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“Did you know this public figure is trying to make your life worse? Click here for what they don’t want you to know.”
“Save thousands today with just one click!”
Spam and bot accounts on social media are everywhere. You’ve likely encountered messages like these that attempt to get you to click on links or to stir your emotions in a frenzy. While bot accounts are usually more of an annoyance than anything, when they’re allowed to run rampant, they can quickly become dangerous to your personally identifiable information (PII) and create an emotionally charged mob mentality.
Here’s what you should know about bot accounts, including how to steer clear of menacing ones, plus a reminder to watch what you share on (and with) social media sites.
Bot accounts are software-automated accounts that try to blend in and act like a real user. They post updates and follow other users, though there isn’t a real person behind the account. A spam account is a type of bot account that attempts to gain financially from its automated posts. Everyday people should be wary of social media bot accounts because they can be used to disseminate false information or phishing scams.
One whistleblower of a social media giant recently divulged that the platform isn’t prioritizing deactivating bot accounts.1 This apathy sparks concerns about the company’s commitment to the security of its users. In the whistleblower’s same report, he stated that the social media site isn’t taking the necessary steps to protect itself from potential inside threats and it had fallen victim to at least 20 breaches in 2020 without reporting the incidents to the proper authorities.
Some bot accounts aren’t malicious (merely an annoying tactic by companies to spread the word about their business), but it’s best to give all of them a wide berth and never click on any links in their posts. Those links could direct to unsecured outside sites laden with malware or drop you in the middle of a phishing scheme.
You can often spot a malicious bot account by the tone of its messages. They’ll often try to inspire intense emotions, such as excitement, sadness, or rage, and attempt to get users to act or share the post. Do not engage with them, not even to argue their points. When you engage or share these posts with your network, it spreads false information and could dangerously manipulate public opinion.2
Here are a few ways you can take your cybersecurity into your own hands when you can’t be sure that social media sites are looking out for the safety of users’ information:
You can’t trust every company to look out for the safety of your personal information, but one organization you can trust is McAfee. McAfee Total Protection is a comprehensive identity and privacy protection solution for your digital life. Great social media habits go a long way toward keeping you safe online, and you can rest assured knowing that McAfee can fill in the gaps. McAfee Total Protection offers antivirus, identity monitoring, and security freeze in the case your information is leaked in a breach or a bot account gets ahold of key details.
Keep on sharing your life’s milestones with your closest friends and family online. The next time you update your status, flag any suspicious accounts you come across, so everyone can enjoy social media confidently!
1NBC News, “Twitter whistleblower alleges major security issues”
2Journal of Information Technology & Politics, “Harass, mislead & polarize: An analysis of Twitter political bots’ tactics in targeting the immigration debate before the 2018 U.S. midterm election”
The post Here’s How to Steer Clear of Bot Accounts on Social Media appeared first on McAfee Blog.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is urging states and localities to beef up security around proprietary devices that connect to the Emergency Alert System — a national public warning system used to deliver important emergency information, such as severe weather and AMBER alerts. The DHS warning came in advance of a workshop to be held this weekend at the DEFCON security conference in Las Vegas, where a security researcher is slated to demonstrate multiple weaknesses in the nationwide alert system.
A Digital Alert Systems EAS encoder/decoder that Pyle said he acquired off eBay in 2019. It had the username and password for the system printed on the machine.
The DHS warning was prompted by security researcher Ken Pyle, a partner at security firm Cybir. Pyle said he started acquiring old EAS equipment off of eBay in 2019, and that he quickly identified a number of serious security vulnerabilities in a device that is broadly used by states and localities to encode and decode EAS alert signals.
“I found all kinds of problems back then, and reported it to the DHS, FBI and the manufacturer,” Pyle said in an interview with KrebsOnSecurity. “But nothing ever happened. I decided I wasn’t going to tell anyone about it yet because I wanted to give people time to fix it.”
Pyle said he took up the research again in earnest after an angry mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I was sitting there thinking, ‘Holy shit, someone could start a civil war with this thing,”’ Pyle recalled. “I went back to see if this was still a problem, and it turns out it’s still a very big problem. So I decided that unless someone actually makes this public and talks about it, clearly nothing is going to be done about it.”
The EAS encoder/decoder devices Pyle acquired were made by Lyndonville, NY-based Digital Alert Systems (formerly Monroe Electronics, Inc.), which issued a security advisory this month saying it released patches in 2019 to fix the flaws reported by Pyle, but that some customers are still running outdated versions of the device’s firmware. That may be because the patches were included in version 4 of the firmware for the EAS devices, and many older models apparently do not support the new software.
“The vulnerabilities identified present a potentially serious risk, and we believe both were addressed in software updates issued beginning Oct 2019,” EAS said in a written statement. “We also provided attribution for the researcher’s responsible disclosure, allowing us to rectify the matters before making any public statements. We are aware that some users have not taken corrective actions and updated their software and should immediately take action to update the latest software version to ensure they are not at risk. Anything lower than version 4.1 should be updated immediately. On July 20, 2022, the researcher referred to other potential issues, and we trust the researcher will provide more detail. We will evaluate and work to issue any necessary mitigations as quickly as possible.”
But Pyle said a great many EAS stakeholders are still ignoring basic advice from the manufacturer, such as changing default passwords and placing the devices behind a firewall, not directly exposing them to the Internet, and restricting access only to trusted hosts and networks.
Pyle, in a selfie that is heavily redacted because the EAS device behind him had its user credentials printed on the lid.
