Recent ‘MFA Bombing’ Attacks Targeting Apple Users

Several Apple customers recently reported being targeted in elaborate phishing attacks that involve what appears to be a bug in Apple’s password reset feature. In this scenario, a target’s Apple devices are forced to display dozens of system-level prompts that prevent the devices from being used until the recipient responds “Allow” or “Don’t Allow” to each prompt. Assuming the user manages not to fat-finger the wrong button on the umpteenth password reset request, the scammers will then call the victim while spoofing Apple support in the caller ID, saying the user’s account is under attack and that Apple support needs to “verify” a one-time code.

Parth Patel is an entrepreneur who is trying to build a startup in the conversational AI space. On March 23, Patel documented on Twitter/X a recent phishing campaign targeting him that involved what’s known as a “push bombing” or “MFA fatigue” attack, wherein the phishers abuse a feature or weakness of a multi-factor authentication (MFA) system in a way that inundates the target’s device(s) with alerts to approve a password change or login.

“All of my devices started blowing up, my watch, laptop and phone,” Patel told KrebsOnSecurity. “It was like this system notification from Apple to approve [a reset of the account password], but I couldn’t do anything else with my phone. I had to go through and decline like 100-plus notifications.”

Some people confronted with such a deluge may eventually click “Allow” to the incessant password reset prompts — just so they can use their phone again. Others may inadvertently approve one of these prompts, which will also appear on a user’s Apple watch if they have one.

But the attackers in this campaign had an ace up their sleeves: Patel said after denying all of the password reset prompts from Apple, he received a call on his iPhone that said it was from Apple Support (the number displayed was 1-800-275-2273, Apple’s real customer support line).

“I pick up the phone and I’m super suspicious,” Patel recalled. “So I ask them if they can verify some information about me, and after hearing some aggressive typing on his end he gives me all this information about me and it’s totally accurate.”

All of it, that is, except his real name. Patel said when he asked the fake Apple support rep to validate the name they had on file for the Apple account, the caller gave a name that was not his but rather one that Patel has only seen in background reports about him that are for sale at a people-search website called PeopleDataLabs.

Patel said he has worked fairly hard to remove his information from multiple people-search websites, and he found PeopleDataLabs uniquely and consistently listed this inaccurate name as an alias on his consumer profile.

“For some reason, PeopleDataLabs has three profiles that come up when you search for my info, and two of them are mine but one is an elementary school teacher from the midwest,” Patel said. “I asked them to verify my name and they said Anthony.”

Patel said the goal of the voice phishers is to trigger an Apple ID reset code to be sent to the user’s device, which is a text message that includes a one-time password. If the user supplies that one-time code, the attackers can then reset the password on the account and lock the user out. They can also then remotely wipe all of the user’s Apple devices.

THE PHONE NUMBER IS KEY

Chris is a cryptocurrency hedge fund owner who asked that only his first name be used so as not to paint a bigger target on himself. Chris told KrebsOnSecurity he experienced a remarkably similar phishing attempt in late February.

“The first alert I got I hit ‘Don’t Allow’, but then right after that I got like 30 more notifications in a row,” Chris said. “I figured maybe I sat on my phone weird, or was accidentally pushing some button that was causing these, and so I just denied them all.”

Chris says the attackers persisted hitting his devices with the reset notifications for several days after that, and at one point he received a call on his iPhone that said it was from Apple support.

“I said I would call them back and hung up,” Chris said, demonstrating the proper response to such unbidden solicitations. “When I called back to the real Apple, they couldn’t say whether anyone had been in a support call with me just then. They just said Apple states very clearly that it will never initiate outbound calls to customers — unless the customer requests to be contacted.”

Massively freaking out that someone was trying to hijack his digital life, Chris said he changed his passwords and then went to an Apple store and bought a new iPhone. From there, he created a new Apple iCloud account using a brand new email address.

Chris said he then proceeded to get even more system alerts on his new iPhone and iCloud account — all the while still sitting at the local Apple Genius Bar.

Chris told KrebsOnSecurity his Genius Bar tech was mystified about the source of the alerts, but Chris said he suspects that whatever the phishers are abusing to rapidly generate these Apple system alerts requires knowing the phone number on file for the target’s Apple account. After all, that was the only aspect of Chris’s new iPhone and iCloud account that hadn’t changed.

WATCH OUT!

“Ken” is a security industry veteran who spoke on condition of anonymity. Ken said he first began receiving these unsolicited system alerts on his Apple devices earlier this year, but that he has not received any phony Apple support calls as others have reported.

“This recently happened to me in the middle of the night at 12:30 a.m.,” Ken said. “And even though I have my Apple watch set to remain quiet during the time I’m usually sleeping at night, it woke me up with one of these alerts. Thank god I didn’t press ‘Allow,’ which was the first option shown on my watch. I had to scroll watch the wheel to see and press the ‘Don’t Allow’ button.”

