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Countless smartphones seized in arrests and searches by police forces across the United States are being auctioned online without first having the data on them erased, a practice that can lead to crime victims being re-victimized, a new study found. In response, the largest online marketplace for items seized in U.S. law enforcement investigations says it now ensures that all phones sold through its platform will be data-wiped prior to auction.
Researchers at the University of Maryland last year purchased 228 smartphones sold “as-is” from PropertyRoom.com, which bills itself as the largest auction house for police departments in the United States. Of phones they won at auction (at an average of $18 per phone), the researchers found 49 had no PIN or passcode; they were able to guess an additional 11 of the PINs by using the top-40 most popular PIN or swipe patterns.
Phones may end up in police custody for any number of reasons — such as its owner was involved in identity theft — and in these cases the phone itself was used as a tool to commit the crime.
“We initially expected that police would never auction these phones, as they would enable the buyer to recommit the same crimes as the previous owner,” the researchers explained in a paper released this month. “Unfortunately, that expectation has proven false in practice.”
The researchers said while they could have employed more aggressive technological measures to work out more of the PINs for the remaining phones they bought, they concluded based on the sample that a great many of the devices they won at auction had probably not been data-wiped and were protected only by a PIN.
Beyond what you would expect from unwiped second hand phones — every text message, picture, email, browser history, location history, etc. — the 61 phones they were able to access also contained significant amounts of data pertaining to crime — including victims’ data — the researchers found.
Some readers may be wondering at this point, “Why should we care about what happens to a criminal’s phone?” First off, it’s not entirely clear how these phones ended up for sale on PropertyRoom.
“Some folks are like, ‘Yeah, whatever, these are criminal phones,’ but are they?” said Dave Levin, an assistant professor of computer science at University of Maryland.
“We started looking at state laws around what they’re supposed to do with lost or stolen property, and we found that most of it ends up going the same route as civil asset forfeiture,” Levin continued. “Meaning, if they can’t find out who owns something, it eventually becomes the property of the state and gets shipped out to these resellers.”
Also, the researchers found that many of the phones clearly had personal information on them regarding previous or intended targets of crime: A dozen of the phones had photographs of government-issued IDs. Three of those were on phones that apparently belonged to sex workers; their phones contained communications with clients.
An overview of the phone functionality and data accessibility for phones purchased by the researchers.
One phone had full credit files for eight different people on it. On another device they found a screenshot including 11 stolen credit cards that were apparently purchased from an online carding shop. On yet another, the former owner had apparently been active in a Telegram group chat that sold tutorials on how to run identity theft scams.
The most interesting phone from the batches they bought at auction was one with a sticky note attached that included the device’s PIN and the notation “Gry Keyed,” no doubt a reference to the Graykey software that is often used by law enforcement agencies to brute-force a mobile device PIN.
“That one had the PIN on the back,” Levin said. “The message chain on that phone had 24 Experian and TransUnion credit histories”.
The University of Maryland team said they took care in their research not to further the victimization of people whose information was on the devices they purchased from PropertyRoom.com. That involved ensuring that none of the devices could connect to the Internet when powered on, and scanning all images on the devices against known hashes for child sexual abuse material.
It is common to find phones and other electronics for sale on auction platforms like eBay that have not been wiped of sensitive data, but in those cases eBay doesn’t possess the items being sold. In contrast, platforms like PropertyRoom obtain devices and resell them at auction directly.
PropertyRoom did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But the researchers said sometime in the past few months PropertyRoom began posting a notice stating that all mobile devices would be wiped of their data before being sold at auction.
“We informed them of our research in October 2022, and they responded that they would review our findings internally,” Levin said. “They stopped selling them for a while, but then it slowly came back, and then we made sure we won every auction. And all of the ones we got from that were indeed wiped, except there were four devices that had external SD [storage] cards in them that weren’t wiped.”
A copy of the University of Maryland study is here (PDF).
I wish I'd read this blog post years ago.
I don't have any expertise whatsoever to be guiding others through this process so please don't look at this as a "how to". But what I do have is an audience, and I've found that each time I've opened up about the more personal aspects of my life and where I've struggled (such as my post a few years ago on dealing with stress), I've had a huge amount of feedback from people that have been helped by it.
Just read this. Hugely helpful to me going through the never ending stress of divorce. It had given me hope and focus. Thank you 🙏
— Ruth Cornish (@RuthACornish) March 16, 2022
Perhaps my willingness to talk openly about it has led to others coming to terms with their own similar circumstances, and that's my hope in writing this. Not to guide you through divorce, but to help you understand it.
Here's what I've learned.
This title is deliberately blunt, and I chose to run with it because it's one of the most important things I've learned throughout this process. Let me explain:
Nobody goes into a marriage expecting it to fail. You're marrying for life and when the day comes that you realise it's not going to happen, you feel like a failure. You also feel stigmatised; "I've not been able to deliver on the promise of my marriage, what will people think of me? What will my family think? My kids?" Now, I'm not religious in any way whatsoever but I'm conscious of the social expectation of marriage. I found it extremely difficult early on to talk to people about it outside my closest circle of friends, partly because I had difficulty simply finding the words to explain it and partly because to be honest, I was worried about being judged for having a failed marriage.
It took time to realise that people don't care or more specifically, they don't care about stigmatisation or judgement or most of the other emotional baggage you get caught up with. Friends care about you, of course, but the fact you've decided to dissolve a marriage really isn't their concern. Your wellbeing is their concern. Your happiness. Your children's happiness. The person caring most about the mechanics of divorce and leading separate lives was me, and that's something I had complete control over.
The exception to "nobody cares", in my experience, is family and others in your inner circle who hold onto that same stigma that dogged me early on. There may be traditional reasons for this, cultural reasons, religious reasons or just the simple sadness for a relationship that is no more. Family in particular can be complex, especially when there may be existing resentment, jealousy or as we've all experienced at one time or another, individuals who just revel in drama. They can be your greatest supporters or, if they prefer, antagonists. But that's their own emotional struggle to deal with, not yours, and a truly supportive inner circle will prioritise your wellbeing.
Where it really started to normalise for me was over the course of time as I learned how many other people had, themselves, gone through divorce. Sometimes it was much simpler happening earlier in life and without kids, but often it was much, much more complex, especially where there was financial distress or older children. Once I came to terms with the fact that the concept of a marriage falling apart is not the thing I should be worried about and I should instead focus on the logistics of the various practical challenges that presents, I became a lot more comfortable with the situation and frankly, a lot happier.
Someone I spoke with recently was married to an abusive drunk. They knew the relationship was over when they found themselves thinking how easy it would be to push their inebriated spouse down the stairs.
A friend confided in me about how their partner had physically assaulted them since the birth of their child. The kid was about to enter adulthood.
Another friend explained recently how it wasn't until their wedding night they acknowledged they were gay.
Not all stories are as dramatic; one friend is happily married with two children of their own and two their partner had in a previous marriage. Another divorced young and now lives happily with their new partner, the child they had together, their partner's ex and the child they'd had previously.
I've deliberately used gender-neutral pronouns here; it surprised me how often personal stories didn't align to the stereotypical norms of male and female behaviours. Especially in cases where there has been mental illness, alcohol dependency or drug addiction, you realise just how unique everyone's own journey is and how even though your own may feel exceptional, it's probably not.
I mention this here because as my life started to settle down, that headline kept coming back up - "everyone has their own story". As time went by and I met new people and heard new stories, it would come up over and over again in my mind. It helped me normalise my own circumstances and overcome the stigma I'd felt so much in the early days.
It's tricky when there's mutual friends, common contacts in social circles, other parents at school and all sorts of scenarios where you're going to be spending time with the same people your ex is. Whose side do they take? Who are they sympathetic to? Angry towards?
There's a temptation to inject your own views into discussions with these people but frankly, the chances of doing that in a balanced fashion in the midst of the most emotional period of your life are zilch. I know when I think back to conversations with friends who've gone through similar trauma in their own lives, I'm acutely aware that as much as I want to be there to support them, I'm only hearing half the story. One friend in particular I've spent a lot of time with is convinced their ex is actively turning their kids against them and they may very well be right, but I only hear one side of the story. Another was concerned their child had been abused whilst in their ex's care and again, I've only heard one story. But to my earlier headline, I don't care because I'm not listening to their stories so that I can play judge, I'm listening to help them get it off their chest and deal with their emotions.
What I found over the course of years was that when it comes to mutual friends, it was preferable to simply not discuss the ex. It might come up organically (which parent will the kids be with when a friend wants a play date, for example), but that's a discussion that can be had in a pure mechanical fashion without emotion. It's harder when more pointed questions are asked - "How's it going with the divorce?" - and candid, honest responses aren't always compatible with the goal of remaining neutral. Interestingly, I found that people judged bitterness towards the other party quite harshly, especially where they viewed behaviour as derogatory. "Why can't they just get over it and move on", I'd keep hearing. It feels almost trite to put it this way, but people respond well to positivity and just getting on with life, but judge negativity and bitterness quite harshly.
Giving people time and space to observe without feeling like someone is trying to influence their views is invaluable and, in my experience, led to much more support.
During the good days of my marriage, I knew my wife wanted the best for me as I did for her. After all, that's the bedrock of a relationship: that you're there to support each other and wish for nothing other than their happiness. Divorce changes that and in many cases, inverts that bedrock yet somehow your brain is still wired to want the best for them and in turn, to expect that they want the best for you.
During the divorce process, there was constant strategising about how to move matters forward and drive the formal things to a conclusion and time and time again, I'd talk to my lawyer and say "she's telling me she'd like [blah]". In this context, [blah] was normally something that had the optics of good intentions, often motherhood statements such as "desirous of an amicable outcome" or words like "fair", "kind" and "considerate". Who wouldn't want these things?! These things are all great! At one stage I relayed this messaging to him after which he paused, and then asked a very simple question:
What do her actions tell you?
Uh... something different. Opposite.
It was the "be kind" of misdirection where someone says words you naturally support (of course we all should be kind!) yet demonstrate actions to the contrary. Do you judge them on the words? Or the actions? Of course it should be the latter, but that realisation only comes once you recognise that the two don't always align.
The problem is the aforementioned brain wiring where you're conditioned to expect the other party to want the best for you and to take them at their word. It's hard to let go of the fact that your wellbeing is no longer their first priority and frankly, the inverse is also true. But that doesn't change the intention being represented so we need to move beyond judging on words and start judging on behaviour. I later heard this same sentiment expressed in a more eloquent way:
Characterise people by their actions and you will never be fooled by their words
This was another epiphany for me, and it fundamentally changed the way I viewed the situation. If I'm honest, it gave me a lot more clarity of mind; it forced me to let go of many of the emotions surrounding the divorce and instead just focus on the facts. The motherhood statements and platitudes no longer mattered, all that mattered was actions.
I read a lot to try and help me understand what was going on, particularly in the earlier days of separation. One piece I read really resonated as it helped explain how two people who were once so close can now be on totally different wavelengths and have different versions of the same events. The piece I read was about the Rashomon Effect:
The effect is named after Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon, in which a murder is described in four contradictory ways by four witnesses. The term addresses the motives, mechanism, and occurrences of the reporting on the circumstance and addresses contested interpretations of events, the existence of disagreements regarding the evidence of events, and subjectivity versus objectivity in human perception, memory, and reporting.
Same event, different perceptions of what happened. The Rashomon Effect doesn't help explain what actually happened, rather it describes how people in a highly emotional, life-changing time of their lives can have fundamentally different views of the same circumstances. This might sound kind of clinical and detached, but it helped explain behaviour that I simply couldn't rationalise before. Recognising that people can have different perceptions of the same events that led to the separation helped me deal with the grief. But probably about a year after separating, I had an epiphany that really helped me move forward: the root cause didn't matter anyway.
It's only natural to seek out answers and, indeed, to apportion blame. I've done it, others in similar situations I've spoken to have done it and should you ever find yourself in the same place as me, you'll do it too. It's not always just blame with the other party either and I suspect there's rarely a divorce where all the fault lies purely on one side.
I found all the reasons in the world to explain why this had happened. Recent incidents, things related to money, to work, to kids and even signs that I should have picked up on right from day one of the relationship. I'm sure she did the same. But ultimately, it's inconsequential and my pinning the blame on particular things was making no difference whatsoever.
Legally, it doesn't matter either. In Australia (and in many other parts of the world), we've had the concept of No Fault Divorce since 1975. The court doesn't care who did this or who didn't do that, all they care about is that there's an irretrievable breakdown of the relationship and that either one or both of you wants the marriage annulled. That is all.
In playing back all the events over all the years, I was just reliving bad memories. It was making me angry, regretful, emotional. I wasn't longing for reconciliation and as I moved forward in my own life, I wasn't even wishing things were back where they were years ago. I was seeking answers where I wasn't going to find them, and they wouldn't change a thing today even if I did.
Stop dwelling on it and move on. I can't say I always do that, but the more I've just put my head down, looked to the future and powered forward, the better things got.
Telling the kids was the worst. In the hours beforehand, I was a mess. Inconsolable. I felt that stigma I mentioned earlier coming over me in waves as we prepared to tell our children we were breaking up the family.
Their mother was the one who told them as we all sat down together. It was pretty short and to the point, effectively boiling down to us having mutually decided to lead separate lives. The bomb was dropped, then she finished by prompting the kids for any questions they'd like to ask us. They paused, then our 9-year old son spoke up:
Can we have pizza for dinner tonight?
I smile thinking about that even now 🙂 It was a relief valve at an enormously stressful time not just because it was kinda funny given the gravitas of the news they'd just heard, but because it demonstrated that just as with the observations above about friends not caring, the kids didn't care either. They cared about being loved, supported, having their parents' attention and really, just fundamental Maslow's hierarchy of needs sort of stuff. They didn't understand the social concept of marriage, they weren't aware of the stigma I felt and frankly, if it didn't have any actual impact on their lives in any meaningful sort of way, they didn't care.
