suggests that at least some of these insert skimmers — which record card data and store it on a tiny embedded flash drive — are equipped with technology allowing them to transmit stolen card data wirelessly via infrared, the same communications technology that powers a TV remote control.

Last month the Oklahoma City metropolitan area experienced rash of ATM attacks involving insert skimmers. The local KFOR news channel on June 28, 2017 ran a story stating that at least four banks in the area were hit with insert skimmers.

The story quoted a local police detective saying “the skimmer contains an antenna which transmits your card information to a tiny camera hidden somewhere outside the ATM.”

Financial industry sources tell KrebsOnSecurity that preliminary analysis of the insert skimmers used in the attacks suggests they were configured to transmit stolen card data wirelessly to the hidden camera using infrared, a short-range communications technology most commonly found in television remote controls.

Here’s a look at one of the insert skimmers that Oklahoma authorities recently seized from a compromised ATM:

An insert skimmer retrieved from a compromised cash machine in Oklahoma City. Image: KrebsOnSecurity.com.

In such an attack, the hidden camera has a dual function: To record time-stamped videos of ATM users entering their PINs; and to receive card data recorded and transmitted by the insert skimmer. In this scenario, the fraudster could leave the insert skimmer embedded in the ATM’s card acceptance slot, and merely swap out the hidden camera whenever its internal battery is expected to be depleted.

Of course, the insert skimmer also operates on an embedded battery, but according to my sources the skimmer in question was designed to turn on only when someone uses the cash machine, thereby preserving the battery.

Thieves involved in skimming attacks have hidden spy cameras in some pretty ingenious places, such as a brochure rack to the side of the cash machine or a safety mirror affixed above the cash machine (some ATMs legitimately place these mirrors so that customers will be alerted if someone is standing behind them at the machine). Continue reading →

Adobe, Microsoft Push Critical Security Fixes

July 11, 2017

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It’s Patch Tuesday, again. That is, if you run Microsoft Windows or Adobe products. Microsoft issued a dozen patch bundles to fix at least 54 security flaws in Windows and associated software. Separately, Adobe’s got a new version of its Flash Player available that addresses at least three vulnerabilities.

The updates from Microsoft concern many of the usual program groups that seem to need monthly security fixes, including Windows, Internet Explorer, Edge, Office, .NET Framework and Exchange.

According to security firm Qualys, the Windows update that is most urgent for enterprises tackles a critical bug in the Windows Search Service that could be exploited remotely via the SMB file-sharing service built into both Windows workstations and servers.

Qualys says the issue affects Windows Server 2016, 2012, 2008 R2, 2008 as well as desktop systems like Windows 10, 7 and 8.1.

“While this vulnerability can leverage SMB as an attack vector, this is not a vulnerability in SMB itself, and is not related to the recent SMB vulnerabilities leveraged by EternalBlue, WannaCry, and Petya.” Qualys notes, referring to the recent rash of ransomware attacks which leveraged similar vulnerabilities.

Other critical fixes of note in this month’s release from Microsoft include at least three vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s built-in browser — Edge or Internet Explorer depending on your version of Windows. There are at least three serious flaws in these browsers that were publicly detailed prior to today’s release, suggesting that malicious hackers may have had some advance notice on figuring out how to exploit these weaknesses.

As it is accustomed to doing on Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday, Adobe released a new version of its Flash Player browser plugin that addresses a trio of flaws in that program.

The latest update brings Flash to v. 26.0.0.137 for Windows, Mac and Linux users alike. If you have Flash installed, you should update, hobble or remove Flash as soon as possible. To see which version of Flash your browser may have installed, check out this page. Continue reading →

Self-Service Food Kiosk Vendor Avanti Hacked

July 8, 2017

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Avanti Markets, a company whose self-service payment kiosks sit beside shelves of snacks and drinks in thousands of corporate breakrooms across America, has suffered of breach of its internal networks in which hackers were able to push malicious software out to those payment devices, the company has acknowledged. The breach may have jeopardized customer credit card accounts as well as biometric data, Avanti warned.