Ken didn’t know it when all this was happening (and it’s not at all obvious from the Apple prompts), but clicking “Allow” would not have allowed the attackers to change Ken’s password. Rather, clicking “Allow” displays a six digit PIN that must be entered on Ken’s device — allowing Ken to change his password. It appears that these rapid password reset prompts are being used to make a subsequent inbound phone call spoofing Apple more believable.

Ken said he contacted the real Apple support and was eventually escalated to a senior Apple engineer. The engineer assured Ken that turning on an Apple Recovery Key for his account would stop the notifications once and for all.

A recovery key is an optional security feature that Apple says “helps improve the security of your Apple ID account.” It is a randomly generated 28-character code, and when you enable a recovery key it is supposed to disable Apple’s standard account recovery process. The thing is, enabling it is not a simple process, and if you ever lose that code in addition to all of your Apple devices you will be permanently locked out.

Ken said he enabled a recovery key for his account as instructed, but that it hasn’t stopped the unbidden system alerts from appearing on all of his devices every few days.

KrebsOnSecurity tested Ken’s experience, and can confirm that enabling a recovery key does nothing to stop a password reset prompt from being sent to associated Apple devices. Visiting Apple’s “forgot password” page — https://iforgot.apple.com — asks for an email address and for the visitor to solve a CAPTCHA.

After that, the page will display the last two digits of the phone number tied to the Apple account. Filling in the missing digits and hitting submit on that form will send a system alert, whether or not the user has enabled an Apple Recovery Key.

RATE LIMITS

What sanely designed authentication system would send dozens of requests for a password change in the span of a few moments, when the first requests haven’t even been acted on by the user? Could this be the result of a bug in Apple’s systems?

Apple has not yet responded to requests for comment.

Throughout 2022, a criminal hacking group known as LAPSUS$ used MFA bombing to great effect in intrusions at Cisco, Microsoft and Uber. In response, Microsoft began enforcing “MFA number matching,” a feature that displays a series of numbers to a user attempting to log in with their credentials. These numbers must then be entered into the account owner’s Microsoft authenticator app on their mobile device to verify they are logging into the account.

Kishan Bagaria is a hobbyist security researcher and engineer who founded the website texts.com (now owned by Automattic), and he’s convinced Apple has a problem on its end. In August 2019, Bagaria reported to Apple a bug that allowed an exploit he dubbed “AirDoS” because it could be used to let an attacker infinitely spam all nearby iOS devices with a system-level prompt to share a file via AirDrop — a file-sharing capability built into Apple products.

Apple fixed that bug nearly four months later in December 2019, thanking Bagaria in the associated security bulletin. Bagaria said Apple’s fix was to add stricter rate limiting on AirDrop requests, and he suspects that someone has figured out a way to bypass Apple’s rate limit on how many of these password reset requests can be sent in a given timeframe.

“I think this could be a legit Apple rate limit bug that should be reported,” Bagaria said.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Apple seems requires a phone number to be on file for your account, but after you’ve set up the account it doesn’t have to be a mobile phone number. KrebsOnSecurity’s testing shows Apple will accept a VOIP number (like Google Voice). So, changing your account phone number to a VOIP number that isn’t widely known would be one mitigation here.

One caveat with the VOIP number idea: Unless you include a real mobile number, Apple’s iMessage and Facetime applications will be disabled for that device. This might a bonus for those concerned about reducing the overall attack surface of their Apple devices, since zero-click zero-days in these applications have repeatedly been used by spyware purveyors.

Also, it appears Apple’s password reset system will accept and respect email aliases. Adding a “+” character after the username portion of your email address — followed by a notation specific to the site you’re signing up at — lets you create an infinite number of unique email addresses tied to the same account.

For instance, if I were signing up at example.com, I might give my email address as krebsonsecurity+example@gmail.com. Then, I simply go back to my inbox and create a corresponding folder called “Example,” along with a new filter that sends any email addressed to that alias to the Example folder. In this case, however, perhaps a less obvious alias than “+apple” would be advisable.

Update, March 27, 5:06 p.m. ET: Added perspective on Ken’s experience. Also included a What Can You Do? section.

Patch Tuesday, October 2023 Edition

Microsoft today issued security updates for more than 100 newly-discovered vulnerabilities in its Windows operating system and related software, including four flaws that are already being exploited. In addition, Apple recently released emergency updates to quash a pair of zero-day bugs in iOS.

Apple last week shipped emergency updates in iOS 17.0.3 and iPadOS 17.0.3 in response to active attacks. The patch fixes CVE-2023-42724, which attackers have been using in targeted attacks to elevate their access on a local device.

Apple said it also patched CVE-2023-5217, which is not listed as a zero-day bug. However, as Bleeping Computer pointed out, this flaw is caused by a weakness in the open-source “libvpx” video codec library, which was previously patched as a zero-day flaw by Google in the Chrome browser and by Microsoft in Edge, Teams, and Skype products. For anyone keeping count, this is the 17th zero-day flaw that Apple has patched so far this year.