Pyle said the biggest threat to the security of the EAS is that an attacker would only need to compromise a single EAS station to send out alerts locally that can be picked up by other EAS systems and retransmitted across the nation.
“The process for alerts is automated in most cases, hence, obtaining access to a device will allow you to pivot around,” he said. “There’s no centralized control of the EAS because these devices are designed such that someone locally can issue an alert, but there’s no central control over whether I am the one person who can send or whatever. If you are a local operator, you can send out nationwide alerts. That’s how easy it is to do this.”
One of the Digital Alert Systems devices Pyle sourced from an electronics recycler earlier this year was non-functioning, but whoever discarded it neglected to wipe the hard drive embedded in the machine. Pyle soon discovered the device contained the private cryptographic keys and other credentials needed to send alerts through Comcast, the nation’s third-largest cable company.
“I can issue and create my own alert here, which has all the valid checks or whatever for being a real alert station,” Pyle said in an interview earlier this month. “I can create a message that will start propagating through the EAS.”
Comcast told KrebsOnSecurity that “a third-party device used to deliver EAS alerts was lost in transit by a trusted shipping provider between two Comcast locations and subsequently obtained by a cybersecurity researcher.
“We’ve conducted a thorough investigation of this matter and have determined that no customer data, and no sensitive Comcast data, were compromised,” Comcast spokesperson David McGuire said.
The company said it also confirmed that the information included on the device can no longer be used to send false messages to Comcast customers or used to compromise devices within Comcast’s network, including EAS devices.
“We are taking steps to further ensure secure transfer of such devices going forward,” McGuire said. “Separately, we have conducted a thorough audit of all EAS devices on our network and confirmed that they are updated with currently available patches and are therefore not vulnerable to recently reported security issues. We’re grateful for the responsible disclosure and to the security research community for continuing to engage and share information with our teams to make our products and technologies ever more secure. Mr. Pyle informed us promptly of his research and worked with us as we took steps to validate his findings and ensure the security of our systems.”
The user interface for an EAS device.
Unauthorized EAS broadcast alerts have happened enough that there is a chronicle of EAS compromises over at fandom.com. Thankfully, most of these incidents have involved fairly obvious hoaxes.
According to the EAS wiki, in February 2013, hackers broke into the EAS networks in Great Falls, Mt. and Marquette, Mich. to broadcast an alert that zombies had risen from their graves in several counties. In Feb. 2017, an EAS station in Indiana also was hacked, with the intruders playing the same “zombies and dead bodies” audio from the 2013 incidents.
“On February 20 and February 21, 2020, Wave Broadband’s EASyCAP equipment was hacked due to the equipment’s default password not being changed,” the Wiki states. “Four alerts were broadcasted, two of which consisted of a Radiological Hazard Warning and a Required Monthly Test playing parts of the Hip Hop song Hot by artist Young Thug.”
In January 2018, Hawaii sent out an alert to cell phones, televisions and radios, warning everyone in the state that a missile was headed their way. It took 38 minutes for Hawaii to let people know the alert was a misfire, and that a draft alert was inadvertently sent. The news video clip below about the 2018 event in Hawaii does a good job of walking through how the EAS works.
The first day of school is right around the corner. The whole family is gearing up for a return to the routine: waking up to alarm clocks at dawn, rushed mornings, learning all day, and after-school activities and homework all night.
Even though everyone is in a frenzied state, now is a great time to slow down and discuss important topics that may arise during the school year. Parents and guardians know their children are tech savvy, just by looking at their thumbs fly across keyboards; however, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re cyber-savvy.
To make sure we’re all on the same page, here are our definitions of tech savvy and cyber savvy:
According to McAfee research, children cited that their parents are best suited to teach them about being safe online when compared to their teachers and online resources. Here are common scenarios your child, tween, or teen will likely encounter during the school year, plus some tips and tools you can share to make sure they are safe online.
It’s now common practice for school systems to communicate with students and their guardians over email, whether that’s through a school-issued email address or a personal one. Your student should know that phishers often impersonate institutions with authority, such as the IRS, banks, and in their case, a school. Put your children on alert to the most common signs of a cybercriminal phishing for valuable personally identifiable information (PII). These signs include:
If your child ever receives a suspicious-looking or -sounding email, they should start an entirely new email chain with the supposed sender and confirm that they sent the message. Do not reply to the suspicious email and don’t click on any links within the message.
An excellent nugget of wisdom you can impart is the following: Never divulge your Social Security Number over online channels and never give out passwords. If someone needs your SSN for official purposes, they can follow up in a method other than email. And no one ever needs to know your password.
With a return to the school year routine comes a flood of back-to-school social media posts and catching up electronically with friends. If your child owns a social media profile (or several!), alert them to the various social media engineering tactics that are common to each platform. Similar to phishing schemes, social media scams are usually “time sensitive” and attempt to inspire strong emotions in readers, whether that’s excitement, fear, sadness, or anger.
Alert your child that not everything they read on social media is true. Photos can be doctored and stories can be fabricated in order to prompt people to click on links to “donate” or “sign a petition.” You don’t have to discourage your child from taking a stand for causes they believe in; rather, urge them to follow up through official channels. For instance, if they see a social media post about contributing to save the rainforest, instead of donating through the post, contact a well-known organization, such as the World Wildlife Fund and inquire how to make a difference.
More and more school systems are entrusting school-issued connected devices to students to use in the classroom and to bring home. Other districts have BYOD (or bring your own device) policies where students can use personal family devices for school activities. In either case, device security is key to keeping their information safe and maintaining the integrity of the school system’s network. Families don’t want to be the weakest link in the school system and are responsible for a town-wide education network breach.