According to Tukwila, Wash.-based Avanti’s marketing literature, some 1.6 million customers use the company’s break room self-checkout devices — which allow customers to pay for drinks, snacks and other food items with a credit card, fingerprint scan or cash.

An Avanti Markets kiosk. Image: Avanti

Sometime in the last few hours, Avanti published a “notice of data breach” on its Web site.

“On July 4, 2017, we discovered a sophisticated malware attack which affected kiosks at some Avanti Markets. Based on our investigation thus far, and although we have not yet confirmed the root cause of the intrusion, it appears the attackers utilized the malware to gain unauthorized access to customer personal information from some kiosks. Because not all of our kiosks are configured or used the same way, personal information on some kiosks may have been adversely affected, while other kiosks may not have been affected.”

Avanti said it appears the malware was designed to gather certain payment card information including the cardholder’s first and last name, credit/debit card number and expiration date.

Breaches at point-of-sale vendors have become almost regular occurrences over the past few years, but this breach is especially notable as it may also have jeopardized customer biometric data. That’s because the newer Avanti kiosk systems allow users to pay using a scan of their fingerprint.

“In addition, users of the Market Card option may have had their names and email addresses compromised, as well as their biometric information if they used the kiosk’s biometric verification functionality,” the company warned.

On Thursday, KrebsOnSecurity learned from a source at a law firm that the food vending machine in its employee lunchroom was no longer able to accept credit cards. The source said his firm’s information technology personnel told him the credit card functionality had been temporarily disabled because of a breach at Avanti.

Another source told this author that Avanti’s corporate network had been breached, and that Avanti had made the decision to turn off all self-checkouts for now — although the source said customers could still use cash at the machines.

“I was told that about half of the self-checkouts do not have P2Pe,” the source said, on condition of anonymity. P2Pe is short for “point-to-point encryption,” and it’s a technological solution that encrypts sensitive data such as credit card information at every point in the card transaction. In theory, P2Pe should to be able to protect card data even if there is malicious software resident on the device or network in question.

Avanti said in its notice that it had shut down payment processing at some locations, and that the company was working with its operators to purge infected systems of any malware from the attack and to take steps to “substantially minimize the risk of a data compromise in the future.”

THE MALWARE

On Friday evening, security firm RiskAnalytics published a blog post that detailed an experience from a customer who shared a remarkably similar experience to the one referenced by the anonymous law firm source above.

RiskAnalytics’s Noah Dunker wrote that the company’s technology on July 4 flagged suspicious behavior by a break room vending kiosk. Further inspection of the device and communications traffic emanating from it revealed it was infected with a family of point-of-sale malware known as PoSeidon (a.k.a. “FindPOS”) that siphons credit card data from point-of-sale devices.

“In our analysis of the incident, it seems most likely that the larger vendor was compromised, and some or all of the kiosks maintained by local vendors were impacted,” Dunker wrote. “We’ve been able to identify at least two smaller vendors with local operations that have been impacted in two different cities though we are not naming any impacted vendors yet, as we’ve been unable to contact them directly.”

KrebsOnSecurity reached out to RiskAnalytics to see if the vendor of the snack machine used by the victim organization he wrote about also was Avanti. Dunker confirmed that the kiosk vendor that was the subject of his post was indeed Avanti.

Dunker noted that much like point-of-sale devices at many restaurant chains, these snack machines usually are installed and managed by third-party technology companies, adding another layer of complexity to the challenge of securing these devices from hackers.

Dunker said RiskAnalytics first noticed something wasn’t right with its client’s break room snack machine after it began sending data out of the client’s network using an SSL encryption certificate that has long been associated with cybercrime activity — including ransomware activity dating back to 2015.

“This is a textbook example of an ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) threat: A network-connected device, controlled and maintained by a third party, which cannot be easily patched, audited, or controlled by your own IT staff,” Dunker wrote. Continue reading →

B&B Theatres Hit in 2-Year Credit Card Breach

July 7, 2017

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B&B Theatres, a company that owns and operates the 7th-largest theater chain in America, says it is investigating a breach of its credit card systems. The acknowledgment comes just days after KrebsOnSecurity reached out to the company for comment on reports from financial industry sources who said they suspected the cinema chain has been leaking customer credit card data to cyber thieves for the past two years.

bandb Headquartered in Gladstone, Missouri, B&B Theatres operates approximately 400 screens across 50 locations in seven states, including Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Missouri, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.