Fortunately, the zero-days affecting Microsoft customers this month are somewhat less severe than usual, with the exception of CVE-2023-44487. This weakness is not specific to Windows but instead exists within the HTTP/2 protocol used by the World Wide Web: Attackers have figured out how to use a feature of HTTP/2 to massively increase the size of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and these monster attacks reportedly have been going on for several weeks now.

Amazon, Cloudflare and Google all released advisories today about how they’re addressing CVE-2023-44487 in their cloud environments. Google’s Damian Menscher wrote on Twitter/X that the exploit — dubbed a “rapid reset attack” — works by sending a request and then immediately cancelling it (a feature of HTTP/2). “This lets attackers skip waiting for responses, resulting in a more efficient attack,” Menscher explained.

Natalie Silva, lead security engineer at Immersive Labs, said this flaw’s impact to enterprise customers could be significant, and lead to prolonged downtime.

“It is crucial for organizations to apply the latest patches and updates from their web server vendors to mitigate this vulnerability and protect against such attacks,” Silva said. In this month’s Patch Tuesday release by Microsoft, they have released both an update to this vulnerability, as well as a temporary workaround should you not be able to patch immediately.”

Microsoft also patched zero-day bugs in Skype for Business (CVE-2023-41763) and Wordpad (CVE-2023-36563). The latter vulnerability could expose NTLM hashes, which are used for authentication in Windows environments.

“It may or may not be a coincidence that Microsoft announced last month that WordPad is no longer being updated, and will be removed in a future version of Windows, although no specific timeline has yet been given,” said Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7. “Unsurprisingly, Microsoft recommends Word as a replacement for WordPad.”

Other notable bugs addressed by Microsoft include CVE-2023-35349, a remote code execution weakness in the Message Queuing (MSMQ) service, a technology that allows applications across multiple servers or hosts to communicate with each other. This vulnerability has earned a CVSS severity score of 9.8 (10 is the worst possible). Happily, the MSMQ service is not enabled by default in Windows, although Immersive Labs notes that Microsoft Exchange Server can enable this service during installation.

Speaking of Exchange, Microsoft also patched CVE-2023-36778,  a vulnerability in all current versions of Exchange Server that could allow attackers to run code of their choosing. Rapid7’s Barnett said successful exploitation requires that the attacker be on the same network as the Exchange Server host, and use valid credentials for an Exchange user in a PowerShell session.

For a more detailed breakdown on the updates released today, see the SANS Internet Storm Center roundup. If today’s updates cause any stability or usability issues in Windows, AskWoody.com will likely have the lowdown on that.

Please consider backing up your data and/or imaging your system before applying any updates. And feel free to sound off in the comments if you experience any difficulties as a result of these patches.

Adobe, Apple, Google & Microsoft Patch 0-Day Bugs

Microsoft today issued software updates to fix at least five dozen security holes in Windows and supported software, including patches for two zero-day vulnerabilities that are already being exploited. Also, Adobe, Google Chrome and Apple iOS users may have their own zero-day patching to do.

On Sept. 7, researchers at Citizen Lab warned they were seeing active exploitation of a “zero-click,” zero-day flaw to install spyware on iOS devices without any interaction from the victim.

“The exploit chain was capable of compromising iPhones running the latest version of iOS (16.6) without any interaction from the victim,” the researchers wrote.

According to Citizen Lab, the exploit uses malicious images sent via iMessage, an embedded component of Apple’s iOS that has been the source of previous zero-click flaws in iPhones and iPads.

Apple says the iOS flaw (CVE-2023-41064) does not seem to work against devices that have its ultra-paranoid “Lockdown Mode” enabled. This feature restricts non-essential iOS features to reduce the device’s overall attack surface, and it was designed for users concerned that they may be subject to targeted attacks. Citizen Lab says the bug it discovered was being exploited to install spyware made by the Israeli cyber surveillance company NSO Group.

This vulnerability is fixed in iOS 16.6.1 and iPadOS 16.6.1. To turn on Lockdown Mode in iOS 16, go to Settings, then Privacy and Security, then Lockdown Mode.

Not to be left out of the zero-day fun, Google acknowledged on Sept. 11 that an exploit for a heap overflow bug in Chrome is being exploited in the wild. Google says it is releasing updates to fix the flaw, and that restarting Chrome is the way to apply any pending updates. Interestingly, Google says this bug was reported by Apple and Citizen Lab.

On the Microsoft front, a zero-day in Microsoft Word is among the more concerning bugs fixed today. Tracked as CVE-2023-36761, it is flagged as an “information disclosure” vulnerability. But that description hardly grasps at the sensitivity of the information potentially exposed here.

