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Twice in the past month KrebsOnSecurity has heard from readers who had their accounts at big-three credit bureau Experian hacked and updated with a new email address that wasn’t theirs. In both cases the readers used password managers to select strong, unique passwords for their Experian accounts. Research suggests identity thieves were able to hijack the accounts simply by signing up for new accounts at Experian using the victim’s personal information and a different email address.
John Turner is a software engineer based in Salt Lake City. Turner said he created the account at Experian in 2020 to place a security freeze on his credit file, and that he used a password manager to select and store a strong, unique password for his Experian account.
Turner said that in early June 2022 he received an email from Experian saying the email address on his account had been changed. Experian’s password reset process was useless at that point because any password reset links would be sent to the new (impostor’s) email address.
An Experian support person Turner reached via phone after a lengthy hold time asked for his Social Security Number (SSN) and date of birth, as well as his account PIN and answers to his secret questions. But the PIN and secret questions had already been changed by whoever re-signed up as him at Experian.
“I was able to answer the credit report questions successfully, which authenticated me to their system,” Turner said. “At that point, the representative read me the current stored security questions and PIN, and they were definitely not things I would have used.”
Turner said he was able to regain control over his Experian account by creating a new account. But now he’s wondering what else he could do to prevent another account compromise.
“The most frustrating part of this whole thing is that I received multiple ‘here’s your login information’ emails later that I attributed to the original attackers coming back and attempting to use the ‘forgot email/username’ flow, likely using my SSN and DOB, but it didn’t go to their email that they were expecting,” Turner said. “Given that Experian doesn’t support two-factor authentication of any kind — and that I don’t know how they were able to get access to my account in the first place — I’ve felt very helpless ever since.”
Arthur Rishi is a musician and co-executive director of the Boston Landmarks Orchestra. Rishi said he recently discovered his Experian account had been hijacked after receiving an alert from his credit monitoring service (not Experian’s) that someone had tried to open an account in his name at JPMorgan Chase.
Rishi said the alert surprised him because his credit file at Experian was frozen at the time, and Experian did not notify him about any activity on his account. Rishi said Chase agreed to cancel the unauthorized account application, and even rescinded its credit inquiry (each credit pull can ding your credit score slightly).
But he never could get anyone from Experian’s support to answer the phone, despite spending what seemed like eternity trying to progress through the company’s phone-based system. That’s when Rishi decided to see if he could create a new account for himself at Experian.
“I was able to open a new account at Experian starting from scratch, using my SSN, date of birth and answering some really basic questions, like what kind of car did you take out a loan for, or what city did you used to live in,’ Rishi said.
Upon completing the sign-up, Rishi noticed that his credit was unfrozen.
Like Turner, Rishi is now worried that identity thieves will just hijack his Experian account once more, and that there is nothing he can do to prevent such a scenario. For now, Rishi has decided to pay Experian $25.99 a month to more closely monitor his account for suspicious activity. Even using the paid Experian service, there were no additional multi-factor authentication options available, although he said Experian did send a one-time code to his phone via SMS recently when he logged on.
“Experian now sometimes does require MFA for me if I use a new browser or have my VPN on,” Rishi said, but he’s not sure if Experian’s free service would have operated differently.
“I get so angry when I think about all this,” he said. “I have no confidence this won’t happen again.”
In a written statement, Experian suggested that what happened to Rishi and Turner was not a normal occurrence, and that its security and identity verification practices extend beyond what is visible to the user.
“We believe these are isolated incidents of fraud using stolen consumer information,” Experian’s statement reads. “Specific to your question, once an Experian account is created, if someone attempts to create a second Experian account, our systems will notify the original email on file.”
“We go beyond reliance on personally identifiable information (PII) or a consumer’s ability to answer knowledge-based authentication questions to access our systems,” the statement continues. “We do not disclose additional processes for obvious security reasons; however, our data and analytical capabilities verify identity elements across multiple data sources and are not visible to the consumer. This is designed to create a more positive experience for our consumers and to provide additional layers of protection. We take consumer privacy and security seriously, and we continually review our security processes to guard against constant and evolving threats posed by fraudsters.”
KrebsOnSecurity sought to replicate Turner and Rishi’s experience — to see if Experian would allow me to re-create my account using my personal information but a different email address. The experiment was done from a different computer and Internet address than the one that created the original account years ago.