In a written statement forwarded by B&B spokesman Paul Farnsworth, the company said B&B Theatres was made aware of a potential breach by a local banking partner in one of its communities.

“Upon being notified we immediately engaged Trustwave, a third party security firm recommended to B&B by partners at major credit card brands, to work with our internal I.T. resources to contain the breach and mitigate any further potential penetration,” the statement reads. “While some malware was identified on B&B systems that dated back to 2015, the investigation completed by Trustwave did not conclude that customer data was at risk on all B&B systems for the entirety of the breach.”

The statement continued:

“Trustwave’s investigation has since shown the breach to be contained to the satisfaction of our processing partners as well as the major credit card brands. B&B Theatres values the security of our customer’s data and will continue to implement the latest available technologies to keep our networks & systems secure into the future.”

In June, sources at two separate U.S.-based financial institutions reached out to KrebsOnSecurity about alerts they’d received privately from the credit card associations regarding lists of card numbers that were thought to have been compromised in a recent breach.

The credit card companies generally do not tell financial institutions in these alerts which merchants got breached, leaving banks and credit unions to work backwards from those lists of compromised cards to a so-called “common point-of-purchase” (CPP).

In addition to lists of potentially compromised card numbers, the card associations usually include a “window of exposure” — their best estimate of how long the breach lasted. Two financial industry sources said initial reports from the credit card companies said the window of exposure at B&B Theatres was between Sept. 1, 2015 and April 7, 2017.

However, a more recent update to this advisory shared by my sources shows that the window of exposure is currently estimated between April 2015 and April 2017, meaning cyber thieves have likely been siphoning credit and debit card data from B&B Theatres customers for nearly two years undisturbed. Continue reading →

Who is the GovRAT Author and Mirai Botmaster ‘Bestbuy’?

July 5, 2017

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In February 2017, authorities in the United Kingdom arrested a 29-year-old U.K. man on suspicion of knocking more than 900,000 Germans offline in an attack tied to Mirai, a malware strain that enslaves Internet of Things (IoT) devices like security cameras and Internet routers for use in large-scale cyberattacks. Investigators haven’t yet released the man’s name, but news reports suggest he may be better known by the hacker handle “Bestbuy.” This post will follow a trail of clues back to one likely real-life identity of Bestbuy.

At the end of November 2016, a modified version of Mirai began spreading across the networks of German ISP Deutsche Telekom. This version of the Mirai worm spread so quickly that the very act of scanning for new infectable hosts overwhelmed the devices doing the scanning, causing outages for more than 900,000 customers. The same botnet had previously been tied to attacks on U.K. broadband providers Post Office and Talk Talk.

dtoutage

Security firm Tripwire published a writeup on that failed Mirai attack, noting that the domain names tied to servers used to coordinate the activities of the botnet were registered variously to a “Peter Parker” and “Spider man,” and to a street address in Israel (27 Hofit St). We’ll come back to Spider Man in a moment.

According to multiple security firms, the Mirai botnet responsible for the Deutsche Telekom outage was controlled via servers at the Internet address 62.113.238.138. Farsight Security, a company that maps which domain names are tied to which Internet addresses over time, reports that this address has hosted just nine domains.

The only one of those domains that is not related to Mirai is dyndn-web[dot]com, which according to a 2015 report from BlueCoat (now Symantec) was a domain tied to the use and sale of a keystroke logging remote access trojan (RAT) called “GovRAT.” The trojan is documented to have been used in numerous cyber espionage campaigns against governments, financial institutions, defense contractors and more than 100 corporations.

Another report on GovRAT — this one from security firm InfoArmor — shows that the GovRAT malware was sold on Dark Web cybercrime forums by a hacker or hackers who went by the nicknames BestBuy and “Popopret” (some experts believe these were just two different identities managed by the same cybercriminal).