Tom Bowyer, manager of product security at Automox, said exploiting this vulnerability could lead to the disclosure of Net-NTLMv2 hashes, which are used for authentication in Windows environments.

“If a malicious actor gains access to these hashes, they can potentially impersonate the user, gaining unauthorized access to sensitive data and systems,” Bowyer said, noting that CVE-2023-36761 can be exploited just by viewing a malicious document in the Windows preview pane. “They could also conduct pass-the-hash attacks, where the attacker uses the hashed version of a password to authenticate themselves without needing to decrypt it.”

The other Windows zero-day fixed this month is CVE-2023-36802. This is an “elevation of privilege” flaw in the “Microsoft Streaming Service Proxy,” which is built into Windows 10, 11 and Windows Server versions. Microsoft says an attacker who successfully exploits the bug can gain SYSTEM level privileges on a Windows computer.

Five of the flaws Microsoft fixed this month earned its “critical” rating, which the software giant reserves for vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malware or malcontents with little or no interaction by Windows users.

According to the SANS Internet Storm Center, the most serious critical bug in September’s Patch Tuesday is CVE-2023-38148, which is a weakness in the Internet Connection Sharing service on Windows. Microsoft says an unauthenticated attacker could leverage the flaw to install malware just sending a specially crafted data packet to a vulnerable Windows system.

Finally, Adobe has released critical security updates for its Adobe Reader and Acrobat software that also fixes a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2023-26369). More details are at Adobe’s advisory.

For a more granular breakdown of the Windows updates pushed out today, check out Microsoft Patch Tuesday by Morphus Labs. In the meantime, consider backing up your data before updating Windows, and keep an eye on AskWoody.com for reports of any widespread problems with any of the updates released as part of September’s Patch Tuesday.

Update: Mozilla also has fixed zero-day flaw in Firefox and Thunderbird, and the Brave browser was updated as well. It appears the common theme here is any software that uses a code library called “libwebp,” and that this vulnerability is being tracked as CVE-2023-4863.

“This includes Electron-based applications, for example – Signal,” writes StackDiary.com. “Electron patched the vulnerability yesterday. Also, software like Honeyview (from Bandisoft) released an update to fix the issue. CVE-2023-4863 was falsely marked as Chrome-only by Mitre and other organizations that track CVE’s and 100% of media reported this issue as “Chrome only”, when it’s not.”

Apple & Microsoft Patch Tuesday, July 2023 Edition

Microsoft Corp. today released software updates to quash 130 security bugs in its Windows operating systems and related software, including at least five flaws that are already seeing active exploitation. Meanwhile, Apple customers have their own zero-day woes again this month: On Monday, Apple issued (and then quickly pulled) an emergency update to fix a zero-day vulnerability that is being exploited on MacOS and iOS devices.

On July 10, Apple pushed a “Rapid Security Response” update to fix a code execution flaw in the Webkit browser component built into iOS, iPadOS, and macOS Ventura. Almost as soon as the patch went out, Apple pulled the software because it was reportedly causing problems loading certain websites. MacRumors says Apple will likely re-release the patches when the glitches have been addressed.

Launched in May, Apple’s Rapid Security Response updates are designed to address time-sensitive vulnerabilities, and this is the second month Apple has used it. July marks the sixth month this year that Apple has released updates for zero-day vulnerabilities — those that get exploited by malware or malcontents before there is an official patch available.

If you rely on Apple devices and don’t have automatic updates enabled, please take a moment to check the patch status of your various iDevices. The latest security update that includes the fix for the zero-day bug should be available in iOS/iPadOS 16.5.1, macOS 13.4.1, and Safari 16.5.2.

On the Windows side, there are at least four vulnerabilities patched this month that earned high CVSS (badness) scores and that are already being exploited in active attacks, according to Microsoft. They include CVE-2023-32049, which is a hole in Windows SmartScreen that lets malware bypass security warning prompts; and CVE-2023-35311 allows attackers to bypass security features in Microsoft Outlook.

The two other zero-day threats this month for Windows are both privilege escalation flaws. CVE-2023-32046 affects a core Windows component called MSHTML, which is used by Windows and other applications, like Office, Outlook and Skype. CVE-2023-36874 is an elevation of privilege bug in the Windows Error Reporting Service.

Many security experts expected Microsoft to address a fifth zero-day flaw — CVE-2023-36884 — a remote code execution weakness in Office and Windows.

“Surprisingly, there is no patch yet for one of the five zero-day vulnerabilities,” said Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7. “Microsoft is actively investigating publicly disclosed vulnerability, and promises to update the advisory as soon as further guidance is available.”

Barnett notes that Microsoft links exploitation of this vulnerability with Storm-0978, the software giant’s name for a cybercriminal group based out of Russia that is identified by the broader security community as RomCom.

“Exploitation of CVE-2023-36884 may lead to installation of the eponymous RomCom trojan or other malware,” Barnett said. “[Microsoft] suggests that RomCom / Storm-0978 is operating in support of Russian intelligence operations. The same threat actor has also been associated with ransomware attacks targeting a wide array of victims.”

