Krebs on Security

February Updates from Adobe, Microsoft

February 19, 2017

A handful of readers have inquired as to the whereabouts of Microsoft‘s usual monthly patches for Windows and related software. Microsoft opted to delay releasing any updates until next month, even though there is a zero-day vulnerability in Windows going around. However, Adobe did push out updates this week as per usual to fix critical issues in its Flash Player software.

brokenwindows In a brief statement this week, Microsoft said it “discovered a last minute issue that could impact some customers” that was not resolved in time for Patch Tuesday, which normally falls on the second Tuesday of each month. In an update to that advisory posted on Wednesday, Microsoft said it would deliver February’s batch of patches as part of the next regularly-scheduled Patch Tuesday, which falls on March 14, 2017.

On Feb. 2, the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University warned that an unpatched bug in a core file-sharing component of Windows (SMB) could let attackers crash Windows 8.1, and Windows 10 systems, as well as server equivalents of those platforms. CERT warned that exploit code for the flaw was already available online. Continue reading →

Men Who Sent Swat Team, Heroin to My Home Sentenced

February 17, 2017

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It’s been a remarkable week for cyber justice. On Thursday, a Ukrainian man who hatched a plan in 2013 to send heroin to my home and then call the cops when the drugs arrived was sentenced to 41 months in prison for unrelated cybercrime charges. Separately, a 19-year-old American who admitted to being part of a hacker group that sent a heavily-armed police force to my home in 2013 was sentenced to three years probation.

Sergei “Fly” Vovnenko, in an undated photo. In a letter to this author following his arrest, Vovnenko said he forgave me for “doxing” him — printing his real name and image — on my site.

Sergey Vovnenko, a.k.a. “Fly,” “Flycracker” and “MUXACC1,” pleaded guilty last year to aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Prosecutors said Vovnenko operated a network of more than 13,000 hacked computers, using them to harvest credit card numbers and other sensitive information.

When I first became acquainted with Vovnenko in 2013, Fly was the administrator of the fraud forum “thecc[dot]bz,” an exclusive and closely guarded Russian language board dedicated to financial fraud and identity theft.

After I secretly gained access to his forum, I learned he’d hatched a plot to have heroin sent to my home and to have one of his forum lackeys call the police when the drugs arrived.

I explained this whole ordeal in great detail in 2015, when Vovnenko initially was extradited from Italy to face charges here in the United States. In short, the antics didn’t end when I foiled his plot to get me arrested for drug possession, and those antics likely contributed to his arrest and to this guilty plea.

Vovnenko contested his extradition from Italy, and in so doing spent roughly 15 months in arguably Italy’s worst prison. During that time, he seemed to have turned his life around, sending me postcards at Christmas time and even an apparently heartfelt apology letter.

Seasons greetings from my pen pal, Flycracker.

On Thursday, a judge in New Jersey sentenced Vovnenko to 41 months in prison, three years of supervised released and ordered him to pay restitution of $83,368. Continue reading →

Who Ran Leakedsource.com?

February 15, 2017

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Late last month, multiple news outlets reported that unspecified law enforcement officials had seized the servers for Leakedsource.com, perhaps the largest online collection of usernames and passwords leaked or stolen in some of the worst data breaches — including billions of credentials for accounts at top sites like LinkedIn and Myspace.

In a development that could turn out to be deeply ironic, it seems that the real-life identity of LeakedSource’s principal owner may have been exposed by many of the same stolen databases he’s been peddling.

The now-defunct LeakedSource service.

LeakedSource in October 2015 began selling access to passwords stolen in high-profile breaches. Enter any email address on the site’s search page and it would tell you if it had a password corresponding to that address. However, users had to select a payment plan before viewing any passwords.

LeakedSource was a curiosity to many, and for some journalists a potential source of news about new breaches. But unlike services such as BreachAlarm and HaveIBeenPwned.com — which force users to verify that they can access a given account or inbox before the site displays whether it has found a password associated with the account in question — LeakedSource did nothing to validate users. This fact, critics charged, showed that the proprietors of LeakedSource were purely interested in making money and helping others pillage accounts.