After providing my Social Security Number (SSN), date of birth, and answering several multiple choice questions whose answers are derived almost entirely from public records, Experian promptly changed the email address associated with my credit file. It did so without first confirming that new email address could respond to messages, or that the previous email address approved the change.
Experian’s system then sent an automated message to the original email address on file, saying the account’s email address had been changed. The only recourse Experian offered in the alert was to sign in, or send an email to an Experian inbox that replies with the message, “this email address is no longer monitored.”
After that, Experian prompted me to select new secret questions and answers, as well as a new account PIN — effectively erasing the account’s previously chosen PIN and recovery questions. Once I’d changed the PIN and security questions, Experian’s site helpfully reminded me that I have a security freeze on file, and would I like to remove or temporarily lift the security freeze?
To be clear, Experian does have a business unit that sells one-time password services to businesses. While Experian’s system did ask for a mobile number when I signed up a second time, at no time did that number receive a notification from Experian. Also, I could see no option in my account to enable multi-factor authentication for all logins.
How does Experian differ from the practices of Equifax and TransUnion, the other two big consumer credit reporting bureaus? When KrebsOnSecurity tried to re-create an existing account at TransUnion using my Social Security number, TransUnion rejected the application, noting that I already had an account and prompting me to proceed through its lost password flow. The company also appears to send an email to the address on file asking to validate account changes.
Likewise, trying to recreate an existing account at Equifax using personal information tied to my existing account prompts Equifax’s systems to report that I already have an account, and to use their password reset process (which involves sending a verification email to the address on file).
KrebsOnSecurity has long urged readers in the United States to place a security freeze on their files with the three major credit bureaus. With a freeze in place, potential creditors can’t pull your credit file, which makes it very unlikely anyone will be granted new lines of credit in your name. I’ve also advised readers to plant their flag at the three major bureaus, to prevent identity thieves from creating an account for you and assuming control over your identity.
The experiences of Rishi, Turner and this author suggest Experian’s practices currently undermine both of those proactive security measures. Even so, having an active account at Experian may be the only way you find out when crooks have assumed your identity. Because at least then you should receive an email from Experian saying they gave your identity to someone else.
In April 2021, KrebsOnSecurity revealed how identity thieves were exploiting lax authentication on Experian’s PIN retrieval page to unfreeze consumer credit files. In those cases, Experian failed to send any notice via email when a freeze PIN was retrieved, nor did it require the PIN to be sent to an email address already associated with the consumer’s account.
A few days after that April 2021 story, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that an Experian API was exposing the credit scores of most Americans.
Emory Roan, policy counsel for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, said Experian not offering multi-factor authentication for consumer accounts is inexcusable in 2022.
“They compound the problem by gating the recovery process with information that’s likely available or inferable from third party data brokers, or that could have been exposed in previous data breaches,” Roan said. “Experian is one of the largest Consumer Reporting Agencies in the country, trusted as one of the few essential players in a credit system Americans are forced to be part of. For them to not offer consumers some form of (free) MFA is baffling and reflects extremely poorly on Experian.”
Nicholas Weaver, a researcher for the International Computer Science Institute at University of California, Berkeley, said Experian has no real incentive to do things right on the consumer side of its business. That is, he said, unless Experian’s customers — banks and other lenders — choose to vote with their feet because too many people with frozen credit files are having to deal with unauthorized applications for new credit.
“The actual customers of the credit service don’t realize how much worse Experian is, and this isn’t the first time Experian has screwed up horribly,” Weaver said. “Experian is part of a triopoly, and I’m sure this is costing their actual customers money, because if you have a credit freeze that gets lifted and somebody loans against it, it’s the lender who eats that fraud cost.”
And unlike consumers, he said, lenders do have a choice in which of the triopoly handles their credit checks.
“I do think it’s important to point out that their real customers do have a choice, and they should switch to TransUnion and Equifax,” he added.
More greatest hits from Experian:
2017: Experian Site Can Give Anyone Your Credit Freeze PIN
2015: Experian Breach Affects 15 Million Customers
2015: Experian Breach Tied to NY-NJ ID Theft Ring
2015: At Experian, Security Attrition Amid Acquisitions
2015: Experian Hit With Class Action Over ID Theft Service
2014: Experian Lapse Allowed ID Theft Service Access to 200 Million Consumer Records
2013: Experian Sold Consumer Data to ID Theft Service
Update, 10:32 a.m.: Updated the story to clarify that while Experian does sometimes ask users to enter a one-time code sent via SMS to the number on file, there does not appear to be any option to enable this on all logins.