In later reading I'd learn that as far as divorces and kids go, this is the ideal time to do it. Were they to be much older (our daughter was 6 at the time), things would be harder as they became more independently minded and more aware of the social issues surrounding a marriage breakdown. But at this age and in an environment that was still civil at the time, both the news on that day and everything else I've observed in the years since has been entirely unnoteworthy.
But I also don't want to trivialise the situation with kids as I've seen things work very differently for other people, especially when teenagers are involved. I can only relay my own experiences here and acknowledge that I've been extraordinarily fortunate. Part of that good fortune has been luck due to the timing of our separation, their age and their personalities, and part of it has been good management on our behalf as parents.
What I've found most difficult to navigate is loyalty binds:
A loyalty bind in divorce is where the child does not feel allowed to love both parents. He has to side with one or the other about any number of issues, big and small. His anger, sadness, and anxiety increases as he feels pushed to choose and either choice results in the loss, or fear of loss, of the other parent. He can’t win.
When you've got two people who've decided to wind up a relationship, there's going to be flashpoints. Disagreements. Possibly legal battles. You're both angry, both convinced you're right and sometimes, certain that the other party is the devil. Now, imagine amidst the heights of that frustration a parent gives the kids some pretty unfiltered opinions about the other party - how do the kids react? Angry towards the parent being spoken harshly of due to the things they've allegedly done? Or defensive of that parent as they watch the other one unleashing on them? He can't win!
I've found this to be an extremely delicate area to navigate for two reasons:
Firstly, I've had to make sure that no matter how I've felt about the situation, I avoid negativity towards the ex in front of the kids to the fullest extent possible. Sometimes that's easy insofar as there are many discussions that simply don't need to be had with the kids (it's much better to vent to close friends and family), but other times it can be extremely difficult if it's a topic that directly impacts them (e.g., their movements over school holidays). But that burden is on us - the adults - and it's one the kids shouldn't have to bear.
Secondly, there's dealing with times where the other parent puts the kids in the very position you're trying so hard to avoid. Particularly when derogatory messaging comes home in ways that could only have come from the other party, you're left feeling defensive and wanting to set them straight with your version of the record, but now you're back at the loyalty bind problem. It's not always explicitly derogatory behaviour that creates that loyalty bind either, it can be something as minor as being emotional when the kids mention the other party or particular activities they've been involved in; "every time I talk about [thing], it makes [mum|dad] upset".
In dealing with the latter situation, I sought support from a family counsellor who gave me an example from another client that epitomises everything that is wrong with creating loyalty binds. A lady had attended with her 6-year old daughter and during the session, received a call from her lawyer related to matrimonial matters. After hanging up, she burst into tears and in an attempt to calm her, the daughter put her arms around the mother and said, "that's ok mum, I hate dad too". That story is just heartbreaking and even though it may not have been the mother's intention, her reaction drove a wedge between a child and their parent. That's a hard one but again, we're the adults, it's our responsibility to manage our emotions around these situations.
I keep coming back to what is ultimately a very simple premise: putting the kids in a situation where it creates a loyalty bind is a selfish act that prioritises your emotions over the kids' wellbeing. Whether it's deliberate or accidental, it must be avoided to the fullest extent possible.
I originally started seeing a psychologist to help me deal with stress and sustain my performance when I felt everything was getting too much for me. It quickly became clear that the bulk of my stress wasn't due to my workload, it was due to my relationship. This is where psychologists can make a big difference - cutting through the emotion and getting to the core of what's eating you.
So, I started seeing Clive. He wasn't the first psych I'd seen, but he was the first one that really resonated with me, so I made appointments to see him every couple of weeks. We'd spend an hour each time going through recent events, how they made me feel and how I'd deal with them moving forward. He made an enormously positive difference not just in terms of understanding my own emotions, but reframing situations to reduce the unnecessary stress I was feeling.
Here's a perfect example: I'd often worry about things that were really of very little consequence but would bug the hell out of me. They'd come through an email, via the kids or in a lawyer's letter. On one occasion, I unloaded the whole lot onto Clive after which he sat thoughtfully, then suggested the following:
Think of her as a drunk person in a pub throwing punches at you. It's demanding your attention, but nothing is connecting and eventually she'll tire out or sober up.
I loved that and ever since that session, I've become much more adept at separating the things that actually require my emotional input from the drunk punches.
The other exceptionally helpful guidance he gave came during a protracted legal stoush that felt like it had no end in sight:
Me: "This feels like it will never end"
Clive: "Do you know what to do next?"
Me: "Yes, I'm going to do [legal thing] then [other legal thing] then if that doesn't work, [alternating legal thing]."
Clive: "Then just follow the process."
Follow the process. Time and time again, I'd sit on the couch, pour out my heart and we'd come back again to simply following the process. Divorce paperwork - follow the process. Parenting orders - follow the process. Financial settlement - follow the process. At their essence, they were merely business deals and negotiations, they just happened to be wrapped up in multiple layers of emotions.
In a later session, there was one addition to this guidance; follow the process and sustain performance. You can't let the process sap you of energy such that you're unable to perform. You can't let it mentally or emotionally drain you, distract you from life's essentials or keep you from reaching the goal. This was the high-performance coaching I was seeking out in the first place, and it was more relevant at this juncture than ever before.
That's not to say that following the process is simple, it certainly wasn't for me, and those layers of emotions would regularly impede progress. Clive would often break it down into psychological behaviours he'd plot out on the whiteboard:
I'd rarely take notes, but I'd take photos. I'd go back through them later on in an attempt to make sense of it all. Professional help made an enormously positive difference; it helped me process everything going on in my life, understand it more objectively and ultimately, lead a happier life. Speaking of which...
Every person I spoke to who'd been through divorce and "emerged on the other side" told me the same thing - it gets better. Clive told me that from day 1, pointing out that there's a very predictable cycle we all go through:
This maps pretty closely to your classic Kübler-Ross 5 stages of grief and we recognised that I was somewhere around the righthand side of the whiteboard. It's not always movement in the one direction, indeed I was oscillating back and forth around "understanding of new normal", sometimes a couple of steps backwards towards "anger", but increasingly towards "engaging and embracing new normal". And my new normal was starting to look pretty damn good:
Let’s face it. Everyone who’s as slick as Troy and done as much for the sec community deserves a girl that fine!😂 #yesG
— .b (@dot_b) June 4, 2021
I love this comment, not because I alone somehow deserve romantic happiness, but because we all do. To inject further optimism into the end of this post, upon reflection, every single story I relayed above about friends who have gone through their own divorce struggles has resulted in new partners, new lives and new happiness. Every. Single. One. Charlotte and I got engaged on New Year's Day two years ago and married in September. Life has never been better 😊
Sometimes, life feels like a fairytale. This is now my favourite photo ever ❤️ pic.twitter.com/lspKwVVSly
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) December 9, 2022
One final note on this, a quote from Lao Tzu:
If you are depressed you are living in the past.
If you are anxious you are living in the future.
If you are at peace you are living in the present.
There are still "drunk punches" and occasional anxious moments, but they're increasingly fleeting and I'm at peace. I hope this post has been helpful and if you recognise yourself in this, that you reach this stage of the process quickly and peacefully.
A sprawling online company based in Georgia that has made tens of millions of dollars purporting to sell access to jobs at the United States Postal Service (USPS) has exposed its internal IT operations and database of nearly 900,000 customers. The leaked records indicate the network’s chief technology officer in Pakistan has been hacked for the past year, and that the entire operation was created by the principals of a Tennessee-based telemarketing firm that has promoted USPS employment websites since 2016.
The website FederalJobsCenter promises to get you a job at the USPS in 30 days or your money back.
KrebsOnSecurity was recently contacted by a security researcher who said he found a huge tranche of full credit card records exposed online, and that at first glance the domain names involved appeared to be affiliated with the USPS.
Further investigation revealed a long-running international operation that has been emailing and text messaging people for years to sign up at a slew of websites that all promise they can help visitors secure employment at the USPS.
Sites like FederalJobsCenter[.]com also show up prominently in Google search results for USPS employment, and steer applicants toward making credit card “registration deposits” to ensure that one’s application for employment is reviewed. These sites also sell training, supposedly to help ace an interview with USPS human resources.
FederalJobsCenter’s website is full of content that makes it appear the site is affiliated with the USPS, although its “terms and conditions” state that it is not. Rather, the terms state that FederalJobsCenter is affiliated with an entity called US Job Services, which says it is based in Lawrenceville, Ga.
“US Job Services provides guidance, coaching, and live assistance to postal job candidates to help them perform better in each of the steps,” the website explains.
The site says applicants need to make a credit card deposit to register, and that this amount is refundable if the applicant is not offered a USPS job within 30 days after the interview process.
But a review of the public feedback on US Job Services and dozens of similar names connected to this entity over the years shows a pattern of activity: Applicants pay between $39.99 and $100 for USPS job coaching services, and receive little if anything in return. Some reported being charged the same amount monthly.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has sued several times over the years to disrupt various schemes offering to help people get jobs at the Postal Service. Way back in 1998, the FTC and the USPS took action against several organizations that were selling test or interview preparation services for potential USPS employees.
“Companies promising jobs with the U.S. Postal Service are breaking federal law,” the joint USPS-FTC statement said.
In that 1998 case, the defendants behind the scheme were taking out classified ads in newspapers. Ditto for a case the FTC brought in 2005. By 2008, the USPS job exam preppers had shifted to advertising their schemes mostly online. And in 2013, the FTC won a nearly $5 million judgment against a Kentucky company purporting to offer such services.
Tim McKinlay authored a report last year at Affiliateunguru.com on whether the US Job Services website job-postal[.]com was legitimate or a scam. He concluded it was a scam based on several factors, including that the website listed multiple other names (suggesting it had recently switched names), and that he got nothing from the transaction with the job site.
“They openly admit they’re not affiliated with the US Postal Service, but claim to be experts in the field, and that, just by following the steps on their site, you easily pass the postal exams and get a job in no time,” McKinlay wrote. “But it’s really just a smoke and mirrors game. The site’s true purpose is to collect $46.95 from as many people as possible. And considering how popular this job is, they’re probably making a killing.”
KrebsOnSecurity was alerted to the data exposure by Patrick Barry, chief information officer at Charlotte, NC based Rebyc Security. Barry said he found that not only was US Job Services leaking its customer payment records in real-time and going back to 2016, but its website also leaked a log file from 2019 containing the site administrator’s contact information and credentials to the site’s back-end database.
Barry shared screenshots of that back-end database, which show the email address for the administrator of US Job Services is tab.webcoder@gmail.com. According to cyber intelligence platform Constella Intelligence, that email address is tied to the LinkedIn profile for a developer in Karachi, Pakistan named Muhammed Tabish Mirza.
A search on tab.webcoder@gmail.com at DomainTools.com reveals that email address was used to register several USPS-themed domains, including postal2017[.]com, postaljobscenter[.]com and usps-jobs[.]com.
Mr. Mirza declined to respond to questions, but the exposed database information was removed from the Internet almost immediately after KrebsOnSecurity shared the offending links.
A “Campaigns” tab on that web panel listed several advertising initiatives tied to US Job Services websites, with names like “walmart drip campaign,” “hiring activity due to virus,” “opt-in job alert SMS,” and “postal job opening.”
Another page on the US Job Services panel included a script for upselling people who call in response to email and text message solicitations, with an add-on program that normally sells for $1,200 but is being “practically given away” for a limited time, for just $49.
An upselling tutorial for call center employees.
“There’s something else we have you can take advantage of that can help you make more money,” the script volunteers. “It’s an easy to use 12-month career development plan and program to follow that will result in you getting any job you want, not just at the post office….anywhere…and then getting promoted rapidly.”
It’s bad enough that US Job Services was leaking customer data: Constella Intelligence says the email address tied to Mr. Mirza shows up in more than a year’s worth of “bot logs” created by a malware infection from the Redline infostealer.
Constella reports that for roughly a year between 2021 and 2022, a Microsoft Windows device regularly used by Mr. Mirza and his colleagues was actively uploading all of the device’s usernames, passwords and authentication cookies to cybercriminals based in Russia.
The web-based backend for US Job Services lists more than 160 people under its “Users & Teams” tab. This page indicates that access to the consumer and payment data collected by US Job Services is currently granted to several other coders who work with Mr. Mirza in Pakistan, and to multiple executives, contractors and employees working for a call center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
The call center — which operates as Nextlevelsupportcenters[.]com and thenextlevelsupport[.]com — curiously has several key associates with a history of registering USPS jobs-related domain names.
The US Job Services website has more than 160 users, including most of the employees at Next Level Support.
The website for NextLevelSupport says it was founded in 2017 by a Gary Plott, whose LinkedIn profile describes him as a seasoned telecommunications industry expert. The leaked backend database for US Job Services says Plott is a current administrator on the system, along with several other Nextlevel founders listed on the company’s site.
Reached via telephone, Plott initially said his company was merely a “white label” call center that multiple clients use to interact with customers, and that the content their call center is responsible for selling on behalf of US Job Services was not produced by NextLevelSupport.
“A few years ago, we started providing support for this postal product,” Plott said. “We didn’t develop the content but agreed we would support it.”
Interestingly, DomainTools says the Gmail address used by Plott in the US Jobs system was also used to register multiple USPS job-related domains, including postaljobssite[.]com, postalwebsite[.]com, usps-nlf[.]com, usps-nla[.]com.