I also was curious about LeakedSource, but for a different reason. I wanted to chase down something I’d heard from multiple sources: That one of the administrators of LeakedSource also was the admin of abusewith[dot]us, a site unabashedly dedicated to helping people hack email and online gaming accounts.

Abusewith[dot]us began in September 2013 as a forum for learning and teaching how to hack accounts at Runescape, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) set in a medieval fantasy realm where players battle for kingdoms and riches.

The currency with which Runescape players buy and sell weapons, potions and other in-game items are virtual gold coins, and many of Abusewith[dot]us’s early members traded in a handful of commodities: Phishing kits and exploits that could be used to steal Runescape usernames and passwords from fellow players; virtual gold plundered from hacked accounts; and databases from hacked forums and Web sites related to Runescape and other online games.

The administrator of Abusewith[dot]us is a hacker who uses the nickname “Xerx3s.” The avatar attached to Xerx3s’s account suggests the name is taken from Xerxes the Great, a Persian king who lived during the fifth century BC.

Xerx3s the hacker appears to be especially good at breaking into discussion forums and accounts dedicated to Runescape and online gaming. Xerx3s also is a major seller of Runescape gold — often sold to other players at steep discounts and presumably harvested from hacked accounts.

Xerx3s’s administrator account profile at Abusewith.us.

I didn’t start looking into who might be responsible for LeakedSource until July 2016, when I sought an interview by reaching out to the email listed on the site (leakedsourceonline@gmail.com). Soon after, I received a Jabber chat invite from the address “leakedsource@chatme.im.”

The entirety of that brief interview is archived here. I wanted to know whether the proprietors of the service believed they were doing anything wrong (we’ll explore more about the legal aspects of LeakedSource’s offerings later in this piece). Also, I wanted to learn whether the rumors of LeakedSource arising out of Abusewith[us] were true.

“After many of the big breaches of 2015, we noticed a common public trend…’Where can I search it to see if I was affected?’,” wrote the anonymous person hiding behind the leakedsource@chatme.im account. “And thus, the idea was born to fill that need, not rising out of anything. We are however going to terminate the interview as it does seem to be more of a witch hunt instead of journalism. Thank you for your time.”

Nearly two weeks after that chat with the LeakedSource administrator, I got a note from a source who keeps fairly close tabs on the major players in the English-speaking cybercrime underground. My source told me he’d recently chatted with Xerx3s using the Jabber address Xerx3s has long used prior to the creation of LeakedSource — xerx3s@chatme.im.

Xerx3s told my source in great detail about my conversation with the Leakedsource administrator, suggesting that either Xerx3s was the same person I spoke with in my brief interview with LeakedSource, or that the LeakedSource admin had shared a transcript of our chat with Xerx3s.

Although his username on Abusewith[dot]us was Xerx3s, many of Xerx3s’s closest associates on the forum referred to him as “Wade” in their forum postings. This is in reference to a pseudonym Xerx3s frequently used, “Jeremy Wade.”

An associate of Xerx3s tells another abusewith[dot]us user that Xerx3s is the owner of LeakedSource. That comment was later deleted from the discussion thread pictured here.

One email address this Jeremy Wade identity used pseudonymously was imjeremywade@gmail.com. According to a “reverse WHOIS” record search ordered through Domaintools.com, that email address is tied to two domain names registered in 2015: abusing[dot]rs, and cyberpay[dot]info. The original registration records for each site included the name “Secure Gaming LLC.” [Full disclosure: Domaintools is an advertiser on this blog].

The “Jeremy Wade” pseudonym shows up in a number of hacked forum databases that were posted to both Abusewith[dot]us and LeakedSource, including several other sites related to hacking and password abuse.

For example, the user database stolen and leaked from the DDoS-for-hire service “panic-stresser[dot]xyz” shows that a PayPal account tied to the email address eadeh_andrew@yahoo.com paid $5 to cover a subscription for a user named “jeremywade;” The leaked Panicstresser database shows the Jeremywade account was tied to the email address xdavros@gmail.com, and that the account was created in July 2012.

