Who Stole 3.6M Tax Records from South Carolina?

For nearly a dozen years, residents of South Carolina have been kept in the dark by state and federal investigators over who was responsible for hacking into the state’s revenue department in 2012 and stealing tax and bank account information for 3.6 million people. The answer may no longer be a mystery: KrebsOnSecurity found compelling clues suggesting the intrusion was carried out by the same Russian hacking crew that stole of millions of payment card records from big box retailers like Home Depot and Target in the years that followed.

Questions about who stole tax and financial data on roughly three quarters of all South Carolina residents came to the fore last week at the confirmation hearing of Mark Keel, who was appointed in 2011 by Gov. Nikki Haley to head the state’s law enforcement division. If approved, this would be Keel’s third six-year term in that role.

The Associated Press reports that Keel was careful not to release many details about the breach at his hearing, telling lawmakers he knows who did it but that he wasn’t ready to name anyone.

“I think the fact that we didn’t come up with a whole lot of people’s information that got breached is a testament to the work that people have done on this case,” Keel asserted.

A ten-year retrospective published in 2022 by The Post and Courier in Columbia, S.C. said investigators determined the breach began on Aug. 13, 2012, after a state IT contractor clicked a malicious link in an email. State officials said they found out about the hack from federal law enforcement on October 10, 2012.

KrebsOnSecurity examined posts across dozens of cybercrime forums around that time, and found only one instance of someone selling large volumes of tax data in the year surrounding the breach date.

On Oct. 7, 2012 — three days before South Carolina officials say they first learned of the intrusion — a notorious cybercriminal who goes by the handle “Rescator” advertised the sale of “a database of the tax department of one of the states.”

“Bank account information, SSN and all other information,” Rescator’s sales thread on the Russian-language crime forum Embargo read. “If you purchase the entire database, I will give you access to it.”

A week later, Rescator posted a similar offer on the exclusive Russian forum Mazafaka, saying he was selling information from a U.S. state tax database, without naming the state. Rescator said the data exposed included Social Security Number (SSN), employer, name, address, phone, taxable income, tax refund amount, and bank account number.

“There is a lot of information, I am ready to sell the entire database, with access to the database, and in parts,” Rescator told Mazafaka members. “There is also information on corporate taxpayers.”

On Oct. 26, 2012, the state announced the breach publicly. State officials said they were working with investigators from the U.S. Secret Service and digital forensics experts from Mandiant, which produced an incident report (PDF) that was later published by South Carolina Dept. of Revenue. KrebsOnSecurity sought comment from the Secret Service, South Carolina prosecutors, and Mr. Keel’s office. This story will be updated if any of them respond. Update: The Secret Service declined to comment.

On Nov. 18, 2012, Rescator told fellow denizens of the forum Verified he was selling a database of 65,000 records with bank account information from several smaller, regional financial institutions. Rescator’s sales thread on Verified listed more than a dozen database fields, including account number, name, address, phone, tax ID, date of birth, employer and occupation.

Asked to provide more context about the database for sale, Rescator told forum members the database included financial records related to tax filings of a U.S. state. Rescator added that there was a second database of around 80,000 corporations that included social security numbers, names and addresses, but no financial information.

The AP says South Carolina paid $12 million to Experian for identity theft protection and credit monitoring for its residents after the breach.

“At the time, it was one of the largest breaches in U.S. history but has since been surpassed greatly by hacks to Equifax, Yahoo, Home Depot, Target and PlayStation,” the AP’s Jeffrey Collins wrote.

As it happens, Rescator’s criminal hacking crew was directly responsible for the 2013 breach at Target and the 2014 hack of Home Depot. The Target intrusion saw Rescator’s cybercrime shops selling roughly 40 million stolen payment cards, and 56 million cards from Home Depot customers.

Who is Rescator? On Dec. 14, 2023, KrebsOnSecurity published the results of a 10-year investigation into the identity of Rescator, a.k.a. Mikhail Borisovich Shefel, a 36-year-old who lives in Moscow and who recently changed his last name to Lenin.

Mr. Keel’s assertion that somehow the efforts of South Carolina officials following the breach may have lessened its impact on citizens seems unlikely. The stolen tax and financial data appears to have been sold openly on cybercrime forums by one of the Russian underground’s most aggressive and successful hacking crews.

While there are no indications from reviewing forum posts that Rescator ever sold the data, his sales threads came at a time when the incidence of tax refund fraud was skyrocketing.

Tax-related identity theft occurs when someone uses a stolen identity and SSN to file a tax return in that person’s name claiming a fraudulent refund. Victims usually first learn of the crime after having their returns rejected because scammers beat them to it. Even those who are not required to file a return can be victims of refund fraud, as can those who are not actually owed a refund from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

According to a 2013 report from the Treasury Inspector General’s office, the IRS issued nearly $4 billion in bogus tax refunds in 2012, and more than $5.8 billion in 2013. The money largely was sent to people who stole SSNs and other information on U.S. citizens, and then filed fraudulent tax returns on those individuals claiming a large refund but at a different address.

It remains unclear why Shefel has never been officially implicated in the breaches at Target, Home Depot, or in South Carolina. It may be that Shefel has been indicted, and that those indictments remain sealed for some reason. Perhaps prosecutors were hoping Shefel would decide to leave Russia, at which point it would be easier to apprehend him if he believed no one was looking for him.

But all signs are that Shefel is deeply rooted in Russia, and has no plans to leave. In January 2024, authorities in Australia, the United States and the U.K. levied financial sanctions against 33-year-old Russian man Aleksandr Ermakov for allegedly stealing data on 10 million customers of the Australian health insurance giant Medibank.

A week after those sanctions were put in place, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive on Ermakov, which found that he co-ran a Moscow-based IT security consulting business along with Mikhail Shefel called Shtazi-IT.

Why CISA is Warning CISOs About a Breach at Sisense

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said today it is investigating a breach at business intelligence company Sisense, whose products are designed to allow companies to view the status of multiple third-party online services in a single dashboard. CISA urged all Sisense customers to reset any credentials and secrets that may have been shared with the company, which is the same advice Sisense gave to its customers Wednesday evening.

New York City based Sisense has more than a thousand customers across a range of industry verticals, including financial services, telecommunications, healthcare and higher education. On April 10, Sisense Chief Information Security Officer Sangram Dash told customers the company had been made aware of reports that “certain Sisense company information may have been made available on what we have been advised is a restricted access server (not generally available on the internet.)”

“We are taking this matter seriously and promptly commenced an investigation,” Dash continued. “We engaged industry-leading experts to assist us with the investigation. This matter has not resulted in an interruption to our business operations. Out of an abundance of caution, and while we continue to investigate, we urge you to promptly rotate any credentials that you use within your Sisense application.”

In its alert, CISA said it was working with private industry partners to respond to a recent compromise discovered by independent security researchers involving Sisense.

“CISA is taking an active role in collaborating with private industry partners to respond to this incident, especially as it relates to impacted critical infrastructure sector organizations,” the sparse alert reads. “We will provide updates as more information becomes available.”

Sisense declined to comment when asked about the veracity of information shared by two trusted sources with close knowledge of the breach investigation. Those sources said the breach appears to have started when the attackers somehow gained access to the company’s Gitlab code repository, and in that repository was a token or credential that gave the bad guys access to Sisense’s Amazon S3 buckets in the cloud.

Customers can use Gitlab either as a solution that is hosted in the cloud at Gitlab.com, or as a self-managed deployment. KrebsOnSecurity understands that Sisense was using the self-managed version of Gitlab.

Both sources said the attackers used the S3 access to copy and exfiltrate several terabytes worth of Sisense customer data, which apparently included millions of access tokens, email account passwords, and even SSL certificates.

The incident raises questions about whether Sisense was doing enough to protect sensitive data entrusted to it by customers, such as whether the massive volume of stolen customer data was ever encrypted while at rest in these Amazon cloud servers.

It is clear, however, that unknown attackers now have all of the credentials that Sisense customers used in their dashboards.

The breach also makes clear that Sisense is somewhat limited in the clean-up actions that it can take on behalf of customers, because access tokens are essentially text files on your computer that allow you to stay logged in for extended periods of time — sometimes indefinitely. And depending on which service we’re talking about, it may be possible for attackers to re-use those access tokens to authenticate as the victim without ever having to present valid credentials.

Beyond that, it is largely up to Sisense customers to decide if and when they change passwords to the various third-party services that they’ve previously entrusted to Sisense.

Earlier today, a public relations firm working with Sisense reached out to learn if KrebsOnSecurity planned to publish any further updates on their breach (KrebsOnSecurity posted a screenshot of the CISO’s customer email to both LinkedIn and Mastodon on Wednesday evening). The PR rep said Sisense wanted to make sure they had an opportunity to comment before the story ran.

But when confronted with the details shared by my sources, Sisense apparently changed its mind.

“After consulting with Sisense, they have told me that they don’t wish to respond,” the PR rep said in an emailed reply.

Update, 6:49 p.m., ET: Added clarification that Sisense is using a self-hosted version of Gitlab, not the cloud version managed by Gitlab.com.

Also, Sisense’s CISO Dash just sent an update to customers directly. The latest advice from the company is far more detailed, and involves resetting a potentially large number of access tokens across multiple technologies, including Microsoft Active Directory credentials, GIT credentials, web access tokens, and any single sign-on (SSO) secrets or tokens.

The full message from Dash to customers is below:

“Good Afternoon,

We are following up on our prior communication of April 10, 2024, regarding reports that certain Sisense company information may have been made available on a restricted access server. As noted, we are taking this matter seriously and our investigation remains ongoing.

Our customers must reset any keys, tokens, or other credentials in their environment used within the Sisense application.

Specifically, you should:
– Change Your Password: Change all Sisense-related passwords on http://my.sisense.com
– Non-SSO:
– Replace the Secret in the Base Configuration Security section with your GUID/UUID.
– Reset passwords for all users in the Sisense application.
– Logout all users by running GET /api/v1/authentication/logout_all under Admin user.
– Single Sign-On (SSO):
– If you use SSO JWT for the user’s authentication in Sisense, you will need to update sso.shared_secret in Sisense and then use the newly generated value on the side of the SSO handler.
– We strongly recommend rotating the x.509 certificate for your SSO SAML identity provider.
– If you utilize OpenID, it’s imperative to rotate the client secret as well.
– Following these adjustments, update the SSO settings in Sisense with the revised values.
– Logout all users by running GET /api/v1/authentication/logout_all under Admin user.
– Customer Database Credentials: Reset credentials in your database that were used in the Sisense application to ensure continuity of connection between the systems.
– Data Models: Change all usernames and passwords in the database connection string in the data models.
– User Params: If you are using the User Params feature, reset them.
– Active Directory/LDAP: Change the username and user password of users whose authorization is used for AD synchronization.
– HTTP Authentication for GIT: Rotate the credentials in every GIT project.
– B2D Customers: Use the following API PATCH api/v2/b2d-connection in the admin section to update the B2D connection.
– Infusion Apps: Rotate the associated keys.
– Web Access Token: Rotate all tokens.
– Custom Email Server: Rotate associated credentials.
– Custom Code: Reset any secrets that appear in custom code Notebooks.

If you need any assistance, please submit a customer support ticket at https://community.sisense.com/t5/support-portal/bd-p/SupportPortal and mark it as critical. We have a dedicated response team on standby to assist with your requests.

At Sisense, we give paramount importance to security and are committed to our customers’ success. Thank you for your partnership and commitment to our mutual security.

Regards,

Sangram Dash
Chief Information Security Officer”

BlackCat Ransomware Group Implodes After Apparent $22M Payment by Change Healthcare

There are indications that U.S. healthcare giant Change Healthcare has made a $22 million extortion payment to the infamous BlackCat ransomware group (a.k.a. “ALPHV“) as the company struggles to bring services back online amid a cyberattack that has disrupted prescription drug services nationwide for weeks. However, the cybercriminal who claims to have given BlackCat access to Change’s network says the crime gang cheated them out of their share of the ransom, and that they still have the sensitive data Change reportedly paid the group to destroy. Meanwhile, the affiliate’s disclosure appears to have prompted BlackCat to cease operations entirely.

In the third week of February, a cyber intrusion at Change Healthcare began shutting down important healthcare services as company systems were taken offline. It soon emerged that BlackCat was behind the attack, which has disrupted the delivery of prescription drugs for hospitals and pharmacies nationwide for nearly two weeks.

On March 1, a cryptocurrency address that security researchers had already mapped to BlackCat received a single transaction worth approximately $22 million. On March 3, a BlackCat affiliate posted a complaint to the exclusive Russian-language ransomware forum Ramp saying that Change Healthcare had paid a $22 million ransom for a decryption key, and to prevent four terabytes of stolen data from being published online.

The affiliate claimed BlackCat/ALPHV took the $22 million payment but never paid him his percentage of the ransom. BlackCat is known as a “ransomware-as-service” collective, meaning they rely on freelancers or affiliates to infect new networks with their ransomware. And those affiliates in turn earn commissions ranging from 60 to 90 percent of any ransom amount paid.

“But after receiving the payment ALPHV team decide to suspend our account and keep lying and delaying when we contacted ALPHV admin,” the affiliate “Notchy” wrote. “Sadly for Change Healthcare, their data [is] still with us.”

Change Healthcare has neither confirmed nor denied paying, and has responded to multiple media outlets with a similar non-denial statement — that the company is focused on its investigation and on restoring services.

Assuming Change Healthcare did pay to keep their data from being published, that strategy seems to have gone awry: Notchy said the list of affected Change Healthcare partners they’d stolen sensitive data from included Medicare and a host of other major insurance and pharmacy networks.

On the bright side, Notchy’s complaint seems to have been the final nail in the coffin for the BlackCat ransomware group, which was infiltrated by the FBI and foreign law enforcement partners in late December 2023. As part of that action, the government seized the BlackCat website and released a decryption tool to help victims recover their systems.

BlackCat responded by re-forming, and increasing affiliate commissions to as much as 90 percent. The ransomware group also declared it was formally removing any restrictions or discouragement against targeting hospitals and healthcare providers.

However, instead of responding that they would compensate and placate Notchy, a representative for BlackCat said today the group was shutting down and that it had already found a buyer for its ransomware source code.

“There’s no sense in making excuses,” wrote the RAMP member “Ransom.” “Yes, we knew about the problem, and we were trying to solve it. We told the affiliate to wait. We could send you our private chat logs where we are shocked by everything that’s happening and are trying to solve the issue with the transactions by using a higher fee, but there’s no sense in doing that because we decided to fully close the project. We can officially state that we got screwed by the feds.”

BlackCat’s website now features a seizure notice from the FBI, but several researchers noted that this image seems to have been merely cut and pasted from the notice the FBI left in its December raid of BlackCat’s network. The FBI has not responded to requests for comment.

Fabian Wosar, head of ransomware research at the security firm Emsisoft, said it appears BlackCat leaders are trying to pull an “exit scam” on affiliates by withholding many ransomware payment commissions at once and shutting down the service.

“ALPHV/BlackCat did not get seized,” Wosar wrote on Twitter/X today. “They are exit scamming their affiliates. It is blatantly obvious when you check the source code of their new takedown notice.”

Dmitry Smilyanets, a researcher for the security firm Recorded Future, said BlackCat’s exit scam was especially dangerous because the affiliate still has all the stolen data, and could still demand additional payment or leak the information on his own.

“The affiliates still have this data, and they’re mad they didn’t receive this money, Smilyanets told Wired.com. “It’s a good lesson for everyone. You cannot trust criminals; their word is worth nothing.”

BlackCat’s apparent demise comes closely on the heels of the implosion of another major ransomware group — LockBit, a ransomware gang estimated to have extorted over $120 million in payments from more than 2,000 victims worldwide. On Feb. 20, LockBit’s website was seized by the FBI and the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) following a months-long infiltration of the group.

LockBit also tried to restore its reputation on the cybercrime forums by resurrecting itself at a new darknet website, and by threatening to release data from a number of major companies that were hacked by the group in the weeks and days prior to the FBI takedown.

But LockBit appears to have since lost any credibility the group may have once had. After a much-promoted attack on the government of Fulton County, Ga., for example, LockBit threatened to release Fulton County’s data unless paid a ransom by Feb. 29. But when Feb. 29 rolled around, LockBit simply deleted the entry for Fulton County from its site, along with those of several financial organizations that had previously been extorted by the group.

Fulton County held a press conference to say that it had not paid a ransom to LockBit, nor had anyone done so on their behalf, and that they were just as mystified as everyone else as to why LockBit never followed through on its threat to publish the county’s data. Experts told KrebsOnSecurity LockBit likely balked because it was bluffing, and that the FBI likely relieved them of that data in their raid.

Smilyanets’ comments are driven home in revelations first published last month by Recorded Future, which quoted an NCA official as saying LockBit never deleted the data after being paid a ransom, even though that is the only reason many of its victims paid.

“If we do not give you decrypters, or we do not delete your data after payment, then nobody will pay us in the future,” LockBit’s extortion notes typically read.

Hopefully, more companies are starting to get the memo that paying cybercrooks to delete stolen data is a losing proposition all around.

Fulton County, Security Experts Call LockBit’s Bluff

The ransomware group LockBit told officials with Fulton County, Ga. they could expect to see their internal documents published online this morning unless the county paid a ransom demand. LockBit removed Fulton County’s listing from its victim shaming website this morning, claiming the county had paid. But county officials said they did not pay, nor did anyone make payment on their behalf. Security experts say LockBit was likely bluffing and probably lost most of the data when the gang’s servers were seized this month by U.S. and U.K. law enforcement.

LockBit listed Fulton County as a victim on Feb. 13, saying that unless it was paid a ransom the group would publish files stolen in a breach at the county last month. That attack disrupted county phones, Internet access and even their court system. LockBit leaked a small number of the county’s files as a teaser, which appeared to include sensitive and sealed court records in current and past criminal trials.

On Feb. 16, Fulton County’s entry — along with a countdown timer until the data would be published — was removed from the LockBit website without explanation. The leader of LockBit told KrebsOnSecurity this was because Fulton County officials had engaged in last-minute negotiations with the group.

But on Feb. 19, investigators with the FBI and the U.K.’s National Crime Agency (NCA) took over LockBit’s online infrastructure, replacing the group’s homepage with a seizure notice and links to LockBit ransomware decryption tools.

In a press briefing on Feb. 20, Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts told reporters the county did not pay a ransom demand, noting that the board “could not in good conscience use Fulton County taxpayer funds to make a payment.”

Three days later, LockBit reemerged with new domains on the dark web, and with Fulton County listed among a half-dozen other victims whose data was about to be leaked if they refused to pay. As it does with all victims, LockBit assigned Fulton County a countdown timer, saying officials had until late in the evening on March 1 until their data was published.

LockBit soon moved up the deadline to the morning of Feb. 29. As Fulton County’s LockBit timer was counting down to zero this morning, its listing disappeared from LockBit’s site. LockBit’s leader and spokesperson, who goes by the handle “LockBitSupp,” told KrebsOnSecurity today that Fulton County’s data disappeared from their site because county officials paid a ransom.

“Fulton paid,” LockBitSupp said. When asked for evidence of payment, LockBitSupp claimed. “The proof is that we deleted their data and did not publish it.”

But at a press conference today, Fulton County Chairman Robb Pitts said the county does not know why its data was removed from LockBit’s site.

“As I stand here at 4:08 p.m., we are not aware of any data being released today so far,” Pitts said. “That does not mean the threat is over. They could release whatever data they have at any time. We have no control over that. We have not paid any ransom. Nor has any ransom been paid on our behalf.”

Brett Callow, a threat analyst with the security firm Emsisoft, said LockBit likely lost all of the victim data it stole before the FBI/NCA seizure, and that it has been trying madly since then to save face within the cybercrime community.

“I think it was a case of them trying to convince their affiliates that they were still in good shape,” Callow said of LockBit’s recent activities. “I strongly suspect this will be the end of the LockBit brand.”

Others have come to a similar conclusion. The security firm RedSense posted an analysis to Twitter/X that after the takedown, LockBit published several “new” victim profiles for companies that it had listed weeks earlier on its victim shaming site. Those victim firms — a healthcare provider and major securities lending platform — also were unceremoniously removed from LockBit’s new shaming website, despite LockBit claiming their data would be leaked.

“We are 99% sure the rest of their ‘new victims’ are also fake claims (old data for new breaches),” RedSense posted. “So the best thing for them to do would be to delete all other entries from their blog and stop defrauding honest people.”

Callow said there certainly have been plenty of cases in the past where ransomware gangs exaggerated their plunder from a victim organization. But this time feels different, he said.

“It is a bit unusual,” Callow said. “This is about trying to still affiliates’ nerves, and saying, ‘All is well, we weren’t as badly compromised as law enforcement suggested.’ But I think you’d have to be a fool to work with an organization that has been so thoroughly hacked as LockBit has.”

New Leak Shows Business Side of China’s APT Menace

A new data leak that appears to have come from one of China’s top private cybersecurity firms provides a rare glimpse into the commercial side of China’s many state-sponsored hacking groups. Experts say the leak illustrates how Chinese government agencies increasingly are contracting out foreign espionage campaigns to the nation’s burgeoning and highly competitive cybersecurity industry.

A large cache of more than 500 documents published to GitHub last week indicate the records come from i-SOON, a technology company headquartered in Shanghai that is perhaps best known for providing cybersecurity training courses throughout China. But the leaked documents, which include candid employee chat conversations and images, show a less public side of i-SOON, one that frequently initiates and sustains cyberespionage campaigns commissioned by various Chinese government agencies.

The leaked documents suggest i-SOON employees were responsible for a raft of cyber intrusions over many years, infiltrating government systems in the United Kingdom and countries throughout Asia. Although the cache does not include raw data stolen from cyber espionage targets, it features numerous documents listing the level of access gained and the types of data exposed in each intrusion.