Here are three ways to protect any device connected to the school network:
These conversations are great to start at the dinner table or on long, boring car rides where you’re most likely to get your child’s undivided attention. Don’t focus so much on the fearful consequences or punishment that could result from poor cyberhabits. Instead, emphasize how easy these steps and tools are to use, so it would be silly not to follow or use them.
The post Back to School: Tech Savvy vs. Cyber Savvy appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Image: Shutterstock.
A cybersecurity firm says it has intercepted a large, unique stolen data set containing the names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, Social Security Numbers and dates of birth on nearly 23 million Americans. The firm’s analysis of the data suggests it corresponds to current and former customers of AT&T. The telecommunications giant stopped short of saying the data wasn’t theirs, but it maintains the records do not appear to have come from its systems and may be tied to a previous data incident at another company.
Milwaukee-based cybersecurity consultancy Hold Security said it intercepted a 1.6 gigabyte compressed file on a popular dark web file-sharing site. The largest item in the archive is a 3.6 gigabyte file called “dbfull,” and it contains 28.5 million records, including 22.8 million unique email addresses and 23 million unique SSNs. There are no passwords in the database.
Hold Security founder Alex Holden said a number of patterns in the data suggest it relates to AT&T customers. For starters, email addresses ending in “att.net” accounted for 13.7 percent of all addresses in the database, with addresses from SBCGLobal.net and Bellsouth.net — both AT&T companies — making up another seven percent. In contrast, Gmail users made up more than 30 percent of the data set, with Yahoo addresses accounting for 24 percent. More than 10,000 entries in the database list “none@att.com” in the email field.
Hold Security found these email domains account for 87% of all domains in the data set. Nearly 21% belonged to AT&T customers.
Holden’s team also examined the number of email records that included an alias in the username portion of the email, and found 293 email addresses with plus addressing. Of those, 232 included an alias that indicated the customer had signed up at some AT&T property; 190 of the aliased email addresses were “+att@”; 42 were “+uverse@,” an oddly specific reference to an AT&T entity that included broadband Internet. In September 2016, AT&T rebranded U-verse as AT&T Internet.
According to its website, AT&T Internet is offered in 21 states, including Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin. Nearly all of the records in the database that contain a state designation corresponded to those 21 states; all other states made up just 1.64 percent of the records, Hold Security found.
Image: Hold Security.
The vast majority of records in this database belong to consumers, but almost 13,000 of the entries are for corporate entities. Holden said 387 of those corporate names started with “ATT,” with various entries like “ATT PVT XLOW” appearing 81 times. And most of the addresses for these entities are AT&T corporate offices.
How old is this data? One clue may be in the dates of birth exposed in this database. There are very few records in this file with dates of birth after 2000.
“Based on these statistics, we see that the last significant number of subscribers born in March of 2000,” Holden told KrebsOnSecurity, noting that AT&T requires new account holders to be 18 years of age or older. “Therefore, it makes sense that the dataset was likely created close to March of 2018.”
There was also this anomaly: Holden said one of his analysts is an AT&T customer with a 13-letter last name, and that her AT&T bill has always had the same unique misspelling of her surname (they added yet another letter). He said the analyst’s name is identically misspelled in this database.
KrebsOnSecurity shared the large data set with AT&T, as well as Hold Security’s analysis of it. AT&T ultimately declined to say whether all of the people in the database are or were at some point AT&T customers. The company said the data appears to be several years old, and that “it’s not immediately possible to determine the percentage that may be customers.”
“This information does not appear to have come from our systems,” AT&T said in a written statement. “It may be tied to a previous data incident at another company. It is unfortunate that data can continue to surface over several years on the dark web. However, customers often receive notices after such incidents, and advice for ID theft is consistent and can be found online.”
The company declined to elaborate on what they meant by “a previous data incident at another company.”
But it seems likely that this database is related to one that went up for sale on a hacker forum on August 19, 2021. That auction ran with the title “AT&T Database +70M (SSN/DOB),” and was offered by ShinyHunters, a well-known threat actor with a long history of compromising websites and developer repositories to steal credentials or API keys.
Image: BleepingComputer
ShinyHunters established the starting price for the auction at $200,000, but set the “flash” or “buy it now” price at $1 million. The auction also included a small sampling of the stolen information, but that sample is no longer available. The hacker forum where the ShinyHunters sales thread existed was seized by the FBI in April, and its alleged administrator arrested.
But cached copies of the auction, as recorded by cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, show ShinyHunters received bids of up to $230,000 for the entire database before they suspended the sale.
“This thread has been deleted several times,” ShinyHunters wrote in their auction discussion on Sept. 6, 2021. “Therefore, the auction is suspended. AT&T will be available on WHM as soon as they accept new vendors.”
The WHM initialism was a reference to the White House Market, a dark web marketplace that shut down in October 2021.
“In many cases, when a database is not sold, ShinyHunters will release it for free on hacker forums,” wrote BleepingComputer’s Lawrence Abrams, who broke the news of the auction last year and confronted AT&T about the hackers’ claims.
AT&T gave Abrams a similar statement, saying the data didn’t come from their systems.
“When asked whether the data may have come from a third-party partner, AT&T chose not to speculate,” Abrams wrote. “‘Given this information did not come from us, we can’t speculate on where it came from or whether it is valid,'” AT&T told BleepingComputer.
Asked to respond to AT&T’s denial, ShinyHunters told BleepingComputer at the time, “I don’t care if they don’t admit. I’m just selling.”