Asked to reconcile this with his previous statement, Plott said he never did anything with those sites but acknowledged that his company did decide to focus on the US Postal jobs market from the very beginning.
Plott said his company never refuses to issue a money-back request from a customer, because doing so would result in costly chargebacks for NextLevel (and presumably for the many credit card merchant accounts apparently set up by Mr. Mirza).
“We’ve never been deceptive,” Plott said, noting that customers of the US Job Services product receive a digital download with tips on how to handle a USPS interview, as well as unlimited free telephone support if they need it.
“We’ve never told anyone we were the US Postal Service,” Plott continued. “We make sure people fully understand that they are not required to buy this product, but we think we can help you and we have testimonials from people we have helped. But ultimately you as the customer make that decision.”
An email address in the US Job Services teams page for another user — Stephanie Dayton — was used to register the domains postalhiringreview[.]com, and postalhiringreviewboard[.]org back in 2014. Reached for comment, Ms. Dayton said she has provided assistance to Next Level Support Centers with their training and advertising, but never in the capacity as an employee.
Perhaps the most central NextLevel associate who had access to US Job Services was Russell Ramage, a telemarketer from Warner Robins, Georgia. Ramage is listed in South Carolina incorporation records as the owner of a now-defunct call center service called Smart Logistics, a company whose name appears in the website registration records for several early and long-running US Job Services sites.
According to the state of Georgia, Russell Ramage was the registered agent of several USPS job-themed companies.
The leaked records show the email address used by Ramage also registered multiple USPS jobs-related domains, including postalhiringcenter[.]com, postalhiringreviews[.]com, postaljobs-email[.]com, and postaljobssupport1[.]com.
A review of business incorporation records in Georgia indicate Ramage was the registered agent for at least three USPS-related companies over the years, including Postal Career Placement LLC, Postal Job Services Inc., and Postal Operations Inc. All three companies were founded in 2015, and are now dissolved.
An obituary dated February 2023 says Russell Ramage recently passed away at the age of 41. No cause of death was stated, but the obituary goes on to say that Russ “Rusty” Ramage was “preceded in death by his mother, Anita Lord Ramage, pets, Raine and Nola and close friends, Nicole Reeves and Ryan Rawls.”
In 2014, then 33-year-old Ryan “Jootgater” Rawls of Alpharetta, Georgia pleaded guilty to conspiring to distribute controlled substances. Rawls also grew up in Warner Robins, and was one of eight suspects charged with operating a secret darknet narcotics ring called the Farmer’s Market, which federal prosecutors said trafficked in millions of dollars worth of controlled substances.
Reuters reported that an eighth suspect in that case had died by the time of Rawls’ 2014 guilty plea, although prosecutors declined to offer further details about that. According to his obituary, Ryan Christopher Rawls died at the age of 38 on Jan. 28, 2019.
In a comment on Ramage’s memorial wall, Stephanie Dayton said she began working with Ramage in 2006.
“Our friendship far surpassed a working one, we had a very close bond and became like brother and sister,” Dayton wrote. “I loved Russ deeply and he was like family. He was truly one of the best human beings I have ever known. He was kind and sweet and truly cared about others. Never met anyone like him. He will be truly missed. RIP brother.”
The FTC and USPS note that while applicants for many entry-level postal jobs are required to take a free postal exam, the tests are usually offered only every few years in any particular district, and there are no job placement guarantees based on score.
“If applicants pass the test by scoring at least 70 out of 100, they are placed on a register, ranked by their score,” the FTC explained. “When a position becomes open, the local post office looks to the applicable register for that geographic location and calls the top three applicants. The score is only one of many criteria taken into account for employment. The exams test general aptitude, something that cannot necessarily be increased by studying.”
The FTC says anyone interested in a job at the USPS should inquire at their local postal office, where applicants generally receive a free packet of information about required exams. More information about job opportunities at the postal service is available at the USPS’s careers website.
Michael Martel, spokesperson for the United States Postal Inspection Service, said in a written statement that the USPS has no affiliation with the websites or companies named in this story.
“To learn more about employment with USPS, visit USPS.com/careers,” Martel wrote. “If you are the victim of a crime online report it to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) at www.ic3.gov. To report fraud committed through or toward the USPS, its employees, or customers, report it to the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) at www.uspis.gov/report.”
According to the leaked back-end server for US Job Services, here is a list of the current sites selling this product:
usjobshelpcenter[.]com
usjobhelpcenter[.]com
job-postal[.]com
localpostalhiring[.]com
uspostalrecruitment[.]com
postalworkerjob[.]com
next-level-now[.]com
postalhiringcenters[.]com
postofficehiring[.]com
postaljobsplacement[.]com
postal-placement[.]com
postofficejobopenings[.]com
postalexamprep[.]com
postaljobssite[.]com
postalwebsite[.]com
postalcareerscenters[.]com
postal-hiring[.]com
postal-careers[.]com
postal-guide[.]com
postal-hiring-guide[.]com
postal-openings[.]com
postal-placement[.]com
postofficeplacements[.]com
postalplacementservices[.]com
postaljobs20[.]com
postal-jobs-placement[.]com
postaljobopenings[.]com
postalemployment[.]com
postaljobcenters[.]com
postalmilitarycareers[.]com
epostaljobs[.]com
postal-job-center[.]com
postalcareercenter[.]com
postalhiringcenters[.]com
postal-job-center[.]com
postalcareercenter[.]com
postalexamprep[.]com
postalplacementcenters[.]com
postalplacementservice[.]com
postalemploymentservices[.]com
uspostalhiring[.]com
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A shocking number of organizations — including banks and healthcare providers — are leaking private and sensitive information from their public Salesforce Community websites, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The data exposures all stem from a misconfiguration in Salesforce Community that allows an unauthenticated user to access records that should only be available after logging in.
A researcher found DC Health had five Salesforce Community sites exposing data.
Salesforce Community is a widely-used cloud-based software product that makes it easy for organizations to quickly create websites. Customers can access a Salesforce Community website in two ways: Authenticated access (requiring login), and guest user access (no login required). The guest access feature allows unauthenticated users to view specific content and resources without needing to log in.
However, sometimes Salesforce administrators mistakenly grant guest users access to internal resources, which can cause unauthorized users to access an organization’s private information and lead to potential data leaks.
Until being contacted by this reporter on Monday, the state of Vermont had at least five separate Salesforce Community sites that allowed guest access to sensitive data, including a Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program that exposed the applicant’s full name, Social Security number, address, phone number, email, and bank account number.
This misconfigured Salesforce Community site from the state of Vermont was leaking pandemic assistance loan application data, including names, SSNs, email address and bank account information.
Vermont’s Chief Information Security Officer Scott Carbee said his security teams have been conducting a full review of their Salesforce Community sites, and already found one additional Salesforce site operated by the state that was also misconfigured to allow guest access to sensitive information.
“My team is frustrated by the permissive nature of the platform,” Carbee said.
Carbee said the vulnerable sites were all created rapidly in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, and were not subjected to their normal security review process.
“During the pandemic, we were largely standing up tons of applications, and let’s just say a lot of them didn’t have the full benefit of our dev/ops process,” Carbee said. “In our case, we didn’t have any native Salesforce developers when we had to suddenly stand up all these sites.”
Earlier this week, KrebsOnSecurity notified Columbus, Ohio-based Huntington Bank that its recently acquired TCF Bank had a Salesforce Community website that was leaking documents related to commercial loans. The data fields in those loan applications included name, address, full Social Security number, title, federal ID, IP address, average monthly payroll, and loan amount.
Huntington Bank has disabled the leaky TCF Bank Salesforce website. Matthew Jennings, deputy chief information security officer at Huntington, said the company was still investigating how the misconfiguration occurred, how long it lasted, and how many records may have been exposed.
KrebsOnSecurity learned of the leaks from security researcher Charan Akiri, who said he wrote a program that identified hundreds of other organizations running misconfigured Salesforce pages. But Akiri said he’s been wary of probing too far, and has had difficulty getting responses from most of the organizations he has notified to date.
“In January and February 2023, I contacted government organizations and several companies, but I did not receive any response from these organizations,” Akiri said. “To address the issue further, I reached out to several CISOs on LinkedIn and Twitter. As a result, five companies eventually fixed the problem. Unfortunately, I did not receive any responses from government organizations.”
The problem Akiri has been trying to raise awareness about came to the fore in August 2021, when security researcher Aaron Costello published a blog post explaining how misconfigurations in Salesforce Community sites could be exploited to reveal sensitive data (Costello subsequently published a follow-up post detailing how to lock down Salesforce Community sites).
On Monday, KrebsOnSecurity used Akiri’s findings to notify Washington D.C. city administrators that at least five different public DC Health websites were leaking sensitive information. One DC Health Salesforce Community website designed for health professionals seeking to renew licenses with the city leaked documents that included the applicant’s full name, address, Social Security number, date of birth, license number and expiration, and more.
Akiri said he notified the Washington D.C. government in February about his findings, but received no response. Reached by KrebsOnSecurity, interim Chief Information Security Officer Mike Rupert initially said the District had hired a third party to investigate, and that the third party confirmed the District’s IT systems were not vulnerable to data loss from the reported Salesforce configuration issue.
But after being presented with a document including the Social Security number of a health professional in D.C. that was downloaded in real-time from the DC Health public Salesforce website, Rupert acknowledged his team had overlooked some configuration settings.
Washington, D.C. health administrators are still smarting from a data breach earlier this year at the health insurance exchange DC Health Link, which exposed personal information for more than 56,000 users, including many members of Congress.
That data later wound up for sale on a top cybercrime forum. The Associated Press reports that the DC Health Link breach was likewise the result of human error, and said an investigation revealed the cause was a DC Health Link server that was “misconfigured to allow access to the reports on the server without proper authentication.”
Salesforce says the data exposures are not the result of a vulnerability inherent to the Salesforce platform, but they can occur when customers’ access control permissions are misconfigured.
“As previously communicated to all Experience Site and Sites customers, we recommend utilizing the Guest User Access Report Package to assist in reviewing access control permissions for unauthenticated users,” reads a Salesforce advisory from Sept. 2022. “Additionally, we suggest reviewing the following Help article, Best Practices and Considerations When Configuring the Guest User Profile.”
In a written statement, Salesforce said it is actively focused on data security for organizations with guest users, and that it continues to release “robust tools and guidance for our customers,” including:
Control Which Users Experience Cloud Site Users Can See
Best Practices and Considerations When Configuring the Guest User Profile
“We’ve also continued to update our Guest User security policies, beginning with our Spring ‘21 release with more to come in Summer ‘23,” the statement reads. “Lastly, we continue to proactively communicate with customers to help them understand the capabilities available to them, and how they can best secure their instance of Salesforce to meet their security, contractual, and regulatory obligations.”
We learned some remarkable new details this week about the recent supply-chain attack on VoIP software provider 3CX. The lengthy, complex intrusion has all the makings of a cyberpunk spy novel: North Korean hackers using legions of fake executive accounts on LinkedIn to lure people into opening malware disguised as a job offer; malware targeting Mac and Linux users working at defense and cryptocurrency firms; and software supply-chain attacks nested within earlier supply chain attacks.
Researchers at ESET say this job offer from a phony HSBC recruiter on LinkedIn was North Korean malware masquerading as a PDF file.
In late March 2023, 3CX disclosed that its desktop applications for both Windows and macOS were compromised with malicious code that gave attackers the ability to download and run code on all machines where the app was installed. 3CX says it has more than 600,000 customers and 12 million users in a broad range of industries, including aerospace, healthcare and hospitality.
3CX hired incident response firm Mandiant, which released a report on Wednesday that said the compromise began in 2022 when a 3CX employee installed a malware-laced software package distributed via an earlier software supply chain compromise that began with a tampered installer for X_TRADER, a software package provided by Trading Technologies.
“This is the first time Mandiant has seen a software supply chain attack lead to another software supply chain attack,” reads the April 20 Mandiant report.
Mandiant found the earliest evidence of compromise uncovered within 3CX’s network was through the VPN using the employee’s corporate credentials, two days after the employee’s personal computer was compromised.
“Eventually, the threat actor was able to compromise both the Windows and macOS build environments,” 3CX said in an April 20 update on their blog.
Mandiant concluded that the 3CX attack was orchestrated by the North Korean state-sponsored hacking group known as Lazarus, a determination that was independently reached earlier by researchers at Kaspersky Lab and Elastic Security.
Mandiant found the compromised 3CX software would download malware that sought out new instructions by consulting encrypted icon files hosted on GitHub. The decrypted icon files revealed the location of the malware’s control server, which was then queried for a third stage of the malware compromise — a password stealing program dubbed ICONICSTEALER.
The double supply chain compromise that led to malware being pushed out to some 3CX customers. Image: Mandiant.
Meanwhile, the security firm ESET today published research showing remarkable similarities between the malware used in the 3CX supply chain attack and Linux-based malware that was recently deployed via fake job offers from phony executive profiles on LinkedIn. The researchers said this was the first time Lazarus had been spotted deploying malware aimed at Linux users.
As reported in a series last summer here, LinkedIn has been inundated this past year by fake executive profiles for people supposedly employed at a range of technology, defense, energy and financial companies. In many cases, the phony profiles spoofed chief information security officers at major corporations, and some attracted quite a few connections before their accounts were terminated.
Mandiant, Proofpoint and other experts say Lazarus has long used these bogus LinkedIn profiles to lure targets into opening a malware-laced document that is often disguised as a job offer. This ongoing North Korean espionage campaign using LinkedIn was first documented in August 2020 by ClearSky Security, which said the Lazarus group operates dozens of researchers and intelligence personnel to maintain the campaign globally.