Emotet malware is back with ferocious vigor, according to ESET telemetry in the first four months of 2022. Will it survive the ever-tightening controls on macro-enabled documents?
The post How Emotet is changing tactics in response to Microsoft’s tightening of Office macro security appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
Authored by Dexter Shin
McAfee’s Mobile Research Team introduced a new Android malware targeting Instagram users who want to increase their followers or likes in the last post. As we researched more about this threat, we found another malware type that uses different technical methods to steal user’s credentials. The target is users who are not satisfied with the default functions provided by Instagram. Various Instagram modification application already exists for those users on the Internet. The new malware we found pretends to be a popular mod app and steals Instagram credentials.
Instander is one of the famous Instagram modification applications available for Android devices to help Instagram users access extra helpful features. The mod app supports uploading high-quality images and downloading posted photos and videos.
The initial screens of this malware and Instander are similar, as shown below.
Figure 1. Instander legitimate app(Left) and Mmalware(Right)
Next, this malware requests an account (username or email) and password. Finally, this malware displays an error message regardless of whether the login information is correct.
Figure 2. Malware requests account and password
The malware steals the user’s username and password in a very unique way. The main trick is to use the Firebase API. First, the user input value is combined with l@gmail.com. This value and static password(=kamalw20051) are then sent via the Firebase API, createUserWithEmailAndPassword. And next, the password process is the same. After receiving the user’s account and password input, this malware will request it twice.
Since we cannot see the dashboard of the malware author, we tested it using the same API. As a result, we checked the user input value in plain text on the dashboard.
According to the Firebase document, createUserWithEmailAndPassword API is to create a new user account associated with the specified email address and password. Because the first parameter is defined as email patterns, the malware author uses the above code to create email patterns regardless of user input values.
It is an API for creating accounts in the Firebase so that the administrator can check the account name in the Firebase dashboard. The victim’s account and password have been requested as Firebase account name, so it should be seen as plain text without hashing or masking.
As an interesting point on the network traffic of the malware, this malware communicates with the Firebase server in Protobuf format in the network. The initial configuration of this Firebase API uses the JSON format. Although the Protobuf format is readable enough, it can be assumed that this malware author intentionally attempts to obfuscate the network traffic through the additional settings. Also, the domain used for data transfer(=www.googleapis.com) is managed by Google. Because it is a domain that is too common and not dangerous, many network filtering and firewall solutions do not detect it.
As mentioned, users should always be careful about installing 3rd party apps. Aside from the types of malware we’ve introduced so far, attackers are trying to steal users’ credentials in a variety of ways. Therefore, you should employ security software on your mobile devices and always keep up to date.
Fortunately, McAfee Mobile Security is able to detect this as Android/InstaStealer and protect you from similar threats. For more information visit McAfee Mobile Security
SHA256:
The post Instagram credentials Stealer: Disguised as Mod App appeared first on McAfee Blog.
If you’re like most people, you probably use your computer for most of your online activities. It’s amazing what the internet can do to make our lives easier. But if you’ve spent any time online, you know the internet also comes with some risks.
Malware (or malicious software) is one risk of living a connected life. Whether it comes from infected websites, innocent-looking email attachments, or applications and tools you think you can trust, malware can expose your private information to cybercriminals who may use it for personal gain.
If you suspect that malicious software has infected your device, it’s important to remove it quickly to protect yourself.
Though dealing with malware can be scary, there are a few things you can do. This article will explain how malware can infect devices and how you can remove it from them.
There are many types of malware, which do their work in different ways. They can include viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware, adware, ransomware, and more.
Some common ways that Windows PCs, Macs, tablets, and smartphones can get infected include:
Malware can affect you in a variety of ways. For example, malware can allow hackers to steal your private information, uncover passwords, cause financial issues for you or your company, delete files, and render your device unusable.
Malware can also move from your computer to other devices, so you may unwittingly infect friends, family, or co-workers. It can gobble up your computer’s memory, slow its operation to a snail’s pace, and more.
For these reasons, it’s a good idea to find out how to remove malware and learn to protect yourself from it in the first place.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Consumer Information points out some ways to know if malware has infected your device, including if it:
If you think your computer, smartphone or tablet has been infected by malware, the first step is to stop shopping, banking, and doing other things online that involve usernames, passwords, or other sensitive information until you have the problem resolved.