On June 1, 2022, a 21-year-old Frenchman was arrested in Morocco for allegedly being a member of ShinyHunters. Databreaches.net reports the defendant was arrested on an Interpol “Red Notice” at the request of a U.S. federal prosecutor from Washington state.
Databreaches.net suggests the warrant could be tied to a ShinyHunters theft in May 2020, when the group announced they had exfiltrated 500 GB of Microsoft’s source code from Microsoft’s private GitHub repositories.
“Researchers assess that Shiny Hunters gained access to roughly 1,200 private repositories around March 28, 2020, which have since been secured,” reads a May 2020 alert posted by the New Jersey Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Cell, a component within the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness.
“Though the breach was largely dismissed as insignificant, some images of the directory listing appear to contain source code for Azure, Office, and some Windows runtimes, and concerns have been raised regarding access to private API keys or passwords that may have been mistakenly included in some private repositories,” the alert continues. “Additionally, Shiny Hunters is flooding dark web marketplaces with breached databases.”
Last month, T-Mobile agreed to pay $350 million to settle a consolidated class action lawsuit over a breach in 2021 that affected 40 million current and former customers. The breach came to light on Aug. 16, 2021, when someone starting selling tens of millions of SSN/DOB records from T-Mobile on the same hacker forum where the ShinyHunters would post their auction for the claimed AT&T database just three days later.
T-Mobile has not disclosed many details about the “how” of last year’s breach, but it said the intruder(s) “leveraged their knowledge of technical systems, along with specialized tools and capabilities, to gain access to our testing environments and then used brute force attacks and other methods to make their way into other IT servers that included customer data.”
A sales thread tied to the stolen T-Mobile customer data.
One way to tame your email inbox is to get in the habit of using unique email aliases when signing up for new accounts online. Adding a “+” character after the username portion of your email address — followed by a notation specific to the site you’re signing up at — lets you create an infinite number of unique email addresses tied to the same account. Aliases can help users detect breaches and fight spam. But not all websites allow aliases, and they can complicate account recovery. Here’s a look at the pros and cons of adopting a unique alias for each website.
What is an email alias? When you sign up at a site that requires an email address, think of a word or phrase that represents that site for you, and then add that prefaced by a “+” sign just to the left of the “@” sign in your email address. For instance, if I were signing up at example.com, I might give my email address as krebsonsecurity+example@gmail.com. Then, I simply go back to my inbox and create a corresponding folder called “Example,” along with a new filter that sends any email addressed to that alias to the Example folder.
Importantly, you don’t ever use this alias anywhere else. That way, if anyone other than example.com starts sending email to it, it is reasonable to assume that example.com either shared your address with others or that it got hacked and relieved of that information. Indeed, security-minded readers have often alerted KrebsOnSecurity about spam to specific aliases that suggested a breach at some website, and usually they were right, even if the company that got hacked didn’t realize it at the time.
Alex Holden, founder of the Milwaukee-based cybersecurity consultancy Hold Security, said many threat actors will scrub their distribution lists of any aliases because there is a perception that these users are more security- and privacy-focused than normal users, and are thus more likely to report spam to their aliased addresses.
Holden said freshly-hacked databases also are often scrubbed of aliases before being sold in the underground, meaning the hackers will simply remove the aliased portion of the email address.
“I can tell you that certain threat groups have rules on ‘+*@’ email address deletion,” Holden said. “We just got the largest credentials cache ever — 1 billion new credentials to us — and most of that data is altered, with aliases removed. Modifying credential data for some threat groups is normal. They spend time trying to understand the database structure and removing any red flags.”
According to the breach tracking site HaveIBeenPwned.com, only about .03 percent of the breached records in circulation today include an alias.
Email aliases are rare enough that seeing just a few email addresses with the same alias in a breached database can make it trivial to identify which company likely got hacked and leaked said database. That’s because the most common aliases are simply the name of the website where the signup takes place, or some abbreviation or shorthand for it.
Hence, for a given database, if there are more than a handful of email addresses that have the same alias, the chances are good that whatever company or website corresponds to that alias has been hacked.
That might explain the actions of Allekabels, a large Dutch electronics web shop that suffered a data breach in 2021. Allekabels said a former employee had stolen data on 5,000 customers, and that those customers were then informed about the data breach by Allekabels.
But Dutch publication RTL Nieuws said it obtained a copy of the Allekabels user database from a hacker who was selling information on 3.6 million customers at the time, and found that the 5,000 number cited by the retailer corresponded to the number of customers who’d signed up using an alias. In essence, RTL argued, the company had notified only those most likely to notice and complain that their aliased addresses were suddenly receiving spam.
“RTL Nieuws has called more than thirty people from the database to check the leaked data,” the publication explained. “The customers with such a unique email address have all received a message from Allekabels that their data has been leaked – according to Allekabels they all happened to be among the 5000 data that this ex-employee had stolen.”
HaveIBeenPwned’s Hunt arrived at the conclusion that aliases account for about .03 percent of registered email addresses by studying the data leaked in the 2013 breach at Adobe, which affected at least 38 million users. Allekabels’s ratio of aliased users was considerably higher than Adobe’s — .14 percent — but then again European Internet users tend to be more privacy-conscious.
While overall adoption of email aliases is still quite low, that may be changing. Apple customers who use iCloud to sign up for new accounts online automatically are prompted to use Apple’s Hide My Email feature, which creates the account using a unique email address that automatically forwards to a personal inbox.