Microsoft Corp., which owns LinkedIn, said in September 2022 that it had detected a wide range of social engineering campaigns using a proliferation of phony LinkedIn accounts. Microsoft said the accounts were used to impersonate recruiters at technology, defense and media companies, and to entice people into opening a malicious file. Microsoft found the attackers often disguised their malware as legitimate open-source software like Sumatra PDF and the SSH client Putty.
Microsoft attributed those attacks to North Korea’s Lazarus hacking group, although they’ve traditionally referred to this group as “ZINC“. That is, until earlier this month, when Redmond completely revamped the way it names threat groups; Microsoft now references ZINC as “Diamond Sleet.”
The ESET researchers said they found a new fake job lure tied to an ongoing Lazarus campaign on LinkedIn designed to compromise Linux operating systems. The malware was found inside of a document that offered an employment contract at the multinational bank HSBC.
“A few weeks ago, a native Linux payload was found on VirusTotal with an HSBC-themed PDF lure,” wrote ESET researchers Peter Kalnai and Marc-Etienne M.Leveille. “This completes Lazarus’s ability to target all major desktop operating systems. In this case, we were able to reconstruct the full chain, from the ZIP file that delivers a fake HSBC job offer as a decoy, up until the final payload.”
ESET said the malicious PDF file used in the scheme appeared to have a file extension of “.pdf,” but that this was a ruse. ESET discovered that the dot in the filename wasn’t a normal period but instead a Unicode character (U+2024) representing a “leader dot,” which is often used in tables of contents to connect section headings with the page numbers on which those sections begin.
“The use of the leader dot in the filename was probably an attempt to trick the file manager into treating the file as an executable instead of a PDF,” the researchers continued. “This could cause the file to run when double-clicked instead of opening it with a PDF viewer.”
ESET said anyone who opened the file would see a decoy PDF with a job offer from HSBC, but in the background the executable file would download additional malware payloads. The ESET team also found the malware was able to manipulate the program icon displayed by the malicious PDF, possibly because fiddling with the file extension could cause the user’s system to display a blank icon for the malware lure.
Kim Zetter, a veteran Wired.com reporter and now independent security journalist, interviewed Mandiant researchers who said they expect “many more victims” will be discovered among the customers of Trading Technologies and 3CX now that news of the compromised software programs is public.
“Mandiant informed Trading Technologies on April 11 that its X_Trader software had been compromised, but the software maker says it has not had time to investigate and verify Mandiant’s assertions,” Zetter wrote in her Zero Day newsletter on Substack. For now, it remains unclear whether the compromised X_Trader software was downloaded by people at other software firms.
If there’s a silver lining here, the X_Trader software had been decommissioned in April 2020 — two years before the hackers allegedly embedded malware in it.
“The company hadn’t released new versions of the software since that time and had stopped providing support for the product, making it a less-than-ideal vector for the North Korean hackers to infect customers,” Zetter wrote.
The United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency (NCA) has been busy setting up phony DDoS-for-hire websites that seek to collect information on users, remind them that launching DDoS attacks is illegal, and generally increase the level of paranoia for people looking to hire such services.
The warning displayed to users on one of the NCA’s fake booter sites. Image: NCA.
The NCA says all of its fake so-called “booter” or “stresser” sites — which have so far been accessed by several thousand people — have been created to look like they offer the tools and services that enable cyber criminals to execute these attacks.
“However, after users register, rather than being given access to cyber crime tools, their data is collated by investigators,” reads an NCA advisory on the program. “Users based in the UK will be contacted by the National Crime Agency or police and warned about engaging in cyber crime. Information relating to those based overseas is being passed to international law enforcement.”
The NCA declined to say how many phony booter sites it had set up, or for how long they have been running. The NCA says hiring or launching attacks designed to knock websites or users offline is punishable in the UK under the Computer Misuse Act 1990.
“Going forward, people who wish to use these services can’t be sure who is actually behind them, so why take the risk?” the NCA announcement continues.
The NCA campaign comes closely on the heels of an international law enforcement takedown involving four-dozen websites that made powerful DDoS attacks a point-and-click operation.
In mid-December 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced “Operation Power Off,” which seized four-dozen booter business domains responsible for more than 30 million DDoS attacks, and charged six U.S. men with computer crimes related to their alleged ownership of popular DDoS-for-hire services. In connection with that operation, the NCA also arrested an 18-year-old man suspected of running one of the sites.
According to U.S. federal prosecutors, the use of booter and stresser services to conduct attacks is punishable under both wire fraud laws and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. § 1030), and may result in arrest and prosecution, the seizure of computers or other electronics, as well as prison sentences and a penalty or fine.
The United Kingdom, which has been battling its fair share of domestic booter bosses, started running online ads in 2020 aimed at young people who search the Web for booter services.
As part of last year’s mass booter site takedown, the FBI and the Netherlands Police joined the NCA in announcing they are running targeted placement ads to steer those searching for booter services toward a website detailing the potential legal risks of hiring an online attack.
A new breach involving data from nine million AT&T customers is a fresh reminder that your mobile provider likely collects and shares a great deal of information about where you go and what you do with your mobile device — unless and until you affirmatively opt out of this data collection. Here’s a primer on why you might want to do that, and how.
Image: Shutterstock
Telecommunications giant AT&T disclosed this month that a breach at a marketing vendor exposed certain account information for nine million customers. AT&T said the data exposed did not include sensitive information, such as credit card or Social Security numbers, or account passwords, but was limited to “Customer Proprietary Network Information” (CPNI), such as the number of lines on an account.
Certain questions may be coming to mind right now, like “What the heck is CPNI?” And, ‘If it’s so ‘customer proprietary,’ why is AT&T sharing it with marketers?” Also maybe, “What can I do about it?” Read on for answers to all three questions.
AT&T’s disclosure said the information exposed included customer first name, wireless account number, wireless phone number and email address. In addition, a small percentage of customer records also exposed the rate plan name, past due amounts, monthly payment amounts and minutes used.
CPNI refers to customer-specific “metadata” about the account and account usage, and may include:
-Called phone numbers
-Time of calls
-Length of calls
-Cost and billing of calls
-Service features
-Premium services, such as directory call assistance
According to a succinct CPNI explainer at TechTarget, CPNI is private and protected information that cannot be used for advertising or marketing directly.
“An individual’s CPNI can be shared with other telecommunications providers for network operating reasons,” wrote TechTarget’s Gavin Wright. “So, when the individual first signs up for phone service, this information is automatically shared by the phone provider to partner companies.”
Is your mobile Internet usage covered by CPNI laws? That’s less clear, as the CPNI rules were established before mobile phones and wireless Internet access were common. TechTarget’s CPNI primer explains:
“Under current U.S. law, cellphone use is only protected as CPNI when it is being used as a telephone. During this time, the company is acting as a telecommunications provider requiring CPNI rules. Internet use, websites visited, search history or apps used are not protected CPNI because the company is acting as an information services provider not subject to these laws.”
Hence, the carriers can share and sell this data because they’re not explicitly prohibited from doing so. All three major carriers say they take steps to anonymize the customer data they share, but researchers have shown it is not terribly difficult to de-anonymize supposedly anonymous web-browsing data.
“Your phone, and consequently your mobile provider, know a lot about you,” wrote Jack Morse for Mashable. “The places you go, apps you use, and the websites you visit potentially reveal all kinds of private information — e.g. religious beliefs, health conditions, travel plans, income level, and specific tastes in pornography. This should bother you.”
Happily, all of the U.S. carriers are required to offer customers ways to opt out of having data about how they use their devices shared with marketers. Here’s a look at some of the carrier-specific practices and opt-out options.
AT&T’s policy says it shares device or “ad ID”, combined with demographics including age range, gender, and ZIP code information with third parties which explicitly include advertisers, programmers, and networks, social media networks, analytics firms, ad networks and other similar companies that are involved in creating and delivering advertisements.
AT&T said the data exposed on 9 million customers was several years old, and mostly related to device upgrade eligibility. This may sound like the data went to just one of its partners who experienced a breach, but in all likelihood it also went to hundreds of AT&T’s partners.
AT&T’s CPNI opt-out page says it shares CPNI data with several of its affiliates, including WarnerMedia, DirecTV and Cricket Wireless. Until recently, AT&T also shared CPNI data with Xandr, whose privacy policy in turn explains that it shares data with hundreds of other advertising firms. Microsoft bought Xandr from AT&T last year.
According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), T-Mobile seems to be the only company out of the big three to extend to all customers the rights conferred by the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
EPIC says T-Mobile customer data sold to third parties uses another unique identifier called mobile advertising IDs or “MAIDs.” T-Mobile claims that MAIDs don’t directly identify consumers, but under the CCPA MAIDs are considered “personal information” that can be connected to IP addresses, mobile apps installed or used with the device, any video or content viewing information, and device activity and attributes.
T-Mobile customers can opt out by logging into their account and navigating to the profile page, then to “Privacy and Notifications.” From there, toggle off the options for “Use my data for analytics and reporting” and “Use my data to make ads more relevant to me.”
Verizon’s privacy policy says it does not sell information that personally identities customers (e.g., name, telephone number or email address), but it does allow third-party advertising companies to collect information about activity on Verizon websites and in Verizon apps, through MAIDs, pixels, web beacons and social network plugins.
According to Wired.com’s tutorial, Verizon users can opt out by logging into their Verizon account through a web browser or the My Verizon mobile app. From there, select the Account tab, then click Account Settings and Privacy Settings on the web. For the mobile app, click the gear icon in the upper right corner and then Manage Privacy Settings.
On the privacy preferences page, web users can choose “Don’t use” under the Custom Experience section. On the My Verizon app, toggle any green sliders to the left.
EPIC notes that all three major carriers say resetting the consumer’s device ID and/or clearing cookies in the browser will similarly reset any opt-out preferences (i.e., the customer will need to opt out again), and that blocking cookies by default may also block the opt-out cookie from being set.
T-Mobile says its opt out is device-specific and/or browser-specific. “In most cases, your opt-out choice will apply only to the specific device or browser on which it was made. You may need to separately opt out from your other devices and browsers.”
Both AT&T and Verizon offer opt-in programs that gather and share far more information, including device location, the phone numbers you call, and which sites you visit using your mobile and/or home Internet connection. AT&T calls this their Enhanced Relevant Advertising Program; Verizon’s is called Custom Experience Plus.
In 2021, multiple media outlets reported that some Verizon customers were being automatically enrolled in Custom Experience Plus — even after those customers had already opted out of the same program under its previous name — “Verizon Selects.”
If none of the above opt out options work for you, at a minimum you should be able to opt out of CPNI sharing by calling your carrier, or by visiting one of their stores.
Why should you opt out of sharing CPNI data? For starters, some of the nation’s largest wireless carriers don’t have a great track record in terms of protecting the sensitive information that you give them solely for the purposes of becoming a customer — let alone the information they collect about your use of their services after that point.
In January 2023, T-Mobile disclosed that someone stole data on 37 million customer accounts, including customer name, billing address, email, phone number, date of birth, T-Mobile account number and plan details. In August 2021, T-Mobile acknowledged that hackers made off with the names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and driver’s license/ID information on more than 40 million current, former or prospective customers who applied for credit with the company.
Last summer, a cybercriminal began selling the names, email addresses, phone numbers, SSNs and dates of birth on 23 million Americans. An exhaustive analysis of the data strongly suggested it all belonged to customers of one AT&T company or another. AT&T stopped short of saying the data wasn’t theirs, but said the records did not appear to have come from its systems and may be tied to a previous data incident at another company.
However frequently the carriers may alert consumers about CPNI breaches, it’s probably nowhere near often enough. Currently, the carriers are required to report a consumer CPNI breach only in cases “when a person, without authorization or exceeding authorization, has intentionally gained access to, used or disclosed CPNI.”
But that definition of breach was crafted eons ago, back when the primary way CPNI was exposed was through “pretexting,” such when the phone company’s employees are tricked into giving away protected customer data.
In January, regulators at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposed amending the definition of “breach” to include things like inadvertent disclosure — such as when companies expose CPNI data on a poorly-secured server in the cloud. The FCC is accepting public comments on the matter until March 24, 2023.
While it’s true that the leak of CPNI data does not involve sensitive information like Social Security or credit card numbers, one thing AT&T’s breach notice doesn’t mention is that CPNI data — such as balances and payments made — can be abused by fraudsters to make scam emails and text messages more believable when they’re trying to impersonate AT&T and phish AT&T customers.
The other problem with letting companies share or sell your CPNI data is that the wireless carriers can change their privacy policies at any time, and you are assumed to be okay with those changes as long as you keep using their services.
For example, location data from your wireless device is most definitely CPNI, and yet until very recently all of the major carriers sold their customers’ real-time location data to third party data brokers without customer consent.
What was their punishment? In 2020, the FCC proposed fines totaling $208 million against all of the major carriers for selling their customers’ real-time location data. If that sounds like a lot of money, consider that all of the major wireless providers reported tens of billions of dollars in revenue last year (e.g., Verizon’s consumer revenue alone was more than $100 billion last year).
If the United States had federal privacy laws that were at all consumer-friendly and relevant to today’s digital economy, this kind of data collection and sharing would always be opt-in by default. In such a world, the enormously profitable wireless industry would likely be forced to offer clear financial incentives to customers who choose to share this information.
But until that day arrives, understand that the carriers can change their data collection and sharing policies when it suits them. And regardless of whether you actually read any notices about changes to their privacy policies, you will have agreed to those changes as long as you continue using their service.
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Millions of Americans receiving food assistance benefits just earned a new right that they can’t yet enforce: The right to be reimbursed if funds on their Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards are stolen by card skimming devices secretly installed at cash machines and grocery store checkout lanes.