If you don’t have an antivirus program on your device, it’s a good idea to get one. McAfee’s antivirus software provides award-winning protection for your data and devices. It’s important to get antivirus software from a trusted name because some malware can even masquerade as security software.
It’s also important to make sure that your operating system for your different devices and applications are up to date. Older programs and apps might not have the latest security features — cybercriminals are constantly devising new ways to get people’s information — and outdated software can have a harder time fighting off infection.
Once your cybersecurity software is in place, you should:
If you have a PC with Windows 10 or 11, you already benefit from free virus threat protection with Microsoft Windows Defender. Windows Defender, or built-in Microsoft security, compares new files and programs against a database of known malware. It keeps an eye out for signs that an attack is underway, such as the encryption of key files.
Defender can run in active, passive, and disabled mode. In active mode, it’s the primary antivirus app on the device. This means the program will scan files, remedy any threats, and show detected threats in your organization’s security reports and in the Windows Security app.
Microsoft Defender will automatically turn off if you have another antivirus app installed and turned on. Microsoft Defender will turn back on automatically if you uninstall the other app.
In passive mode, Microsoft Defender isn’t used as the primary antivirus app on the device. It’ll scan files and report any threats but it won’t remedy those threats. Finally, Microsoft Windows can’t detect or address threats if it is disabled or uninstalled.
You can run quick and advanced scans in Windows Security. If you’re worried that a specific file or folder has been compromised, you can also run a manual scan by:
You’ll see the scan results and options for dealing with any potential threats.
Microsoft Defender is also available to protect Android smartphones from viruses and malware. It can also help against phishing and phishing and scans your Android device automatically to track and identify potentially unwanted, and dangerous, applications on your device.
Apple users, as well, have built-in antivirus software to help detect and fight off malware. Malware is commonly distributed across macOS systems by being embedded in a harmless-looking app.
Luckily, settings in Security & Privacy preferences allow you to designate the sources of software installed on your Mac. Just follow these steps:
Apple iPads and iPhones have strong built-in security and privacy protections, so it is up to the user on whether or not they want to install antivirus for additional malware protections. Apple boasts a “walled-garden” approach–meaning that their operating system is closed to outside apps and games not affiliated with their official app store unless you jailbreak the device.
Remember that while cybersecurity features built into devices are a great starting point, they’re not always comprehensive. That’s where antivirus software, like McAfee Total Protection, can help. It offers continuous protection against malware, viruses, phishing, ransomware, and other online threats. It also automatically updates so you don’t need to worry about manual upgrades.
The security software also includes alerts before you connect to risky websites and offers one-click fixes to help you stay safe online.
Antivirus software like McAfee works to block malware from infecting your computer, smartphone, or tablet. If malware somehow does get through, it can act as a powerful malware scanner by searching every file on your device for infections.
It can troubleshoot, look for vulnerabilities, and compile a list of infected software that can be quarantined (or isolated) to prevent it from doing harm and deleted at the end of the virus scan using removal tools.
McAfee’s anti-malware software updates its virus database by using an automatic web crawler that scans the internet, identifies online threats like malicious software, and figures out how to delete them.
McAfee antivirus uses this data to automatically update your device’s protective set-upl, providing strong protection so nothing harmful gets in.
Besides desktop computers, McAfee provides mobile security for both Android and Apple devices. For example, when you use your iPhone or Android phone on a public Wi-Fi system, McAfee’s Wi-Fi privacy protection (VPN) in effect turns the public network into a private one, where you can surf safely. Of course, its antivirus app regularly scans for threats and malware while actively blocking them in real time, keeping your mobile devices protected.
McAfee offers a variety of plans tailored to fit your needs and budget so your computer and other devices — including Android smartphones, Apple iPhones, and various tablets — are protected from malware and other online threats.
McAfee is a leader in consumer security, and our antivirus software is used on more than 6 million devices. It’s easy to install and use, provides 24/7 real-time threat protection, and comes with a Virus Pledge — a money-back guarantee that it’ll remove all viruses from your protected devices.
You can get antivirus software as part of McAfee’s Total Protection services. This includes all-in-one protection for your personal info and privacy, with identity restoration assistance and up to $1 million of identity theft coverage for data breaches. You also have access to identity monitoring, safe browsing, and a secure VPN.
With McAfee, you can turn apprehension about malware into the peace of mind that comes from proper protection.
The post How to Quickly Remove Malware in 2022 appeared first on McAfee Blog.
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