What are the downsides to using email aliases, apart from the hassle of setting them up? The biggest downer is that many sites won’t let you use a “+” sign in your email address, even though this functionality is clearly spelled out in the email standard.
Also, if you use aliases, it helps to have a reliable mnemonic to remember the alias used for each account (this is a non-issue if you create a new folder or rule for each alias). That’s because knowing the email address for an account is generally a prerequisite for resetting the account’s password, and if you can’t remember the alias you added way back when you signed up, you may have limited options for recovering access to that account if you at some point forget your password.
What about you, Dear Reader? Do you rely on email aliases? If so, have they been useful? Did I neglect to mention any pros or cons? Feel free to sound off in the comments below.
Microsoft today released updates to fix a record 141 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and related software. Once again, Microsoft is patching a zero-day vulnerability in the Microsoft Support Diagnostics Tool (MSDT), a service built into Windows. Redmond also addressed multiple flaws in Exchange Server — including one that was disclosed publicly prior to today — and it is urging organizations that use Exchange for email to update as soon as possible and to enable additional protections.
In June, Microsoft patched a vulnerability in MSDT dubbed “Follina” that had been used in active attacks for at least three months prior. This latest MSDT bug — CVE-2022-34713 — is a remote code execution flaw that requires convincing a target to open a booby-trapped file, such as an Office document. Microsoft this month also issued a different patch for another MSDT flaw, tagged as CVE-2022-35743.
The publicly disclosed Exchange flaw is CVE-2022-30134, which is an information disclosure weakness. Microsoft also released fixes for three other Exchange flaws that rated a “critical” label, meaning they could be exploited remotely to compromise the system and with no help from users. Microsoft says addressing some of the Exchange vulnerabilities fixed this month requires administrators to enable Windows Extended protection on Exchange Servers. See Microsoft’s blog post on the Exchange Server updates for more details.
“If your organization runs local exchange servers, this trio of CVEs warrant an urgent patch,” said Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research for Immerse Labs. “Exchanges can be treasure troves of information, making them valuable targets for attackers. With CVE-2022-24477, for example, an attacker can gain initial access to a user’s host and could take over the mailboxes for all exchange users, sending and reading emails and documents. For attackers focused on Business Email Compromise this kind of vulnerability can be extremely damaging.”
The other two critical Exchange bugs are tracked as CVE-2022-24516 and CVE-2022-21980. It’s difficult to believe it’s only been a little more than a year since malicious hackers worldwide pounced in a bevy of zero-day Exchange vulnerabilities to remotely compromise the email systems for hundreds of thousands of organizations running Exchange Server locally for email. That lingering catastrophe is reminder enough that critical Exchange bugs deserve immediate attention.
The SANS Internet Storm Center‘s rundown on Patch Tuesday warns that a critical remote code execution bug in the Windows Point-to-Point Protocol (CVE-2022-30133) could become “wormable” — a threat capable of spreading across a network without any user interaction.
“Another critical vulnerability worth mentioning is an elevation of privilege affecting Active Directory Domain Services (CVE-2022-34691),” SANS wrote. “According to the advisory, ‘An authenticated user could manipulate attributes on computer accounts they own or manage, and acquire a certificate from Active Directory Certificate Services that would allow elevation of privilege to System.’ A system is vulnerable only if Active Directory Certificate Services is running on the domain. The CVSS for this vulnerability is 8.8.”
Breen highlighted a set of four vulnerabilities in Visual Studio that earned Microsoft’s less-dire “important” rating but that nevertheless could be vitally important for the security of developer systems.
“Developers are empowered with access to API keys and deployment pipelines that, if compromised, could be significantly damaging to organizations,” he said. “So it’s no surprise they are often targeted by more advanced attackers. Patches for their tools should not be overlooked. We’re seeing a continued trend of supply-chain compromise too, making it vital that we ensure developers, and their tools, are kept up-to-date with the same rigor we apply to standard updates.”
Greg Wiseman, product manager at Rapid7, pointed to an interesting bug Microsoft patched in Windows Hello, the biometric authentication mechanism for Windows 10. Microsoft notes that the successful exploitation of the weakness requires physical access to the target device, but would allow an attacker to bypass a facial recognition check.
Wiseman said despite the record number of vulnerability fixes from Redmond this month, the numbers are slightly less dire.
“20 CVEs affect their Chromium-based Edge browser and 34 affect Azure Site Recovery (up from 32 CVEs affecting that product last month),” Wiseman wrote. “As usual, OS-level updates will address a lot of these, but note that some extra configuration is required to fully protect Exchange Server this month.”
As it often does on Patch Tuesday, Adobe has also released security updates for many of its products, including Acrobat and Reader, Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source. More details here.
Please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
Has your PC been hacked? Whatever happens, don’t panic. Read on for ten signs your PC has been hacked and handy tips on how to fix it.
The post How to check if your PC has been hacked – and what to do next appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
A class action lawsuit has been filed against big-three consumer credit bureau Experian over reports that the company did little to prevent identity thieves from hijacking consumer accounts. The legal filing cites liberally from an investigation KrebsOnSecurity published in July, which found that identity thieves were able to assume control over existing Experian accounts simply by signing up for new accounts using the victim’s personal information and a different email address.
The lawsuit, filed July 28, 2022 in California Central District Court, argues that Experian’s documented practice of allowing the re-registration of accounts without first verifying that the existing account authorized the changes is a violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
In July’s Experian, You Have Some Explaining to Do, we heard from two different readers who had security freezes on their credit files with Experian and who also recently received notifications from Experian that the email address on their account had been changed. So had their passwords and account PIN and secret questions. Both had used password managers to pick and store complex, unique passwords for their accounts.