On December 29, 2022, President Biden signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, which — for the first time ever — includes provisions for the replacement of stolen EBT benefits. This is a big deal because in 2022, organized crime groups began massively targeting EBT accounts — often emptying affected accounts at ATMs immediately after the states disperse funds each month.
EBT cards can be used along with a personal identification number (PIN) to pay for goods at participating stores, and to withdraw cash from an ATM. However, EBT cards differ from debit cards issued to most Americans in two important ways. First, most states do not equip EBT cards with smart chip technology, which can make the cards more difficult and expensive for skimming thieves to clone.
More critically, EBT participants traditionally have had little hope of recovering food assistance funds when their cards were copied by card-skimming devices and used for fraud. That’s because while the EBT programs are operated by individually by the states, those programs are funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which until late last year was barred from reimbursing states for stolen EBT funds.
The protections passed in the 2023 Appropriations Act allow states to use federal funds to replace stolen EBT benefits, and they permit states to seek reimbursement for any skimmed EBT funds they may have replaced from their own coffers (dating back to Oct. 1, 2022).
But first, all 50 states must each submit a plan for how they are going to protect and replace food benefits stolen via card skimming. Guidance for the states in drafting those plans was issued by the USDA on Jan. 31 (PDF), and states that don’t get them done before Feb. 27, 2023 risk losing the ability to be reimbursed for EBT fraud losses.
Deborah Harris is a staff attorney at The Massachusetts Law Reform Institute (MLRI), a nonprofit legal assistance organization that has closely tracked the EBT skimming epidemic. In November 2022, the MLRI filed a class-action lawsuit against Massachusetts on behalf of thousands of low-income families who were collectively robbed of more than $1 million in food assistance benefits by card skimming devices secretly installed at cash machines and grocery store checkout lanes across the state.
Harris said she’s pleased that the USDA guidelines were issued so promptly, and that the guidance for states was not overly prescriptive. For example, some security experts have suggested that adding contactless capability to EBT cards could help participants avoid skimming devices altogether. But Harris said contactless cards do not require a PIN, which is the only thing that stops EBT cards from being drained at the ATM when a participant’s card is lost or stolen.
Then again, nothing in the guidance even mentions chip-based cards, or any other advice for improving the physical security of EBT cards. Rather, it suggests states should seek to develop the capability to perform basic fraud detection and alerting on suspicious transactions, such as when an EBT card that is normally used only in one geographic area suddenly is used to withdraw cash at an ATM halfway across the country.
“Besides having the states move fast to approve their plans, we’d also like to see a focused effort to move states from magstripe-only cards to chip, and also assisting states to develop the algorithms that will enable them to identify likely incidents of stolen benefits,” Harris said.
Harris said Massachusetts has begun using algorithms to look for these suspicious transaction patterns throughout its EBT network, and now has the ability to alert households and verify transactions. But she said most states do not have this capability.
“We have heard that other states aren’t currently able to do that,” Harris said. “But encouraging states to more affirmatively identify instances of likely theft and assisting with the claims and verification process is critical. Most households can’t do that on their own, and in Massachusetts it’s very hard for a person to get a copy of their transaction history. Some states can do that through third-party apps, but something so basic should not be on the burden of EBT households.”
Some states aren’t waiting for direction from the federal government to beef up EBT card security. Like Maryland, which identified more than 1,400 households hit by EBT skimming attacks last year — a tenfold increase over 2021.
Advocates for EBT beneficiaries in Maryland are backing Senate Bill 401 (PDF), which would require the use of chip technology and ongoing monitoring for suspicious activity (a hearing on SB401 is scheduled in the Maryland Senate Finance Commission for Thursday, Feb. 23, at 1 p.m.).
Michelle Salomon Madaio is a director at the Homeless Persons Representation Project, a legal assistance organization based in Silver Spring, Md. Madaio said the bill would require the state Department of Human Services to replace skimmed benefits, not only after the bill goes into effect but also retroactively from January 2020 to the present.
Madaio said the bill also would require the state to monitor for patterns of suspicious activity on EBT cards, and to develop a mechanism to contact potentially affected households.
“For most of the skimming victims we’ve worked with, the fraudulent transactions would be pretty easy to spot because they mostly happened in the middle of the night or out of state, or both,” Madaio said. “To make matters worse, a lot of families whose benefits were scammed then incurred late fees on many other things as a result.”
It is not difficult to see why organized crime groups have pounced on EBT cards as easy money. In most traditional payment card transactions, there are usually several parties that have a financial interest in minimizing fraud and fraud losses, including the bank that issued the card, the card network (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, etc.), and the merchant.
But that infrastructure simply does not exist within state EBT programs, and it certainly isn’t a thing at the inter-state level. What that means is that the vast majority of EBT cards have zero fraud controls, which is exactly what continues to make them so appealing to thieves.
For now, the only fraud controls available to most EBT cardholders include being especially paranoid about where they use their cards, and frequently changing their PINs.
According to USDA guidance issued prior to the passage of the appropriations act, EBT cardholders should consider changing their card PIN at least once a month.
“By changing PINs frequently, at least monthly, and doing so before benefit issuance dates, households can minimize their risk of stolen benefits from a previously skimmed EBT card,” the USDA advised.
Authorities in the United States and United Kingdom today levied financial sanctions against seven men accused of operating “Trickbot,” a cybercrime-as-a-service platform based in Russia that has enabled countless ransomware attacks and bank account takeovers since its debut in 2016. The U.S. Department of the Treasury says the Trickbot group is associated with Russian intelligence services, and that this alliance led to the targeting of many U.S. companies and government entities.
Initially a stealthy trojan horse program delivered via email and used to steal passwords, Trickbot evolved into “a highly modular malware suite that provides the Trickbot Group with the ability to conduct a variety of illegal cyber activities, including ransomware attacks,” the Treasury Department said.
A spam email from 2020 containing a Trickbot-infected attachment. Image: Microsoft.
“During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Trickbot targeted hospitals and healthcare centers, launching a wave of ransomware attacks against hospitals across the United States,” the sanctions notice continued. “In one of these attacks, the Trickbot Group deployed ransomware against three Minnesota medical facilities, disrupting their computer networks and telephones, and causing a diversion of ambulances. Members of the Trickbot Group publicly gloated over the ease of targeting the medical facilities and the speed with which the ransoms were paid to the group.”
Only one of the men sanctioned today is known to have been criminally charged in connection with hacking activity. According to the Treasury Department, the alleged senior leader of the Trickbot group is 34-year-old Russian national Vitaly “Bentley” Kovalev.
A New Jersey grand jury indicted Kovalev in 2012 after an investigation by the U.S. Secret Service determined that he ran a massive “money mule” scheme, which used phony job offers to trick people into laundering money stolen from hacked small to mid-sized businesses in the United States. The 2012 indictment against Kovalev relates to cybercrimes he allegedly perpetrated prior to the creation of Trickbot.
In 2015, Kovalev reportedly began filming a movie in Russia about cybercrime called “Botnet.” According to a 2016 story from Forbes.ru, Botnet’s opening scene was to depict the plight of Christina Svechinskaya, a Russian student arrested by FBI agents in September 2010.
Christina Svechinskaya, a money mule hired by Bentley who was arrested by the FBI in 2010.
Svechinskaya was one of Bentley’s money mules, most of whom were young Russian students on temporary travel visas in the United States. She was among 37 alleged mules charged with aiding an international cybercrime operation — basically, setting up phony corporate bank accounts for the sole purpose of laundering stolen funds.
Although she possessed no real hacking skills, Svechinskaya’s mugshot and social media photos went viral online and she was quickly dubbed “the world’s sexiest computer hacker” by the tabloids.
Kovalev’s Botnet film project was disrupted after Russian authorities raided the film production company’s offices as part of a cybercrime investigation. In February 2016, Reuters reported that the raid was connected to a crackdown on “Dyre,” a sophisticated trojan that U.S. federal investigators say was the precursor to the Trickbot malware. The Forbes.ru article cited sources close to the investigation who said the film studio was operating as a money-laundering front for the cybercrooks behind Dyre.
But shifting political winds in Russia would soon bring high treason charges against three of the Russian cybercrime investigators tied to the investigation into the film studio. In a major shakeup in 2017, the Kremlin levied treason charges against Sergey Mikhaylov, then deputy chief of Russia’s top anti-cybercrime unit.
Also charged with treason was Ruslan Stoyanov, then a senior employee at Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab [the Forbes.ru report from 2016 said investigators from Mikhaylov’s unit and Kaspersky Lab were present at the film company raid].
Russian media outlets have speculated that the men were accused of treason for helping American cybercrime investigators pursue top Russian hackers. However, the charges against both men were classified and have never been officially revealed. After their brief, closed trial, both men were convicted of treason. Mikhaylov was given a 22 year prison sentence; Stoyanov was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
In September 2021, the Kremlin issued treason charges against Ilya Sachkov, formerly head of the cybersecurity firm Group-IB. According to Reuters, Sachkov and his company were hired by the film studio “to advise the Botnet director and writers on the finer points of cybercrime.” Sachkov remains imprisoned in Russia pending his treason trial.
Trickbot was heavily used by Conti and Ryuk, two of Russia’s most ruthless and successful ransomware groups. Blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis estimates that in 2021 alone, Conti extorted more than USD $100 million from its hacking victims; Chainalysis estimates Ryuk extorted more than USD $150 million from its ransomware victims.
The U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has long tracked the activities of Trickbot, Ryuk and Conti under the same moniker — “Wizard Spider” — which CrowdStrike describes as “a Russia-nexus cybercriminal group behind the core development and distribution of a sophisticated arsenal of criminal tools, that allow them to run multiple different types of operations.”
“CrowdStrike Intelligence has observed WIZARD SPIDER targeting multiple countries and industries such as academia, energy, financial services, government, and more,” said Adam Meyers, head of intelligence at CrowdStrike.
This is not the U.S. government’s first swipe at the Trickbot group. In early October 2020, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that someone had launched a series of coordinated attacks designed to disrupt the Trickbot botnet. A week later, The Washington Post ran a story saying the attack on Trickbot was the work of U.S. Cyber Command, a branch of the Department of Defense headed by the director of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).
Days after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, a Ukrainian researcher leaked several years of internal chat logs from the Conti ransomware gang. Those candid conversations offer a fascinating view into the challenges of running a sprawling criminal enterprise with more than 100 salaried employees. They also showed that Conti enjoyed protection from prosecution by Russian authorities, as long as the hacker group took care not to target Russian organizations.
In addition, the leaked Conti chats confirmed there was considerable overlap in the operation and leadership of Conti, Trickbot and Ryuk.
Michael DeBolt, chief intelligence officer at cybersecurity firm Intel 471, said the leaked Conti chats showed Bentley oversaw a team of coders tasked with ensuring that the Trickbot and Conti malware remained undetected by the different antivirus and security software vendors.
In the years prior to the emergence of Trickbot in 2016, Bentley worked closely on the Gameover ZeuS trojan, a peer-to-peer malware threat that infected between 500,000 and a million computers with an automated ransomware strain called Cryptolocker, DeBolt said.
The FBI has a standing $3 million bounty offered for the capture of Evgeny “Slavik” Bogachev, the alleged author of the Zeus trojan. And there are indications that Bentley worked directly with Bogachev. DeBolt pointed to an October 2014 discussion on the exclusive Russian hacking forum Mazafaka that included a complaint by a Russian hosting firm against a forum user by the name “Ferrari” who had failed to pay a $30,000 hosting bill.
In that discussion thread, it emerged that the hosting company thought it was filing a complaint against Slavik. But the Mazafaka member who vouched for Ferrari’s membership on the forum said they knew Ferrari as Bentley the mule handler, and at some point Slavik and Bentley must have been sharing the Ferrari user account.
“It is likely that Slavik (aka. Bogachev) and Bentley (aka. Kovalev) shared the same ‘Ferrari’ handle on the Mazafaka forum circa 2014, which suggests the two had a working relationship at that time, and supports the recent US and UK Government announcements regarding Kovalev’s past involvement in cybercrime predating Dyre or the Trickbot Group,” DeBolt said.
CrowdStrike’s Meyers said while Wizard Spider operations have significantly reduced following the demise of Conti in June 2022, today’s sanctions will likely cause temporary disruptions for the cybercriminal group while they look for ways to circumvent the financial restrictions — which make it illegal to transact with or hold the assets of sanctioned persons or entities.
“Often, when cybercriminal groups are disrupted, they will go dark for a time only to rebrand under a new name,” Meyers said.
The prosecution of Kovalev is being handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey. A copy of the now-unsealed 2012 indictment of Kovalev is here (PDF).
On Dec. 23, 2022, KrebsOnSecurity alerted big-three consumer credit reporting bureau Experian that identity thieves had worked out how to bypass its security and access any consumer’s full credit report — armed with nothing more than a person’s name, address, date of birth, and Social Security number. Experian fixed the glitch, but remained silent about the incident for a month. This week, however, Experian acknowledged that the security failure persisted for nearly seven weeks, between Nov. 9, 2022 and Dec. 26, 2022.
The tip about the Experian weakness came from Jenya Kushnir, a security researcher living in Ukraine who said he discovered the method being used by identity thieves after spending time on Telegram chat channels dedicated to cybercrime.
Normally, Experian’s website will ask a series of multiple-choice questions about one’s financial history, as a way of validating the identity of the person requesting the credit report. But Kushnir said the crooks learned they could bypass those questions and trick Experian into giving them access to anyone’s credit report, just by editing the address displayed in the browser URL bar at a specific point in Experian’s identity verification process.
When I tested Kushnir’s instructions on my own identity at Experian, I found I was able to see my report even though Experian’s website told me it didn’t have enough information to validate my identity. A security researcher friend who tested it at Experian found she also could bypass Experian’s four or five multiple-choice security questions and go straight to her full credit report at Experian.