Security experts who reviewed the leaked data say they believe the information is legitimate, and that i-SOON works closely with China’s Ministry of Public Security and the military. In 2021, the Sichuan provincial government named i-SOON as one of “the top 30 information security companies.”

“The leak provides some of the most concrete details seen publicly to date, revealing the maturing nature of China’s cyber espionage ecosystem,” said Dakota Cary, a China-focused consultant at the security firm SentinelOne. “It shows explicitly how government targeting requirements drive a competitive marketplace of independent contractor hackers-for-hire.”

Mei Danowski is a former intelligence analyst and China expert who now writes about her research in a Substack publication called Natto Thoughts. Danowski said i-SOON has achieved the highest secrecy classification that a non-state-owned company can receive, which qualifies the company to conduct classified research and development related to state security.

i-SOON’s “business services” webpage states that the company’s offerings include public security, anti-fraud, blockchain forensics, enterprise security solutions, and training. Danowski said that in 2013, i-SOON established a department for research on developing new APT network penetration methods.

APT stands for Advanced Persistent Threat, a term that generally refers to state-sponsored hacking groups. Indeed, among the documents apparently leaked from i-SOON is a sales pitch slide boldly highlighting the hacking prowess of the company’s “APT research team” (see screenshot above).

The leaked documents included a lengthy chat conversation between the company’s founders, who repeatedly discuss flagging sales and the need to secure more employees and government contracts. Danowski said the CEO of i-SOON, Wu Haibo (“Shutdown” in the leaked chats) is a well-known first-generation red hacker or “Honker,” and an early member of Green Army — the very first Chinese hacktivist group founded in 1997. Mr. Haibo has not yet responded to a request for comment.

In October 2023, Danowski detailed how i-SOON became embroiled in a software development contract dispute when it was sued by a competing Chinese cybersecurity company called Chengdu 404. In September 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed indictments against multiple Chengdu 404 employees, charging that the company was a facade that hid more than a decade’s worth of cyber intrusions attributed to a threat actor group known as “APT 41.”

Danowski said the existence of this legal dispute suggests that Chengdu 404 and i-SOON have or at one time had a business relationship, and that one company likely served as a subcontractor to the other.

“From what they chat about we can see this is a very competitive industry, where companies in this space are constantly poaching each others’ employees and tools,” Danowski said. “The infosec industry is always trying to distinguish [the work] of one APT group from another. But that’s getting harder to do.”

It remains unclear if i-SOON’s work has earned it a unique APT designation. But Will Thomas, a cyber threat intelligence researcher at Equinix, found an Internet address in the leaked data that corresponds to a domain flagged in a 2019 Citizen Lab report about one-click mobile phone exploits that were being used to target groups in Tibet. The 2019 report referred to the threat actor behind those attacks as an APT group called Poison Carp.

Several images and chat records in the data leak suggest i-SOON’s clients periodically gave the company a list of targets they wanted to infiltrate, but sometimes employees confused the instructions. One screenshot shows a conversation in which an employee tells his boss they’ve just hacked one of the universities on their latest list, only to be told that the victim in question was not actually listed as a desired target.

The leaked chats show i-SOON continuously tried to recruit new talent by hosting a series of hacking competitions across China. It also performed charity work, and sought to engage employees and sustain morale with various team-building events.

However, the chats include multiple conversations between employees commiserating over long hours and low pay. The overall tone of the discussions indicates employee morale was quite low and that the workplace environment was fairly toxic. In several of the conversations, i-SOON employees openly discuss with their bosses how much money they just lost gambling online with their mobile phones while at work.

Danowski believes the i-SOON data was probably leaked by one of those disgruntled employees.

“This was released the first working day after the Chinese New Year,” Danowski said. “Definitely whoever did this planned it, because you can’t get all this information all at once.”

SentinelOne’s Cary said he came to the same conclusion, noting that the Protonmail account tied to the GitHub profile that published the records was registered a month before the leak, on January 15, 2024.

China’s much vaunted Great Firewall not only lets the government control and limit what citizens can access online, but this distributed spying apparatus allows authorities to block data on Chinese citizens and companies from ever leaving the country.

As a result, China enjoys a remarkable information asymmetry vis-a-vis virtually all other industrialized nations. Which is why this apparent data leak from i-SOON is such a rare find for Western security researchers.

“I was so excited to see this,” Cary said. “Every day I hope for data leaks coming out of China.”

That information asymmetry is at the heart of the Chinese government’s cyberwarfare goals, according to a 2023 analysis by Margin Research performed on behalf of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

“In the area of cyberwarfare, the western governments see cyberspace as a ‘fifth domain’ of warfare,” the Margin study observed. “The Chinese, however, look at cyberspace in the broader context of information space. The ultimate objective is, not ‘control’ of cyberspace, but control of information, a vision that dominates China’s cyber operations.”

The National Cybersecurity Strategy issued by the White House last year singles out China as the biggest cyber threat to U.S. interests. While the United States government does contract certain aspects of its cyber operations to companies in the private sector, it does not follow China’s example in promoting the wholesale theft of state and corporate secrets for the commercial benefit of its own private industries.

Dave Aitel, a co-author of the Margin Research report and former computer scientist at the U.S. National Security Agency, said it’s nice to see that Chinese cybersecurity firms have to deal with all of the same contracting headaches facing U.S. companies seeking work with the federal government.

“This leak just shows there’s layers of contractors all the way down,” Aitel said. “It’s pretty fun to see the Chinese version of it.”

U.S. Internet Leaked Years of Internal, Customer Emails

The Minnesota-based Internet provider U.S. Internet Corp. has a business unit called Securence, which specializes in providing filtered, secure email services to businesses, educational institutions and government agencies worldwide. But until it was notified last week, U.S. Internet was publishing more than a decade’s worth of its internal email — and that of thousands of Securence clients — in plain text out on the Internet and just a click away for anyone with a Web browser.

Headquartered in Minnetonka, Minn., U.S. Internet is a regional ISP that provides fiber and wireless Internet service. The ISP’s Securence division bills itself “a leading provider of email filtering and management software that includes email protection and security services for small business, enterprise, educational and government institutions worldwide.”

Roughly a week ago, KrebsOnSecurity was contacted by Hold Security, a Milwaukee-based cybersecurity firm. Hold Security founder Alex Holden said his researchers had unearthed a public link to a U.S. Internet email server listing more than 6,500 domain names, each with its own clickable link.

Drilling down into those individual domain links revealed inboxes for each employee or user of these exposed host names. Some of the emails dated back to 2008; others were as recent as the present day.

Securence counts among its customers dozens of state and local governments, including: nc.gov — the official website of North Carolina; stillwatermn.gov, the website for the city of Stillwater, Minn.; and cityoffrederickmd.gov, the website for the government of Frederick, Md.

Incredibly, included in this giant index of U.S. Internet customer emails were the internal messages for every current and former employee of U.S. Internet and its subsidiary USI Wireless. Since that index also included the messages of U.S. Internet’s CEO Travis Carter, KrebsOnSecurity forwarded one of Mr. Carter’s own recent emails to him, along with a request to understand how exactly the company managed to screw things up so spectacularly.

Within minutes of that notification, U.S. Internet pulled all of the published inboxes offline. Mr. Carter responded and said his team was investigating how it happened. In the same breath, the CEO asked if KrebsOnSecurity does security consulting for hire (I do not).

[Author’s note: Perhaps Mr. Carter was frantically casting about for any expertise he could find in a tough moment. But I found the request personally offensive, because I couldn’t shake the notion that maybe the company was hoping it could buy my silence.]

Earlier this week, Mr. Carter replied with a highly technical explanation that ultimately did little to explain why or how so many internal and customer inboxes were published in plain text on the Internet.

“The feedback from my team was a issue with the Ansible playbook that controls the Nginx configuration for our IMAP servers,” Carter said, noting that this incorrect configuration was put in place by a former employee and never caught. U.S. Internet has not shared how long these messages were exposed.

“The rest of the platform and other backend services are being audited to verify the Ansible playbooks are correct,” Carter said.

Holden said he also discovered that hackers have been abusing a Securence link scrubbing and anti-spam service called Url-Shield to create links that look benign but instead redirect visitors to hacked and malicious websites.

“The bad guys modify the malicious link reporting into redirects to their own malicious sites,” Holden said. “That’s how the bad guys drive traffic to their sites and increase search engine rankings.”

For example, clicking the Securence link shown in the screenshot directly above leads one to a website that tries to trick visitors into allowing site notifications by couching the request as a CAPTCHA request designed to separate humans from bots. After approving the deceptive CAPTCHA/notification request, the link forwards the visitor to a Russian internationalized domain name (рпроаг[.]рф).

U.S. Internet has not responded to questions about how long it has been exposing all of its internal and customer emails, or when the errant configuration changes were made. The company also still has not disclosed the incident on its website. The last press release on the site dates back to March 2020.

KrebsOnSecurity has been writing about data breaches for nearly two decades, but this one easily takes the cake in terms of the level of incompetence needed to make such a huge mistake unnoticed. I’m not sure what the proper response from authorities or regulators should be to this incident, but it’s clear that U.S. Internet should not be allowed to manage anyone’s email unless and until it can demonstrate more transparency, and prove that it has radically revamped its security.

Arrests in $400M SIM-Swap Tied to Heist at FTX?

Three Americans were charged this week with stealing more than $400 million in a November 2022 SIM-swapping attack. The U.S. government did not name the victim organization, but there is every indication that the money was stolen from the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which had just filed for bankruptcy on that same day.

An indictment unsealed this week and first reported on by Ars Technica alleges that Chicago man Robert Powell, a.k.a. “R,” “R$” and “ElSwapo1,” was the ringleader of a SIM-swapping group called the “Powell SIM Swapping Crew.” Colorado resident Emily “Em” Hernandez allegedly helped the group gain access to victim devices in service of SIM-swapping attacks between March 2021 and April 2023. Indiana resident Carter Rohn, a.k.a. “Carti,” and “Punslayer,” allegedly assisted in compromising devices.

In a SIM-swapping attack, the crooks transfer the target’s phone number to a device they control, allowing them to intercept any text messages or phone calls sent to the victim, including one-time passcodes for authentication or password reset links sent via SMS.

The indictment states that the perpetrators in this heist stole the $400 million in cryptocurrencies on Nov. 11, 2022 after they SIM-swapped an AT&T customer by impersonating them at a retail store using a fake ID. However, the document refers to the victim in this case only by the name “Victim 1.”

Wired’s Andy Greenberg recently wrote about FTX’s all-night race to stop a $1 billion crypto heist that occurred on the evening of November 11:

“FTX’s staff had already endured one of the worst days in the company’s short life. What had recently been one of the world’s top cryptocurrency exchanges, valued at $32 billion only 10 months earlier, had just declared bankruptcy. Executives had, after an extended struggle, persuaded the company’s CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, to hand over the reins to John Ray III, a new chief executive now tasked with shepherding the company through a nightmarish thicket of debts, many of which it seemed to have no means to pay.”

“FTX had, it seemed, hit rock bottom. Until someone—a thief or thieves who have yet to be identified—chose that particular moment to make things far worse. That Friday evening, exhausted FTX staffers began to see mysterious outflows of the company’s cryptocurrency, publicly captured on the Etherscan website that tracks the Ethereum blockchain, representing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto being stolen in real time.”

The indictment says the $400 million was stolen over several hours between November 11 and 12, 2022. Tom Robinson, co-founder of the blockchain intelligence firm Elliptic, said the attackers in the FTX heist began to drain FTX wallets on the evening of Nov. 11, 2022 local time, and continuing until the 12th of November.

Robinson said Elliptic is not aware of any other crypto heists of that magnitude occurring on that date.

“We put the value of the cryptoassets stolen at $477 million,” Robinson said. “The FTX administrators have reported overall losses due to “unauthorized third-party transfers” of $413 million – the discrepancy is likely due to subsequent seizure and return of some of the stolen assets. Either way, it’s certainly over $400 million, and we are not aware of any other thefts from crypto exchanges on this scale, on this date.”

The SIM-swappers allegedly responsible for the $400 million crypto theft are all U.S. residents. But there are some indications they had help from organized cybercriminals based in Russia. In October 2023, Elliptic released a report that found the money stolen from FTX had been laundered through exchanges with ties to criminal groups based in Russia.

“A Russia-linked actor seems a stronger possibility,” Elliptic wrote. “Of the stolen assets that can be traced through ChipMixer, significant amounts are combined with funds from Russia-linked criminal groups, including ransomware gangs and darknet markets, before being sent to exchanges. This points to the involvement of a broker or other intermediary with a nexus in Russia.”

Nick Bax, director of analytics at the cryptocurrency wallet recovery firm Unciphered, said the flow of stolen FTX funds looks more like what his team has seen from groups based in Eastern Europe and Russian than anything they’ve witnessed from US-based SIM-swappers.

“I was a bit surprised by this development but it seems to be consistent with reports from CISA [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] and others that “Scattered Spider” has worked with [ransomware] groups like ALPHV/BlackCat,” Bax said.

CISA’s alert on Scattered Spider says they are a cybercriminal group that targets large companies and their contracted information technology (IT) help desks.

“Scattered Spider threat actors, per trusted third parties, have typically engaged in data theft for extortion and have also been known to utilize BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware alongside their usual TTPs,” CISA said, referring to the group’s signature “Tactics, Techniques an Procedures.”

Earlier this week, KrebsOnSecurity published a story noting that a Florida man recently charged with being part of a SIM-swapping conspiracy is thought to be a key member of Scattered Spider, a hacking group also known as 0ktapus. That group has been blamed for a string of cyber intrusions at major U.S. technology companies during the summer of 2022.

Financial claims involving FTX’s bankruptcy proceedings are being handled by the financial and risk consulting giant Kroll. In August 2023, Kroll suffered its own breach after a Kroll employee was SIM-swapped. According to Kroll, the thieves stole user information for multiple cryptocurrency platforms that rely on Kroll services to handle bankruptcy proceedings.

KrebsOnSecurity sought comment for this story from Kroll, the FBI, the prosecuting attorneys, and Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm handling the FTX bankruptcy. This story will be updated in the event any of them respond.

Attorneys for Mr. Powell said they do not know who Victim 1 is in the indictment, as the government hasn’t shared that information yet. Powell’s next court date is a detention hearing on Feb. 2, 2024.

Update, Feb. 3, 12:19 p.m. ET: The FBI declined a request to comment.

Okta: Breach Affected All Customer Support Users

When KrebsOnSecurity broke the news on Oct. 20, 2023 that identity and authentication giant Okta had suffered a breach in its customer support department, Okta said the intrusion allowed hackers to steal sensitive data from fewer than one percent of its 18,000+ customers. But today, Okta revised that impact statement, saying the attackers also stole the name and email address for nearly all of its customer support users.

Okta acknowledged last month that for several weeks beginning in late September 2023, intruders had access to its customer support case management system. That access allowed the hackers to steal authentication tokens from some Okta customers, which the attackers could then use to make changes to customer accounts, such as adding or modifying authorized users.

In its initial incident reports about the breach, Okta said the hackers gained unauthorized access to files inside Okta’s customer support system associated with 134 Okta customers, or less than 1% of Okta’s customer base.

But in an updated statement published early this morning, Okta said it determined the intruders also stole the names and email addresses of all Okta customer support system users.

“All Okta Workforce Identity Cloud (WIC) and Customer Identity Solution (CIS) customers are impacted except customers in our FedRamp High and DoD IL4 environments (these environments use a separate support system NOT accessed by the threat actor),” Okta’s advisory states. “The Auth0/CIC support case management system was also not impacted by this incident.”

Okta said that for nearly 97 percent of users, the only contact information exposed was full name and email address. That means about three percent of Okta customer support accounts had one or more of the following data fields exposed (in addition to email address and name): last login; username; phone number; SAML federation ID; company name; job role; user type; date of last password change or reset.

Okta notes that a large number of the exposed accounts belong to Okta administrators — IT people responsible for integrating Okta’s authentication technology inside customer environments — and that these individuals should be on guard for targeted phishing attacks.

“Many users of the customer support system are Okta administrators,” Okta pointed out. “It is critical that these users have multi-factor authentication (MFA) enrolled to protect not only the customer support system, but also to secure access to their Okta admin console(s).”

While it may seem completely bonkers that some companies allow their IT staff to operate company-wide authentication systems using an Okta administrator account that isn’t protected with MFA, Okta said fully six percent of its customers (more than 1,000) persist in this dangerous practice.

In a previous disclosure on Nov. 3, Okta blamed the intrusion on an employee who saved the credentials for a service account in Okta’s customer support infrastructure to their personal Google account, and said it was likely those credentials were stolen when the employee’s personal device using the same Google account was compromised.

Unlike standard user accounts, which are accessed by humans, service accounts are mostly reserved for automating machine-to-machine functions, such as performing data backups or antivirus scans every night at a particular time. For this reason, they can’t be locked down with multifactor authentication the way user accounts can.

Dan Goodin over at Ars Technica reckons this explains why MFA wasn’t set up on the compromised Okta service account. But as he rightly points out, if a transgression by a single employee breaches your network, you’re doing it wrong.

“Okta should have put access controls in place besides a simple password to limit who or what could log in to the service account,” Goodin wrote on Nov. 4. “One way of doing this is to put a limit or conditions on the IP addresses that can connect. Another is to regularly rotate access tokens used to authenticate to service accounts. And, of course, it should have been impossible for employees to be logged in to personal accounts on a work machine. These and other precautions are the responsibility of senior people inside Okta.”

Goodin suggested that people who want to delve further into various approaches for securing service accounts should read this thread on Mastodon.

“A fair number of the contributions come from security professionals with extensive experience working in sensitive cloud environments,” Goodin wrote.

ID Theft Service Resold Access to USInfoSearch Data

One of the cybercrime underground’s more active sellers of Social Security numbers, background and credit reports has been pulling data from hacked accounts at the U.S. consumer data broker USinfoSearch, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

Since at least February 2023, a service advertised on Telegram called USiSLookups has operated an automated bot that allows anyone to look up the SSN or background report on virtually any American. For prices ranging from $8 to $40 and payable via virtual currency, the bot will return detailed consumer background reports automatically in just a few moments.

USiSLookups is the project of a cybercriminal who uses the nicknames JackieChan/USInfoSearch, and the Telegram channel for this service features a small number of sample background reports, including that of President Joe Biden, and podcaster Joe Rogan. The data in those reports includes the subject’s date of birth, address, previous addresses, previous phone numbers and employers, known relatives and associates, and driver’s license information.

JackieChan’s service abuses the name and trademarks of Columbus, OH based data broker USinfoSearch, whose website says it provides “identity and background information to assist with risk management, fraud prevention, identity and age verification, skip tracing, and more.”

“We specialize in non-FCRA data from numerous proprietary sources to deliver the information you need, when you need it,” the company’s website explains. “Our services include API-based access for those integrating data into their product or application, as well as bulk and batch processing of records to suit every client.”

As luck would have it, my report was also listed in the Telegram channel for this identity fraud service, presumably as a teaser for would-be customers. On October 19, 2023, KrebsOnSecurity shared a copy of this file with the real USinfoSearch, along with a request for information about the provenance of the data.

USinfoSearch said it would investigate the report, which appears to have been obtained on or before June 30, 2023. On Nov. 9, 2023, Scott Hostettler, general manager of USinfoSearch parent Martin Data LLC shared a written statement about their investigation that suggested the ID theft service was trying to pass off someone else’s consumer data as coming from USinfoSearch:

Regarding the Telegram incident, we understand the importance of protecting sensitive information and upholding the trust of our users is our top priority. Any allegation that we have provided data to criminals is in direct opposition to our fundamental principles and the protective measures we have established and continually monitor to prevent any unauthorized disclosure. Because Martin Data has a reputation for high-quality data, thieves may steal data from other sources and then disguise it as ours. While we implement appropriate safeguards to guarantee that our data is only accessible by those who are legally permitted, unauthorized parties will continue to try to access our data. Thankfully, the requirements needed to pass our credentialing process is tough even for established honest companies.

USinfoSearch’s statement did not address any questions put to the company, such as whether it requires multi-factor authentication for customer accounts, or whether my report had actually come from USinfoSearch’s systems.

After much badgering, on Nov. 21 Hostettler acknowledged that the USinfoSearch identity fraud service on Telegram was in fact pulling data from an account belonging to a vetted USinfoSearch client.

“I do know 100% that my company did not give access to the group who created the bots, but they did gain access to a client,” Hostettler said of the Telegram-based identity fraud service. “I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.”

Hostettler said USinfoSearch heavily vets any new potential clients, and that all users are required to undergo a background check and provide certain documents. Even so, he said, several fraudsters each month present themselves as credible business owners or C-level executives during the credentialing process, completing the application and providing the necessary documentation to open a new account.

“The level of skill and craftsmanship demonstrated in the creation of these supporting documents is incredible,” Hostettler said. “The numerous licenses provided appear to be exact replicas of the original document. Fortunately, I’ve discovered several methods of verification that do not rely solely on those documents to catch the fraudsters.”

“These people are unrelenting, and they act without regard for the consequences,” Hostettler continued. “After I deny their access, they will contact us again within the week using the same credentials. In the past, I’ve notified both the individual whose identity is being used fraudulently and the local police. Both are hesitant to act because nothing can be done to the offender if they are not apprehended. That is where most attention is needed.”

SIM SWAPPER’S DELIGHT

JackieChan is most active on Telegram channels focused on “SIM swapping,” which involves bribing or tricking mobile phone company employees into redirecting a target’s phone number to a device the attackers control. SIM swapping allows crooks to temporarily intercept the target’s text messages and phone calls, including any links or one-time codes for authentication that are delivered via SMS.