Microsoft’s advisory on CVE-2023-36884 is pretty sparse, but it does include a Windows registry hack that should help mitigate attacks on this vulnerability. Microsoft has also published a blog post about phishing campaigns tied to Storm-0978 and to the exploitation of this flaw.

Barnett said it’s while it’s possible that a patch will be issued as part of next month’s Patch Tuesday, Microsoft Office is deployed just about everywhere, and this threat actor is making waves.

“Admins should be ready for an out-of-cycle security update for CVE-2023-36884,” he said.

Microsoft also today released new details about how it plans to address the existential threat of malware that is cryptographically signed by…wait for it….Microsoft.

In late 2022, security experts at Sophos, Trend Micro and Cisco warned that ransomware criminals were using signed, malicious drivers in an attempt to evade antivirus and endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools.

In a blog post today, Sophos’s Andrew Brandt wrote that Sophos identified 133 malicious Windows driver files that were digitally signed since April 2021, and found 100 of those were actually signed by Microsoft. Microsoft said today it is taking steps to ensure those malicious driver files can no longer run on Windows computers.

As KrebsOnSecurity noted in last month’s story on malware signing-as-a-service, code-signing certificates are supposed to help authenticate the identity of software publishers, and provide cryptographic assurance that a signed piece of software has not been altered or tampered with. Both of these qualities make stolen or ill-gotten code-signing certificates attractive to cybercriminal groups, who prize their ability to add stealth and longevity to malicious software.

Dan Goodin at Ars Technica contends that whatever Microsoft may be doing to keep maliciously signed drivers from running on Windows is being bypassed by hackers using open source software that is popular with video game cheaters.

“The software comes in the form of two software tools that are available on GitHub,” Goodin explained. “Cheaters use them to digitally sign malicious system drivers so they can modify video games in ways that give the player an unfair advantage. The drivers clear the considerable hurdle required for the cheat code to run inside the Windows kernel, the fortified layer of the operating system reserved for the most critical and sensitive functions.”

Meanwhile, researchers at Cisco’s Talos security team found multiple Chinese-speaking threat groups have repurposed the tools—one apparently called “HookSignTool” and the other “FuckCertVerifyTimeValidity.”

“Instead of using the kernel access for cheating, the threat actors use it to give their malware capabilities it wouldn’t otherwise have,” Goodin said.

For a closer look at the patches released by Microsoft today, check out the always-thorough Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.

And as ever, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. If you encounter any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.

SMS Phishers Harvested Phone Numbers, Shipment Data from UPS Tracking Tool

The United Parcel Service (UPS) says fraudsters have been harvesting phone numbers and other information from its online shipment tracking tool in Canada to send highly targeted SMS phishing (a.k.a. “smishing”) messages that spoofed UPS and other top brands. The missives addressed recipients by name, included details about recent orders, and warned that those orders wouldn’t be shipped unless the customer paid an added delivery fee.

In a snail mail letter sent this month to Canadian customers, UPS Canada Ltd. said it is aware that some package recipients have received fraudulent text messages demanding payment before a package can be delivered, and that it has been working with partners in its delivery chain to try to understand how the fraud was occurring.

“During that review, UPS discovered a method by which a person who searched for a particular package or misused a package look-up tool could obtain more information about the delivery, potentially including a recipient’s phone number,” the letter reads. “Because this information could be misused by third parties, including potentially in a smishing scheme, UPS has taken steps to limit access to that information.”

The written notice goes on to say UPS believes the data exposure “affected packages for a small group of shippers and some of their customers from February 1, 2022 to April 24, 2023.”

As early as April 2022, KrebsOnSecurity began receiving tips from Canadian readers who were puzzling over why they’d just received one of these SMS phishing messages that referenced information from a recent order they’d legitimately placed at an online retailer.

In March, 2023, a reader named Dylan from British Columbia wrote in to say he’d received one of these shipping fee scam messages not long after placing an order to buy gobs of building blocks directly from Lego.com. The message included his full name, phone number, and postal code, and urged him to click a link to mydeliveryfee-ups[.]info and pay a $1.55 delivery fee that was supposedly required to deliver his Legos.

“From searching the text of this phishing message, I can see that a lot of people have experienced this scam, which is more convincing because of the information the phishing text contains,” Dylan wrote. “It seems likely to me that UPS is leaking information somehow about upcoming deliveries.”

Josh is a reader who works for a company that ships products to Canada, and in early January 2023 he inquired whether there was any information about a breach at UPS Canada.

“We’ve seen many of our customers targeted with a fraudulent UPS text message scheme after placing an order,” Josh said. “A link is provided (often only after the customer responds to the text) which takes you to a captcha page, followed by a fraudulent payment collection page.”