Experian acknowledged receipt of my Dec. 23 report four days later on Dec. 27, a day after Kushnir’s method stopped working on Experian’s website (the exploit worked as long as you came to Experian’s website via annualcreditreport.com — the site mandated to provide a free copy of your credit report from each of the major bureaus once a year).
Experian never did respond to official requests for comment on that story. But earlier this week, I received an otherwise unhelpful letter via snail mail from Experian (see image above), which stated that the weakness we reported persisted between Nov. 9, 2022 and Dec. 26, 2022.
“During this time period, we experienced an isolated technical issue where a security feature may not have functioned,” Experian explained.
It’s not entirely clear whether Experian sent me this paper notice because they legally had to, or if they felt I deserved a response in writing and thought maybe they’d kill two birds with one stone. But it’s pretty crazy that it took them a full month to notify me about the potential impact of a security failure that I notified them about.
It’s also a little nuts that Experian didn’t simply include a copy of my current credit report along with this letter, which is confusingly worded and reads like they suspect someone other than me may have been granted access to my credit report without any kind of screening or authorization.
After all, if I hadn’t authorized the request for my credit file that apparently prompted this letter (I had), that would mean the thieves already had my report. Shouldn’t I be granted the same visibility into my own credit file as them?
Instead, their woefully inadequate letter once again puts the onus on me to wait endlessly on hold for an Experian representative over the phone, or sign up for a free year’s worth of Experian monitoring my credit report.
As it stands, using Kushnir’s exploit was the only time I’ve ever been able to get Experian’s website to cough up a copy of my credit report. To make matters worse, a majority of the information in that credit report is not mine. So I’ve got that to look forward to.
If there is a silver lining here, I suppose that if I were Experian, I probably wouldn’t want to show Brian Krebs his credit file either. Because it’s clear this company has no idea who I really am. And in a weird, kind of sad way I guess, that makes me happy.
For thoughts on what you can do to minimize your victimization by and overall worth to the credit bureaus, see this section of the most recent Experian story.
Identity thieves have been exploiting a glaring security weakness in the website of Experian, one of the big three consumer credit reporting bureaus. Normally, Experian requires that those seeking a copy of their credit report successfully answer several multiple choice questions about their financial history. But until the end of 2022, Experian’s website allowed anyone to bypass these questions and go straight to the consumer’s report. All that was needed was the person’s name, address, birthday and Social Security number.
The vulnerability in Experian’s website was exploitable after one applied to see their credit file via annualcreditreport.com.
In December, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Jenya Kushnir, a security researcher living in Ukraine who said he discovered the method being used by identity thieves after spending time on Telegram chat channels dedicated to the cashing out of compromised identities.
“I want to try and help to put a stop to it and make it more difficult for [ID thieves] to access, since [Experian is] not doing shit and regular people struggle,” Kushnir wrote in an email to KrebsOnSecurity explaining his motivations for reaching out. “If somehow I can make small change and help to improve this, inside myself I can feel that I did something that actually matters and helped others.”
Kushnir said the crooks learned they could trick Experian into giving them access to anyone’s credit report, just by editing the address displayed in the browser URL bar at a specific point in Experian’s identity verification process.
Following Kushnir’s instructions, I sought a copy of my credit report from Experian via annualcreditreport.com — a website that is required to provide all Americans with a free copy of their credit report from each of the three major reporting bureaus, once per year.
Annualcreditreport.com begins by asking for your name, address, SSN and birthday. After I supplied that and told Annualcreditreport.com I wanted my report from Experian, I was taken to Experian.com to complete the identity verification process.
Normally at this point, Experian’s website would present four or five multiple-guess questions, such as “Which of the following addresses have you lived at?”
Kushnir told me that when the questions page loads, you simply change the last part of the URL from “/acr/oow/” to “/acr/report,” and the site would display the consumer’s full credit report.
But when I tried to get my report from Experian via annualcreditreport.com, Experian’s website said it didn’t have enough information to validate my identity. It wouldn’t even show me the four multiple-guess questions. Experian said I had three options for a free credit report at this point: Mail a request along with identity documents, call a phone number for Experian, or upload proof of identity via the website.
But that didn’t stop Experian from showing me my full credit report after I changed the Experian URL as Kushnir had instructed — modifying the error page’s trailing URL from “/acr/OcwError” to simply “/acr/report”.
Experian’s website then immediately displayed my entire credit file.
Even though Experian said it couldn’t tell that I was actually me, it still coughed up my report. And thank goodness it did. The report contains so many errors that it’s probably going to take a good deal of effort on my part to straighten out.
Now I know why Experian has NEVER let me view my own file via their website. For example, there were four phone numbers on my Experian credit file: Only one of them was mine, and that one hasn’t been mine for ages.
I was so dumbfounded by Experian’s incompetence that I asked a close friend and trusted security source to try the method on her identity file at Experian. Sure enough, when she got to the part where Experian asked questions, changing the last part of the URL in her address bar to “/report” bypassed the questions and immediately displayed her full credit report. Her report also was replete with errors.
KrebsOnSecurity shared Kushnir’s findings with Experian on Dec. 23, 2022. On Dec. 27, 2022, Experian’s PR team acknowledged receipt of my Dec. 23 notification, but the company has so far ignored multiple requests for comment or clarification.
By the time Experian confirmed receipt of my report, the “exploit” Kushnir said he learned from the identity thieves on Telegram had been patched and no longer worked. But it remains unclear how long Experian’s website was making it so easy to access anyone’s credit report.
In response to information shared by KrebsOnSecurity, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said he was disappointed — but not at all surprised — to hear about yet another cybersecurity lapse at Experian.
“The credit bureaus are poorly regulated, act as if they are above the law and have thumbed their noses at Congressional oversight,” Wyden said in a written statement. “Just last year, Experian ignored repeated briefing requests from my office after you revealed another cybersecurity lapse the company.”
Sen. Wyden’s quote above references a story published here in July 2022, which broke the news that identity thieves were hijacking consumer accounts at Experian.com just by signing up as them at Experian once more, supplying the target’s static, personal information (name, DoB/SSN, address) but a different email address.
From interviews with multiple victims who contacted KrebsOnSecurity after that story, it emerged that Experian’s own customer support representatives were actually telling consumers who got locked out of their Experian accounts to recreate their accounts using their personal information and a new email address. This was Experian’s advice even for people who’d just explained that this method was what identity thieves had used to lock them in out in the first place.
Clearly, Experian found it simpler to respond this way, rather than acknowledging the problem and addressing the root causes (lazy authentication and abhorrent account recovery practices). It’s also worth mentioning that reports of hijacked Experian.com accounts persisted into late 2022. That screw-up has since prompted a class action lawsuit against Experian.
Sen. Wyden said the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) need to do much more to protect Americans from screw-ups by the credit bureaus.
“If they don’t believe they have the authority to do so, they should endorse legislation like my Mind Your Own Business Act, which gives the FTC power to set tough mandatory cybersecurity standards for companies like Experian,” Wyden said.
Sadly, none of this is terribly shocking behavior for Experian, which has shown itself a completely negligent custodian of obscene amounts of highly sensitive consumer information.
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.
It’s bad enough that we can’t really opt out of companies like Experian making $2.6 billion each quarter collecting and selling gobs of our personal and financial information. But there has to be some meaningful accountability when these monopolistic companies engage in negligent and reckless behavior with the very same consumer data that feeds their quarterly profits. Or when security and privacy shortcuts are found to be intentional, like for cost-saving reasons.
And as we saw with Equifax’s consolidated class-action settlement in response to letting state-sponsored hackers from China steal data on nearly 150 million Americans back in 2017, class-actions and more laughable “free credit monitoring” services from the very same companies that created the problem aren’t going to cut it.
It is easy to adopt a defeatist attitude with the credit bureaus, who often foul things up royally even for consumers who are quite diligent about watching their consumer credit files and disputing any inaccuracies.
But there are some concrete steps that everyone can take which will dramatically lower the risk that identity thieves will ruin your financial future. And happily, most of these steps have the side benefit of costing the credit bureaus money, or at least causing the data they collect about you to become less valuable over time.
The first step is awareness. Find out what these companies are saying about you behind your back. Keep in mind that — fair or not — your credit score as collectively determined by these bureaus can affect whether you get that loan, apartment, or job. In that context, even small, unintentional errors that are unrelated to identity theft can have outsized consequences for consumers down the road.
Each bureau is required to provide a free copy of your credit report every year. The easiest way to get yours is through annualcreditreport.com.
Some consumers report that this site never works for them, and that each bureau will insist they don’t have enough information to provide a report. I am definitely in this camp. Thankfully, a financial institution that I already have a relationship with offers the ability to view your credit file through them. Your mileage on this front may vary, and you may end up having to send copies of your identity documents through the mail or website.
When you get your report, look for anything that isn’t yours, and then document and file a dispute with the corresponding credit bureau. And after you’ve reviewed your report, set a calendar reminder to recur every four months, reminding you it’s time to get another free copy of your credit file.
If you haven’t already done so, consider making 2023 the year that you freeze your credit files at the three major reporting bureaus, including Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. It is now free to people in all 50 U.S. states to place a security freeze on their credit files. It is also free to do this for your partner and/or your dependents.
Freezing your credit means no one who doesn’t already have a financial relationship with you can view your credit file, making it unlikely that potential creditors will grant new lines of credit in your name to identity thieves. Freezing your credit file also means Experian and its brethren can no longer sell peeks at your credit history to others.
Anytime you wish to apply for new credit or a new job, or open an account at a utility or communications provider, you can quickly thaw a freeze on your credit file, and set it to freeze automatically again after a specified length of time.
Please don’t confuse a credit freeze (a.k.a. “security freeze”) with the alternative that the bureaus will likely steer you towards when you ask for a freeze: “Credit lock” services.
The bureaus pitch these credit lock services as a way for consumers to easily toggle their credit file availability with push of a button on a mobile app, but they do little to prevent the bureaus from continuing to sell your information to others.
My advice: Ignore the lock services, and just freeze your credit files already.
One final note. Frequent readers here will have noticed that I’ve criticized these so-called “knowledge-based authentication” or KBA questions that Experian’s website failed to ask as part of its consumer verification process.
KrebsOnSecurity has long assailed KBA as weak authentication because the questions and answers are drawn largely from consumer records that are public and easily accessible to organized identity theft groups.
That said, given that these KBA questions appear to be the ONLY thing standing between me and my Experian credit report, it seems like maybe they should at least take care to ensure that those questions actually get asked.
Our core mission in the NOC is network resilience. We also provide integrated security, visibility and automation, a SOC inside the NOC.
In part one, we covered:
In part two, we are going deep with security:
As the needs of Black Hat evolved, so did the Cisco Secure Technologies in the NOC:
The SecureX dashboard made it easy to see the status of each of the connected Cisco Secure technologies.
Since joining the Black Hat NOC in 2016, my goal remains integration and automation. As a NOC team comprised of many technologies and companies, we are pleased that this Black Hat NOC was the most integrated to date, to provide an overall SOC cybersecurity architecture solution.
We have ideas for even more integrations for Black Hat Asia and Black Hat USA 2023. Thank you, Piotr Jarzynka, for designing the integration diagram.
Below are the SecureX threat response integrations for Black Hat Europe, empowering analysts to investigate Indicators of Compromise very quickly, with one search.
The original Black Hat NOC integration for Cisco was NetWitness sending suspicious files to Threat Grid (know Secure Malware Analytics). We expanded that in 2022 with Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR and used it in London, for investigation of malicious payload attack.
NetWitness observed a targeted attack against the Black Hat network. The attack was intended to compromise the network.
NetWitness extracted the payload and sent it to Secure Malware Analytics for detonation.
Reviewing the analysis report, we were able to quickly determine it was the MyDoom worm, which would have been very damaging.
The attack was blocked at the perimeter and the analysts were able to track and enrich the incident in XSOAR.
My first time at Black Hat turned out to be an incredible journey!
Thanks to the cybersecurity partnership between Paris 2024 and Cisco, I was able to integrate into the Cisco Crew, to operate the NOC/SOC as a Threat Hunter on the most dangerous network in the world for this European Edition of Black Hat.
My first day, I helped with deploying the network by installing the wireless Meraki APs on the venue, understanding how they were configured and how they could help analysts to identify and locate any client connected to the network that could have a bad behavior during the event, the idea being to protect the attendees if an attack was to spray on the network.
Following this “physical” deployment, I’ve been able to access the whole Cisco Secure environment including Meraki, Secure Malware Analytics, Umbrella, SecureX and the other Black Hat NOC partners software tools.
SecureX was definitely the product on which I wanted to step up. By having so fantastic professionals around me, we were able to dig in the product, identifying potential use cases to deploy in the orchestration module and expected integrations for Paris 2024.
Time was flying and so were the attendees to the conference, a network without user is fun but can be quite boring as nothing happens, having so many cybersecurity professional at the same place testing different security malwares, attacks and so on led us to very interesting investigations. A paradox at the Black Hat, we do not want to block malicious content as it could be part of exercises or training classes, quite a different mindset as what we, security defenders, are used to! Using the different components, we were able to find some observables/IOCs that we investigate through SecureX, SecureX being connected to all the other components helped us to enrich the observables (IPs, urls, domains…), understanding the criticality of what we identified (such as malware payloads) and even led us to poke the folks in the training classes to let them know that something really wrong was happening on their devices.
Being part of the Black Hat NOC was an incredible experience, I was able to meet fantastic professionals, fully committed on making the event a success for all attendees and exhibitors. It also helped me to better understand how products, that we use or will use within Paris 2024, could be leveraged to our needs and which indicators could be added to our various Dashboards, helping us to identify, instantaneously, that something is happening.