Reached on Telegram, JackieChan said most of his clients hail from the criminal SIM swapping world, and that the bulk of his customers use his service via an application programming interface (API) that allows customers to integrate the lookup service with other web-based services, databases, or applications.

“Sim channels is where I get most of my customers,” JackieChan told KrebsOnSecurity. “I’m averaging around 100 lookups per day on the [Telegram] bot, and around 400 per day on the API.”

JackieChan claims his USinfoSearch bot on Telegram abuses stolen credentials needed to access an API used by the real USinfoSearch, and that his service was powered by USinfoSearch account credentials that were stolen by malicious software tied to a botnet that he claims to have operated for some time.

This is not the first time USinfoSearch has had trouble with identity thieves masquerading as legitimate customers. In 2013, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that an identity fraud service in the underground called “SuperGet[.]info” was reselling access to personal and financial data on more than 200 million Americans that was obtained via the big-three credit bureau Experian.

The consumer data resold by Superget was not obtained directly from Experian, but rather via USinfoSearch. At the time, USinfoSearch had a contractual agreement with a California company named Court Ventures, whereby customers of Court Ventures had access to the USinfoSearch data, and vice versa.

When Court Ventures was purchased by Experian in 2012, the proprietor of SuperGet — a Vietnamese hacker named Hieu Minh Ngo who had impersonated an American private investigator — was grandfathered in as a client. The U.S. Secret Service agent who oversaw Ngo’s capture, extradition, prosecution and rehabilitation told KrebsOnSecurity he’s unaware of any other cybercriminal who has caused more material financial harm to more Americans than Ngo.

REAL POLICE, FAKE EDRS

JackieChan also sells access to hacked email accounts belonging to law enforcement personnel in the United States and abroad. Hacked police department emails can come in handy for ID thieves trying to pose as law enforcement officials who wish to purchase consumer data from platforms like USinfoSearch. Hence, Mr. Hostettler’s ongoing battle with fraudsters seeking access to his company’s service.

These police credentials are mainly marketed to criminals seeking fraudulent “Emergency Data Requests,” wherein crooks use compromised government and police department email accounts to rapidly obtain customer account data from mobile providers, ISPs and social media companies.

Normally, these companies will require law enforcement officials to supply a subpoena before turning over customer or user records. But EDRs allow police to bypass that process by attesting that the information sought is related to an urgent matter of life and death, such as an impending suicide or terrorist attack.

In response to an alarming increase in the volume of fraudulent EDRs, many service providers have chosen to require all EDRs be processed through a service called Kodex, which seeks to filter EDRs based on the reputation of the law enforcement entity requesting the information, and other attributes of the requestor.

For example, if you want to send an EDR to Coinbase or Twilio, you’ll first need to have valid law enforcement credentials and create an account at the Kodex online portal at these companies. However, Kodex may still throttle or block any requests from any accounts if they set off certain red flags.

Within their own separate Kodex portals, Twilio can’t see requests submitted to Coinbase, or vice versa. But each can see if a law enforcement entity or individual tied to one of their own requests has ever submitted a request to a different Kodex client, and then drill down further into other data about the submitter, such as Internet address(es) used, and the age of the requestor’s email address.

In August, JackieChan was advertising a working Kodex account for sale on the cybercrime channels, including redacted screenshots of the Kodex account dashboard as proof of access.

Kodex co-founder Matt Donahue told KrebsOnSecurity his company immediately detected that the law enforcement email address used to create the Kodex account pictured in JackieChan’s ad was likely stolen from a police officer in India. One big tipoff, Donahue said, was that the person creating the account did so using an Internet address in Brazil.

“There’s a lot of friction we can put in the way for illegitimate actors,” Donahue said. “We don’t let people use VPNs. In this case we let them in to honeypot them, and that’s how they got that screenshot. But nothing was allowed to be transmitted out from that account.”

Massive amounts of data about you and your personal history are available from USinfoSearch and dozens of other data brokers that acquire and sell “non-FCRA” data — i.e., consumer data that cannot be used for the purposes of determining one’s eligibility for credit, insurance, or employment.

Anyone who works in or adjacent to law enforcement is eligible to apply for access to these data brokers, which often market themselves to police departments and to “skip tracers,” essentially bounty hunters hired to locate others in real life — often on behalf of debt collectors, process servers or a bail bondsman.

There are tens of thousands of police jurisdictions around the world — including roughly 18,000 in the United States alone. And the harsh reality is that all it takes for hackers to apply for access to data brokers (and abuse the EDR process) is illicit access to a single police email account.

The trouble is, compromised credentials to law enforcement email accounts show up for sale with alarming frequency on the Telegram channels where JackieChan and their many clients reside. Indeed, Donahue said Kodex so far this year has identified attempted fake EDRs coming from compromised email accounts for police departments in India, Italy, Thailand and Turkey.

Hackers Stole Access Tokens from Okta’s Support Unit

Okta, a company that provides identity tools like multi-factor authentication and single sign-on to thousands of businesses, has suffered a security breach involving a compromise of its customer support unit, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Okta says the incident affected a “very small number” of customers, however it appears the hackers responsible had access to Okta’s support platform for at least two weeks before the company fully contained the intrusion.

In an advisory sent to an undisclosed number of customers on Oct. 19, Okta said it “has identified adversarial activity that leveraged access to a stolen credential to access Okta’s support case management system. The threat actor was able to view files uploaded by certain Okta customers as part of recent support cases.”

Okta explained that when it is troubleshooting issues with customers it will often ask for a recording of a Web browser session (a.k.a. an HTTP Archive or HAR file). These are sensitive files because they can include the customer’s cookies and session tokens, which intruders can then use to impersonate valid users.

“Okta has worked with impacted customers to investigate, and has taken measures to protect our customers, including the revocation of embedded session tokens,” their notice continued. “In general, Okta recommends sanitizing all credentials and cookies/session tokens within a HAR file before sharing it.”

The security firm BeyondTrust is among the Okta customers who received Thursday’s alert from Okta. BeyondTrust Chief Technology Officer Marc Maiffret said that alert came more than two weeks after his company alerted Okta to a potential problem.

Maiffret emphasized that BeyondTrust caught the attack earlier this month as it was happening, and that none of its own customers were affected. He said that on Oct 2., BeyondTrust’s security team detected that someone was trying to use an Okta account assigned to one of their engineers to create an all-powerful administrator account within their Okta environment.

When BeyondTrust reviewed the activity of the employee account that tried to create the new administrative profile, they found that — just 30 minutes prior to the unauthorized activity — one of their support engineers shared with Okta one of these HAR files that contained a valid Okta session token, Maiffret said.

“Our admin sent that [HAR file] over at Okta’s request, and 30 minutes after that the attacker started doing session hijacking, tried to replay the browser session and leverage the cookie in that browser recording to act on behalf of that user,” he said.

Maiffret said BeyondTrust followed up with Okta on Oct. 3 and said they were fairly confident Okta had suffered an intrusion, and that he reiterated that conclusion in a phone call with Okta on October 11 and again on Oct. 13.

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Okta’s Deputy Chief Information Security Officer Charlotte Wylie said Okta initially believed that BeyondTrust’s alert on Oct. 2 was not a result of a breach in its systems. But she said that by Oct. 17, the company had identified and contained the incident — disabling the compromised customer case management account, and invalidating Okta access tokens associated with that account.

Wylie declined to say exactly how many customers received alerts of a potential security issue, but characterized it as a “very, very small subset” of its more than 18,000 customers.

The disclosure from Okta comes just weeks after casino giants Caesar’s Entertainment and MGM Resorts were hacked. In both cases, the attackers managed to social engineer employees into resetting the multi-factor login requirements for Okta administrator accounts.

In March 2022, Okta disclosed a breach from the hacking group LAPSUS$, which specialized in social-engineering employees at targeted companies. An after-action report from Okta on that incident found that LAPSUS$ had social engineered its way onto the workstation of a support engineer at Sitel, a third-party outsourcing company that had access to Okta resources.

Okta’s Wylie declined to answer questions about how long the intruder may have had access to the company’s case management account, or who might have been responsible for the attack. However, she did say the company believes this is an adversary they have seen before.

“This is a known threat actor that we believe has targeted us and Okta-specific customers,” Wylie said.

Update, 2:57 p.m. ET: Okta has published a blog post about this incident that includes some “indicators of compromise” that customers can use to see if they were affected. But the company stressed that “all customers who were impacted by this have been notified. If you’re an Okta customer and you have not been contacted with another message or method, there is no impact to your Okta environment or your support tickets.”

Update, 3:36 p.m. ET: BeyondTrust has published a blog post about their findings.

Update, Oct. 24, 10:20 a.m. ET: 1Password and Cloudflare have disclosed compromises of their Okta authentication platforms as a result of the Okta breach. Both companies say an investigation has determined no customer information or systems were affected. Meanwhile, an Okta spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company notified about 1 percent of its customer base (~170 customers), so we are likely to see more such disclosures in the days and weeks ahead.

A Closer Look at the Snatch Data Ransom Group

Earlier this week, KrebsOnSecurity revealed that the darknet website for the Snatch ransomware group was leaking data about its users and the crime gang’s internal operations. Today, we’ll take a closer look at the history of Snatch, its alleged founder, and their claims that everyone has confused them with a different, older ransomware group by the same name.

According to a September 20, 2023 joint advisory from the FBI and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration (CISA), Snatch was originally named Team Truniger, based on the nickname of the group’s founder and organizer — Truniger.

The FBI/CISA report says Truniger previously operated as an affiliate of GandCrab, an early ransomware-as-a-service offering that closed up shop after several years and claims to have extorted more than $2 billion from victims. GandCrab dissolved in July 2019, and is thought to have become “REvil,” one of the most ruthless and rapacious Russian ransomware groups of all time.

The government says Snatch used a customized ransomware variant notable for rebooting Microsoft Windows devices into Safe Mode — enabling the ransomware to circumvent detection by antivirus or endpoint protection — and then encrypting files when few services are running.

“Snatch threat actors have been observed purchasing previously stolen data from other ransomware variants in an attempt to further exploit victims into paying a ransom to avoid having their data released on Snatch’s extortion blog,” the FBI/CISA alert reads. It continues:

“Prior to deploying the ransomware, Snatch threat actors were observed spending up to three months on a victim’s system. Within this timeframe, Snatch threat actors exploited the victim’s network moving laterally across the victim’s network with RDP for the largest possible deployment of ransomware and searching for files and folders for data exfiltration followed by file encryption.”

New York City-based cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint said the Snatch ransomware group was created in 2018, based on Truniger’s recruitment both on Russian language cybercrime forums and public Russian programming boards. Flashpoint said Truniger recruited “pen testers” for a new, then-unnamed cybercrime group, by posting their private Jabber instant messenger contact details on multiple Russian language coding forums, as well as on Facebook.

“The command requires Windows system administrators,” Truniger’s ads explained. “Experience in backup, increase privileges, mikicatz, network. Details after contacting on jabber: truniger@xmpp[.]jp.”

In at least some of those recruitment ads — like one in 2018 on the forum sysadmins[.]ru –the username promoting Truniger’s contact information was Semen7907. In April 2020, Truniger was banned from two of the top Russian cybercrime forums, where members from both forums confirmed that Semen7907 was one of Truniger’s known aliases.

[SIDE NOTE: Truniger was banned because he purchased credentials to a company from a network access broker on the dark web, and although he promised to share a certain percentage of whatever ransom amount Truniger’s group extracted from the victim, Truniger paid the access broker just a few hundred dollars off of a six-figure ransom].

According to Constella Intelligence, a data breach and threat actor research platform, a user named Semen7907 registered in 2017 on the Russian-language programming forum pawno[.]ru using the email address tretyakov-files@yandex.ru.

That same email address was assigned to the user “Semen-7907” on the now defunct gaming website tunngle.net, which suffered a data breach in 2020. Semen-7907 registered at Tunngle from the Internet address 31.192.175[.]63, which is in Yekaterinburg, RU.

Constella reports that tretyakov-files@yandex.ru was also used to register an account at the online game stalker[.]so with the nickname Trojan7907.

There is a Skype user by the handle semen7907, and which has the name Semyon Tretyakov from Yekaterinburg, RU. Constella also found a breached record from the Russian mobile telephony site tele2[.]ru, which shows that a user from Yekaterinburg registered in 2019 with the name Semyon Sergeyvich Tretyakov and email address tretyakov-files@ya.ru.

The above accounts, as well as the email address semen_7907@mail.ru, were all registered or accessed from the same Yekaterinburg Internet address mentioned previously: 31.192.175.63. The Russian mobile phone number associated with that tele2[.]ru account is connected to the Telegram account “Perchatka,” (“glove” in Russian).

BAD BEATS

Reached via Telegram, Perchatka (a.k.a. Mr. Tretyakov) said he was not a cybercriminal, and that he currently has a full-time job working in IT at a major company (he declined to specify which).

Presented with the information gathered for this report (and more that is not published here), Mr. Tretyakov acknowledged that Semen7907 was his account on sysadmins[.]ru, the very same account Truniger used to recruit hackers for the Snatch Ransomware group back in 2018.

However, he claims that he never made those posts, and that someone else must have assumed control over his sysadmins[.]ru account and posted as him. Mr. Tretyakov said that KrebsOnSecurity’s outreach this week was the first time he became aware that his sysadmins[.]ru account was used without his permission.

Mr. Tretyakov suggested someone may have framed him, pointing to an August 2023 story at a Russian news outlet about the reported hack and leak of the user database from sysadmins[.]ru, allegedly at the hands of a pro-Ukrainian hacker group called CyberSec.

“Recently, because of the war in Ukraine, a huge number of databases have been leaked and finding information about a person is not difficult,” Tretyakov said. “I’ve been using this login since about 2013 on all the forums where I register, and I don’t always set a strong password. If I had done something illegal, I would have hidden much better :D.”

[For the record, KrebsOnSecurity does not generally find this to be the case, as the ongoing Breadcrumbs series will attest.]

A Semyon Sergeyvich Tretyakov is listed as the composer of a Russian-language rap song called “Parallels,” which seems to be about the pursuit of a high-risk lifestyle online. A snippet of the song goes:

“Someone is on the screen, someone is on the blacklist
I turn on the timer and calculate the risks
I don’t want to stay broke And in the pursuit of money
I can’t take these zeros Life is like a zebra –
everyone wants to be first Either the stripes are white,
or we’re moving through the wilds I won’t waste time.”

Mr. Tretyakov said he was not the author of that particular rhyme, but that he has been known to record his own rhythms.

“Sometimes I make bad beats,” he said. “Soundcloud.”

NEVER MIND THE DOMAIN NAME

The FBI/CISA alert on Snatch Ransomware (PDF) includes an interesting caveat: It says Snatch actually deploys ransomware on victim systems, but it also acknowledges that the current occupants of Snatch’s dark and clear web domains call themselves Snatch Team, and maintain that they are not the same people as Snatch Ransomware from 2018.

Here’s the interesting bit from the FBI/CISA report:

“Since November 2021, an extortion site operating under the name Snatch served as a clearinghouse for data exfiltrated or stolen from victim companies on Clearnet and TOR hosted by a bulletproof hosting service. In August 2023, individuals claiming to be associated with the blog gave a media interview claiming the blog was not associated with Snatch ransomware and “none of our targets has been attacked by Ransomware Snatch…”, despite multiple confirmed Snatch victims’ data appearing on the blog alongside victims associated with other ransomware groups, notably Nokoyawa and Conti.”

Avid readers will recall a story here earlier this week about Snatch Team’s leaky darknet website based in Yekaterinburg, RU that exposed their internal operations and Internet addresses of their visitors. The leaked data suggest that Snatch is one of several ransomware groups using paid ads on Google.com to trick people into installing malware disguised as popular free software, such as Microsoft Teams, Adobe Reader, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Discord.

Snatch Team claims to deal only in stolen data — not in deploying ransomware malware to hold systems hostage.

Representatives of the Snatch Team recently answered questions from Databreaches.net about the claimed discrepancy in the FBI/CISA report.

“First of all, we repeat once again that we have nothing to do with Snatch Ransomware, we are Security Notification Attachment, and we have never violated the terms of the concluded transactions, because our honesty and openness is the guarantee of our income,” the Snatch Team wrote to Databreaches.net in response to questions.

But so far the Snatch Team has not been able to explain why it is using the very same domain names that the Snatch ransomware group used?

Their claim is even more unbelievable because the Snatch Team members told Databreaches.net they didn’t even know that a ransomware group with that name already existed when they initially formed just two years ago.

This is difficult to swallow because even if they were a separate group, they’d still need to somehow coordinate the transfer of the Ransomware group’s domains on the clear and dark webs. If they were hoping for a fresh start or separation, why not just pick a new name and new web destination?

“Snatchteam[.]cc is essentially a data market,” they continued. “The only thing to underline is that we are against selling leaked information, sticking to the idea of free access. Absolutely any team can come to us and offer information for publication. Even more, we have heard rumors that a number of ransomware teams scare their clients that they will post leaked information on our resource. We do not have our own ransomware, but we are open to cooperation on placement and monetization of dates (sic).”

Maybe Snatch Team does not wish to be associated with Snatch Ransomware because they currently believe stealing data and then extorting victim companies for money is somehow less evil than infecting all of the victim’s servers and backups with ransomware.

It is also likely that Snatch Team is well aware of how poorly some of their founders covered their tracks online, and are hoping for a do-over on that front.

‘Snatch’ Ransom Group Exposes Visitor IP Addresses

The victim shaming site operated by the Snatch ransomware group is leaking data about its true online location and internal operations, as well as the Internet addresses of its visitors, KrebsOnSecurity has found. The leaked data suggest that Snatch is one of several ransomware groups using paid ads on Google.com to trick people into installing malware disguised as popular free software, such as Microsoft Teams, Adobe Reader, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Discord.

First spotted in 2018, the Snatch ransomware group has published data stolen from hundreds of organizations that refused to pay a ransom demand. Snatch publishes its stolen data at a website on the open Internet, and that content is mirrored on the Snatch team’s darknet site, which is only reachable using the global anonymity network Tor.

KrebsOnSecurity has learned that Snatch’s darknet site exposes its “server status” page, which includes information about the true Internet addresses of users accessing the website.

Refreshing this page every few seconds shows that the Snatch darknet site generates a decent amount of traffic, often attracting thousands of visitors each day. But by far the most frequent repeat visitors are coming from Internet addresses in Russia that either currently host Snatch’s clear web domain names or recently did.

Probably the most active Internet address accessing Snatch’s darknet site is 193.108.114[.]41, which is a server in Yekaterinburg, Russia that hosts several Snatch domains, including snatchteam[.]top, sntech2ch[.]top, dwhyj2[.]top and sn76930193ch[.]top. It could well be that this Internet address is showing up frequently because Snatch’s clear-web site features a toggle button at the top that lets visitors switch over to accessing the site via Tor.

Another Internet address that showed up frequently in the Snatch server status page was 194.168.175[.]226, currently assigned to Matrix Telekom in Russia. According to DomainTools.com, this address also hosts or else recently hosted the usual coterie of Snatch domains, as well as quite a few domains phishing known brands such as Amazon and Cashapp.

The Moscow Internet address 80.66.64[.]15 accessed the Snatch darknet site all day long, and that address also housed the appropriate Snatch clear-web domains. More interestingly, that address is home to multiple recent domains that appear confusingly similar to known software companies, including libreoff1ce[.]com and www-discord[.]com.

This is interesting because the phishing domains associated with the Snatch ransomware gang were all registered to the same Russian name — Mihail Kolesnikov, a name that is somewhat synonymous with recent phishing domains tied to malicious Google ads.

Kolesnikov could be a nod to a Russian general made famous during Boris Yeltsin’s reign. Either way, it’s clearly a pseudonym, but there are some other commonalities among these domains that may provide insight into how Snatch and other ransomware groups are sourcing their victims.

DomainTools says there are more than 1,300 current and former domain names registered to Mihail Kolesnikov between 2013 and July 2023. About half of the domains appear to be older websites advertising female escort services in major cities around the United States (e.g. the now-defunct pittsburghcitygirls[.]com).

The other half of the Kolesnikov websites are far more recent phishing domains mostly ending in “.top” and “.app” that appear designed to mimic the domains of major software companies, including www-citrix[.]top, www-microsofteams[.]top, www-fortinet[.]top, ibreoffice[.]top, www-docker[.]top, www-basecamp[.]top, ccleaner-cdn[.]top, adobeusa[.]top, and www.real-vnc[.]top.

In August 2023, researchers with Trustwave Spiderlabs said they encountered domains registered to Mihail Kolesnikov being used to disseminate the Rilide information stealer trojan.

But it appears multiple crime groups may be using these domains to phish people and disseminate all kinds of information-stealing malware. In February 2023, Spamhaus warned of a huge surge in malicious ads that were hijacking search results in Google.com, and being used to distribute at least five different families of information stealing trojans, including AuroraStealer, IcedID/Bokbot, Meta Stealer, RedLine Stealer and Vidar.

For example, Spamhaus said victims of these malicious ads would search for Microsoft Teams in Google.com, and the search engine would often return a paid ad spoofing Microsoft or Microsoft Teams as the first result — above all other results. The malicious ad would include a logo for Microsoft and at first glance appear to be a safe and trusted place to download the Microsoft Teams client.

However, anyone who clicked on the result was whisked away instead to mlcrosofteams-us[.]top — yet another malicious domain registered to Mr. Kolesnikov. And while visitors to this website may believe they are only downloading the Microsoft Teams client, the installer file includes a copy of the IcedID malware, which is really good at stealing passwords and authentication tokens from the victim’s web browser.