Pivoting on the domain in the smishing message sent to Dylan shows the phishing domain shared an Internet host in Russia [91.215.85-166] with nearly two dozen other smishing related domains, including upsdelivery[.]info, legodelivery[.]info, adidascanadaltd[.]com, crocscanadafee[.]info, refw0234apple[.]info, vista-printcanada[.]info and telus-ca[.]info.

The inclusion of big-name brands in the domains of these UPS smishing campaigns suggests the perpetrators had the ability to focus their lookups on UPS customers who had recently ordered items from specific companies.

Attempts to visit these domains with a web browser failed, but loading them in a mobile device (or in my case, emulating a mobile device using a virtual machine and Developer Tools in Firefox) revealed the first stage of this smishing attack. As Josh mentioned, what first popped up was a CAPTCHA; after the visitor solved the CAPTCHA, they were taken through several more pages that requested the user’s full name, date of birth, credit card number, address, email and phone number.

In April 2022, KrebsOnSecurity heard from Alex, the CEO of a technology company in Canada who asked to leave his last name out of this story. Alex reached out when he began receiving the smishing messages almost immediately after ordering two sets of Airpods directly from Apple’s website.

What puzzled Alex most was that he’d instructed Apple to send the Airpods as a gift to two different people, and less than 24 hours later the phone number he uses for his Apple account received two of the phishing messages, both of which contained salutations that included the names of the people for whom he’d bought Airpods.

“I’d put the recipient as different people on my team, but because it was my phone number on both orders I was the one getting the texts,” Alex explained. “That same day, I got text messages referring to me as two different people, neither of whom were me.”

Alex said he believes UPS Canada either doesn’t fully understand what happened yet, or it is being coy about what it knows. He said the wording of UPS’s response misleadingly suggests the smishing attacks were somehow the result of hackers randomly looking up package information via the company’s tracking website.

Alex said it’s likely that whoever is responsible figured out how to query the UPS Canada website for only pending orders from specific brands, perhaps by exploiting some type of application programming interface (API) that UPS Canada makes or made available to its biggest retail partners.

“It wasn’t like I put the order through [on Apple.ca] and some days or weeks later I got a targeted smishing attack,” he said. “It was more or less the same day. And it was as if [the phishers] were being notified the order existed.”

The letter to UPS Canada customers does not mention whether any other customers in North America were affected, and it remains unclear whether any UPS customers outside of Canada may have been targeted.

In a statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity, Sandy Springs, Ga. based UPS [NYSE:UPS] said the company has been working with partners in the delivery chain to understand how that fraud was being perpetrated, as well as with law enforcement and third-party experts to identify the cause of this scheme and to put a stop to it.

“Law enforcement has indicated that there has been an increase in smishing impacting a number of shippers and many different industries,” reads an email from Brian Hughes, director of financial and strategy communications at UPS.

“Out of an abundance of caution, UPS is sending privacy incident notification letters to individuals in Canada whose information may have been impacted,” Hughes said. “We encourage our customers and general consumers to learn about the ways they can stay protected against attempts like this by visiting the UPS Fight Fraud website.”

Microsoft Patch Tuesday, December 2022 Edition

Microsoft has released its final monthly batch of security updates for 2022, fixing more than four dozen security holes in its various Windows operating systems and related software. The most pressing patches include a zero-day in a Windows feature that tries to flag malicious files from the Web, a critical bug in PowerShell, and a dangerous flaw in Windows 11 systems that was detailed publicly prior to this week’s Patch Tuesday.

The security updates include patches for Azure, Microsoft Edge, Office, SharePoint Server, SysInternals, and the .NET framework. Six of the update bundles earned Microsoft’s most dire “critical” rating, meaning they fix vulnerabilities that malware or malcontents can use to remotely commandeer an unpatched Windows system — with little to no interaction on the part of the user.

The bug already seeing exploitation is CVE-2022-44698, which allows attackers to bypass the Windows SmartScreen security feature. The vulnerability allows attackers to craft documents that won’t get tagged with Microsoft’s “Mark of the Web,” despite being downloaded from untrusted sites.

“This means no Protected View for Microsoft Office documents, making it easier to get users to do sketchy things like execute malicious macros, said Greg Wiseman, product manager at security firm Rapid7. This is the second Mark of the Web flaw Microsoft has patched in as many months; both were first publicly detailed over the past two months on Twitter by security researcher Will Dormann.

Publicly disclosed (but not actively exploited for now) is CVE-2022-44710, which is an elevation of privilege flaw in the DirectX graphics component of Windows 11.

Another notable critical bug is CVE-2022-41076, a remote code execution flaw in PowerShell — a key component of Windows that makes it easier to automate system tasks and configurations.

Kevin Breen at Immersive Labs said while Microsoft doesn’t share much detail about CVE-2022-41076 apart from the designation ‘Exploitation More Likely,’ they also note that successful exploitation requires an attacker to take additional actions to prepare the target environment.