The leaked Panicstresser database also showed that the first login for that Jeremywade account came from the Internet address 68.41.238.208, which is a dynamic Internet address assigned to residential customers of Comcast Communications in Michigan.

According to a large number of forum postings, it appears that whoever used the xdavros@gmail.com address also created several variations on that address, including alexdavros@gmail.com, davrosalex3@yahoo.com, davrosalex4@yahoo.com, as well as themarketsales@gmail.com.

The Gmail account xdavros@gmail.com was used to register at least four domain names almost six years ago in 2011. Two of those domains — daily-streaming.com and tiny-chats.com — were originally registered to a “Nick Davros” at 3757 Dunes Parkway, Muskegon, Mich. The other two were registered to a Nick or Alex Davros at 868 W. Hile Rd., Muskegon, Mich. All four domain registration records included the phone number +12313430295.

I took that 68.41.238.208 Internet address that the leaked Panicstresser database said was tied to the account xdavros@gmail.com and ran an Internet search on it. The address turned up in yet another compromised hacker forum database — this time in the leaked user database for sinister[dot]ly, ironically another site where users frequently post databases plundered from other sites and forums.

The leaked sinister[dot]ly forum database shows that a user by the name of “Jwade” who registered under the email address trpkisaiah@gmailcom first logged into the forum from the same Comcast Internet address tied to the xdavros@gmail.com account at Panicstresser. Continue reading →

Fast Food Chain Arby’s Acknowledges Breach

February 9, 2017

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Sources at nearly a half-dozen banks and credit unions independently reached out over the past 48 hours to inquire if I’d heard anything about a data breach at Arby’s fast-food restaurants. Asked about the rumors, Arby’s told KrebsOnSecurity that it recently remediated a breach involving malicious software installed on payment card systems at hundreds of its restaurant locations nationwide.

arbys2 A spokesperson for Atlanta, Ga.-based Arby’s said the company was first notified by industry partners in mid-January about a breach at some stores, but that it had not gone public about the incident at the request of the FBI.

“Arby’s Restaurant Group, Inc. (ARG) was recently provided with information that prompted it to launch an investigation of its payment card systems,” the company said in a written statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity.

“Upon learning of the incident, ARG immediately notified law enforcement and enlisted the expertise of leading security experts, including Mandiant,” their statement continued. “While the investigation is ongoing, ARG quickly took measures to contain this incident and eradicate the malware from systems at restaurants that were impacted.”

Arby’s said the breach involved malware placed on payment systems inside Arby’s corporate stores, and that Arby’s franchised restaurant locations were not impacted.

Arby’s has more than 3,330 stores in the United States, and roughly one-third of those are corporate-owned. The remaining stores are franchises. However, this distinction is likely to be lost on Arby’s customers until the company releases more information about individual restaurant locations affected by the breach.

“Although there are over 1,000 corporate Arby’s restaurants, not all of the corporate restaurants were affected,” said Christopher Fuller, Arby’s senior vice president of communications. “But this is the most important point: That we have fully contained and eradicated the malware that was on our point-of-sale systems.” Continue reading →

‘Top 10 Spammer’ Indicted for Wire Fraud

February 8, 2017

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Michael A. Persaud, a California man profiled in a Nov. 2014 KrebsOnSecurity story about a junk email purveyor tagged as one of the World’s Top 10 Worst Spammers, was indicted this week on federal wire fraud charges tied to an alleged spamming operation.

According to an indictment returned in federal court in Chicago, Persaud used multiple Internet addresses and domains – a technique known as “snowshoe spamming” – to transmit spam emails over at least nine networks.

persaud-fb

The Justice Department says Persaud sent well over a million spam emails to recipients in the United States and abroad. Prosecutors charge that Persaud often used false names to register the domains, and he created fraudulent “From:” address fields to conceal that he was the true sender of the emails. The government also accuses Persaud of “illegally transferring and selling millions of email addresses for the purpose of transmitting spam.”