The founder of the Swiss anti-abuse website abuse.ch told Spamhaus it is likely that some cybercriminals have started to sell “malvertising as a service” on the dark web, and that there is a great deal of demand for this service.

In other words, someone appears to have built a very profitable business churning out and promoting new software-themed phishing domains and selling that as a service to other cybercriminals. Or perhaps they are simply selling any stolen data (and any corporate access) to active and hungry ransomware group affiliates.

The tip about the exposed “server status” page on the Snatch darkweb site came from @htmalgae, the same security researcher who alerted KrebsOnSecurity earlier this month that the darknet victim shaming site run by the 8Base ransomware gang was inadvertently left in development mode.

That oversight revealed not only the true Internet address of the hidden 8Base site (in Russia, naturally), but also the identity of a programmer in Moldova who apparently helped to develop the 8Base code.

@htmalgae said the idea of a ransomware group’s victim shaming site leaking data that they did not intend to expose is deliciously ironic.

“This is a criminal group that shames others for not protecting user data,” @htmalgae said. “And here they are leaking their user data.”

All of the malware mentioned in this story is designed to run on Microsoft Windows devices. But Malwarebytes recently covered the emergence of a Mac-based information stealer trojan called AtomicStealer that was being advertised through malicious Google ads and domains that were confusingly similar to software brands.

Please be extra careful when you are searching online for popular software titles. Cracked, pirated copies of major software titles are a frequent source of infostealer infections, as are these rogue ads masquerading as search results. Make sure to double-check you are actually at the domain you believe you’re visiting *before* you download and install anything.

Stay tuned for Part II of this post, which includes a closer look at the Snatch ransomware group and their founder.

Further reading:

@HTMalgae’s list of the top Internet addresses seen accessing Snatch’s darknet site

Ars Technica: Until Further Notice Think Twice Before Using Google to Download Software

Bleeping Computer: Hackers Abuse Google Ads to Spread Malware in Legit Software

LastPass: ‘Horse Gone Barn Bolted’ is Strong Password

The password manager service LastPass is now forcing some of its users to pick longer master passwords. LastPass says the changes are needed to ensure all customers are protected by their latest security improvements. But critics say the move is little more than a public relations stunt that will do nothing to help countless early adopters whose password vaults were exposed in a 2022 breach at LastPass.

LastPass told customers this week they would be forced to update their master password if it was less than 12 characters. LastPass officially instituted this change back in 2018, but some undisclosed number of the company’s earlier customers were never required to increase the length of their master passwords.

This is significant because in November 2022, LastPass disclosed a breach in which hackers stole password vaults containing both encrypted and plaintext data for more than 25 million users.

Since then, a steady trickle of six-figure cryptocurrency heists targeting security-conscious people throughout the tech industry has led some security experts to conclude that crooks likely have succeeded at cracking open some of the stolen LastPass vaults.

KrebsOnSecurity last month interviewed a victim who recently saw more than three million dollars worth of cryptocurrency siphoned from his account. That user signed up with LastPass nearly a decade ago, stored their cryptocurrency seed phrase there, and yet never changed his master password — which was just eight characters. Nor was he ever forced to improve his master password.

That story cited research from Adblock Plus creator Wladimir Palant, who said LastPass failed to upgrade many older, original customers to more secure encryption protections that were offered to newer customers over the years.

For example, another important default setting in LastPass is the number of “iterations,” or how many times your master password is run through the company’s encryption routines. The more iterations, the longer it takes an offline attacker to crack your master password.

Palant said that for many older LastPass users, the initial default setting for iterations was anywhere from “1” to “500.” By 2013, new LastPass customers were given 5,000 iterations by default. In February 2018, LastPass changed the default to 100,100 iterations. And very recently, it upped that again to 600,000. Still, Palant and others impacted by the 2022 breach at LastPass say their account security settings were never forcibly upgraded.

Palant called this latest action by LastPass a PR stunt.

“They sent this message to everyone, whether they have a weak master password or not – this way they can again blame the users for not respecting their policies,” Palant said. “But I just logged in with my weak password, and I am not forced to change it. Sending emails is cheap, but they once again didn’t implement any technical measures to enforce this policy change.”

Either way, Palant said, the changes won’t help people affected by the 2022 breach.

“These people need to change all their passwords, something that LastPass still won’t recommend,” Palant said. “But it will somewhat help with the breaches to come.”

LastPass CEO Karim Toubba said changing master password length (or even the master password itself) is not designed to address already stolen vaults that are offline.

“This is meant to better protect customers’ online vaults and encourage them to bring their accounts up to the 2018 LastPass standard default setting of a 12-character minimum (but could opt out from),” Toubba said in an emailed statement. “We know that some customers may have chosen convenience over security and utilized less complex master passwords despite encouragement to use our (or others) password generator to do otherwise.”

A basic functionality of LastPass is that it will pick and remember lengthy, complex passwords for each of your websites or online services. To automatically populate the appropriate credentials at any website going forward, you simply authenticate to LastPass using your master password.

LastPass has always emphasized that if you lose this master password, that’s too bad because they don’t store it and their encryption is so strong that even they can’t help you recover it.

But experts say all bets are off when cybercrooks can get their hands on the encrypted vault data itself — as opposed to having to interact with LastPass via its website. These so-called “offline” attacks allow the bad guys to conduct unlimited and unfettered “brute force” password cracking attempts against the encrypted data using powerful computers that can each try millions of password guesses per second.

A chart on Palant’s blog post offers an idea of how increasing password iterations dramatically increases the costs and time needed by the attackers to crack someone’s master password. Palant said it would take a single high-powered graphics card about a year to crack a password of average complexity with 500 iterations, and about 10 years to crack the same password run through 5,000 iterations.

However, these numbers radically come down when a determined adversary also has other large-scale computational assets at their disposal, such as a bitcoin mining operation that can coordinate the password-cracking activity across multiple powerful systems simultaneously.

Meaning, LastPass users whose vaults were never upgraded to higher iterations and whose master passwords were weak (less than 12 characters) likely have been a primary target of distributed password-cracking attacks ever since the LastPass user vaults were stolen late last year.

Asked why some LastPass users were left behind on older security minimums, Toubba said a “small percentage” of customers had corrupted items in their password vaults that prevented those accounts from properly upgrading to the new requirements and settings.

“We have been able to determine that a small percentage of customers have items in their vaults that are corrupt and when we previously utilized automated scripts designed to re-encrypt vaults when the master password or iteration count is changed, they did not complete,” Toubba said. “These errors were not originally apparent as part of these efforts and, as we have discovered them, we have been working to be able to remedy this and finish the re-encryption.”

Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at University of California, Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and lecturer at UC Davis, said LastPass made a huge mistake years ago by not force-upgrading the iteration count for existing users.

“And now this is blaming the users — ‘you should have used a longer passphrase’ — not them for having weak defaults that were never upgraded for existing users,” Weaver said. “LastPass in my book is one step above snake-oil. I used to be, ‘Pick whichever password manager you want,’ but now I am very much, ‘Pick any password manager but LastPass.'”

Asked why LastPass isn’t recommending that users change all of the passwords secured by the encrypted master password that was stolen when the company got hacked last year, Toubba said it’s because “the data demonstrates that the majority of our customers follow our recommendations (or greater), and the probability of successfully brute forcing vault encryption is greatly reduced accordingly.”

“We’ve been telling customers since December of 2022 that they should be following recommended guidelines,” Toubba continued. “And if they haven’t followed the guidelines we recommended that they change their downstream passwords.”

FBI Hacker Dropped Stolen Airbus Data on 9/11

In December 2022, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that a cybercriminal using the handle “USDoD” had infiltrated the FBI‘s vetted information sharing network InfraGard, and was selling the contact information for all 80,000 members. The FBI responded by reverifying InfraGard members and by seizing the cybercrime forum where the data was being sold. But on Sept. 11, 2023, USDoD resurfaced after a lengthy absence to leak sensitive employee data stolen from the aerospace giant Airbus, while promising to visit the same treatment on top U.S. defense contractors.

In a post on the English language cybercrime forum BreachForums, USDoD leaked information on roughly 3,200 Airbus vendors, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. USDoD claimed they grabbed the data by using passwords stolen from a Turkish airline employee who had third-party access to Airbus’ systems.

USDoD didn’t say why they decided to leak the data on the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, but there was definitely an aircraft theme to the message that accompanied the leak, which concluded with the words, “Lockheed martin, Raytheon and the entire defense contractos [sic], I’m coming for you [expletive].”

Airbus has apparently confirmed the cybercriminal’s account to the threat intelligence firm Hudson Rock, which determined that the Airbus credentials were stolen after a Turkish airline employee infected their computer with a prevalent and powerful info-stealing trojan called RedLine.

Info-stealers like RedLine typically are deployed via opportunistic email malware campaigns, and by secretly bundling the trojans with cracked versions of popular software titles made available online. Credentials stolen by info-stealers often end up for sale on cybercrime shops that peddle purloined passwords and authentication cookies (these logs also often show up in the malware scanning service VirusTotal).

Hudson Rock said it recovered the log files created by a RedLine infection on the Turkish airline employee’s system, and found the employee likely infected their machine after downloading pirated and secretly backdoored software for Microsoft Windows.

Hudson Rock says info-stealer infections from RedLine and a host of similar trojans have surged in recent years, and that they remain “a primary initial attack vector used by threat actors to infiltrate organizations and execute cyberattacks, including ransomware, data breaches, account overtakes, and corporate espionage.”

The prevalence of RedLine and other info-stealers means that a great many consequential security breaches begin with cybercriminals abusing stolen employee credentials. In this scenario, the attacker temporarily assumes the identity and online privileges assigned to a hacked employee, and the onus is on the employer to tell the difference.

In addition to snarfing any passwords stored on or transmitted through an infected system, info-stealers also siphon authentication cookies or tokens that allow one to remain signed-in to online services for long periods of time without having to resupply one’s password and multi-factor authentication code. By stealing these tokens, attackers can often reuse them in their own web browser, and bypass any authentication normally required for that account.

Microsoft Corp. this week acknowledged that a China-backed hacking group was able to steal one of the keys to its email kingdom that granted near-unfettered access to U.S. government inboxes. Microsoft’s detailed post-mortem cum mea culpa explained that a secret signing key was stolen from an employee in an unlucky series of unfortunate events, and thanks to TechCrunch we now know that the culprit once again was “token-stealing malware” on the employee’s system.

In April 2023, the FBI seized Genesis Market, a bustling, fully automated cybercrime store that was continuously restocked with freshly hacked passwords and authentication tokens stolen by a network of contractors who deployed RedLine and other info-stealer malware.

In March 2023, the FBI arrested and charged the alleged administrator of BreachForums (aka Breached), the same cybercrime community where USDoD leaked the Airbus data. In June 2023, the FBI seized the BreachForums domain name, but the forum has since migrated to a new domain.

Unsolicited email continues to be a huge vector for info-stealing malware, but lately the crooks behind these schemes have been gaming the search engines so that their malicious sites impersonating popular software vendors actually appear before the legitimate vendor’s website. So take special care when downloading software to ensure that you are in fact getting the program from the original, legitimate source whenever possible.

Also, unless you really know what you’re doing, please don’t download and install pirated software. Sure, the cracked program might do exactly what you expect it to do, but the chances are good that it is also laced with something nasty. And when all of your passwords are stolen and your important accounts have been hijacked or sold, you will wish you had simply paid for the real thing.

Experts Fear Crooks are Cracking Keys Stolen in LastPass Breach

In November 2022, the password manager service LastPass disclosed a breach in which hackers stole password vaults containing both encrypted and plaintext data for more than 25 million users. Since then, a steady trickle of six-figure cryptocurrency heists targeting security-conscious people throughout the tech industry has led some security experts to conclude that crooks likely have succeeded at cracking open some of the stolen LastPass vaults.

Taylor Monahan is lead product manager of MetaMask, a popular software cryptocurrency wallet used to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. Since late December 2022, Monahan and other researchers have identified a highly reliable set of clues that they say connect recent thefts targeting more than 150 people. Collectively, these individuals have been robbed of more than $35 million worth of crypto.

Monahan said virtually all of the victims she has assisted were longtime cryptocurrency investors, and security-minded individuals. Importantly, none appeared to have suffered the sorts of attacks that typically preface a high-dollar crypto heist, such as the compromise of one’s email and/or mobile phone accounts.

“The victim profile remains the most striking thing,” Monahan wrote. “They truly all are reasonably secure. They are also deeply integrated into this ecosystem, [including] employees of reputable crypto orgs, VCs [venture capitalists], people who built DeFi protocols, deploy contracts, run full nodes.”

Monahan has been documenting the crypto thefts via Twitter/X since March 2023, frequently expressing frustration in the search for a common cause among the victims. Then on Aug. 28, Monahan said she’d concluded that the common thread among nearly every victim was that they’d previously used LastPass to store their “seed phrase,” the private key needed to unlock access to their cryptocurrency investments.

Armed with your secret seed phrase, anyone can instantly access all of the cryptocurrency holdings tied to that cryptographic key, and move the funds to anywhere they like.

Which is why the best practice for many cybersecurity enthusiasts has long been to store their seed phrases either in some type of encrypted container — such as a password manager — or else inside an offline, special-purpose hardware encryption device, such as a Trezor or Ledger wallet.

“The seed phrase is literally the money,” said Nick Bax, director of analytics at Unciphered, a cryptocurrency wallet recovery company. “If you have my seed phrase, you can copy and paste that into your wallet, and then you can see all my accounts. And you can transfer my funds.”

Bax said he closely reviewed the massive trove of cryptocurrency theft data that Taylor Monahan and others have collected and linked together.

“It’s one of the broadest and most complex cryptocurrency investigations I’ve ever seen,” Bax said. “I ran my own analysis on top of their data and reached the same conclusion that Taylor reported. The threat actor moved stolen funds from multiple victims to the same blockchain addresses, making it possible to strongly link those victims.”

Bax, Monahan and others interviewed for this story say they’ve identified a unique signature that links the theft of more than $35 million in crypto from more than 150 confirmed victims, with roughly two to five high-dollar heists happening each month since December 2022.

KrebsOnSecurity has reviewed this signature but is not publishing it at the request of Monahan and other researchers, who say doing so could cause the attackers to alter their operations in ways that make their criminal activity more difficult to track.

But the researchers have published findings about the dramatic similarities in the ways that victim funds were stolen and laundered through specific cryptocurrency exchanges. They also learned the attackers frequently grouped together victims by sending their cryptocurrencies to the same destination crypto wallet.

By identifying points of overlap in these destination addresses, the researchers were then able to track down and interview new victims. For example, the researchers said their methodology identified a recent multi-million dollar crypto heist victim as an employee at Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis firm that works closely with law enforcement agencies to help track down cybercriminals and money launderers.

Chainalysis confirmed that the employee had suffered a high-dollar cryptocurrency heist late last month, but otherwise declined to comment for this story.

Bax said the only obvious commonality between the victims who agreed to be interviewed was that they had stored the seed phrases for their cryptocurrency wallets in LastPass.

“On top of the overlapping indicators of compromise, there are more circumstantial behavioral patterns and tradecraft which are also consistent between different thefts and support the conclusion,” Bax told KrebsOnSecuirty. “I’m confident enough that this is a real problem that I’ve been urging my friends and family who use LastPass to change all of their passwords and migrate any crypto that may have been exposed, despite knowing full well how tedious that is.”

LastPass declined to answer questions about the research highlighted in this story, citing an ongoing law enforcement investigation and pending litigation against the company in response to its 2022 data breach.

“Last year’s incident remains the subject of an ongoing investigation by law enforcement and is also the subject of pending litigation,” LastPass said in a written statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity. “Since last year’s attack on LastPass, we have remained in contact with law enforcement and continue to do so.”

Their statement continues:

“We have shared various technical information, Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), and threat actor tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) with our law enforcement contacts as well as our internal and external threat intelligence and forensic partners in an effort to try and help identify the parties responsible. In the meantime, we encourage any security researchers to share any useful information they believe they may have with our Threat Intelligence team by contacting securitydisclosure@lastpass.com.”

THE LASTPASS BREACH(ES)

On August 25, 2022, LastPass CEO Karim Toubba wrote to users that the company had detected unusual activity in its software development environment, and that the intruders stole some source code and proprietary LastPass technical information. On Sept. 15, 2022, LastPass said an investigation into the August breach determined the attacker did not access any customer data or password vaults.

But on Nov. 30, 2022, LastPass notified customers about another, far more serious security incident that the company said leveraged data stolen in the August breach. LastPass disclosed that criminal hackers had compromised encrypted copies of some password vaults, as well as other personal information.

In February 2023, LastPass disclosed that the intrusion involved a highly complex, targeted attack against a DevOps engineer who was one of only four LastPass employees with access to the corporate vault.

“This was accomplished by targeting the DevOps engineer’s home computer and exploiting a vulnerable third-party media software package, which enabled remote code execution capability and allowed the threat actor to implant keylogger malware,” LastPass officials wrote. “The threat actor was able to capture the employee’s master password as it was entered, after the employee authenticated with MFA, and gain access to the DevOps engineer’s LastPass corporate vault.”

Dan Goodin at Ars Technica reported and then confirmed that the attackers exploited a known vulnerability in a Plex media server that the employee was running on his home network, and succeeded in installing malicious software that stole passwords and other authentication credentials. The vulnerability exploited by the intruders was patched back in 2020, but the employee never updated his Plex software.

As it happens, Plex announced its own data breach one day before LastPass disclosed its initial August intrusion. On August 24, 2022, Plex’s security team urged users to reset their passwords, saying an intruder had accessed customer emails, usernames and encrypted passwords.

OFFLINE ATTACKS

A basic functionality of LastPass is that it will pick and remember lengthy, complex passwords for each of your websites or online services. To automatically populate the appropriate credentials at any website going forward, you simply authenticate to LastPass using your master password.

LastPass has always emphasized that if you lose this master password, that’s too bad because they don’t store it and their encryption is so strong that even they can’t help you recover it.

But experts say all bets are off when cybercrooks can get their hands on the encrypted vault data itself — as opposed to having to interact with LastPass via its website. These so-called “offline” attacks allow the bad guys to conduct unlimited and unfettered “brute force” password cracking attempts against the encrypted data using powerful computers that can each try millions of password guesses per second.

“It does leave things vulnerable to brute force when the vaults are stolen en masse, especially if info about the vault HOLDER is available,” said Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at University of California, Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and lecturer at UC Davis. “So you just crunch and crunch and crunch with GPUs, with a priority list of vaults you target.”

How hard would it be for well-resourced criminals to crack the master passwords securing LastPass user vaults? Perhaps the best answer to this question comes from Wladimir Palant, a security researcher and the original developer behind the Adblock Plus browser plugin.

In a December 2022 blog post, Palant explained that the crackability of a LastPass master password depends largely on two things: The complexity of the master password, and the default settings for LastPass users, which appear to have varied quite a bit based on when those users began patronizing the service.

LastPass says that since 2018 it has required a twelve-character minimum for master passwords, which the company said “greatly minimizes the ability for successful brute force password guessing.”

But Palant said while LastPass indeed improved its master password defaults in 2018, it did not force all existing customers who had master passwords of lesser lengths to pick new credentials that would satisfy the 12-character minimum.

“If you are a LastPass customer, chances are that you are completely unaware of this requirement,” Palant wrote. “That’s because LastPass didn’t ask existing customers to change their master password. I had my test account since 2018, and even today I can log in with my eight-character password without any warnings or prompts to change it.”

Palant believes LastPass also failed to upgrade many older, original customers to more secure encryption protections that were offered to newer customers over the years. One important setting in LastPass is the number of “iterations,” or how many times your master password is run through the company’s encryption routines. The more iterations, the longer it takes an offline attacker to crack your master password.

Palant noted last year that for many older LastPass users, the initial default setting for iterations was anywhere from “1” to “500.” By 2013, new LastPass customers were given 5,000 iterations by default. In February 2018, LastPass changed the default to 100,100 iterations. And very recently, it upped that again to 600,000.

Palant said the 2018 change was in response to a security bug report he filed about some users having dangerously low iterations in their LastPass settings.

“Worse yet, for reasons that are beyond me, LastPass didn’t complete this migration,” Palant wrote. “My test account is still at 5,000 iterations, as are the accounts of many other users who checked their LastPass settings. LastPass would know how many users are affected, but they aren’t telling that. In fact, it’s painfully obvious that LastPass never bothered updating users’ security settings. Not when they changed the default from 1 to 500 iterations. Not when they changed it from 500 to 5,000. Only my persistence made them consider it for their latest change. And they still failed implementing it consistently.”

A chart on Palant’s blog post offers an idea of how increasing password iterations dramatically increases the costs and time needed by the attackers to crack someone’s master password. Palant said it would take a single GPU about a year to crack a password of average complexity with 500 iterations, and about 10 years to crack the same password run through 5,000 iterations.

However, these numbers radically come down when a determined adversary also has other large-scale computational assets at their disposal, such as a bitcoin mining operation that can coordinate the password-cracking activity across multiple powerful systems simultaneously.

Weaver said a password or passphrase with average complexity — such as “Correct Horse Battery Staple” is only secure against online attacks, and that its roughly 40 bits of randomness or “entropy” means a graphics card can blow through it in no time.

“An Nvidia 3090 can do roughly 4 million [password guesses] per second with 1000 iterations, but that would go down to 8 thousand per second with 500,000 iterations, which is why iteration count matters so much,” Weaver said. “So a combination of ‘not THAT strong of a password’ and ‘old vault’ and ‘low iteration count’ would make it theoretically crackable but real work, but the work is worth it given the targets.”

Reached by KrebsOnSecurity, Palant said he never received a response from LastPass about why the company apparently failed to migrate some number of customers to more secure account settings.