“What actions are required is not clear; however, we do know that exploitation requires an authenticated user level of access,” Breen said. “This combination suggests that the exploit requires a social engineering element, and would likely be seen in initial infections using attacks like MalDocs or LNK files.”

Speaking of malicious documents, Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative highlights CVE-2022-44713, a spoofing vulnerability in Outlook for Mac.

“We don’t often highlight spoofing bugs, but anytime you’re dealing with a spoofing bug in an e-mail client, you should take notice,” ZDI’s Dustin Childs wrote. “This vulnerability could allow an attacker to appear as a trusted user when they should not be. Now combine this with the SmartScreen Mark of the Web bypass and it’s not hard to come up with a scenario where you receive an e-mail that appears to be from your boss with an attachment entitled “Executive_Compensation.xlsx”. There aren’t many who wouldn’t open that file in that scenario.”

Microsoft also released guidance on reports that certain software drivers certified by Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Developer Program were being used maliciously in post-exploitation activity.

Three different companies reported evidence that malicious hackers were using these signed malicious driver files to lay the groundwork for ransomware deployment inside victim organizations. One of those companies, Sophos, published a blog post Tuesday detailing how the activity was tied to the Russian ransomware group Cuba, which has extorted an estimated $60 million from victims since 2019.

Of course, not all scary and pressing security threats are Microsoft-based. Also on Tuesday, Apple released a bevy of security updates to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS and Safari, including  a patch for a newly discovered zero-day vulnerability that could lead to remote code execution.

Anyone responsible for maintaining Fortinet or Citrix remote access products probably needs to update, as both are dealing with active attacks on just-patched flaws.

For a closer look at the patches released by Microsoft today (indexed by severity and other metrics) check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.

As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.

LinkedIn Adds Verified Emails, Profile Creation Dates

Responding to a recent surge in AI-generated bot accounts, LinkedIn is rolling out new features that it hopes will help users make more informed decisions about with whom they choose to connect. Many LinkedIn profiles now display a creation date, and the company is expanding its domain validation offering, which allows users to publicly confirm that they can reply to emails at the domain of their stated current employer.

LinkedIn’s new “About This Profile” section — which is visible by clicking the “More” button at the top of a profile — includes the year the account was created, the last time the profile information was updated, and an indication of how and whether an account has been verified.

LinkedIn also said it is adding a warning to some LinkedIn messages that include high-risk content, or that try to entice the user into taking the conversation to another platform (like WeChat).

“We may warn you about messages that ask you to take the conversation to another platform because that can be a sign of a scam,” the company said in a blog post. “These warnings will also give you the choice to report the content without letting the sender know.”

In late September 2022, KrebsOnSecurity warned about the proliferation of fake LinkedIn profiles for Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) roles at some of the world’s largest corporations. A follow-up story on Oct. 5 showed how the phony profile problem has affected virtually all executive roles at corporations, and how these fake profiles are creating an identity crisis for the businesses networking site and the companies that rely on it to hire and screen prospective employees.

Reporting here last month also tracked a massive drop in profiles claiming to work at several major technology companies, as LinkedIn apparently took action against hundreds of thousands of inauthentic accounts that falsely claimed roles at these companies.

For example, on October 10, 2022, there were 576,562 LinkedIn accounts that listed their current employer as Apple Inc. The next day, half of those profiles no longer existed. At around the same time, the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming current roles at Amazon fell from roughly 1.25 million to 838,601 in just one day, a 33 percent drop.

For whatever reason, the majority of the phony LinkedIn profiles reviewed by this author were young women with profile photos that appear to have been generated by artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

“We’re seeing rapid advances in AI-based synthetic image generation technology and we’ve created a deep learning model to better catch profiles made with this technology,” LinkedIn’s Oscar Rodriguez wrote. “AI-based image generators can create an unlimited number of unique, high-quality profile photos that do not correspond to real people.”

It remains unclear who or what is behind the recent proliferation of fake executive profiles on LinkedIn, but likely they are from a combination of scams. Cybersecurity firm Mandiant (recently acquired by Google) told Bloomberg that hackers working for the North Korean government have been copying resumes and profiles from leading job listing platforms LinkedIn and Indeed, as part of an elaborate scheme to land jobs at cryptocurrency firms.

Identity thieves have been known to masquerade on LinkedIn as job recruiters, collecting personal and financial information from people who fall for employment scams.

Also, fake profiles also may be tied to so-called “pig butchering” scams, wherein people are lured by flirtatious strangers online into investing in cryptocurrency trading platforms that eventually seize any funds when victims try to cash out.

Battle with Bots Prompts Mass Purge of Amazon, Apple Employee Accounts on LinkedIn

On October 10, 2022, there were 576,562 LinkedIn accounts that listed their current employer as Apple Inc. The next day, half of those profiles no longer existed. A similarly dramatic drop in the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming employment at Amazon comes as LinkedIn is struggling to combat a significant uptick in the creation of fake employee accounts that pair AI-generated profile photos with text lifted from legitimate users.