Both were able to recover access to their Experian account simply by recreating it — sharing their name, address, phone number, social security number, date of birth, and successfully gleaning or guessing the answers to four multiple choice questions that are almost entirely based on public records (or else information that is not terribly difficult to find).
Here’s the bit from that story that got excerpted in the class action lawsuit:
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.
In response to my story, Experian suggested the reports from readers were isolated incidents, and that the company does all kinds of things it can’t talk about publicly to prevent bad people from abusing its systems.
“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.”
That sounds great, but since that story ran I’ve heard from several more readers who were doing everything right and still had their Experian accounts hijacked, with little left to show for it except an email alert from Experian saying they had changed the address on file for the account.
I’d like to believe this class action lawsuit will change things, but I do not. Likely, the only thing that will come from this lawsuit — if it is not dismissed outright — is a fat payout for the plaintiffs’ attorneys and “free” credit monitoring for a few years compliments of Experian.
Credit bureaus do not view consumers as customers, who are instead the product that is being sold to third party companies. Often that data is sold based on the interests of the entity purchasing the data, wherein consumer records can be packaged into categories like “dog owner,” “expectant parent,” or “diabetes patient.”
A chat conversation between the plaintiff and Experian’s support staff shows he experienced the same account hijack as described by our readers, despite his use of a computer-generated, unique password for his Experian account.
Most lenders rely on the big-three consumer credit reporting bureaus, including Equifax, Experian and Trans Union — to determine everyone’s credit score, fluctuations in which can make or break one’s application for a loan or job.
On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal broke a story saying Equifax sent lenders incorrect credit scores for millions of consumers this spring.
Meanwhile, the credit bureaus keep enjoying record earnings. For its part, Equifax reported a record fourth quarter 2021 revenue of 1.3 billion. Much of that revenue came from its Workforce Solutions business, which sells information about consumer salary histories to a variety of customers.
The Biden administration reportedly wants to create a public entity within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that would incorporate factors like rent and utility payments into lending decisions. Such a move would require congressional approval but CFPB officials are already discussing how it might be set up, Reuters reported.
“Credit reporting firms oppose the move, saying they are already working to provide fair and affordable credit to all consumers,” Reuters wrote. “A public credit bureau would be bad for consumers because it would expand the government’s power in an inappropriate way and its goals would shift with political winds, the Consumer Data Industry Association (CDIA), which represents private rating firms, said in a statement.”
A public credit bureau is likely to meet fierce resistance from the Congress’s most generous constituents — the banking industry — which detests rapid change and is heavily reliant on the credit bureaus.
And there is a preview of that fight going on right now over the bipartisan American Data Privacy and Protection Act, which The Hill described as one of the most lobbied bills in Congress. The idea behind the bill is that companies can’t collect any more information from you than they need to provide you with the service you’re seeking.
“The bipartisan bill, which represents a breakthrough for lawmakers after years of negotiations, would restrict the kind of data companies can collect from online users and the ways they can use that data,” The Hill reported Aug. 3. “Its provisions would impact companies in every consumer-centric industry — including retailers, e-commerce giants, telecoms, credit card companies and tech firms — that compile massive amounts of user data and rely on targeted ads to attract customers.”
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group, the bill as drafted falls short in protecting consumers in several areas. For starters, it would override or preempt many kinds of state privacy laws. The EFF argues the bill also would block the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from enforcing federal privacy laws that now apply to cable and satellite TV, and that consumers should still be allowed to sue companies that violate their privacy.
A copy of the class action complaint against Experian is available here (PDF).
Email scammers sent an Uber to the home of an 80-year-old woman who responded to a well-timed email scam, in a bid to make sure she went to the bank and wired money to the fraudsters. In this case, the woman figured out she was being scammed before embarking for the bank, but her story is a chilling reminder of how far crooks will go these days to rip people off.
Travis Hardaway is a former music teacher turned app developer from Towson, Md. Hardaway said his mother last month replied to an email she received regarding an appliance installation from BestBuy/GeekSquad. Hardaway said the timing of the scam email couldn’t have been worse: His mom’s dishwasher had just died, and she’d paid to have a new one delivered and installed.
“I think that’s where she got confused, because she thought the email was about her dishwasher installation,” Hardaway told KrebsOnSecurity.
Hardaway said his mom initiated a call to the phone number listed in the phony BestBuy email, and that the scammers told her she owed $160 for the installation, which seemed right at the time. Then the scammers asked her to install remote administration software on her computer so that they could control the machine from afar and assist her in making the payment.
After she logged into her bank and savings accounts with scammers watching her screen, the fraudster on the phone claimed that instead of pulling $160 out of her account, they accidentally transferred $160,000 to her account. They said they they needed her help to make sure the money was “returned.”
“They took control of her screen and said they had accidentally transferred $160,000 into her account,” Hardaway said. “The person on the phone told her he was going to lose his job over this transfer error, that he didn’t know what to do. So they sent her some information about where to wire the money, and asked her to go to the bank. But she told them, ‘I don’t drive,’ and they told her, “No problem, we’re sending an Uber to come help you to the bank.'”
Hardaway said he was out of town when all this happened, and that thankfully his mom eventually grew exasperated and gave up trying to help the scammers.
“They told her they were sending an Uber to pick her up and that it was on its way,” Hardaway said. “I don’t know if the Uber ever got there. But my mom went over to the neighbor’s house and they saw it for what it was — a scam.”