During the last day of Black Hat Europe, our NOC partner, NetWitness saw some files being downloaded on the network. The integration again automatically carved out the file and submitted the Cisco Secure Malware Analytics (SMA) platform. One of those files came back as a trojan, after SMA detonated the file in a sandbox environment. The specific hash is the below SHA-256:
938635a0ceed453dc8ff60eab20c5d168a882bdd41792e5c5056cc960ebef575
The screenshot below shows some of the behaviors that influenced the decision:
The result of seeing these behaviors caused SMA to give it the highest judgement score available to a detonated file:
After this judgement was made, we connected with the Palo Alto Networks team, and they found the IP address associated with the file download.
Once we had this information, we went to the Meraki dashboard and did a search for the IP address. The search returned only one client that has been associated with the address for the entire Black Hat conference.
Knowing that there has only been one client associated with the address made finding the attendee easier. We then needed to know where they were and Meraki had this figured out. After opening the client’s profile, we saw what SSID and access point (AP) they were connected to using the Meraki location map.
We then found the attendee and let them know to have their IT inspect their laptop to make sure it is clean.
Apart from the technical challenges of running a temporary network for N thousand people, the Black Hat event reminded us that success doesn’t happen without teamwork; that leadership isn’t just about keeping the project on track. It is also about looking after the team and that small details in planning, build up and tear down can be just as important, as having all the right tools and fantastically skilled Individuals using them during the event itself.
In the Cisco Secure technology stack, within the Black Hat NOC, we use SecureX Single Sign-on. This reduces the confusion of managing multiple accounts and passwords. It also streamlines the integrations between the Cisco products and our fellow NOC partners. We have an open ecosystem approach to integrations and access in the NOC, so we will provision Cisco Secure accounts for any staff member of the NOC. Logging into each individual console and creating an account is time consuming and can often lead to confusion on which tools to provision and which permission levels are needed.
To automate this process, I developed two workflows: one to create non-admin users for NOC partners and one to create administrator accounts in all the tools for Cisco staff. The workflows create accounts in SecureX, Secure Malware Analytics (Threat Grid), Umbrella DNS and Meraki dashboard, all using SecureX Single Sign-On.
Here is what the workflow looks like for creating non-admin users.
The workflow requires three inputs: first name, last name, and email. Click Run.
The sequence of API calls is as follows:
Once the workflow has completed successfully, the user will receive four emails to create a SecureX Sign-On account and accept the invitations to the various products. These workflows really improved our responsiveness to account provisioning requests and makes it much easier to collaborate with other NOC partners.
Over the previous Black Hat events, we have been utilizing Meraki scanning data to get location data for individual clients, as they roamed conference. In the initial blog post (Black Hat Asia 2022), we created a Docker container to accept the data from the Meraki Scanning API and save it for future analysis. At Black Hat USA 2022, we wrote about how to use Python Folium to use the flat text files to generate chronological heatmaps that illustrated the density of clients throughout the conference.
This time around, we’ve stepped it up again by integrating Umbrella DNS Security events and adding the ability to track clients across the heatmap using their local IP address.
To improve the portability of our data and the efficiency of our code, we began by moving from flat JSON files to a proper database. We chose SQLite this time around, though going forward we will likely use Mongo.
Both can be queried directly into Python Pandas dataframes which is what will give us the optimal performance we are looking for. We have a dedicated Docker container (Meraki-Receiver) that will validate the incoming data stream from the Meraki dashboard and insert the values into the database.
The database is stored on a Docker volume that can be mounted by our second container, the Meraki-Mapper. Though this container’s primary purpose is building the heatmaps, it also performs the task of retrieving and correlating Umbrella DNS security events. That is, any DNS query from the Black Hat network that matches one of several predefined security categories. Umbrella’s APIs were recently improved to add OAuth and simplify the URI scheme for each endpoint. After retrieving a token, we can get all security events in the time frame of the current heatmap with one call.
What we want to do with these events is to create Folium Markers. These are static “pins” that will sit on the map to indicate where the DNS query originated from. Clicking on a marker will popup more information about the query and the client who sent it.
Thanks to the Umbrella Virtual Appliances in the Black Hat network, we have the internal IP address of the client who sent the DNS query. We also have the internal IP address in the Meraki scanning data, along with the latitude and longitude. After converting the database query into a Pandas dataframe, our logic takes the IP address from the DNS query and finds all instances in the database of location data for that IP within a 5-minute window (the resolution of our heatmap).
What we end up with is a list of dictionaries representing the markers we want to add to the map. Using Bootstrap, we can format the popup for each event to make it look a bit more polished. Folium’s Popup plugin allows for an iFrame for each marker popup.
The result is a moving heatmap covering an entire day on a given conference floor, complete with markers indicating security events (the red pushpin icon).
Clicking on the pushpin shows the details of the query, allowing us in the NOC to see the exact location of the client when they sent it.
To further improve this service during the next conference, we plan to implement a web page where NOC staff can submit an IP address and immediately get map tracking that client through the conference floor. This should give us an even more efficient way to find and notify folks who are either behaving maliciously or appear to be infected.
For years we have been tracking the DNS stats at the Blackhat conferences. The post-pandemic 2022 numbers look like we never skipped a beat after the dip in DNS queries from 2021, seen in the bar graph below. This year’s attendance saw well over 11 million total DNS queries.
The Activity volume view from Umbrella gives a top-level level glance of activity by category, which we can drill into for deeper threat hunting. On trend with the previous Black Hat Europe events, the top Security categories were Dynamic DNS and Newly Seen Domains. However, it’s worth noting a proportionally larger increase in the cryptomining and phishing categories from 9 to 17 and 28 to 73, respectively, compared to last year.
These years, Black Hat saw over 4,100 apps connect to the network, which is nearly double of what was seen last year. However, still not topping over 6,100 apps seen at Black Hat USA early this year.
Should the need arise, we can block any application, such as Mail.ru above.
Black Hat Europe 2022 was the best planned and executed NOC in my experience, with the most integrations and visibility. This allowed us the time to deal with problems, which will always arise.
We are very proud of the collaboration of the team and the NOC partners.
Black Hat Asia will be in May 2023, at the Marina Bay Sands, Singapore…hope to see you there!
Thank you to the Cisco NOC team:
Also, to our NOC partners NetWitness (especially David Glover, Iain Davidson, Alessandro Contini and Alessandro Zatti), Palo Alto Networks (especially James Holland, Matt Ford, Matt Smith and Mathew Chase), Gigamon, IronNet, and the entire Black Hat / Informa Tech staff (especially Grifter ‘Neil Wyler’, Bart Stump, Steve Fink, James Pope, Jess Stafford and Steve Oldenbourg).
For 25 years, Black Hat has provided attendees with the very latest in information security research, development, and trends. These high-profile global events and trainings are driven by the needs of the security community, striving to bring together the best minds in the industry. Black Hat inspires professionals at all career levels, encouraging growth and collaboration among academia, world-class researchers, and leaders in the public and private sectors. Black Hat Briefings and Trainings are held annually in the United States, Europe and USA. More information is available at: blackhat.com. Black Hat is brought to you by Informa Tech.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
In this blog about the design, deployment and automation of the Black Hat network, we have the following sections:
Cisco is honored to be a Premium Partner of the Black Hat NOC, and is the Official Network Platform, Mobile Device Management, Malware Analysis and DNS (Domain Name Service) Provider of Black Hat.
2022 was Cisco’s sixth year as a NOC partner for Black Hat Europe. However, it was our first time building the network for Black Hat Europe. We used experiences of Black Hat Asia 2022 and Black Hat USA 2022 to refine the planning for network topology design and equipment. Below are our fellow NOC partners providing hardware, to build and secure the network, for our joint customer: Black Hat.
We are grateful to share that Black Hat Europe 2022 was the smoothest experience we’ve had in the years at Black Hat. This is thanks to the 15 Cisco Meraki and Cisco Secure engineers on site (plus virtually supporting engineers) to build, operate and secure the network; and great NOC leadership and collaborative partners.
To plan, configure, deploy (in two days), maintain resilience, and recover (in four hours) an enterprise class network, took a lot of coordination. We appreciate the Black Hat NOC leadership, Informa and the NOC partners; meeting each week to discuss the best design, staffing, gear selection and deployment, to meet the unique needs of the conference. Check out the “Meraki Unboxed” podcast – Episode 94: Learnings from the Black Hat Europe 2022 Cybersecurity Event
We must allow real malware on the Black Hat network: for training, demonstrations, and briefing sessions; while protecting the attendees from attack within the network from their fellow attendees, and prevent bad actors from using the network to attack the Internet. It is a critical balance to ensure everyone has a safe experience, while still being able to learn from real world malware, vulnerabilities, and malicious websites.
In addition to the weekly meetings with Black Hat and the other partners, the Cisco Meraki engineering team of Sandro Fasser, Rossi Rosario Burgos, Otis Ioannou, Asmae Boutkhil, Jeffry Handal and I met every Friday for two months. We also discussed the challenges in a Webex space with other engineers who worked on past Black Hat events.
The mission:
Division of labor is essential to reduce mistakes and stay laser focused on security scope. Otis took the lead working on network topology design with Partners. Asmae handled the port assignments for the switches. Rossi ensured every AP and Switch was tracked, and the MAC addresses were provided to Palo Alto Networks for DCHP assignments. Otis and Rossi spent two days in the server room with the NOC partners, ensuring every switch was operating and configured correctly. Rossi also deployed and configured a remote Registration switch for Black Hat.
In the weeks before deployment, our virtual Meraki team member, Aleksandar Dimitrov Vladimirov, and I focused on planning and creating a virtual Wi-Fi site survey. Multiple requirements and restrictions had to be taken into consideration. The report was based on the ExCel centre floor plans, the space allocation requirements from Black Hat and the number of APs we had available to us. Although challenging to create, with some uncertainties and often changing requirements due to the number of stakeholders involved, the surveys AP placement for best coverage ended up being pivotal at the event.
Below is the Signal Strength plan for the Expo Hall Floor on the 5 GHz band. The original plan to go with a dual-Band deployment was adjusted onsite and the 2.4 GHz band was disabled to enhance performance and throughput. This was a decision made during the network setup, in coordination with the NOC Leadership and based on experience from past conferences.
Upon arrival at the ExCel Centre, we conducted a walkthrough of the space that most of us had only seen as a floor plan and on some photos. Thanks to good planning, we could start deploying the 100+ APs immediately, with only a small number of changes to optimize the deployment on-site. As the APs had been pre-staged and added to the Meraki dashboard, including their location on the floor maps, the main work was placing and cabling them physically. During operation, the floor plans in the Meraki Dashboard were a visual help to easily spot a problem and navigate the team on the ground to the right spot, if something had to be adjusted.
As the sponsors and attendees filled each space, in the Meraki dashboard, we were able to see in real-time the number of clients connected to each AP, currently and over the time of the conference. This enabled quick reaction if challenges were identified, or APs could be redeployed to other zones. Below is the ExCel Centre Capital Hall and London Suites, Level 0. We could switch between the four levels with a single click on the Floor Plans, and drill into any AP, as needed.
The Location heatmaps also provided essential visibility into conference traffic, both on the network and footfalls of attendees. Physical security is also an important aspect of cybersecurity; we need to know how devices move in space, know where valuable assets are located and monitor their safety.
Below is the Business Hall at lunchtime, on the opening day of the conference. You can see no live APs in the bottom right corner of the Location heatmap. This is an example of adapting the plan to reality onsite. In past Black Hat Europe conferences, the Lobby in that area was the main entrance. Construction in 2022 closed this entrance. So, those APs were reallocated to the Level 1 Lobby, where attendees would naturally flow from Registration.
The floor plans and heatmaps also helped with the Training, Briefings and Keynote network resilience. Capacity was easy to add temporarily, and we were able to remove it and relocate it after a space emptied.
During our time in the NOC, we had the chance to work with other vendor engineers and some use cases that came up led to interesting collaborations. One specific use case was that we wanted to block wireless clients, that show some malicious or bad behavior, automatically after they have been identified by one of the SOC analysts on the different security platforms, in addition we wanted to show them a friendly warning page that guides them to the SOC for a friendly conversation.
The solution was a script that can be triggered thru the interfaces of the other security products and attaches a group policy thru the Meraki Dashboard, including a quarantine VLAN and a splash page, via the Meraki APIs. This integration was just one of the many collaboration bits that we worked on.
During the first day of training, in the Meraki dashboard Air Marshal, I observed packet flood attacks, against we were able to adapt and remain resilient.
I also observed an AP spoofing and broadcast de-authentication attack. I was able to quickly identify the location of the attack, which was at the Lobby outside the Business Hall. Should the attacks continue, physical security had the information to intervene. We also had the ability to track the MAC address throughout the venue, as discussed in Christian Clasen’s section in part two.
From our experiences at Black Hat USA 2022, we had encrypted frames enabled, blunting the attack.
The Meraki dashboards made it very easy to monitor the health of the network APs and Switches, with the ability to aggregate data, and quickly pivot into any switch, AP or clients.
Through the phases of the conference, from two days of pre-conference setup, to focused and intense training the first two days, and transition to the briefings and Business Hall, we were able to visualize the network traffic.
In addition, we could see the number of attendees who passed through the covered area of the conference, with or without connecting to the network. Christian Clasen takes this available data to a new level in Part 2 of the blog.
As the person with core responsibilities for the switch configuration and uptime, the Meraki dashboard made it very simple to quickly change the network topology, according to the needs of the Black Hat customer.