Jay Pinho is a developer who is working on a product that tracks company data, including hiring. Pinho has been using LinkedIn to monitor daily employee headcounts at several dozen large organizations, and last week he noticed that two of them had far fewer people claiming to work for them than they did just 24 hours previously.

Pinho’s screenshot below shows the daily count of employees as displayed on Amazon’s LinkedIn homepage. Pinho said his scraper shows that the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming current roles at Amazon fell from roughly 1.25 million to 838,601 in just one day, a 33 percent drop:

As stated above, the number of LinkedIn profiles that claimed to work at Apple fell by approximately 50 percent on Oct. 10, according to Pinho’s analysis:

Neither Amazon or Apple responded to requests for comment. LinkedIn declined to answer questions about the account purges, saying only that the company is constantly working to keep the platform free of fake accounts. In June, LinkedIn acknowledged it was seeing a rise in fraudulent activity happening on the platform.

KrebsOnSecurity hired Menlo Park, Calif.-based SignalHire to check Pinho’s numbers. SignalHire keeps track of active and former profiles on LinkedIn, and during the Oct 9-11 timeframe SignalHire said it saw somewhat smaller but still unprecedented drops in active profiles tied to Amazon and Apple.

“The drop in the percentage of 7-10 percent [of all profiles], as it happened [during] this time, is not something that happened before,” SignalHire’s Anastacia Brown told KrebsOnSecurity.

Brown said the normal daily variation in profile numbers for these companies is plus or minus one percent.

“That’s definitely the first huge drop that happened throughout the time we’ve collected the profiles,” she said.

In late September 2022, KrebsOnSecurity warned about the proliferation of fake LinkedIn profiles for Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) roles at some of the world’s largest corporations. A follow-up story on Oct. 5 showed how the phony profile problem has affected virtually all executive roles at corporations, and how these fake profiles are creating an identity crisis for the businesses networking site and the companies that rely on it to hire and screen prospective employees.

A day after that second story ran, KrebsOnSecurity heard from a recruiter who noticed the number of LinkedIn profiles that claimed virtually any role in network security had dropped seven percent overnight. LinkedIn declined to comment about that earlier account purge, saying only that, “We’re constantly working at taking down fake accounts.”

It’s unclear whether LinkedIn is responsible for this latest account purge, or if individually affected companies are starting to take action on their own. The timing, however, argues for the former, as the account purges for Apple and Amazon employees tracked by Pinho appeared to happen within the same 24 hour period.

It’s also unclear who or what is behind the recent proliferation of fake executive profiles on LinkedIn. Cybersecurity firm Mandiant (recently acquired by Google) told Bloomberg that hackers working for the North Korean government have been copying resumes and profiles from leading job listing platforms LinkedIn and Indeed, as part of an elaborate scheme to land jobs at cryptocurrency firms.

On this point, Pinho said he noticed an account purge in early September that targeted fake profiles tied to jobs at cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Up until Sept. 3, there were 7,846 profiles claiming current executive roles at Binance. The next day, that number stood at 6,102, a 23 percent drop (by some accounts that 6,102 head count is still wildly inflated).

Fake profiles also may be tied to so-called “pig butchering” scams, wherein people are lured by flirtatious strangers online into investing in cryptocurrency trading platforms that eventually seize any funds when victims try to cash out.

In addition, identity thieves have been known to masquerade on LinkedIn as job recruiters, collecting personal and financial information from people who fall for employment scams.

Nicholas Weaver, a researcher for the International Computer Science Institute at University of California, Berkeley, suggested another explanation for the recent glut of phony LinkedIn profiles: Someone may be setting up a mass network of accounts in order to more fully scrape profile information from the entire platform.

“Even with just a standard LinkedIn account, there’s a pretty good amount of profile information just in the default two-hop networks,” Weaver said. “We don’t know the purpose of these bots, but we know creating bots isn’t free and creating hundreds of thousands of bots would require a lot of resources.”

In response to last week’s story about the explosion of phony accounts on LinkedIn, the company said it was exploring new ways to protect members, such as expanding email domain verification. Under such a scheme, LinkedIn users would be able to publicly attest that their profile is accurate by verifying that they can respond to email at the domain associated with their current employer.

LinkedIn claims that its security systems detect and block approximately 96 percent of fake accounts. And despite the recent purges, LinkedIn may be telling the truth, Weaver said.

“There’s no way you can test for that,” he said. “Because technically, it may be that there were actually 100 million bots trying to sign up at LinkedIn as employees at Amazon.”

Weaver said the apparent mass account purge at LinkedIn underscores the size of the bot problem, and could present a “real and material change” for LinkedIn.

“It may mean the statistics they’ve been reporting about usage and active accounts are off by quite a bit,” Weaver said.