Hardaway said he has since wiped her computer, reinstalled the operating system and changed her passwords. But he says the incident has left his mom rattled.
“She’s really second-guessing herself now,” Hardaway said. “She’s not computer-savvy, and just moved down here from Boston during COVID to be near us, but she’s living by herself and feeling isolated and vulnerable, and stuff like this doesn’t help.”
According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), seniors are often targeted because they tend to be trusting and polite. More importantly, they also usually have financial savings, own a home, and have good credit—all of which make them attractive to scammers.
“Additionally, seniors may be less inclined to report fraud because they don’t know how, or they may be too ashamed of having been scammed,” the FBI warned in May. “They might also be concerned that their relatives will lose confidence in their abilities to manage their own financial affairs. And when an elderly victim does report a crime, they may be unable to supply detailed information to investigators.”
In 2021, more than 92,000 victims over the age of 60 reported losses of $1.7 billion to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). The FBI says that represents a 74 percent increase in losses over losses reported in 2020.
The abuse of ride-sharing services to scam the elderly is not exactly new. Authorities in Tampa, Fla. say they’re investigating an incident from December 2021 where fraudsters who’d stolen $700,000 from elderly grandparents used Uber rides to pick up bundles of cash from their victims.
With the recent demise of several popular “proxy” services that let cybercriminals route their malicious traffic through hacked PCs, there is now something of a supply chain crisis gripping the underbelly of the Internet. Compounding the problem, several remaining malware-based proxy services have chosen to block new registrations to avoid swamping their networks with a sudden influx of customers.
Last week, a seven-year-old proxy service called 911[.]re abruptly announced it was permanently closing after a cybersecurity breach allowed unknown intruders to trash its servers and delete customer data and backups. 911 was already akin to critical infrastructure for many in the cybercriminal community after its top two competitors — VIP72 and LuxSocks — closed or were shut down by authorities over the past 10 months.
The underground cybercrime forums are now awash in pleas from people who are desperately seeking a new supplier of abundant, cheap, and reliably clean proxies to restart their businesses. The consensus seems to be that those days are now over, and while there are many smaller proxy services remaining, few of them on their own are capable of absorbing anywhere near the current demand.
“Everybody is looking for an alternative, bro,” wrote a BlackHatForums user on Aug. 1 in response to one of many “911 alternative” discussion threads. “No one knows an equivalent alternative to 911[.]re. Their service in terms of value and accessibility compared to other proxy providers was unmatched. Hopefully someone comes with a great alternative to 911[.]re.”
Among the more frequently recommended alternatives to 911 is SocksEscort[.]com, a malware-based proxy network that has been in existence since at least 2010. Here’s what part of their current homepage looks like:
The SocksEscort home page says its services are perfect for people involved in automated online activity that often results in IP addresses getting blocked or banned, such as Craigslist and dating scams, search engine results manipulation, and online surveys.
But faced with a deluge of new signups in the wake of 911’s implosion, SocksEscort was among the remaining veteran proxy services that opted to close its doors to new registrants, replacing its registration page with the message:
“Due to unusual high demand, and heavy load on our servers, we had to block all new registrations. We won’t be able to support our proxies otherwise, and close SocksEscort as a result. We will resume registrations right after demand drops. Thank you for understanding, and sorry for the inconvenience.”
According to Spur.us, a startup that tracks proxy services, SocksEscort is a malware-based proxy offering, which means the machines doing the proxying of traffic for SocksEscort customers have been infected with malicious software that turns them into a traffic relay.
Spur says SocksEscort’s proxy service relies on software designed to run on Windows computers, and is currently leasing access to more than 14,000 hacked computers worldwide. That is a far cry from the proxy inventory advertised by 911, which stood at more than 200,000 IP addresses for rent just a few days ago.
Image: Spur.us
SocksEscort is what’s known as a “SOCKS Proxy” service. The SOCKS (or SOCKS5) protocol allows Internet users to channel their Web traffic through a proxy server, which then passes the information on to the intended destination. From a website’s perspective, the traffic of the proxy network customer appears to originate from a rented/malware-infected PC tied to a residential ISP customer, not from the proxy service customer.
These services can be used in a legitimate manner for several business purposes — such as price comparisons or sales intelligence — but they are massively abused for hiding cybercrime activity because they make it difficult to trace malicious traffic to its original source.
The disruption at 911[.]re came days after KrebsOnSecurity published an in-depth look at the long-running proxy service, which showed that 911 had a history of incentivizing the installation of its proxy software without user notice or consent, and that it actually ran some of these “pay-per-install” schemes on its own to guarantee a steady supply of freshly-hacked PCs.
More on SocksEscort in an upcoming story.
Further reading:
July 29, 2022: 911 Proxy Service Implodes After Disclosing Breach
July 28, 2022: Breach Exposes Users of Microleaves Proxy Service
July 18, 2022: A Deep Dive Into the Residential Proxy Service ‘911’
June 28, 2022: The Link Between AWM Proxy & the Glupteba Botnet
June 22, 2022: Meet the Administrators of the RSOCKS Proxy Botnet
Sept. 1, 2021: 15-Year-Old Malware Proxy Network VIP72 Goes Dark
If you’re the parent of a tween or teen, chances are they’re not the only ones going back to school. Their smartphones are going back too.
Our recent global research showed just how many tweens and teens use a smartphone. Plenty. Depending on the age band, that figure ranges anywhere from 76% to 93%, with some noteworthy variations between countries.