“I know exactly as much as everyone else,” Palant wrote in reply. “LastPass published some additional information in March. This finally answered the questions about the timeline of their breach – meaning which users are affected. It also made obvious that business customers are very much at risk here, Federated Login Services being highly compromised in this breach (LastPass downplaying as usual of course).”

Palant said upon logging into his LastPass account a few days ago, he found his master password was still set at 5,000 iterations.

INTERVIEW WITH A VICTIM

KrebsOnSecurity interviewed one of the victims tracked down by Monahan, a software engineer and startup founder who recently was robbed of approximately $3.4 million worth of different cryptocurrencies. The victim agreed to tell his story in exchange for anonymity because he is still trying to claw back his losses. We’ll refer to him here as “Connor” (not his real name).

Connor said he began using LastPass roughly a decade ago, and that he also stored the seed phrase for his primary cryptocurrency wallet inside of LastPass. Connor chose to protect his LastPass password vault with an eight character master password that included numbers and symbols (~50 bits of entropy).

“I thought at the time that the bigger risk was losing a piece of paper with my seed phrase on it,” Connor said. “I had it in a bank security deposit box before that, but then I started thinking, ‘Hey, the bank might close or burn down and I could lose my seed phrase.'”

Those seed phrases sat in his LastPass vault for years. Then, early on the morning of Sunday, Aug. 27, 2023, Connor was awoken by a service he’d set up to monitor his cryptocurrency addresses for any unusual activity: Someone was draining funds from his accounts, and fast.

Like other victims interviewed for this story, Connor didn’t suffer the usual indignities that typically presage a cryptocurrency robbery, such as account takeovers of his email inbox or mobile phone number.

Connor said he doesn’t know the number of iterations his master password was given originally, or what it was set at when the LastPass user vault data was stolen last year. But he said he recently logged into his LastPass account and the system forced him to upgrade to the new 600,000 iterations setting.

“Because I set up my LastPass account so early, I’m pretty sure I had whatever weak settings or iterations it originally had,” he said.

Connor said he’s kicking himself because he recently started the process of migrating his cryptocurrency to a new wallet protected by a new seed phrase. But he never finished that migration process. And then he got hacked.

“I’d set up a brand new wallet with new keys,” he said. “I had that ready to go two months ago, but have been procrastinating moving things to the new wallet.”

Connor has been exceedingly lucky in regaining access to some of his stolen millions in cryptocurrency. The Internet is swimming with con artists masquerading as legitimate cryptocurrency recovery experts. To make matters worse, because time is so critical in these crypto heists, many victims turn to the first quasi-believable expert who offers help.

Instead, several friends steered Connor to Flashbots.net, a cryptocurrency recovery firm that employs several custom techniques to help clients claw back stolen funds — particularly those on the Ethereum blockchain.

According to Connor, Flashbots helped rescue approximately $1.5 million worth of the $3.4 million in cryptocurrency value that was suddenly swept out of his account roughly a week ago. Lucky for him, Connor had some of his assets tied up in a type of digital loan that allowed him to borrow against his various cryptocurrency assets.

Without giving away too many details about how they clawed back the funds, here’s a high level summary: When the crooks who stole Connor’s seed phrase sought to extract value from these loans, they were borrowing the maximum amount of credit that he hadn’t already used. But Connor said that left open an avenue for some of that value to be recaptured, basically by repaying the loan in many small, rapid chunks.

WHAT SHOULD LASTPASS USERS DO?

According to MetaMask’s Monahan, users who stored any important passwords with LastPass — particularly those related to cryptocurrency accounts — should change those credentials immediately, and migrate any crypto holdings to new offline hardware wallets.

“Really the ONLY thing you need to read is this,” Monahan pleaded to her 70,000 followers on Twitter/X: “PLEASE DON’T KEEP ALL YOUR ASSETS IN A SINGLE KEY OR SECRET PHRASE FOR YEARS. THE END. Split up your assets. Get a hw [hardware] wallet. Migrate. Now.”

If you also had passwords tied to banking or retirement accounts, or even just important email accounts — now would be a good time to change those credentials as well.

I’ve never been comfortable recommending password managers, because I’ve never seriously used them myself. Something about putting all your eggs in one basket. Heck, I’m so old-fashioned that most of my important passwords are written down and tucked away in safe places.

But I recognize this antiquated approach to password management is not for everyone. Connor says he now uses 1Password, a competing password manager that recently earned the best overall marks from Wired and The New York Times.

1Password says that three things are needed to decrypt your information: The encrypted data itself, your account password, and your Secret Key. Only you know your account password, and your Secret Key is generated locally during setup.

“The two are combined on-device to encrypt your vault data and are never sent to 1Password,” explains a 1Password blog post ‘What If 1Password Gets Hacked?‘ “Only the encrypted vault data lives on our servers, so neither 1Password nor an attacker who somehow manages to guess or steal your account password would be able to access your vaults – or what’s inside them.

Weaver said that Secret Key adds an extra level of randomness to all user master passwords that LastPass didn’t have.

“With LastPass, the idea is the user’s password vault is encrypted with a cryptographic hash (H) of the user’s passphrase,” Weaver said. “The problem is a hash of the user’s passphrase is remarkably weak on older LastPass vaults with master passwords that do not have many iterations. 1Password uses H(random-key||password) to generate the password, and it is why you have the QR code business when adding a new device.”

Weaver said LastPass deserves blame for not having upgraded iteration counts for all users a long time ago, and called the latest forced upgrades “a stunning indictment of the negligence on the part of LastPass.”

“That they never even notified all those with iteration counts of less than 100,000 — who are really vulnerable to brute force even with 8-character random passwords or ‘correct horse battery staple’ type passphrases — is outright negligence,” Weaver said. “I would personally advocate that nobody ever uses LastPass again: Not because they were hacked. Not because they had an architecture (unlike 1Password) that makes such hacking a problem. But because of their consistent refusal to address how they screwed up and take proactive efforts to protect their customers.”

Bax and Monahan both acknowledged that their research alone can probably never conclusively tie dozens of high-dollar crypto heists over the past year to the LastPass breach. But Bax says at this point he doesn’t see any other possible explanation.

“Some might say it’s dangerous to assert a strong connection here, but I’d say it’s dangerous to assert there isn’t one,” he said. “I was arguing with my fiance about this last night. She’s waiting for LastPass to tell her to change everything. Meanwhile, I’m telling her to do it now.”

Kroll Employee SIM-Swapped for Crypto Investor Data

Security consulting giant Kroll disclosed today that a SIM-swapping attack against one of its employees led to the theft of user information for multiple cryptocurrency platforms that are relying on Kroll services in their ongoing bankruptcy proceedings. And there are indications that fraudsters may already be exploiting the stolen data in phishing attacks.

Cryptocurrency lender BlockFi and the now-collapsed crypto trading platform FTX each disclosed data breaches this week thanks to a recent SIM-swapping attack targeting an employee of Kroll — the company handling both firms’ bankruptcy restructuring.

In a statement released today, New York City-based Kroll said it was informed that on Aug. 19, 2023, someone targeted a T-Mobile phone number belonging to a Kroll employee “in a highly sophisticated ‘SIM swapping’ attack.”

“Specifically, T-Mobile, without any authority from or contact with Kroll or its employees, transferred that employee’s phone number to the threat actor’s phone at their request,” the statement continues. “As a result, it appears the threat actor gained access to certain files containing personal information of bankruptcy claimants in the matters of BlockFi, FTX and Genesis.”

T-Mobile has not yet responded to requests for comment.

Countless websites and online services use SMS text messages for both password resets and multi-factor authentication. This means that stealing someone’s phone number often can let cybercriminals hijack the target’s entire digital life in short order — including access to any financial, email and social media accounts tied to that phone number.

SIM-swapping groups will often call employees on their mobile devices, pretend to be someone from the company’s IT department, and then try to get the employee to visit a phishing website that mimics the company’s login page.

Multiple SIM-swapping gangs have had great success using this method to target T-Mobile employees for the purposes of reselling a cybercrime service that can be hired to divert any T-Mobile user’s text messages and phone calls to another device.

In February 2023, KrebsOnSecurity chronicled SIM-swapping attacks claimed by these groups against T-Mobile employees in more than 100 separate incidents in the second half of 2022. The average cost to SIM swap any T-Mobile phone number was approximately $1,500.

The unfortunate result of the SIM-swap against the Kroll employee is that people who had financial ties to BlockFi, FTX, or Genesis now face increased risk of becoming targets of SIM-swapping and phishing attacks themselves.

And there is some indication this is already happening. Multiple readers who said they got breach notices from Kroll today also shared phishing emails they received this morning that spoofed FTX and claimed, “You have been identified as an eligible client to begin withdrawing digital assets from your FTX account.”

A major portion of Kroll’s business comes from helping organizations manage cyber risk. Kroll is often called in to investigate data breaches, and it also sells identity protection services to companies that recently experienced a breach and are grasping at ways to demonstrate that they doing something to protect their customers from further harm.

Kroll did not respond to questions. But it’s a good bet that BlockFi, FTX and Genesis customers will soon enjoy yet another offering of free credit monitoring as a result of the T-Mobile SIM swap.

Kroll’s website says it employs “elite cyber risk leaders uniquely positioned to deliver end-to-end cyber security services worldwide.” Apparently, these elite cyber risk leaders did not consider the increased attack surface presented by their employees using T-Mobile for wireless service.

The SIM-swapping attack against Kroll is a timely reminder that you should do whatever you can to minimize your reliance on mobile phone companies for your security. For example, many online services require you to provide a phone number upon registering an account, but that number can often be removed from your profile afterwards.

Why do I suggest this? Many online services allow users to reset their passwords just by clicking a link sent via SMS, and this unfortunately widespread practice has turned mobile phone numbers into de facto identity documents. Which means losing control over your phone number thanks to an unauthorized SIM swap or mobile number port-out, divorce, job termination or financial crisis can be devastating.

If you haven’t done so lately, take a moment to inventory your most important online accounts, and see how many of them can still have their password reset by receiving an SMS at the phone number on file. This may require stepping through the website’s account recovery or lost password flow.

If the account that stores your mobile phone number does not allow you to delete your number, check to see whether there is an option to disallow SMS or phone calls for authentication and account recovery. If more secure options are available, such as a security key or a one-time code from a mobile authentication app, please take advantage of those instead. The website 2fa.directory is a good starting point for this analysis.

Now, you might think that the mobile providers would share some culpability when a customer suffers a financial loss because a mobile store employee got tricked into transferring that customer’s phone number to criminals. But earlier this year, a California judge dismissed a lawsuit against AT&T that stemmed from a 2017 SIM-swapping attack which netted the thieves more than $24 million in cryptocurrency.

LeakedSource Owner Quit Ashley Madison a Month Before 2015 Hack

[This is Part III in a series on research conducted for a recent Hulu documentary on the 2015 hack of marital infidelity website AshleyMadison.com.]

In 2019, a Canadian company called Defiant Tech Inc. pleaded guilty to running LeakedSource[.]com, a service that sold access to billions of passwords and other data exposed in countless data breaches. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that the owner of Defiant Tech, a 32-year-old Ontario man named Jordan Evan Bloom, was hired in late 2014 as a developer for the marital infidelity site AshleyMadison.com. Bloom resigned from AshleyMadison citing health reasons in June 2015 — less than one month before unidentified hackers stole data on 37 million users — and launched LeakedSource three months later.

On Jan. 15, 2018, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) charged then 27-year-old Bloom, of Thornhill, Ontario, with selling stolen personal identities online through the website LeakedSource[.]com.

LeakedSource was advertised on a number of popular cybercrime forums as a service that could help hackers break into valuable or high-profile accounts. LeakedSource also tried to pass itself off as a legal, legitimate business that was marketing to security firms and professionals.

The RCMP arrested Bloom in December 2017, and said he made approximately $250,000 selling hacked data, which included information on 37 million user accounts leaked in the 2015 Ashley Madison breach.

Subsequent press releases from the RCMP about the LeakedSource investigation omitted any mention of Bloom, and referred to the defendant only as Defiant Tech. In a legal settlement that is quintessentially Canadian, the matter was resolved in 2019 after Defiant Tech agreed to plead guilty. The RCMP declined to comment for this story.

A GREY MARKET

The Impact Team, the hacker group that claimed responsibility for stealing and leaking the AshleyMadison user data, also leaked several years worth of email from then-CEO Noel Biderman. A review of those messages shows that Ashley Madison hired Jordan Evan Bloom as a PHP developer in December 2014 — even though the company understood that Bloom’s success as a programmer and businessman was tied to shady and legally murky enterprises.

Bloom’s recommendation came to Biderman via Trevor Sykes, then chief technology officer for Ashley Madison parent firm Avid Life Media (ALM). The following is an email from Sykes to Biderman dated Nov. 14, 2014:

“Greetings Noel,

“We’d like to offer Jordan Bloom the position of PHP developer reporting to Mike Morris for 75k CAD/Year. He did well on the test, but he also has a great understanding of the business side of things having run small businesses himself. This was an internal referral.”

When Biderman responded that he needed more information about the candidate, Sykes replied that Bloom was independently wealthy as a result of his forays into the shadowy world of “gold farming”  — the semi-automated use of large numbers of player accounts to win some advantage that is usually related to cashing out game accounts or inventory. Gold farming is particularly prevalent in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), such as RuneScape and World of Warcraft.

“In his previous experience he had been doing RMT (Real Money Trading),” Sykes wrote. “This is the practice of selling virtual goods in games for real world money. This is a grey market, which is usually against the terms and services of the game companies.” Here’s the rest of his message to Biderman:

“RMT sellers traditionally have a lot of problems with chargebacks, and payment processor compliance. During my interview with him, I spent some time focusing in on this. He had to demonstrate to the processor, Paypal, at the time he had a business and technical strategy to address his charge back rate.”

“He ran this company himself, and did all the coding, including the integration with the processors,” Sykes continued in his assessment of Bloom. “Eventually he was squeezed out by Chinese gold farmers, and their ability to market with much more investment than he could. In addition the cost of ‘farming’ the virtual goods was cheaper in China to do than in North America.”

COME, ABUSE WITH US

The gold farming reference is fascinating because in 2017 KrebsOnSecurity published Who Ran LeakedSource?, which examined clues suggesting that one of the administrators of LeakedSource also was the admin of abusewith[.]us, a site unabashedly dedicated to helping people hack email and online gaming accounts.

Abusewith[.]us began in September 2013 as a forum for learning and teaching how to hack accounts at Runescape, an MMORPG set in a medieval fantasy realm where players battle for kingdoms and riches.

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

That 2017 report here interviewed a Michigan man who acknowledged being administrator of Abusewith[.]us, but denied being the operator of LeakedSource. Still, the story noted that LeakedSource likely had more than one operator, and breached records show Bloom was a prolific member of Abusewith[.]us.

In an email to all employees on Dec. 1, 2014, Ashley Madison’s director of HR said Bloom graduated from York University in Toronto with a degree in theoretical physics, and that he has been an active programmer since high school.

“He’s a proprietor of a high traffic multiplayer game and developer/publisher of utilities such as PicTrace,” the HR director enthused. “He will be a great addition to the team.”

PicTrace appears to have been a service that allowed users to glean information about anyone who viewed an image hosted on the platform, such as their Internet address, browser type and version number. A copy of pictrace[.]com from Archive.org in 2012 redirects to the domain qksnap.com, which DomainTools.com says was registered to a Jordan Bloom from Thornhill, ON that same year.

The street address listed in the registration records for qksnap.com — 204 Beverley Glen Blvd — also shows up in the registration records for leakadvisor[.]com, a domain registered in 2017 just months after Canadian authorities seized the servers running LeakedSource.

A review of passive DNS records from DomainTools indicates that in 2013 pictrace[.]com shared a server with just a handful of other domains, including Near-Reality[.]com — a popular RuneScape Private Server (RSPS) game based on the RuneScape MMORPG.

Copies of near-reality[.]com from 2013 via Archive.org show the top of the community’s homepage was retrofitted with a message saying Near Reality was no longer available due to a copyright dispute. Although the site doesn’t specify the other party to the copyright dispute, it appears Near-Reality got sued by Jagex, the owner of RuneScape.

The message goes on to say the website will no longer “encourage, facilitate, enable or condone (i) any infringement of copyright in RuneScape or any other Jagex product; nor (ii) any breach of the terms and conditions of RuneScape or any other Jagex product.”

AGENTJAGS

Near Reality also has a Facebook page that was last updated in 2019, when its owner posted a link to a news story about Defiant Tech’s guilty plea in the LeakedSource investigation. That Facebook page indicates Bloom also went by the nickname “Agentjags.”

“Just a quick PSA,” reads a post to the Near Reality Facebook page dated Jan. 21, 2018, which linked to a story about the charges against Bloom and a photo of Bloom standing in front of his lime-green Lamborghini. “Agentjags has got involved in some shady shit that may have compromised your personal details. I advise anyone who is using an old NR [Near Reality] password for anything remotely important should change it ASAP.”

By the beginning of 2016, Bloom was nowhere to be found, and was suspected of having fled his country for the Caribbean, according to the people commenting on the Near Reality Facebook page:

“Jordan aka Agentjags has gone missing,” wrote a presumed co-owner of the Facebook page. “He is supposedly hiding in St. Lucia, doing what he loved, scuba-diving. Any information to his whereabouts will be appreciated.”

KrebsOnSecurity ran the unusual nickname “AgentJags” through a search at Constella Intelligence, a commercial service that tracks breached data sets. That search returned just a few dozen results — and virtually all were accounts at various RuneScape-themed sites, including a half-dozen accounts at Abusewith[.]us.

Constella found other “AgentJags” accounts tied to the email address ownagegaming1@gmail.com. The marketing firm Apollo.io experienced a data breach several years back, and according to Apollo the email address ownagegaming1@gmail.com belongs to Jordan Bloom in Ontario.

Constella also revealed that the password frequently used by ownagegaming1@gmail.com across many sites was some variation on “niggapls,” which my 2017 report found was also the password used by the administrator of LeakedSource.

Constella discovered that the email eric.malek@rogers.com comes up when one searches for “AgentJags.” This is curious because emails leaked from Ashley Madison’s then-CEO Biderman show that Eric Malek from Toronto was the Ashley Madison employee who initially recommended Bloom for the PHP developer job.

According to DomainTools.com, Eric.Malek@rogers.com was used to register the domain devjobs.ca, which previously advertised “the most exciting developer jobs in Canada, delivered to you weekly.” Constella says eric.malek@rogers.com also had an account at Abusewith[.]us — under the nickname “Jags.”

Biderman’s email records show Eric Malek was also a PHP developer for Ashley Madison, and that he was hired into this position just a few months before Bloom — on Sept. 2, 2014. The CEO’s leaked emails show Eric Malek resigned from his developer position at Ashley Madison on June 19, 2015.

“Please note that Eric Malek has resigned from this position with Avid and his last day will be June 19th,” read a June 5, 2015 email from ALM’s HR director. “He is resigning to deal with some personal issues which include health issues. Because he is not sure how much time it will take to resolve, he is not requesting a leave of absence (his time off will be indefinite). Overall, he likes the company and plans to reach out to Trevor or I when the issues are resolved to see what is available at that time.”

A follow-up email from Biderman demanded, “want to know where he’s truly going….,” and it’s unclear whether there was friction with Malek’s departure. But ALM General Counsel Avi Weisman replied indicating that Malek probably would not sign an “Exit Acknowledgment Form” prior to leaving, and that the company had unanswered questions for Malek.

“Aneka should dig during exit interview,” Weisman wrote. “Let’s see if he balks at signing the Acknowledgment.”

Bloom’s departure notice from Ashley Madison’s HR person, dated June 23, 2015, read:

“Please note that Jordan Bloom has resigned from his position as PHP Developer with Avid. He is leaving for personal reasons. He has a neck issue that will require surgery in the upcoming months and because of his medical appointment schedule and the pain he is experiencing he can no longer commit to a full-time schedule. He may pick up contract work until he is back to 100%.”

A follow-up note to Biderman about this announcement read:

“Note that he has disclosed that he is independently wealthy so he can get by without FT work until he is on the mend. He has signed the Exit Acknowledgement Form already without issue. He also says he would consider reapplying to Avid in the future if we have opportunities available at that time.”

Perhaps Mr. Bloom hurt his neck from craning it around blind spots in his Lamborghini. Maybe it was from a bad scuba outing. Whatever the pain in Bloom’s neck was, it didn’t stop him from launching himself fully into LeakedSource[.]com, which was registered roughly one month after the Impact Team leaked data on 37 million Ashley Madison accounts.

Mr. Malek declined a request for comment. A now-deleted LinkedIn profile for Malek from December 2018 listed him as a “technical recruiter” from Toronto who also attended Mr. Bloom’s alma mater — York University. That resume did not mention Mr. Malek’s brief stint as a PHP developer at Ashley Madison.

“Developer, entrepreneur, and now technical recruiter of the most uncommon variety!” Mr. Malek’s LinkedIn profile enthused. “Are you a developer, or other technical specialist, interested in working with a recruiter who can properly understand your concerns and aspirations, technical, environmental and financial? Don’t settle for a ‘hack’; this is your career, let’s do it right! Connect with me on LinkedIn. Note: If you are not a resident of Canada/Toronto, I cannot help you.”

INTERVIEW WITH BLOOM

Mr. Bloom told KrebsOnSecurity he had no role in harming or hacking Ashley Madison. Bloom validated his identity by responding at one of the email addresses mentioned above, and agreed to field questions so long as KrebsOnSecurity agreed to publish our email conversation in full (PDF).

Bloom said Mr. Malek did recommend him for the Ashley Madison job, but that Mr. Malek also received a $5,000 referral bonus for doing so. Given Mr. Malek’s stated role as a technical recruiter, it seems likely he also recommended several other employees to Ashley Madison.