If you refer back to Black Hat USA 2022, you’d have seen that we had over 1,000 iOS devices to deploy, with which we had several difficulties. For context, the company that leases the devices to Black Hat doesn’t use a Mobile Device Management (MDM) platform for any of their other shows…Black Hat is the only one that does. So, instead of using a mass deployment technology, like Apple’s Automated Device Enrollment, the iOS devices are “prepared” using Apple Configurator. This includes uploading a Wi-Fi profile to the devices as part of that process. In Las Vegas, this Wi-Fi profile wasn’t set to auto join the Wi-Fi, resulting in the need to manually change this on 1,000 devices. Furthermore, 200 devices weren’t reset or prepared, so we had those to reimage as well.
Black Hat Europe 2022 was different. We took the lessons from US and coordinated with the contractor to prepare the devices. Now, if you’ve ever used Apple Configurator, there’s several steps needed to prepare a device. However, all of these can be actions can be combined into a Blueprint:
Instead of there being several steps to prepare a device, there is now just one! Applying the Blueprint!
For Black Hat Europe, this included:
There’s lots of other things that can be achieved as well, but this results in the time taken to enroll and set up a device to around 30 seconds. Since devices can be set up in parallel (you’re only limited by the number of USB cables / ports you have), this really streamlines the enrollment and set up process.
Now, for the future, whilst you can’t Export these blueprints, they are transportable. If you open Terminal on a Mac and type:
cd /Users/<YOUR USER NAME>/Library/Group Containers/K36BKF7T3D.group.com.apple.configurator/Library/Application Support/com.apple.configurator/Blueprints
You’ll see a file / package called something.blueprint This can be zipped up and emailed to some else so, they can then use the exact same Blueprint! You may need to reboot your computer for the Blueprint to appear in Apple Configurator.
As mentioned, the registration / lead capture / session scanning devices are provided by the contractor. Obviously, these are all catalogued and have a unique device code / QR code on the back of them. However, during setup, any device name provisioned on the device gets lost.
So, there’s three things we do to know, without having to resort to using the unwieldy serial number, what devices is what.
In the footnote, you’ll see Device Name and Device Serial in blue. This denotes that the values are actually dynamic and change per device. They include:
On the Lock Screen, it’s now possible to see the device’s name and serial number, without having to flip the device over (A problem for the registration devices which are locked in a secure case) or open systems preferences.
We also had integration with SecureX device insights, to see the security status of each iOS device.
With the ability to quickly check on device health from the SecureX dashboard.
This goes without saying, but the iOS devices (Registration, Lead Capture and Session Scanning) do have access to personal information. To ensure the security of the data, devices are wiped at the end of the conference. This is incredibly satisfying, hitting the Erase Devices button in Meraki Systems Manager, and watching the 100+ devices reset!
Deploying a network like Black Hat takes a lot of work, and repetitive configuration. Much of this has been covered in previous blogs. However, to make things easier for this event, instead of the 60 training SSIDs we had in Black Hat US 2022, the Meraki team discussed the benefits of moving to iPSKs with Black Hat NOC Leadership, which accepted the plan.
For context, instead of having a single pre shared key for an SSID, iPSK functionality allows you to have 1000+. Each of these iPSKs can be assigned its own group policy / VLAN. So, we created a script:
This only involves five API calls:
The bulk of the script is error handling (The SSID or network doesn’t exist, for example) and logic!
The result was one SSID for all of training: BHTraining, and each classroom had their own password. This reduced the training SSIDs from over a dozen and helped clear the airwaves.
Thank you to the Cisco NOC team:
Also, to our NOC partners NetWitness (especially David Glover, Iain Davidson, Alessandro Contini and Alessandro Zatti), Palo Alto Networks (especially James Holland, Matt Ford, Matt Smith and Mathew Chase), Gigamon, IronNet, and the entire Black Hat / Informa Tech staff (especially Grifter ‘Neil Wyler’, Bart Stump, Steve Fink, James Pope, Jess Stafford and Steve Oldenbourg).
For 25 years, Black Hat has provided attendees with the very latest in information security research, development, and trends. These high-profile global events and trainings are driven by the needs of the security community, striving to bring together the best minds in the industry. Black Hat inspires professionals at all career levels, encouraging growth and collaboration among academia, world-class researchers, and leaders in the public and private sectors. Black Hat Briefings and Trainings are held annually in the United States, Europe and USA. More information is available at: blackhat.com. Black Hat is brought to you by Informa Tech.
We’d love to hear what you think. Ask a Question, Comment Below, and Stay Connected with Cisco Secure on social!
Cisco Secure Social Channels
For many Aussies, identity theft was always something that happened to other people. People on TV, usually. But the recent spate of data breaches at Optus, Medibank and Energy Australia has made many of us pay far more attention than ever to one of the fastest growing crimes in our country.
According to the Department of Home Affairs, 1 in 4 Aussies will be the victim of identity theft over the course of their lives with an annual economic impact of more than $2 billion. And with the financial fallout from the recent data breaches only just starting to be counted, these statistics will no doubt increase dramatically next year.
Identity theft is when a cybercriminal gains access to your personal information to steal money or gain other benefits. Armed with your personal info, they can apply for real identity documents in your name but with another person’s photograph. This enables them to then apply for loans or benefits in your name, sign up for memberships or even apply for credit cards.
And it goes without saying that the financial and emotional fallout from identity theft can be huge. Since the Optus and Medibank hacking stories broke just a few months ago, there has been multiple stories of Aussie families who have had their identities stolen and who are in a world of pain. This Melbourne family who have had over $40,000 stolen from ATM withdrawals alone is just one example.
Your personal information is any piece of information or data that can confirm who you are or how to find you. It may be a single piece of information, or several pieces used together. It’s often referred to as personally identifiable information (PII). So, it includes your name, parents’ name, address, date of birth, phone numbers, email address, usernames/passwords or passphrases, bank account details, school or university attended, location check-ins even RSVPS for events.
Every time you register with a new shopping site or social media platform, you will be asked to share some personally identifiable information. However, what you share may be stolen or even misused – just think about the recent list of Australian companies who had their customers’ private information stolen by hackers. So that’s why you need to ensure you are only sharing your information with trusted online sites and take every possible step to protect your personal information online.
While there are no guarantees in life, there are steps you can take to ensure your online identity is as safe as possible. Here are my top 5 tips:
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) or 2 Factor Authentication (2FA) is a no-brainer because it makes a hacker’s life a lot harder. In short, it requires the user to provide two or more verification factors to gain access to an account or app. This might be a text, email or even a code generated by an authentication app. So, even if a hacker has your password and username, they still need that final piece of information before they can get their hands on your account!
Now this may take a bit of work to set up but using a unique and complex password on every account is one of the best things you can do to protect your online identity. And here’s the rationale – if you use the same password on all your accounts and your login details are stolen then hackers have access to all the accounts that are accessed with that password. Yikes!!! So, a unique password for each account is a great measure. I love using a password manager to make this process a little easier. Not only do they generate complex passwords, but they remember them too! All you need to do is remember your Master Password which needs to be extremely complex!!!
Updates are most commonly about addressing security weaknesses. And yes, I know they can be a pain but if you ignore them, you are essentially making it easier for hackers to find their way into your life via weak spots. And don’t forget to ensure your security software remains updated too!
I always recommend keeping a backup of all your important info in case something goes wrong. This should include all your photos, key documents and all your personally identifiable information. A hard drive works well but saving to the cloud is also a good option. I once dropped a hard drive and lost treasured family photos, so the cloud is my personal preference.
We all know knowledge is power so investing in top notch security and identity monitoring software will help keep you ahead of threats. McAfee+, McAfee’s new all in one privacy, identity and device protection solution is a fantastic way for Aussies to protect themselves online. It features identity monitoring and a password manager but also an unlimited VPN, a file shredder, protection score and parental controls. And the Rolls Royce version called McAfee+ Advanced, also offers subscribers additional identity protections including access to licensed restoration experts who can help you repair your identity and credit, in case you’re affected by a data breach. It also gives subscribers access to lost wallet protection which help you cancel and replace your ID, credit cards if they are lost or stolen.
Public, unsecured Wi-Fi can make life so much easier when you’re out and about but it’s also a tried and tested way for scammers to access your personal information. Unsecured Wi-Fi is free Wi-Fi that is available in public places such as libraries, cafes, or shopping centres. So, instead of using Wi-Fi, just use the data in your phone plan. Or alternatively invest in a Virtual Private Network (VPN) that cleverly encrypts everything you share on your device.
About 2 months ago, I embarked on a project to clean up my online life. I’m working through the list of sites I have accounts with and am closing those I no longer use, I’m also doing a huge password audit to ensure they are all unique to each site and are super complex, thanks to my password manager. Now, I’m not quite done yet, but things are in better shape than they were. Why not consider doing the same? With the holiday season fast approaching, why not dedicate a little of your poolside time to practicing a little cyber hygiene.
Till next time, keep those identities safe!
Alex
The post The Best Way To Protect Your Online Identity appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Photo: BrandonKleinPhoto / Shutterstock.com
Two U.S. men have been charged with hacking into the Ring home security cameras of a dozen random people and then “swatting” them — falsely reporting a violent incident at the target’s address to trick local police into responding with force. Prosecutors say the duo used the compromised Ring devices to stream live video footage on social media of police raiding their targets’ homes, and to taunt authorities when they arrived.
Prosecutors in Los Angeles allege 20-year-old James Thomas Andrew McCarty, a.k.a. “Aspertaine,” of Charlotte, N.C., and Kya Christian Nelson, a.k.a. “ChumLul,” 22, of Racine, Wisc., conspired to hack into Yahoo email accounts belonging to victims in the United States. From there, the two allegedly would check how many of those Yahoo accounts were associated with Ring accounts, and then target people who used the same password for both accounts.
An indictment unsealed this week says that in the span of just one week in November 2020, McCarty and Nelson identified and swatted at least a dozen different victims across the country.
“The defendants then allegedly accessed without authorization the victims’ Ring devices and transmitted the audio and video from those devices on social media during the police response,” reads a statement from Martin Estrada, the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California. “They also allegedly verbally taunted responding police officers and victims through the Ring devices during several of the incidents.”
James Thomas Andrew McCarty.
The indictment charges that McCarty continued his swatting spree in 2021 from his hometown in Kayenta, Ariz., where he called in bomb threats or phony hostage situations on more than two dozen occasions.
The Telegram and Discord aliases allegedly used by McCarty — “Aspertaine” and “Couch,” among others — correspond to an identity that was active in certain channels dedicated to SIM-swapping, a crime that involves stealing wireless phone numbers and hijacking the online financial and social media accounts tied to those numbers.
Aspertaine bragged on Discord that he’d amassed more than $330,000 in virtual currency. On Telegram, the Aspertaine/Couch alias frequented several popular SIM-swapping channels, where they initially were active as a “holder” — a SIM-swapping group member who agrees to hold SIM cards used in the heist after an account takeover is completed. Aspertaine later claimed more direct involvement in individual SIM-swapping attacks.
In September, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news about a wide-ranging federal investigation into “violence-as-a-service” offerings on Telegram and other social media networks, wherein people can settle scores by hiring total strangers to carry out physical attacks such as brickings, shootings, and firebombings at a target’s address.
The story observed that SIM swappers were especially enamored of these “IRL” or “In Real Life” violence services, which they frequently used to target one another in response to disagreements over how stolen money should be divided amongst themselves. And a number of Aspertaine’s peers on these SIM-swapping channels claimed they’d been ripped off after Aspertaine took more than a fair share from them.
In August, a member of a popular SIM-swapping group on Telegram who was slighted by Aspertaine put out the word that he was looking for some physical violence to be visited on McCarty’s address in North Carolina. “Anyone live near here and wants to [do] a job for me,” the job ad with McCarty’s home address read. “Jobs range from $1k-$50k. Payment in BTC [bitcoin].” It’s unclear if anyone responded to that job offer.
Ring, Inc., which is owned by Amazon, said it learned bad actors used stolen customer email credentials obtained from external (non-Ring) services to access other accounts, and took immediate steps to help those customers secure their Ring accounts.
“We also supported the FBI in identifying the individuals responsible,” the company said in a written statement. “We take the security of our customers extremely seriously — that’s why we made two-step verification mandatory, conduct regular scans for Ring passwords compromised in non-Ring breaches, and continually invest in new security protections to harden our systems. We are committed to continuing to protect our customers and vigorously going after those who seek to harm them.”
KrebsOnSecurity recently published The Wages of Password ReUse: Your Money or Your Life, which noted that when normal computer users fall into the nasty habit of recycling passwords, the result is most often some type of financial loss. Whereas, when cybercriminals reuse passwords, it often costs them their freedom.
But perhaps that story should be updated, because it’s now clear that password reuse can also put you in mortal danger. Swatting attacks are dangerous, expensive hoaxes that sometimes end in tragedy.
In June 2021, an 18-year-old serial swatter from Tennessee was sentenced to five years in prison for his role in a fraudulent swatting attack that led to the death of a 60-year-old man.
In 2019, prosecutors handed down a 20-year sentence to Tyler Barriss, a then 26-year-old serial swatter from California who admitted making a phony emergency call to police in late 2017 that led to the shooting death of an innocent Kansas man.
McCarty was arrested last week, and charged with conspiracy to intentionally access computers without authorization. Prosecutors said Nelson is currently incarcerated in Kentucky in connection with unrelated investigation.
If convicted on the conspiracy charge, both defendants would face a statutory maximum penalty of five years in federal prison. The charge of intentionally accessing without authorization a computer carries a maximum possible sentence of five years. A conviction on the additional charge against Nelson — aggravated identity theft — carries a mandatory two-year consecutive sentence.
Update, 11:48 a.m., Dec. 20: Added statement from Ring. Modified description of a “holder” in the SIM-swapping parlance.
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