Persaud is currently listed as #8 on the World’s 10 Worst Spammers list maintained by Spamhaus, an anti-spam organization. In 1998, Persaud was sued by AOL, which charged that he committed fraud by using various names to send millions of get-rich-quick spam messages to America Online customers. Persaud did not contest the charges and was ordered to pay more than a half-million dollars in restitution and damages. Continue reading →

House Passes Long-Sought Email Privacy Bill

February 7, 2017

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The U.S. House of Representatives on Monday approved a bill that would update the nation’s email surveillance laws so that federal investigators are required to obtain a court-ordered warrant for access to older stored emails. Under the current law, U.S. authorities can legally obtain stored emails older than 180 days using only a subpoena issued by a prosecutor or FBI agent without the approval of a judge.

cloudprivacy The House passed by a voice vote The Email Privacy Act (HR 387). The bill amends the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a 1986 statute that was originally designed to protect Americans from Big Brother and from government overreach. Unfortunately, the law is now so outdated that it actually provides legal cover for the very sort of overreach it was designed to prevent.

Online messaging was something of a novelty when lawmakers were crafting ECPA, which gave email moving over the network essentially the same protection as a phone call or postal letter. In short, it required the government to obtain a court-approved warrant to gain access to that information.

But the U.S. Justice Department wanted different treatment for stored electronic communications. Congress struck a compromise, decreeing that after 180 days email would no longer be protected by the warrant standard and instead would be available to the government with an administrative subpoena and without requiring the approval of a judge. Continue reading →

InterContinental Confirms Breach at 12 Hotels

February 6, 2017

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InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), the parent company for thousands of hotels worldwide including Holiday Inn, acknowledged Friday that a credit card breach impacted at least a dozen properties. News of the breach was first reported by KrebsOnSecurity more than a month ago.

Top of the Mark, San Francisco, one of the bars impacted by the IHG card breach.

In a statement issued late Friday, IHG said it found malicious software installed on point of sale servers at restaurants and bars of 12 IHG-managed properties between August and December 2016. The stolen data included information stored on the magnetic stripe on the backs of customer credit and debit cards — the cardholder name, card number, expiration date, and internal verification code.

A list of the known breached locations is here. IHG said cards used at the front desk of these properties were not affected.

According to IHG, we may not yet know the full scope of this breach: The company advised that its investigation into other properties in the Americas region is ongoing.

Card-stealing cyber thieves have broken into some of the largest hotel chains over the past few years. Hotel brands that have acknowledged card breaches over the last year after prompting by KrebsOnSecurity include Kimpton Hotels, Trump Hotels (twice), Hilton, Mandarin Oriental, and White Lodging (twice). Card breaches also have hit hospitality chains Starwood Hotels and Hyatt. Continue reading →

How Google Took on Mirai, KrebsOnSecurity

February 3, 2017

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The third week of September 2016 was a dark and stormy one for KrebsOnSecurity. Wave after wave of huge denial-of-service attacks flooded this site, forcing me to pull the plug on it until I could secure protection from further assault. The site resurfaced three days later under the aegis of Google’s Project Shield, an initiative which seeks to protect journalists and news sites from being censored by these crippling digital sieges.

Damian Menscher, a Google security engineer with whom I worked very closely on the migration to Project Shield, spoke this week about the unique challenges involved in protecting a small site like this one from very large, sustained and constantly morphing attacks.

Google Security Reliability Engineer Damian Menscher speaking at the Enigma conference this week. Photo: @mrisher

Addressing the Enigma 2017 security conference in Oakland, Calif., Menscher said his team only briefly considered whether it was such a good idea to invite a news site that takes frequent swings at the DDoS-for-hire industry.

“What happens if this botnet actually takes down google.com and we lose all of our revenue?” Menscher recalled. “But we considered [that] if the botnet can take us down, we’re probably already at risk anyway. There’s nothing stopping them from attacking us at any time. So we really had nothing to lose here.” Continue reading →

IRS: Scam Blends CEO Fraud, W-2 Phishing

February 2, 2017

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Most regular readers here are familiar with CEO fraud — e-mail scams in which the attacker spoofs the boss and tricks an employee at the organization into wiring funds to the fraudster. Loyal readers also have heard an earful about W-2 phishing, in which crooks impersonate the boss and request a copy of all employee tax forms. According to a new “urgent alert” issued by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, scammers are now combining both schemes and targeting a far broader range of organizations than ever before.

athook The IRS said phishers are off to a much earlier start this year than in tax years past, trying to siphon W-2 data that can be used to file fraudulent refund requests on behalf of taxpayers. The agency warned that thieves also appear to be targeting a wider range of organizations in these W-2 phishing schemes, including school districts, healthcare organizations, chain restaurants, temporary staffing agencies, tribal organizations and nonprofits.