Bloom was asked whether anyone at the RCMP, Ashley Madison or any authority anywhere ever questioned him in connection with the July 2015 hack of Ashley Madison. He replied that he was called once by someone claiming to be from the Toronto Police Service asking if he knew anything about the Ashley Madison hack.

“The AM situation was not something they pursued according to the RCMP disclosure,” Bloom wrote. “Learning about the RCMP’s most advanced cyber investigative techniques and capabilities was very interesting though. I was eventually told information by a third party which included knowledge that law enforcement effectively knew who the hacker was, but didn’t have enough evidence to proceed with a case. That is the extent of my involvement with any authorities.”

As to his company’s guilty plea for operating LeakedSource, Bloom maintains that the judge at his preliminary inquiry found that even if everything the Canadian government alleged was true it would not constitute a violation of any law in Canada with respect the charges the RCMP leveled against him, which included unauthorized use of a computer and “mischief to data.”

“In Canada at the lower court level we are allowed to possess stolen information and manipulate our copies of them as we please,” Bloom said. “The judge however decided that a trial was required to determine whether any activities of mine were reckless, as the other qualifier of intentionally criminal didn’t apply. I will note here that nothing I was accused of doing would have been illegal if done in the United States of America according to their District Attorney. +1 for free speech in America vs freedom of expression in Canada.”

“Shortly after their having most of their case thrown out, the Government proposed an offer during a closed door meeting where they would drop all charges against me, provide full and complete personal immunity, and in exchange the Corporation which has since been dissolved would plead guilty,” Bloom continued. “The Corporation would also pay a modest fine.”

Bloom said he left Ashley Madison because he was bored, but he acknowledged starting LeakedSource partly in response to the Ashley Madison hack.

“I intended to leverage my gaming connections to get into security work including for other private servers such as Minecraft communities and others,” Bloom said. “After months of asking management for more interesting tasks, I became bored. Some days I had virtually nothing to do except spin in my chair so I would browse the source code for security holes to fix because I found it enjoyable.”

“I believe the decision to start LS [LeakedSource] was partly inspired by the AM hack itself, and the large number of people from a former friend group messaging me asking if XYZ person was in the leak after I revealed to them that I downloaded a copy and had the ability to browse it,” Bloom continued. “LS was never my idea – I was just a builder, and the only Canadian. In other countries it was never thought to be illegal on closer examination of their laws.”

Bloom said he still considers himself independently wealthy, and that still has the lime green Lambo. But he said he’s currently unemployed and can’t seem to land a job in what he views as his most promising career path: Information security.

“As I’m sure you’re aware, having negative media attention associated with alleged (key word) criminal activity can have a detrimental effect on employment, banking and relationships,” Bloom wrote. “I have no current interest in being a business owner, nor do I have any useful business ideas to be honest. I was and am interested in interesting Information Security/programming work but it’s too large of a risk for any business to hire someone who was formerly accused of a crime.”

If you liked this story, please consider reading the first two pieces in this series:

SEO Expert Hired and Fired by Ashley Madison Turned on Company, Promising Revenge

Top Suspect in 2015 Ashley Madison Hack Committed Suicide in 2014

SEO Expert Hired and Fired By Ashley Madison Turned on Company, Promising Revenge

[This is Part II of a story published here last week on reporting that went into a new Hulu documentary series on the 2015 Ashley Madison hack.]

It was around 9 p.m. on Sunday, July 19, when I received a message through the contact form on KrebsOnSecurity.com that the marital infidelity website AshleyMadison.com had been hacked. The message contained links to confidential Ashley Madison documents, and included a manifesto that said a hacker group calling itself the Impact Team was prepared to leak data on all 37 million users unless Ashley Madison and a sister property voluntarily closed down within 30 days.

The message included links to files containing highly sensitive information, including snippets of leaked user account data, maps of internal AshleyMadison company servers, employee network account information, company bank account data and salary information.

A master employee contact list was among the documents leaked that evening. Helpfully, it included the cell phone number for Noel Biderman, then the CEO of Ashley Madison parent firm Avid Life Media (ALM). To my everlasting surprise, Biderman answered on the first ring and acknowledged they’d been hacked without even waiting to be asked.

“We’re on the doorstep of [confirming] who we believe is the culprit, and unfortunately that may have triggered this mass publication,” Biderman told me on July 19, just minutes before I published the first known public report about the breach. “I’ve got their profile right in front of me, all their work credentials. It was definitely a person here that was not an employee but certainly had touched our technical services.”

On Aug 18, 2015, the Impact Team posted a “Time’s up!” message online, along with links to 60 gigabytes of Ashley Madison user data. The data leak led to the public shaming and extortion of many Ashley Madison users, and to at least two suicides. Many other users lost their jobs or their marriages. To this day, nobody has been charged in the hack, and incredibly Ashley Madison remains a thriving company.

THE CHAOS MAKER

The former employee that Biderman undoubtedly had in mind on July 19, 2015 was William Brewster Harrison, a self-described expert in search engine optimization (SEO) tricks that are designed to help websites increase their rankings for various keywords in Google and other search engines.

It is evident that Harrison was Biderman’s top suspect immediately after the breach became public because — in addition to releasing data on 37 million users a month later in August 2015 — the hackers also dumped three years worth of email they stole from Biderman. And Biderman’s inbox is full of messages about hate-filled personal attacks from Harrison.

A Native of Northern Virginia, Harrison eventually settled in North Carolina, had a son with his then-wife, and started a fence-building business. ALM hired Harrison in March 2010 to promote its various adult brands online, and it is clear that one of his roles was creating and maintaining female profiles on Ashley Madison, and creating blogs that were made to look like they were written by women who’d just joined Ashley Madison.

It appears Harrison was working as an affiliate of Ashley Madison prior to his official employment with the company, which suggests that Harrison had already demonstrated he could drive signups to the service and help improve its standing in the search engine rankings.

What is less clear is whether anyone at ALM ever performed a basic background check on Harrison before hiring him. Because if they had, the results almost certainly would have given them pause. Virginia prosecutors charged the young 20-something Harrison with a series of misdemeanors, including trespassing, unlawful entry, drunk in public, and making obscene phone calls.

In 2008, North Carolina authorities charged Harrison with criminal extortion, a case that was transferred to South Carolina before ultimately being dismissed. In December 2009, Harrison faced charges of false imprisonment, charges that were also dropped by the local district attorney.

By the time Ashley Madison officially hired him, Harrison’s life was falling apart. His fence business had failed, and he’d just filed for bankruptcy. Also, his marriage had soured, and after a new arrest for driving under the influence, he was in danger of getting divorced, losing access to his son, and/or going to jail.

It also seems likely that nobody at ALM bothered to look at the dozens of domain names registered to Harrison’s various Vistomail.com email addresses, because had they done so they likely would have noticed two things.

One is that Harrison had a history of creating websites to lambaste companies he didn’t like, or that he believed had slighted him or his family in some way. Some of these websites included content that defamed and doxed executives, such as bash-a-business[.]com, google-your-business[.]com, contact-a-ceo[.]com, lowes-is-a-cancer[.]com (according to Harrison, the home improvement chain once employed his wife).

A background check on Harrison’s online footprint also would have revealed he was a self-styled rapper who claimed to be an active menace to corporate America. Harrison’s website lyrical-gangsta[.]com included a number of works, such as “Slim Thug — I Run — Remix Spoof,” which are replete with menacing words for unnamed corporate executives:

[HOOK]
I surf the net all night n day (the web love thug)
cuz I still surf the net all night n day
yuhh I type for my mind, got smart for my ego
still running circles round them, what’s good?
cuz I still surf, the net all night n day,
I cant stay away.

They don’t make to [sic] many hackers like me
bonafide hustler certified G
still pumpin’ the TOP 10 results
if you got the right dough!
think the results are fake? sucka Google ME
smarter than executives, bigger then Wal-Mart
Nelly strugglin’ with the fact that I’m #1 NOW
street boys know me, ain’t nuttin’ new
about to make my mill, with an all new crew
I-95 execs don’t know what to do, or where to go
watchin them stocks evaporate all their dough
I already left the hood, got up off the streets
its in my blood im a gangsta till Im deceased

moving lumber for money or typin’ in a zone
all night hackin’ till 6 in the mornin
that shit im focusin’ on, stronger then cologne
you can prolly smell the jealousy
through your LCD screen
if you still broke– better work for some green
called them Fortune execs on that legal bluff
cuz the Feds busy raidin other stuff
Imma run the Net til im six feet under
I’m a leave my mark — no reason to wonder
(Yea Yea)

The same theme appears in another rap (“The Hacker Backstage”) penned by Harrison’s rapper alter ego — “Chaos Dog:”

…this hacker was born to write
bust off the rhymes and watch em take flight
you know all about them corporate jets
and handing out pinkslips without regrets
oversized companies are the problem

well, I’ve got a solution
It’s called good ol’ fashioned retribution
file bankruptcy, boycott you like Boston colonists
Corporate America cant stop this Eminem style columnist
2pac would have honored my style
Im the next generation of hacker inspiration
Americans don’t want a corporate nation
All that DOW Jones shit is a dying sensation

In addition to pimping Ashley Madison with fake profiles and phony user blogs, it appears Harrison also went after the company’s enemies during the brief time he was an employee. As noted in Part I of this story, Harrison used multiple pseudonymous Vistomail.com email addresses to harass the owners of AshleyMadisonSucks[.]com into selling or shutting down the site.

When the owner of AshleyMadisonSucks[.]com refused to sell the domain, he and his then-girlfriend were subject to an unrelenting campaign of online harassment and blackmail. It now appears those attacks were perpetrated by Harrison, who sent emails from different accounts at the free email service Vistomail pretending to be the domain owner, his then-girlfriend and their friends. Harrison even went after the domain owner’s lawyer and wife, listing them both on his Contact-A-CEO[.]com website.

TURNABOUT IS FAIR PLAY

Things started going sideways for Ashley Madison when Harrison’s employment contract was terminated in November 2011. The leaked emails do not explain why Harrison was fired, but his mercurial temperament likely played a major role. According to Harrison, it was because he had expressed some moral reservations with certain aspects of his duties, although he was not specific on that point and none of this could be confirmed.

Shortly after Harrison was fired, the company’s executives began noticing that Google was auto-completing the words “Jew” and “Jewish” whenever someone searched for Biderman’s name. The results returned when one accepted Google’s recommended search at the time filled the first page with links to Stormfront, a far-right, neo-Nazi hate group. The company strongly suspected someone was using underhanded SEO techniques to slander and attack its CEO.

In July 2022, KrebsOnSecurity published a retrospective on the 2015 Ashley Madison breach which found that Biderman had become the subject of increasing ire from members of Stormfront and other extremists groups in the years leading up to the hack. According to the neo-Nazi groups, Biderman was a worthy target of their harassment not just because he was a successful Jewish CEO, but also because his company was hellbent on destroying Christian morals and families.

Biderman’s leaked emails show that in February 2012 he hired Brian Cuban — the attorney brother of Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and one the main “sharks” on the ABC reality television series Shark Tank. Through Cuban, Ashley Madison appealed their case to both Google and to the Anti-Defamation League, but neither was apparently able or willing to help.

Also in early January 2012, Biderman and other Ashley Madison executives found themselves inundated with anonymous Vistomail.com emails that were replete with profanity and slurs against Jews. Although he used fake names and email addresses, Harrison made little effort to hide his identity in several of these nastygrams.

One particularly ugly message from Harrison even included a link to a Youtube video he’d put online of his young son playing basketball for a school team. That Youtube video was included in an email wherein Harrison – then separated from his wife — lamented all the hours he spent working for Ashley Madison up in Canada instead of spending time with his son.

Harrison then turned to making threatening phone calls to Ashley Madison executives. In one incident in March 2012, Harrison called the company’s former director of Human Resources using a caller ID spoofing service to make it look like he was calling from inside the building.

ALM’s lawyers contacted the Toronto police in response to Harrison’s harassment.

“For Will to have disguised his phone number as Mark’s strongly suggest he has hacked my email, legal counsel for the opposing side in a perceived legal dispute,” ALM VP and general counsel Mike Dacks wrote in a letter to a detective at the Toronto Police. “Over the months of his many hundreds of emails he alluded a number of times to undertaking cyberattacks against us and this was noted in my original report to police.”

Based on the exchanges in Bidernman’s inbox it appears those appeals to the Toronto authorities were successful in having Harrison barred from being able to enter Canada.

ALM also contacted a detective in Harrison’s home county in North Carolina. But when the local police paid a visit to Harrison’s home to follow up on the harassment complaints, Harrison fled out his back porch, injuring himself after jumping off the second-story deck.

It is unclear if the police ever succeeded in interviewing Harrison in response to the harassment complaints from ALM. The Raleigh police officer contacted by ALM did not respond to requests for information. But the visit from the local cops only seemed to embolden and anger Harrison even more, and Biderman’s emails indicate the harassment continued after this incident.

HUMAN DECOYS

Then in August 2012, the former sex worker turned blogger and activist Maggie McNeill published screenshots from an internal system that Ashley Madison used called the “Human Decoy Interface,” which was a fancy way of describing a system built to manage phony female accounts on the service.

The screenshots appeared to show that a great many female accounts were in fact bots designed to bring in paying customers. Ashley Madison was always free to join, but users had to pay if they wished to chat directly with other users.

Although Harrison had been fired nearly a year earlier, Biderman’s leaked emails show that Harrison’s access to Ashley Madison’s internal tools wasn’t revoked until after the screenshots were posted online and the company began reviewing which employee accounts had access to the Human Decoy Interface.

“Who or what is asdfdfsda@asdf.com?,” Biderman asked, after being sent a list of nine email addresses.

“It appears to be the email address Will used for his profiles,” the IT director replied.

“And his access was never shut off until today?,” asked the company’s general counsel Mike Dacks.

TRUTH BOMBS

Biderman’s leaked emails suggest that Harrison stopped his harassment campaign sometime after 2012. A decade later, KrebsOnSecurity sought to track down and interview Harrison. Finding nobody at his former addresses and phone numbers in North Carolina, KrebsOnSecurity wound up speaking with Will’s stepmother, who lives with Will’s dad in Northern Virginia and asked that her name not be used in this story.

Will’s stepmom quickly dropped two big truth bombs after patiently listening to my spiel about why I was calling and looking for Mr. Harrison. The first was that Will was brought up Jewish, although he did not practice the faith: A local rabbi and friend of the family gave the service at Will’s funeral in 2014.

She also shared that her stepson had killed himself in 2014, shooting himself in the head with a handgun. Will’s mother discovered his body.

“Will committed suicide in March 2014,” Will’s stepmother shared. “I’ve heard all those stories you just mentioned. Will was severely mentally ill. He was probably as close to a sociopath as I can imagine anyone being. He was also a paranoid schizophrenic who wouldn’t take his medication.”

William B. Harrison died on March 5, 2014, nearly 16 months before The Impact Team announced they’d hacked Ashley Madison.

Will’s stepmom said she constantly felt physically threatened when Will was around. But she had trouble believing that her stepson was a raging anti-Semite. She also said she thought the timing of Will’s suicide effectively ruled him out as a suspect in the 2015 Ashley Madison hack.

“Considering the date of death, I’m not sure if he’s your guy,” she offered toward the end of our conversation.

[There is one silver lining to Will Harrison’s otherwise sad tale: His widow has since remarried, and her new husband agreed to adopt their son as his own.]

ANALYSIS

Does Harrison’s untimely death rule him out as a suspect, as his stepmom suggested? This remains an open question. In a parting email to Biderman in late 2012, Harrison signed his real name and said he was leaving, but not going away.

“So good luck, I’m sure we’ll talk again soon, but for now, I’ve got better things in the oven,” Harrison wrote. “Just remember I outsmarted you last time and I will outsmart you and out maneuver you this time too, by keeping myself far far away from the action and just enjoying the sideline view, cheering for the opposition.”

Nothing in the leaked Biderman emails suggests that Ashley Madison did much to revamp the security of its computer systems in the wake of Harrison’s departure and subsequent campaign of harassment — apart from removing an administrator account of his a year after he’d already left the company.

KrebsOnSecurity found nothing in Harrison’s extensive domain history suggesting he had any real malicious hacking skills. But given the clientele that typically employed his skills — the adult entertainment industry — it seems likely Harrison was at least conversant in the dark arts of “Black SEO,” which involves using underhanded or else downright illegal methods to game search engine results.

Armed with such experience, it would not have been difficult for Harrison to have worked out a way to maintain access to working administrator accounts at Ashley Madison. If that in fact did happen, it would have been trivial for him to sell or give those credentials to someone else.

Or to something else. Like Nazi groups. As KrebsOnSecurity reported last year, in the six months leading up to the July 2015 hack, Ashley Madison and Biderman became a frequent subject of derision across multiple neo-Nazi websites.

On Jan. 14, 2015, a member of the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront posted a lively thread about Ashley Madison in the general discussion area titled, “Jewish owned dating website promoting adultery.”

On July 3, 2015, Andrew Anglin, the editor of the alt-right publication Daily Stormer, posted excerpts about Biderman from a story titled, “Jewish Hyper-Sexualization of Western Culture,” which referred to Biderman as the “Jewish King of Infidelity.”

On July 10, a mocking montage of Biderman photos with racist captions was posted to the extremist website Vanguard News Network, as part of a thread called “Jews normalize sexual perversion.”

Some readers have suggested that the data leaked by the Impact Team could have originally been stolen by Harrison. But that timeline does not add up given what we know about the hack. For one thing, the financial transaction records leaked from Ashley Madison show charges up until mid-2015. Also, the final message in the archive of Biderman’s stolen emails was dated July 7, 2015 — almost two weeks before the Impact Team would announce their hack.

Whoever hacked Ashley Madison clearly wanted to disrupt the company as a business, and disgrace its CEO as the endgame. The Impact Team’s intrusion struck just as Ashley Madison’s parent was preparing go public with an initial public offering (IPO) for investors. Also, the hackers stated that while they stole all employee emails, they were only interested in leaking Biderman’s.

Also, the Impact Team had to know that ALM would never comply with their demands to dismantle Ashley Madison and Established Men. In 2014, ALM reported revenues of $115 million. There was little chance the company was going to shut down some of its biggest money machines.

Hence, it appears the Impact Team’s goal all along was to create prodigious amounts of drama and tension by announcing the hack of a major cheating website, and then let that drama play out over the next few months as millions of exposed Ashley Madison users freaked out and became the targets of extortion attacks and public shaming.

After the Impact Team released Biderman’s email archives, several media outlets pounced on salacious exchanges in those messages as supposed proof he had carried on multiple affairs. Biderman resigned as CEO of Ashley Madison on Aug. 28, 2015.

Complicating things further, it appears more than one malicious party may have gained access to Ashley’s Madison’s network in 2015 or possibly earlier. Cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 recorded a series of posts by a user with the handle “Brutium” on the Russian-language cybercrime forum Antichat between 2014 and 2016.

Brutium routinely advertised the sale of large, hacked databases, and on Jan. 24, 2015, this user posted a thread offering to sell data on 32 million Ashley Madison users. However, there is no indication whether anyone purchased the information. Brutium’s profile has since been removed from the Antichat forum.

I realize this ending may be unsatisfying for many readers, as it is for me. The story I wrote in 2015 about the Ashley Madison hack is still the biggest scoop I’ve published here (in terms of traffic), yet it remains perhaps the single most frustrating investigation I’ve ever pursued. But my hunch is that there is still more to this story that has yet to unfold.

Google Suspends Chinese E-Commerce App Pinduoduo Over Malware

Google says it has suspended the app for the Chinese e-commerce giant Pinduoduo after malware was found in versions of the software. The move comes just weeks after Chinese security researchers published an analysis suggesting the popular e-commerce app sought to seize total control over affected devices by exploiting multiple security vulnerabilities in a variety of Android-based smartphones.

In November 2022, researchers at Google’s Project Zero warned about active attacks on Samsung mobile phones which chained together three security vulnerabilities that Samsung patched in March 2021, and which would have allowed an app to add or read any files on the device.

Google said it believes the exploit chain for Samsung devices belonged to a “commercial surveillance vendor,” without elaborating further. The highly technical writeup also did not name the malicious app in question.

On Feb. 28, 2023, researchers at the Chinese security firm DarkNavy published a blog post purporting to show evidence that a major Chinese ecommerce company’s app was using this same three-exploit chain to read user data stored by other apps on the affected device, and to make its app nearly impossible to remove.

DarkNavy likewise did not name the app they said was responsible for the attacks. In fact, the researchers took care to redact the name of the app from multiple code screenshots published in their writeup. DarkNavy did not respond to requests for clarification.

“At present, a large number of end users have complained on multiple social platforms,” reads a translated version of the DarkNavy blog post. “The app has problems such as inexplicable installation, privacy leakage, and inability to uninstall.”

Update, March 27, 1:24 p.m. ET: Dan Goodin over at Ars Technica has an important update on this story that indicates the Pinduoduo code was exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Android — not Samsung. From that piece:

“A preliminary analysis by Lookout found that at least two off-Play versions of Pinduoduo for Android exploited CVE-2023-20963, the tracking number for an Android vulnerability Google patched in updates that became available to end users two weeks ago. This privilege-escalation flaw, which was exploited prior to Google’s disclosure, allowed the app to perform operations with elevated privileges. The app used these privileges to download code from a developer-designated site and run it within a privileged environment.

“The malicious apps represent “a very sophisticated attack for an app-based malware,” Christoph Hebeisen, one of three Lookout researchers who analyzed the file, wrote in an email. “In recent years, exploits have not usually been seen in the context of mass-distributed apps. Given the extremely intrusive nature of such sophisticated app-based malware, this is an important threat mobile users need to protect against.”