The hacker “bestbuy” selling his GovRAT trojan on the dark web forum “Hell.” Image: InfoArmor.

GovRAT has been for sale on various other malware and exploit-related sites since at least 2014. On oday[dot]today, for example, GovRAT was sold by a user who picked the nickname Spdr, and who used the email address spdr01@gmail.com.

Recall that the domains used to control the Mirai botnet that hit Deutsche Telekom all had some form of Spider Man in the domain registration records. Also, recall that the controller used to manage the GovRAT trojan and that Mirai botnet were both at one time hosted on the same server with just a handful of other (Mirai-related) domains.

According to a separate report (PDF) from InfoArmor, GovRAT also was sold alongside a service that allows anyone to digitally sign their malware using code-signing certificates stolen from legitimate companies. InfoArmor said the digital signature it found related to the service was issued to an open source developer Singh Aditya, using the email address parkajackets@gmail.com.

Interestingly, both of these email addresses — parkajackets@gmail.com and spdr01@gmail.com — were connected to similarly-named user accounts at vDOS, for years the largest DDoS-for-hire service (that is, until KrebsOnSecurity last fall outed its proprietors as two 18-year-old Israeli men).

Last summer vDOS got massively hacked, and a copy of its user and payments databases was shared with this author and with U.S. federal law enforcement agencies. The leaked database shows that both of those email addresses are tied to accounts on vDOS named “bestbuy” (bestbuy and bestbuy2).

Spdr01’s sales listing for the GovRAT trojan on a malware and exploits site shows he used the email address spdr01@gmail.com

The leaked vDOS database also contained detailed records of the Internet addresses that vDOS customers used to log in to the attack-for-hire service. Those logs show that the bestbuy and bestbuy2 accounts logged in repeatedly from several different IP addresses in the United Kingdom and in Hong Kong.

The technical support logs from vDOS indicate that the reason the vDOS database shows two different accounts named “bestbuy” is the vDOS administrators banned the original “bestbuy” account after it was seen logged into the account from both the UK and Hong Kong. Bestbuy’s pleas to the vDOS administrators that he was not sharing the account and that the odd activity could be explained by his recent trip to Hong Kong did not move them to refund his money or reactivate his original account.

A number of clues in the data above suggest that the person responsible for both this Mirai botnet and GovRAT had ties to Israel. For one thing, the email address spdr01@gmail.com was used to register at least three domain names, all of which are tied back to a large family in Israel. What’s more, in several dark web postings, Bestbuy can be seen asking if anyone has any “weed for sale in Israel,” noting that he doesn’t want to risk receiving drugs in the mail.

The domains tied to spdr01@gmail.com led down a very deep rabbit hole that ultimately went nowhere useful for this investigation. But it appears the nickname “spdr01” and email spdr01@gmail.com was used as early as 2008 by a core member of the Israeli hacking forum and IRC chat room Binaryvision.co.il. Continue reading →

Is it Time to Can the CAN-SPAM Act?

July 2, 2017

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Regulators at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are asking for public comment on the effectiveness of the CAN-SPAM Act, a 14-year-old federal law that seeks to crack down on unsolicited commercial email. Judging from an unscientific survey by this author, the FTC is bound to get an earful.

spamspamspam

Signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2003, the “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act” was passed in response to a rapid increase in junk email marketing.

The law makes it a misdemeanor to spoof the information in the “from:” field of any marketing message, and prohibits the sending of sexually-oriented spam without labeling it “sexually explicit.” The law also requires spammers to offer recipients a way to opt-out of receiving further messages, and to process unsubscribe requests within 10 business days.

The “CAN” in CAN-SPAM was a play on the verb “to can,” as in “to put an end to,” or “to throw away,” but critics of the law often refer to it as the YOU-CAN-SPAM Act, charging that it essentially legalized spamming. That’s partly because the law does not require spammers to get permission before they send junk email. But also because the act prevents states from enacting stronger anti-spam protections, and it bars individuals from suing spammers except under laws not specific to email.