Perhaps because they are already impersonating the boss, the W-2 phishers feel like they’re leaving money on the table if they don’t also try to loot the victim organization’s treasury: According to the IRS, W-2 phishers very often now follow up with an “executive” email to the payroll or comptroller requesting that a wire transfer be made to a certain account.

“This is one of the most dangerous email phishing scams we’ve seen in a long time,” IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said. “Although not tax related, the wire transfer scam is being coupled with the W-2 scam email, and some companies have lost both employees’ W-2s and thousands of dollars.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been keeping a running tally of the financial devastation visited on companies via CEO fraud scams. In June 2016, the FBI estimated that crooks had stolen nearly $3.1 billion from more than 22,000 victims of these wire fraud schemes.

First surfacing in February 2016, the W-2 phishing scams also have netted thieves plenty of victims. At one point last year I was hearing from almost one new W-2 phishing victim each day. Some of the more prominent companies victimized by W-2 scams last year included Seagate Technology, Moneytree, Sprouts Farmer’s Market, and EWTN Global Catholic Network. Continue reading →

Shopping for W2s, Tax Data on the Dark Web

January 31, 2017

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The 2016 tax season is now in full swing in the United States, which means scammers are once again assembling vast dossiers of personal data and preparing to file fraudulent tax refund requests on behalf of millions of Americans. But for those lazy identity thieves who can’t be bothered to phish or steal the needed data, there is now another option: Buying stolen W-2 tax forms from other crooks who have phished the documents wholesale from corporations.

A cybercriminal shop selling 2016 W-2 tax data.

Pictured in the screenshot above is a cybercriminal shop which sells the usual goods — stolen credit card data, PayPal account logins, and access to hacked computers. But hidden beneath the “other” category of goods for sale by this fraud bazaar is an option I’ve not previously encountered on these ubiquitous, cookie-cutter stores: A menu item advertising “W-2 2016.”

This particular shop — the name of which is being withheld so as not to provide it with free advertising — currently includes raw W-2 tax form data on more than 3,600 Americans, virtually all of whom apparently reside in Florida. The data in each record includes the taxpayer’s employer name, employer ID, address, taxpayer address, Social Security number and information about 2016 wages and taxes withheld.

Each W-2 record costs the Bitcoin equivalent of between $4 and $20. W-2 records for employees with higher-than-average wages in the 2016 tax year cost more, ostensibly because thieves stand to reap a higher tax refund from those W-2’s if they successfully trick the Internal Revenue Service and/or the states into approving a fraudulent refund in the victim’s name.

Tax refund fraud affects hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of U.S. citizens annually. Victims usually first learn of the crime after having their returns rejected because scammers beat them to it. Even those who are not required to file a return can be victims of refund fraud, as can those who are not actually due a refund from the IRS.

Tax data can be phished directly from consumers via phony emails spoofing the IRS or employers. But more often, the information is stolen in bulk from employers. In a typical scenario, the thieves target people who work in HR and payroll departments at corporations, and spoof an email from a higher-up in the company asking for all employee W-2 data to be included in a single file and emailed immediately.

Incredibly, this scam tricks countless organizations into giving away all employee W-2 data directly to identity thieves who use it (or, in this case, sell it) for tax refund fraud. Earlier this month, solar panel maker Sunrun disclosed that a spear phishing attack exposed W-2 tax form data on more than 3,400 employees.

In this case, however, it does not appear the cybercrime shop obtained the W-2’s through phishing employers. It cost roughly $25 worth of Bitcoin to reveal the likely common thread among all 3,600+ Floridians being exploited by this shop: A local tax preparation firm that got hacked or phished. Continue reading →

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