On March 3, 2023, a denizen of the now-defunct cybercrime community BreachForums posted a thread which noted that a unique component of the malicious app code highlighted by DarkNavy also was found in the ecommerce application whose name was apparently redacted from the DarkNavy analysis: Pinduoduo.

On March 4, 2023, e-commerce expert Liu Huafang posted on the Chinese social media network Weibo that Pinduoduo’s app was using security vulnerabilities to gain market share by stealing user data from its competitors. That Weibo post has since been deleted.

On March 7, the newly created Github account Davinci1010 published a technical analysis claiming that until recently Pinduoduo’s source code included a “backdoor,” a hacking term used to describe code that allows an adversary to remotely and secretly connect to a compromised system at will.

That analysis includes links to archived versions of Pinduoduo’s app released before March 5 (version 6.50 and lower), which is when Davinci1010 says a new version of the app removed the malicious code.

Pinduoduo has not yet responded to requests for comment. Pinduoduo parent company PDD Holdings told Reuters Google has not shared details about why it suspended the app.

The company told CNN that it strongly rejects “the speculation and accusation that Pinduoduo app is malicious just from a generic and non-conclusive response from Google,” and said there were “several apps that have been suspended from Google Play at the same time.”

Pinduoduo is among China’s most popular e-commerce platforms, boasting approximately 900 million monthly active users.

Most of the news coverage of Google’s move against Pinduoduo emphasizes that the malware was found in versions of the Pinduoduo app available outside of Google’s app store — Google Play.

“Off-Play versions of this app that have been found to contain malware have been enforced on via Google Play Protect,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to Reuters, adding that the Play version of the app has been suspended for security concerns.

However, Google Play is not available to consumers in China. As a result, the app will still be available via other mobile app stores catering to the Chinese market — including those operated by Huawei, Oppo, Tencent and VIVO.

Google said its ban did not affect the PDD Holdings app Temu, which is an online shopping platform in the United States. According to The Washington Post, four of the Apple App Store’s 10 most-downloaded free apps are owned by Chinese companies, including Temu and the social media network TikTok.

The Pinduoduo suspension comes as lawmakers in Congress this week are gearing up to grill the CEO of TikTok over national security concerns. TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, said last month that it now has roughly 150 million monthly active users in the United States.

A new cybersecurity strategy released earlier this month by the Biden administration singled out China as the greatest cyber threat to the U.S. and Western interests. The strategy says China now presents the “broadest, most active, and most persistent threat to both government and private sector networks,” and says China is “the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do so.”

Why You Should Opt Out of Sharing Data With Your Mobile Provider

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.

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

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.

T-MOBILE

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

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.

THE CASE FOR OPTING OUT

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.

Two U.S. Men Charged in 2022 Hacking of DEA Portal

Two U.S. men have been charged with hacking into a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) online portal that taps into 16 different federal law enforcement databases. Both are alleged to be part of a larger criminal organization that specializes in using fake emergency data requests from compromised police and government email accounts to publicly threaten and extort their victims.

Prosecutors for the Eastern District of New York today unsealed criminal complaints against Sagar Steven Singh — a.k.a “Weep” — a 19-year-old from Pawtucket, Rhode Island; and Nicholas Ceraolo, 25, of Queens, NY, who allegedly went by the handles “Convict” and “Ominus.”

The Justice Department says Singh and Ceraolo belong to a group of cybercriminals known to its members as “ViLE,” who specialize in obtaining personal information about third-party victims, which they then use to harass, threaten or extort the victims, a practice known as “doxing.”

“ViLE is collaborative, and the members routinely share tactics and illicitly obtained information with each other,” prosecutors charged.

The government alleges the defendants and other members of ViLE use various methods to obtain victims’ personal information, including:

-tricking customer service employees;
-submitting fraudulent legal process to social media companies to elicit users’ registration information;
-co-opting and corrupting corporate insiders;
-searching public and private online databases;
-accessing a nonpublic United States government database without authorization
-unlawfully using official email accounts belonging to other countries.

The complaint says once they obtained a victim’s information, Singh and Ceraolo would post the information in an online forum. The government refers to this community only as “Forum-1,” saying that it is administered by the leader of ViLE (referenced in the complaint as “CC-1”).

“Victims are extorted into paying CC-1 to have their information removed from Forum-1,” prosecutors allege. “Singh also uses the threat of revealing personal information to extort victims into giving him access to their social media accounts, which Singh then resells.”

Sources tell KrebsOnSecurity in addition to being members of ViLE, both Weep and Ominous are or were staff members for Doxbin, a highly toxic online community that provides a forum for digging up personal information on people and posting it publicly. This is supported by the Doxbin administrator’s claimed responsibility for a high-profile intrusion at the DEA’s law enforcement data sharing portal last year.

The government alleges that on May 7, 2022, Singh used stolen credentials to log into a U.S. federal government portal without authorization. The complaint doesn’t specify which agency portal was hacked, but it does state that the portal included access to law enforcement databases that track narcotics seizures in the United States.

On May 12, 2022, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that hackers had gained access to a DEA portal that taps into 16 different federal law enforcement databases. As reported at the time, the inside scoop on how that hack went down came from KT, the current administrator of the Doxbin and the individual referenced in the government’s complaint as “CC-1.”

Indeed, a screenshot of the ViLE group website includes the group’s official roster, which lists KT at the top, followed by Weep and Ominus.

In March 2022, KrebsOnSecurity warned that multiple cybercrime groups were finding success with fraudulent Emergency Data Requests (EDRs), wherein the hackers use compromised police and government email accounts to file warrantless data requests with social media firms and mobile telephony providers, attesting that the information being requested can’t wait for a warrant because it relates to an urgent matter of life and death.

That story showed that the previous owner of the Doxbin also was part of a teenage hacking group that specialized in offering fake EDRs as a service on the dark web.

Prosecutors say they tied Singh to the government portal hack because he connected to it from an Internet address that he’d previously used to access a social media account registered in his name. When they raided Singh’s residence on Sept. 8, 2022 and seized his devices, investigators with Homeland Security found a cellular phone and laptop that allegedly “contained extensive evidence of access to the Portal.”

The complaint alleges that between February 2022 and May 2022, Ceraolo used an official email account belonging to a Bangladeshi police official to pose as a police officer in communication with U.S.-based social media platforms.

“In these communications, Ceraolo requested personal information about users of these platforms, under the false pretense that the users were committing crimes or in life-threatening danger,” the complaint states.

For example, on or about March 13, 2022, Ceraolo allegedly used the Bangladeshi police email account to falsely claim that the target of the EDR had sent bomb threats, distributed child pornography and threatened officials of the Bangladeshi government.

On or about May 9, 2022, the government says, Singh sent a friend screenshots of text messages between himself and someone he had doxed on the Doxbin and was trying to extort for their Instagram handle. The data included the victim’s Social Security number, driver’s license number, cellphone number, and home address.

“Look familiar?” Singh allegedly wrote to the victim. “You’re gonna comply to me if you don’t want anything negative to happen to your parents. . . I have every detail involving your parents . . . allowing me to do whatever I desire to them in malicious ways.”

Neither of the defendants could be immediately reached for comment. KT, the current administrator of Doxbin, declined a request for comment on the charges.

Ceraolo is a self-described security researcher who has been credited in many news stories over the years with discovering security vulnerabilities at AT&T, T-Mobile, Comcast and Cox Communications.

Ceraolo’s stated partner in most of these discoveries — a 30-year-old Connecticut man named Ryan “Phobia” Stevenson — was charged in 2019 with being part of a group that stole millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrencies via SIM-swapping, a crime that involves tricking a mobile provider into routing a target’s calls and text messages to another device.

In 2018, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how Stevenson earned bug bounty rewards and public recognition from top telecom companies for finding and reporting security holes in their websites, all the while secretly peddling those same vulnerabilities to cybercriminals.

According to the Justice Department, if convicted Ceraolo faces up to 20 years’ imprisonment for conspiracy to commit wire fraud; both Ceraolo and Singh face five years’ imprisonment for conspiracy to commit computer intrusions.

A copy of the complaint against Ceraolo and Singh is here (PDF).

Hackers Claim They Breached T-Mobile More Than 100 Times in 2022

Three different cybercriminal groups claimed access to internal networks at communications giant T-Mobile in more than 100 separate incidents throughout 2022, new data suggests. In each case, the goal of the attackers was the same: Phish T-Mobile employees for access to internal company tools, and then convert that access into a cybercrime service that could be hired to divert any T-Mobile user’s text messages and phone calls to another device.

The conclusions above are based on an extensive analysis of Telegram chat logs from three distinct cybercrime groups or actors that have been identified by security researchers as particularly active in and effective at “SIM-swapping,” which involves temporarily seizing control over a target’s mobile phone number.

Countless websites and online services use SMS text messages for both password resets and multi-factor authentication. This means that stealing someone’s phone number often can let cybercriminals hijack the target’s entire digital life in short order — including access to any financial, email and social media accounts tied to that phone number.

All three SIM-swapping entities that were tracked for this story remain active in 2023, and they all conduct business in open channels on the instant messaging platform Telegram. KrebsOnSecurity is not naming those channels or groups here because they will simply migrate to more private servers if exposed publicly, and for now those servers remain a useful source of intelligence about their activities.

Each advertises their claimed access to T-Mobile systems in a similar way. At a minimum, every SIM-swapping opportunity is announced with a brief “Tmobile up!” or “Tmo up!” message to channel participants. Other information in the announcements includes the price for a single SIM-swap request, and the handle of the person who takes the payment and information about the targeted subscriber.

The information required from the customer of the SIM-swapping service includes the target’s phone number, and the serial number tied to the new SIM card that will be used to receive text messages and phone calls from the hijacked phone number.

Initially, the goal of this project was to count how many times each entity claimed access to T-Mobile throughout 2022, by cataloging the various “Tmo up!” posts from each day and working backwards from Dec. 31, 2022.

But by the time we got to claims made in the middle of May 2022, completing the rest of the year’s timeline seemed unnecessary. The tally shows that in the last seven-and-a-half months of 2022, these groups collectively made SIM-swapping claims against T-Mobile on 104 separate days — often with multiple groups claiming access on the same days.

KrebsOnSecurity shared a large amount of data gathered for this story with T-Mobile. The company declined to confirm or deny any of these claimed intrusions. But in a written statement, T-Mobile said this type of activity affects the entire wireless industry.

“And we are constantly working to fight against it,” the statement reads. “We have continued to drive enhancements that further protect against unauthorized access, including enhancing multi-factor authentication controls, hardening environments, limiting access to data, apps or services, and more. We are also focused on gathering threat intelligence data, like what you have shared, to help further strengthen these ongoing efforts.”

TMO UP!

While it is true that each of these cybercriminal actors periodically offer SIM-swapping services for other mobile phone providers — including AT&T, Verizon and smaller carriers — those solicitations appear far less frequently in these group chats than T-Mobile swap offers. And when those offers do materialize, they are considerably more expensive.

The prices advertised for a SIM-swap against T-Mobile customers in the latter half of 2022 ranged between USD $1,000 and $1,500, while SIM-swaps offered against AT&T and Verizon customers often cost well more than twice that amount.

To be clear, KrebsOnSecurity is not aware of specific SIM-swapping incidents tied to any of these breach claims. However, the vast majority of advertisements for SIM-swapping claims against T-Mobile tracked in this story had two things in common that set them apart from random SIM-swapping ads on Telegram.

First, they included an offer to use a mutually trusted “middleman” or escrow provider for the transaction (to protect either party from getting scammed). More importantly, the cybercriminal handles that were posting ads for SIM-swapping opportunities from these groups generally did so on a daily or near-daily basis — often teasing their upcoming swap events in the hours before posting a “Tmo up!” message announcement.

In other words, if the crooks offering these SIM-swapping services were ripping off their customers or claiming to have access that they didn’t, this would be almost immediately obvious from the responses of the more seasoned and serious cybercriminals in the same chat channel.

There are plenty of people on Telegram claiming to have SIM-swap access at major telecommunications firms, but a great many such offers are simply four-figure scams, and any pretenders on this front are soon identified and banned (if not worse).

One of the groups that reliably posted “Tmo up!” messages to announce SIM-swap availability against T-Mobile customers also reliably posted “Tmo down!” follow-up messages announcing exactly when their claimed access to T-Mobile employee tools was discovered and revoked by the mobile giant.

A review of the timestamps associated with this group’s incessant “Tmo up” and “Tmo down” posts indicates that while their claimed access to employee tools usually lasted less than an hour, in some cases that access apparently went undiscovered for several hours or even days.

TMO TOOLS

How could these SIM-swapping groups be gaining access to T-Mobile’s network as frequently as they claim? Peppered throughout the daily chit-chat on their Telegram channels are solicitations for people urgently needed to serve as “callers,” or those who can be hired to social engineer employees over the phone into navigating to a phishing website and entering their employee credentials.

Allison Nixon is chief research officer for the New York City-based cybersecurity firm Unit 221B. Nixon said these SIM-swapping groups will typically call employees on their mobile devices, pretend to be someone from the company’s IT department, and then try to get the person on the other end of the line to visit a phishing website that mimics the company’s employee login page.

Nixon argues that many people in the security community tend to discount the threat from voice phishing attacks as somehow “low tech” and “low probability” threats.

“I see it as not low-tech at all, because there are a lot of moving parts to phishing these days,” Nixon said. “You have the caller who has the employee on the line, and the person operating the phish kit who needs to spin it up and down fast enough so that it doesn’t get flagged by security companies. Then they have to get the employee on that phishing site and steal their credentials.”

In addition, she said, often there will be yet another co-conspirator whose job it is to use the stolen credentials and log into employee tools. That person may also need to figure out how to make their device pass “posture checks,” a form of device authentication that some companies use to verify that each login is coming only from employer-issued phones or laptops.

For aspiring criminals with little experience in scam calling, there are plenty of sample call transcripts available on these Telegram chat channels that walk one through how to impersonate an IT technician at the targeted company — and how to respond to pushback or skepticism from the employee. Here’s a snippet from one such tutorial that appeared recently in one of the SIM-swapping channels:

“Hello this is James calling from Metro IT department, how’s your day today?”

(yea im doing good, how r u)

i’m doing great, thank you for asking

i’m calling in regards to a ticket we got last week from you guys, saying you guys were having issues with the network connectivity which also interfered with [Microsoft] Edge, not letting you sign in or disconnecting you randomly. We haven’t received any updates to this ticket ever since it was created so that’s why I’m calling in just to see if there’s still an issue or not….”

TMO DOWN!

The TMO UP data referenced above, combined with comments from the SIM-swappers themselves, indicate that while many of their claimed accesses to T-Mobile tools in the middle of 2022 lasted hours on end, both the frequency and duration of these events began to steadily decrease as the year wore on.

T-Mobile declined to discuss what it may have done to combat these apparent intrusions last year. However, one of the groups began to complain loudly in late October 2022 that T-Mobile must have been doing something that was causing their phished access to employee tools to die very soon after they obtained it.

One group even remarked that they suspected T-Mobile’s security team had begun monitoring their chats.

Indeed, the timestamps associated with one group’s TMO UP/TMO DOWN notices show that their claimed access was often limited to less than 15 minutes throughout November and December of 2022.

Whatever the reason, the calendar graphic above clearly shows that the frequency of claimed access to T-Mobile decreased significantly across all three SIM-swapping groups in the waning weeks of 2022.

SECURITY KEYS

T-Mobile US reported revenues of nearly $80 billion last year. It currently employs more than 71,000 people in the United States, any one of whom can be a target for these phishers.

T-Mobile declined to answer questions about what it may be doing to beef up employee authentication. But Nicholas Weaver, a researcher and lecturer at University of California, Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute, said T-Mobile and all the major wireless providers should be requiring employees to use physical security keys for that second factor when logging into company resources.

“These breaches should not happen,” Weaver said. “Because T-Mobile should have long ago issued all employees security keys and switched to security keys for the second factor. And because security keys provably block this style of attack.”

The most commonly used security keys are inexpensive USB-based devices. A security key implements a form of multi-factor authentication known as Universal 2nd Factor (U2F), which allows the user to complete the login process simply by inserting the USB key and pressing a button on the device. The key works without the need for any special software drivers.

The allure of U2F devices for multi-factor authentication is that even if an employee who has enrolled a security key for authentication tries to log in at an impostor site, the company’s systems simply refuse to request the security key if the user isn’t on their employer’s legitimate website, and the login attempt fails. Thus, the second factor cannot be phished, either over the phone or Internet.

THE ROLE OF MINORS IN SIM-SWAPPING

Nixon said one confounding aspect of SIM-swapping is that these criminal groups tend to recruit teenagers to do their dirty work.

“A huge reason this problem has been allowed to spiral out of control is because children play such a prominent role in this form of breach,” Nixon said.

Nixon said SIM-swapping groups often advertise low-level jobs on places like Roblox and Minecraft, online games that are extremely popular with young adolescent males.

“Statistically speaking, that kind of recruiting is going to produce a lot of people who are underage,” she said. “They recruit children because they’re naive, you can get more out of them, and they have legal protections that other people over 18 don’t have.”

For example, she said, even when underage SIM-swappers are arrested, the offenders tend to go right back to committing the same crimes as soon as they’re released.

In January 2023, T-Mobile disclosed that a “bad actor” stole records on roughly 37 million current customers, including their name, billing address, email, phone number, date of birth, and T-Mobile account number.

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. That breach came to light after a hacker began selling the records on a cybercrime forum.

In the shadow of such mega-breaches, any damage from the continuous attacks by these SIM-swapping groups can seem insignificant by comparison. But Nixon says it’s a mistake to dismiss SIM-swapping as a low volume problem.

“Logistically, you may only be able to get a few dozen or a hundred SIM-swaps in a day, but you can pick any customer you want across their entire customer base,” she said. “Just because a targeted account takeover is low volume doesn’t mean it’s low risk. These guys have crews that go and identify people who are high net worth individuals and who have a lot to lose.”

Nixon said another aspect of SIM-swapping that causes cybersecurity defenders to dismiss the threat from these groups is the perception that they are full of low-skilled “script kiddies,” a derisive term used to describe novice hackers who rely mainly on point-and-click hacking tools.

“They underestimate these actors and say this person isn’t technically sophisticated,” she said. “But if you’re rolling around in millions worth of stolen crypto currency, you can buy that sophistication. I know for a fact some of these compromises were at the hands of these ‘script kiddies,’ but they’re not ripping off other people’s scripts so much as hiring people to make scripts for them. And they don’t care what gets the job done, as long as they get to steal the money.”

Experian Glitch Exposing Credit Files Lasted 47 Days

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.

New T-Mobile Breach Affects 37 Million Accounts

T-Mobile today disclosed a data breach affecting tens of millions of customer accounts, its second major data exposure in as many years. In a filing with federal regulators, T-Mobile said an investigation determined that someone abused its systems to harvest subscriber data tied to approximately 37 million current customer accounts.

In a filing today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, T-Mobile said a “bad actor” abused an application programming interface (API) to hoover up data on roughly 37 million current postpaid and prepaid customer accounts. The data stolen included customer name, billing address, email, phone number, date of birth, T-Mobile account number, as well as information on the number of customer lines and plan features.

APIs are essentially instructions that allow applications to access data and interact with web databases. But left improperly secured, these APIs can be leveraged by malicious actors to mass-harvest information stored in those databases. In October, mobile provider Optus disclosed that hackers abused a poorly secured API to steal data on 10 million customers in Australia.

T-Mobile said it first learned of the incident on Jan. 5, 2023, and that an investigation determined the bad actor started abusing the API beginning around Nov. 25, 2022. The company says it is in the process of notifying affected customers, and that no customer payment card data, passwords, Social Security numbers, driver’s license or other government ID numbers were exposed.

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. That breach came to light after a hacker began selling the records on a cybercrime forum.

Last year, T-Mobile agreed to pay $500 million to settle all class action lawsuits stemming from the 2021 breach. The company pledged to spend $150 million of that money toward beefing up its own cybersecurity.

In its filing with the SEC, T-Mobile suggested it was going to take years to fully realize the benefits of those cybersecurity improvements, even as it claimed that protecting customer data remains a top priority.

“As we have previously disclosed, in 2021, we commenced a substantial multi-year investment working with leading external cybersecurity experts to enhance our cybersecurity capabilities and transform our approach to cybersecurity,” the filing reads. “We have made substantial progress to date, and protecting our customers’ data remains a top priority.”

Despite this being the second major customer data spill in as many years, T-Mobile told the SEC the company does not expect this latest breach to have a material impact on its operations.

While that may seem like a daring thing to say in a data breach disclosure affecting a significant portion of your active customer base, consider that T-Mobile reported revenues of nearly $20 billion in the third quarter of 2022 alone. In that context, a few hundred million dollars every couple of years to make the class action lawyers go away is a drop in the bucket.

The settlement related to the 2021 breach says T-Mobile will make $350 million available to customers who file a claim. But here’s the catch: If you were affected by that 2021 breach and you haven’t filed a claim yet, please know that you have only three more days to do that.

If you were a T-Mobile customer affected by the 2021 incident, it is likely that T-Mobile has already made several efforts to notify you of your eligibility to file a claim, which includes a payout of at least $25, with the possibility of more for those who can document direct costs associated with the breach. OpenClassActions.com says the filing deadline is Jan. 23, 2023.

“If you opt for a cash payment you will receive an estimated $25.00,” the site explains. “If you reside in California, you will receive an estimated $100.00. Out of pocket losses can be reimbursed for up to $25,000.00. The amount that you claim from T-Mobile will be determined by the class action administrator based on how many people file a legitimate and timely claim form.”