Those same critics often argue that the law is rarely enforced, although a search on the FTC’s site for CAN-SPAM press releases produces quite a few civil suits brought by the commission against marketers over the years. Nevertheless, any law affecting Internet commerce is bound to need a few tweaks over the years, and CAN-SPAM has been showing its age for some time now.

Ron Guilmette, an anti-spam activists whose work has been profiled extensively on this blog, didn’t sugar-coat it, calling CAN-SPAM “a travesty that was foisted upon the American people by a small handful of powerful companies, most notably AOL and Microsoft, and by their obedient lackeys in Congress.”

According to Guilmette, the Act was deliberately fashioned so as to nullify California’s more restrictive anti-spam law, and it made it impossible for individual victims of spam to sue spam senders. Rather, he said, that right was reserved only for the same big companies that lobbied heavily for the passage of the CAN-SPAM Act.

“The entire Act should be thrown out and replaced,” Guilmette said. “It hasn’t worked to control spam, and it has in fact only served to make the problem worse.”

In the fix-it-don’t-junk-it camp is Joe Jerome, policy counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit digital rights advocacy group. Jerome allowed that CAN-SPAM is far from perfect, but he said it has helped to set some ground rules.

“In her announcement on this effort, Acting Chairman Ohlhausen hinted that regulations can be excessive, outdated, or unnecessary,” Jerome said. “Nothing can be further from the case with respect to spam. CAN-SPAM was largely ineffective in stopping absolutely bad, malicious spammers, but it’s been incredibly important in creating a baseline for commercial email senders. Advertising transparency and easy opt-outs should not be viewed as a burden on companies, and I’d worry that weakening CAN-SPAM would set us back. If anything, we need stronger standards around opt-outs and quicker turn-around time, not less.” Continue reading →

So You Think You Can Spot a Skimmer?

June 30, 2017

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This week marks the 50th anniversary of the automated teller machine — better known to most people as the ATM or cash machine. Thanks to the myriad methods thieves have devised to fleece unsuspecting cash machine users over the years, there are now more ways than ever to get ripped off at the ATM. Think you’re good at spotting the various scams? A newly released ATM fraud inspection guide may help you test your knowledge.

The first cash machine opened for business on June 27, 1967 at a Barclays bank branch in Enfield, north London, but ATM transactions back then didn’t remotely resemble the way ATMs work today.

The first ATM was installed in Enfield, in North London, on June 27, 1967. Image: Barclays Bank.

The cash machines of 1967 relied not on plastic cards but instead on paper checks that the bank would send to customers in the mail. Customers would take those checks — which had little punched-card holes printed across the surface — and feed them into the ATM, which would then validate the checks and dispense a small amount of cash.

This week, Barclay’s turned the ATM at the same location into a gold color to mark its golden anniversary, dressing the machine with velvet ropes and a red carpet leading up to the machine’s PIN pad.

The location of the world's first ATM, turned to gold to commemorate the cash machine's golden anniversary. Image: Barclays Bank.

The location of the world’s first ATM, turned to gold and commemorated with a plaque to mark the cash machine’s golden anniversary. Image: Barclays Bank.

Chances are, the users of that gold ATM have little to worry about from skimmer scammers. But the rest of us practically need a skimming-specific dictionary to keep up with today’s increasingly ingenious thieves.

These days there are an estimated three million ATMs around the globe, and a seemingly endless stream of innovative criminal skimming devices has introduced us over the years to a range of terms specific to cash machine scams like wiretapping, eavesdropping, card-trapping, cash-trapping, false fascias, shimming, black box attacks, bladder bombs (pump skimmers), gas attacks, and deep insert skimmers.

Think you’ve got what it takes to spot the telltale signs of a skimmer? Then have a look at the ATM Fraud Inspection Guide (PDF) from cash machine giant NCR Corp., which briefly touches on the most common forms of ATM skimming and their telltale signs.

For example, below are a few snippets from that guide showing different cash trapping devices made to siphon bills being dispensed from the ATM.

Cash-trapping devices. Source: NCR.

Continue reading →

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