One of the top reasons parents give their child a phone is to stay in touch, so it likely follows that those phones will likely make their way into the classroom. Whether or not that’s the case for your child, back-to-school time is still a great time to help your child stay safer on their phone—and keep their phones safer too in the event of loss or theft.
Comprehensive online protection software can protect your phone in the same way that it protects your laptops and computers. Unfortunately, while many people use it on their laptops and computers, far fewer people use it on their phones—only about 42% of tweens and teens worldwide use it on their smartphones according to our most recent research.
Installing it can protect their privacy, keep them safe from attacks on public Wi-Fi, and automatically block unsafe websites and links, just to name a few things it can do. You can find our smartphone apps in both Google Play and the Apple App Store.
Updates do all kinds of great things for gaming, streaming, and chatting apps, such as adding more features and functionality over time. Updates do something else—they make those apps more secure. Hackers will hammer away at apps to find or create vulnerabilities, which can steal personal info or compromise the device itself. Updates will often include security improvements, in addition to performance improvements.
iPhones update apps automatically by default, yet you can learn how to turn them back on here if they’ve been set to manual updates. For Android phones, this article can help you set apps to auto-update if they aren’t set that way already.
Much the same goes for the operating system on smartphones too. Updates can bring more features and more security. iOS users can learn how to update their phones automatically in this article. Likewise, Android users can refer to this article about automatic updates for their phones.
Another finding from our latest global research is just how few people use a lock screen on their phones. Only 56% of parents said that they protect their smartphone with a password or passcode, and only 42% said they do the same for their child’s smartphone—a further 14% drop between parents and kids.
The issue here is clear. If an unlocked phone gets lost or stolen, all the information on it is an open book to a potential hacker, scammer, or thief. Enabling a lock screen if you haven’t already. It’s a simple feature found in both iOS and Android devices.
Preventing the actual theft of your phone is important too, as some hacks happen simply because a phone falls into the wrong hands. This is a good case for password or PIN protecting your phone, as well as turning on device tracking so that you can locate your phone or even wipe it remotely if you need to. Apple provides iOS users with a step-by-step guide for remotely wiping devices, and Google offers up a guide for Android users as well.
Strong, unique passwords offer another primary line of defense. Yet with all the accounts we have floating around, juggling dozens of strong and unique passwords can feel like a task—thus the temptation to use (and re-use) simpler passwords. Hackers love this because one password can be the key to several accounts. Instead, try a password manager that can create those passwords for you and safely store them as well. Comprehensive security software will include one, and McAfee also offers a free service with True Key.
Google Play and Apple’s App Store have measures in place to review and vet apps to help ensure that they are safe and secure. Third-party sites may not have that process in place. In fact, some third-party sites may intentionally host malicious apps as part of a broader scam. Granted, cybercriminals have found ways to work around Google and Apple’s review process, yet the chances of downloading a safe app from them are far greater than anywhere else. Furthermore, both Google and Apple are quick to remove malicious apps once discovered, making their stores that much safer.
One way that crooks can hack their way into your phone is via public Wi-Fi, such as at coffee shops, libraries, and other places on the go. These networks are public, meaning that your activities are exposed to others on the network—your banking, your password usage, all of it. One way to make a public network private is with a VPN, which can keep you and all you do protect from others on that Wi-Fi hotspot. Note that our VPN can turn on automatically for public Wi-Fi, protecting account credentials, search habits, and other activities online.
The same advice applies for these devices as well—strong online protection software, password management, VPN usage, and so on. What’s good for a smartphone is good for laptops and desktops too.
For laptops in particular, you can track these devices as well, just like a smartphone. The process differs from smartphones, yet it’s still quite straightforward. Windows and Mac users can enable the following settings—and you can click the links below for complete instructions from the source:
Putting these same protections in place on your laptops and desktops will help make your child, and your whole family, safer than before.
Note that on school-issued devices, your school district will likely have technology teams who manage them. As part of that, they typically have policies and restrictions in place to help keep them running safe and sound. If you have any questions about what kind of protections are in place on these school-issued devices, contact your school district.
While we’ve largely focused on protecting the phone itself, there’s also the importance of protecting the person who’s using it. In this case, your child—what they see, do, and experience on the internet. Device security is only part of the equation there.
Parents of tweens and teens know the concerns that come along with smartphone usage, ranging anywhere from cyberbullying, too much screen time, and simply wanting to know what their child is up to on their phone.
As you can imagine, each of these topics deserves its own treatment. The “Family Safety” section of our blog offers parents and their kids alike plenty of resources, and the list below can get you started on a few of the most pressing issues:
Without a doubt, while a child may get their first smartphone to “keep in touch,” that ownership blossoms into something far greater. And quite quickly. As they dive into the world of apps, social media, messaging, and gaming, take an interest, take it as an opportunity to spend time talking about their day and what it was like online.
By asking if they grabbed any cool pictures, what their favorite games are, and how their friends are when your child is texting them, questions like these can open a look into a world that would otherwise remain closed. This way, talking about the phone and what they’re doing on it becomes part of normal, everyday conversation. This can reap benefits down the road when your child encounters the inevitable bumps along the way, whether they’re dealing with a technical issue or something as difficult as cyberbullying or harassment. Talking about their life online on a regular basis may make them more apt to come forward when there’s a problem than they otherwise might.
In all, think of the smartphone as a fast pass into adulthood, thanks to how it puts the entirety of the internet right in your child’s hand. Protecting the device and the kid who’s using it will help ensure they get the absolute best out of all that potential.
The post Getting Your Kids Ready for School—And Their Smartphones Too appeared first on McAfee Blog.
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