There are currently no signs that hackers are selling this latest data haul from T-Mobile, but if the past is any teacher much of it will wind up posted online soon. It is a safe bet that scammers will use some of this information to target T-Mobile users with phishing messages, account takeovers and harassment.

T-Mobile customers should fully expect to see phishers taking advantage of public concern over the breach to impersonate the company — and possibly even send messages that include the recipient’s compromised account details to make the communications look more legitimate.

Data stolen and exposed in this breach may also be used for identity theft. Credit monitoring and ID theft protection services can help you recover from having your identity stolen, but most will do nothing to stop the ID theft from happening. If you want the maximum control over who should be able to view your credit or grant new lines of credit in your name, then a security freeze is your best option.

Regardless of which mobile provider you patronize, please consider removing your phone number from as many online accounts as you can. Many online services require you to provide a phone number upon registering an account, but in many cases that number can be removed from your profile afterwards.

Why do I suggest this? Many online services allow users to reset their passwords just by clicking a link sent via SMS, and this unfortunately widespread practice has turned mobile phone numbers into de facto identity documents. Which means losing control over your phone number thanks to an unauthorized SIM swap or mobile number port-out, divorce, job termination or financial crisis can be devastating.

Identity Thieves Bypassed Experian Security to View Credit Reports

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.

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.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

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.

The Equifax Breach Settlement Offer is Real, For Now

Millions of people likely just received an email or snail mail notice saying they’re eligible to claim a class action payment in connection with the 2017 megabreach at consumer credit bureau Equifax. Given the high volume of reader inquiries about this, it seemed worth pointing out that while this particular offer is legit (if paltry), scammers are likely to soon capitalize on public attention to the settlement money.

In 2017, Equifax disclosed a massive, extended data breach that led to the theft of Social Security Numbers, dates of birth, addresses and other personal information on nearly 150 million people. Following a public breach response perhaps best described as a giant dumpster fire, the big-three consumer credit reporting bureau was quickly hit with nearly two dozen class-action lawsuits.

In exchange for resolving all outstanding class action claims against it, Equifax in 2019 agreed to a settlement that includes up to $425 million to help people affected by the breach.

Affected consumers were eligible to apply for at least three years of credit monitoring via all three major bureaus simultaneously, including Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. Or, if you didn’t want to take advantage of the credit monitoring offers, you could opt for a cash payment of up to $125.

The settlement also offered reimbursement for the time you may have spent remedying identity theft or misuse of your personal information caused by the breach, or purchasing credit monitoring or credit reports. This was capped at 20 total hours at $25 per hour ($500), with total cash reimbursement payments not to exceed $20,000 per consumer.

Those who did file a claim probably started receiving emails or other communications earlier this year from the Equifax Breach Settlement Fund, which has been messaging class participants about methods of collecting their payments.

How much each recipient receives appears to vary quite a bit, but probably most people will have earned a payment on the smaller end of that $125 scale — like less than $10. Those who received higher amounts likely spent more time documenting actual losses and/or explaining how the breach affected them personally.

So far this week, KrebsOnSecurity has received at least 20 messages from readers seeking more information about these notices. Some readers shared copies of letters they got in the mail along with a paper check from the Equifax Breach Settlement Fund (see screenshot above).

Others said they got emails from the Equifax Breach Settlement domain that looked like an animated greeting card offering instructions on how to redeem a virtual prepaid card.

If you received one of these settlement emails and are wary about clicking the included links (good for you, by the way), copy the redemption code and paste it into the search box at myprepaidcenter.com/redeem. Successfully completing the card application requires accepting a prepaid MasterCard agreement (PDF).

The website for the settlement — equifaxbreachsettlement.com — also includes a lookup tool that lets visitors check whether they were affected by the breach; it requires your last name and the last six digits of your Social Security Number.

But be aware that phishers and other scammers are likely to take advantage of increased public awareness of the payouts to snooker people. Tim Helming, security evangelist at DomainTools.com, today flagged several new domains that mimic the name of the real Equifax Breach Settlement website and do not appear to be defensively registered by Equifax, including equifaxbreechsettlement[.]com, equifaxbreachsettlementbreach[.]com, and equifaxsettlements[.]co.

In February 2020, the U.S. Justice Department indicted four Chinese officers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) for perpetrating the 2017 Equifax hack. DOJ officials said the four men were responsible for carrying out the largest theft of sensitive personal information by state-sponsored hackers ever recorded.

Equifax surpassed Wall Street’s expectations in its most recent quarterly earnings: The company reported revenues of $1.24 billion for the quarter ending September 2022.

Of course, most of those earnings come from Equifax’s continued legal ability to buy and sell eye-popping amounts of financial and personal data on U.S. consumers. As one of the three major credit bureaus, Equifax collects and packages information about your credit, salary, and employment history. It tracks how many credit cards you have, how much money you owe, and how you pay your bills. Each company creates a credit report about you, and then sells this report to businesses who are deciding whether to give you credit.

Americans currently have no legal right to opt out of this data collection and trade. But you can and also should freeze your credit, which by the way can make your credit profile less profitable for companies like Equifax — because they make money every time some potential creditor wants a peek inside your financial life. Also, it’s probably a good idea to freeze the credit of your children and/or dependents as well. It’s free on both counts.

FBI’s Vetted Info Sharing Network ‘InfraGard’ Hacked

InfraGard, a program run by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to build cyber and physical threat information sharing partnerships with the private sector, this week saw its database of contact information on more than 80,000 members go up for sale on an English-language cybercrime forum. Meanwhile, the hackers responsible are communicating directly with members through the InfraGard portal online — using a new account under the assumed identity of a financial industry CEO that was vetted by the FBI itself.

On Dec. 10, 2022, the relatively new cybercrime forum Breached featured a bombshell new sales thread: The user database for InfraGard, including names and contact information for tens of thousands of InfraGard members.

The FBI’s InfraGard program is supposed to be a vetted Who’s Who of key people in private sector roles involving both cyber and physical security at companies that manage most of the nation’s critical infrastructures — including drinking water and power utilities, communications and financial services firms, transportation and manufacturing companies, healthcare providers, and nuclear energy firms.

“InfraGard connects critical infrastructure owners, operators, and stakeholders with the FBI to provide education, networking, and information-sharing on security threats and risks,” the FBI’s InfraGard fact sheet reads.

In response to information shared by KrebsOnSecurity, the FBI said it is aware of a potential false account associated with the InfraGard Portal and that it is actively looking into the matter.

“This is an ongoing situation, and we are not able to provide any additional information at this time,” the FBI said in a written statement.

KrebsOnSecurity contacted the seller of the InfraGard database, a Breached forum member who uses the handle “USDoD” and whose avatar is the seal of the U.S. Department of Defense.

USDoD said they gained access to the FBI’s InfraGard system by applying for a new account using the name, Social Security Number, date of birth  and other personal details of a chief executive officer at a company that was highly likely to be granted InfraGard membership.

The CEO in question — currently the head of a major U.S. financial corporation that has a direct impact on the creditworthiness of most Americans — told KrebsOnSecurity they were never contacted by the FBI seeking to vet an InfraGard application.

USDoD told KrebsOnSecurity their phony application was submitted in November in the CEO’s name, and that the application included a contact email address that they controlled — but also the CEO’s real mobile phone number.

“When you register they said that to be approved can take at least three months,” USDoD said. “I wasn’t expected to be approve[d].”

But USDoD said that in early December, their email address in the name of the CEO received a reply saying the application had been approved (see redacted screenshot to the right). While the FBI’s InfraGard system requires multi-factor authentication by default, users can choose between receiving a one-time code via SMS or email.

“If it was only the phone I will be in [a] bad situation,” USDoD said. “Because I used the person[‘s] phone that I’m impersonating.”

USDoD said the InfraGard user data was made easily available via an Application Programming Interface (API) that is built into several key components of the website that help InfraGard members connect and communicate with each other.

USDoD said after their InfraGard membership was approved, they asked a friend to code a script in Python to query that API and retrieve all available InfraGard user data.

“InfraGard is a social media intelligence hub for high profile persons,” USDoD said. “They even got [a] forum to discuss things.”

To prove they still had access to InfraGard as of publication time Tuesday evening, USDoD sent a direct note through InfraGard’s messaging system to an InfraGard member whose personal details were initially published as a teaser on the database sales thread.

That InfraGard member, who is head of security at a major U.S. technology firm, confirmed receipt of USDoD’s message but asked to remain anonymous for this story.

USDoD acknowledged that their $50,000 asking price for the InfraGard database may be a tad high, given that it is a fairly basic list of people who are already very security-conscious. Also, only about half of the user accounts contain an email address, and most of the other database fields — like Social Security Number and Date of Birth — are completely empty.

“I don’t think someone will pay that price, but I have to [price it] a bit higher to [negotiate] the price that I want,” they explained.

While the data exposed by the infiltration at InfraGard may be minimal, the user data might not have been the true end game for the intruders.

USDoD said they were hoping the imposter account would last long enough for them to finish sending direct messages as the CEO to other executives using the InfraGuard messaging portal. USDoD shared the following redacted screenshot from what they claimed was one such message, although they provided no additional context about it.

USDoD said in their sales thread that the guarantor for the transaction would be Pompompurin, the administrator of the cybercrime forum Breached. By purchasing the database through the forum administrator’s escrow service, would-be buyers can theoretically avoid getting ripped off and ensure the transaction will be consummated to the satisfaction of both parties before money exchanges hands.

Pompompurin has been a thorn in the side of the FBI for years. Their Breached forum is widely considered to be the second incarnation of RaidForums, a remarkably similar English-language cybercrime forum shuttered by the U.S. Department of Justice in April. Prior to its infiltration by the FBI, RaidForums sold access to more than 10 billion consumer records stolen in some of the world’s largest data breaches.

In November 2021, KrebsOnSecurity detailed how Pompompurin abused a vulnerability in an FBI online portal designed to share information with state and local law enforcement authorities, and how that access was used to blast out thousands of hoax email messages — all sent from an FBI email and Internet address.

Update, 10:58 p.m. ET: Updated the story after hearing from the financial company CEO whose identity was used to fool the FBI into approving an InfraGard membership. That CEO said they were never contacted by the FBI.

Update, 11:15 p.m. ET: The FBI just confirmed that it is aware of a potential false account associated with the InfraGard portal. The story now includes their full statement.

This is a developing story. Updates will be noted here with timestamps. 

What Are Tailgating Attacks and How to Protect Yourself From Them

Whether you’re spending time on the web or working in the office, you want peace of mind knowing that you are in a safe environment. While most of us know to take precautions when online — protecting ourselves from things like phishing attacks and other cyber threats — we should also attend to our physical security. 

One concern is tailgating — a social engineering attack where someone gets physical access to a business to take confidential information or do other harm. 

Here are some ways to protect yourself from tailgating attacks, such as an unauthorized person following you into a restricted area while on the job. 

What is a tailgating attack?

Tailgating is a type of social engineering attack where an unauthorized person gains physical access to an off-limits location — perhaps a password-protected area — where they might steal sensitive information, damage property, compromise user credentials or even install malware on computers. 

“Piggybacking” is closely related to tailgating, but it involves consent from the duped employee. So, while a worker might be unaware that someone has tailgated them into a restricted area with piggybacking, the hacker might convince a worker to provide access because they are posing as, say, a delivery driver. 

Who’s at risk of tailgating attacks?

Companies, particularly at risk of being targeted by tailgating scams, include those: 

• With many employees, often moving inside and out of the premises 
• With multiple entrance points into a building 
• That receive deliveries of food, packages, documents, and other things regularly 
• That have many subcontractors working for them 
• Where employees aren’t thoroughly trained in physical and cybersecurity protocols 

Generally speaking, companies with robust security systems in place — including using biometrics, badges, or other identity and information security measures — are better protected from tailgating and piggybacking attacks.  

But that’s not to say that some smooth-talking fraudster can’t talk someone into letting them in or finding some way around those protections. 

What are common tailgating methods?

Common types of tailgating attacks that you should be aware of on the job include:  

• Someone walking behind you into a secure area, depending on your common courtesy to keep the door open for them 
• A courier or delivery driver who aren’t what they seem 
• Someone with their hands full of items to trick you into opening the door for them 
• A person who claims they’ve lost their work ID or forgotten it at home, so that you grant them admittance 

How to protect yourself from tailgating attacks 

Protecting yourself from tailgating attacks is partly a matter of learning about the issue, raising your level of awareness on the job, and depending on your employer, putting in place more effective security systems.  

Some solutions include: 

Increased security training

Many companies know how to train employees to recognize, avoid, and cope with online security issues but may forget to provide the same diligence to physical security. How to spot and deal with threats should be part of this training, plus cultivating an awareness of surroundings and people who might be out of place.   

Management should offer a clearly stated security policy taught to everyone, which might insist that no one be allowed into a secure area without the proper pass or identification. As the security policy is updated, all employees should be aware of changes and additions. 

These security measures should be part of an overall protection program, like McAfee+, which includes antivirus software, a firewall, identity monitoring, password management, web protection, and more. 

Smart badges and cards

If you have a large business spread over several floors, it can be hard for employees to know who works there and who doesn’t, leaving them susceptible to tailgating and piggybacking attacks. Requiring smart badges and cards to access restricted areas can help cut back on unauthorized intrusions and provide better access control. 

Building fully staffed reception areas with dedicated security personnel could also be part of a larger security system. 

Biometric scanners

Biometric scanners are an even more advanced way to provide proper authentication for a worker’s identity. They scan a unique physical or audible feature of a person and compare it to a database for approved personnel.  

Examples of biometric security include: 

• Voice recognition 
• Iris recognition 
• Fingerprint scans 
• Facial recognition 
• Heart-rate sensors 

Understanding social engineering

One reason people are vulnerable to physical and cyberattacks is that they lack education on social engineering and the kinds of threats it poses.  

Workers need to understand the full range of social engineering techniques and know-how to protect themselves, whether in their social media accounts or physical work environment.  

For their part, companies can use simulated phishing emails and tailgating attacks to raise awareness and underline how to follow protocols in dealing with them. 

Video surveillance

If there are many ways to enter a business, it may make sense to put video surveillance on all entrances. Advanced video surveillance systems can use artificial intelligence (AI) and video analytics to scan the faces of people entering and compare them to a database of employee features. 

Discover how McAfee can help keep devices secure from hacking

Whether at work or at home, people want to be secure from attacks by cybercriminals who seek to take personal information. 

To add a layer of security to all their connected devices — including computers, smartphones, and tablets — an increasing number of people are turning to the comprehensive coverage of McAfee+ 

Features range from advanced monitoring of possible threats to your identity, automatic implementation of virtual private networks (VPNs) to deal with unsafe networks, and personal data clean-up, removing your information from high-risk data broker sites. 

McAfee protection allows you to work and play online with greater peace of mind. 

The post What Are Tailgating Attacks and How to Protect Yourself From Them appeared first on McAfee Blog.

How 1-Time Passcodes Became a Corporate Liability

Phishers are enjoying remarkable success using text messages to steal remote access credentials and one-time passcodes from employees at some of the world’s largest technology companies and customer support firms. A recent spate of SMS phishing attacks from one cybercriminal group has spawned a flurry of breach disclosures from affected companies, which are all struggling to combat the same lingering security threat: The ability of scammers to interact directly with employees through their mobile devices.

In mid-June 2022, a flood of SMS phishing messages began targeting employees at commercial staffing firms that provide customer support and outsourcing to thousands of companies. The missives asked users to click a link and log in at a phishing page that mimicked their employer’s Okta authentication page. Those who submitted credentials were then prompted to provide the one-time password needed for multi-factor authentication.

The phishers behind this scheme used newly-registered domains that often included the name of the target company, and sent text messages urging employees to click on links to these domains to view information about a pending change in their work schedule.

The phishing sites leveraged a Telegram instant message bot to forward any submitted credentials in real-time, allowing the attackers to use the phished username, password and one-time code to log in as that employee at the real employer website. But because of the way the bot was configured, it was possible for security researchers to capture the information being sent by victims to the public Telegram server.

This data trove was first reported by security researchers at Singapore-based Group-IB, which dubbed the campaign “0ktapus” for the attackers targeting organizations using identity management tools from Okta.com.

“This case is of interest because despite using low-skill methods it was able to compromise a large number of well-known organizations,” Group-IB wrote. “Furthermore, once the attackers compromised an organization they were quickly able to pivot and launch subsequent supply chain attacks, indicating that the attack was planned carefully in advance.”

It’s not clear how many of these phishing text messages were sent out, but the Telegram bot data reviewed by KrebsOnSecurity shows they generated nearly 10,000 replies over approximately two months of sporadic SMS phishing attacks targeting more than a hundred companies.

A great many responses came from those who were apparently wise to the scheme, as evidenced by the hundreds of hostile replies that included profanity or insults aimed at the phishers: The very first reply recorded in the Telegram bot data came from one such employee, who responded with the username “havefuninjail.”

Still, thousands replied with what appear to be legitimate credentials — many of them including one-time codes needed for multi-factor authentication. On July 20, the attackers turned their sights on internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare.com, and the intercepted credentials show at least three employees fell for the scam.

In a blog post earlier this month, Cloudflare said it detected the account takeovers and that no Cloudflare systems were compromised. Cloudflare said it does not rely on one-time passcodes as a second factor, so there was nothing to provide to the attackers. But Cloudflare said it wanted to call attention to the phishing attacks because they would probably work against most other companies.

“This was a sophisticated attack targeting employees and systems in such a way that we believe most organizations would be likely to be breached,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote. “On July 20, 2022, the Cloudflare Security team received reports of employees receiving legitimate-looking text messages pointing to what appeared to be a Cloudflare Okta login page. The messages began at 2022-07-20 22:50 UTC. Over the course of less than 1 minute, at least 76 employees received text messages on their personal and work phones. Some messages were also sent to the employees family members.”

On three separate occasions, the phishers targeted employees at Twilio.com, a San Francisco based company that provides services for making and receiving text messages and phone calls. It’s unclear how many Twilio employees received the SMS phishes, but the data suggest at least four Twilio employees responded to a spate of SMS phishing attempts on July 27, Aug. 2, and Aug. 7.

On that last date, Twilio disclosed that on Aug. 4 it became aware of unauthorized access to information related to a limited number of Twilio customer accounts through a sophisticated social engineering attack designed to steal employee credentials.

“This broad based attack against our employee base succeeded in fooling some employees into providing their credentials,” Twilio said. “The attackers then used the stolen credentials to gain access to some of our internal systems, where they were able to access certain customer data.”

That “certain customer data” included information on roughly 1,900 users of the secure messaging app Signal, which relied on Twilio to provide phone number verification services. In its disclosure on the incident, Signal said that with their access to Twilio’s internal tools the attackers were able to re-register those users’ phone numbers to another device.

On Aug. 25, food delivery service DoorDash disclosed that a “sophisticated phishing attack” on a third-party vendor allowed attackers to gain access to some of DoorDash’s internal company tools. DoorDash said intruders stole information on a “small percentage” of users that have since been notified. TechCrunch reported last week that the incident was linked to the same phishing campaign that targeted Twilio.

This phishing gang apparently had great success targeting employees of all the major mobile wireless providers, but most especially T-Mobile. Between July 10 and July 16, dozens of T-Mobile employees fell for the phishing messages and provided their remote access credentials.

“Credential theft continues to be an ongoing issue in our industry as wireless providers are constantly battling bad actors that are focused on finding new ways to pursue illegal activities like this,” T-Mobile said in a statement. “Our tools and teams worked as designed to quickly identify and respond to this large-scale smishing attack earlier this year that targeted many companies. We continue to work to prevent these types of attacks and will continue to evolve and improve our approach.”

This same group saw hundreds of responses from employees at some of the largest customer support and staffing firms, including Teleperformanceusa.com, Sitel.com and Sykes.com. Teleperformance did not respond to requests for comment. KrebsOnSecurity did hear from Christopher Knauer, global chief security officer at Sitel Group, the customer support giant that recently acquired Sykes. Knauer said the attacks leveraged newly-registered domains and asked employees to approve upcoming changes to their work schedules.

Knauer said the attackers set up the phishing domains just minutes in advance of spamming links to those domains in phony SMS alerts to targeted employees. He said such tactics largely sidestep automated alerts generated by companies that monitor brand names for signs of new phishing domains being registered.

“They were using the domains as soon as they became available,” Knauer said. “The alerting services don’t often let you know until 24 hours after a domain has been registered.”

On July 28 and again on Aug. 7, several employees at email delivery firm Mailchimp provided their remote access credentials to this phishing group. According to an Aug. 12 blog post, the attackers used their access to Mailchimp employee accounts to steal data from 214 customers involved in cryptocurrency and finance.

On Aug. 15, the hosting company DigitalOcean published a blog post saying it had severed ties with MailChimp after its Mailchimp account was compromised. DigitalOcean said the MailChimp incident resulted in a “very small number” of DigitalOcean customers experiencing attempted compromises of their accounts through password resets.

According to interviews with multiple companies hit by the group, the attackers are mostly interested in stealing access to cryptocurrency, and to companies that manage communications with people interested in cryptocurrency investing. In an Aug. 3 blog post from email and SMS marketing firm Klaviyo.com, the company’s CEO recounted how the phishers gained access to the company’s internal tools, and used that to download information on 38 crypto-related accounts.

The ubiquity of mobile phones became a lifeline for many companies trying to manage their remote employees throughout the Coronavirus pandemic. But these same mobile devices are fast becoming a liability for organizations that use them for phishable forms of multi-factor authentication, such as one-time codes generated by a mobile app or delivered via SMS.

Because as we can see from the success of this phishing group, this type of data extraction is now being massively automated, and employee authentication compromises can quickly lead to security and privacy risks for the employer’s partners or for anyone in their supply chain.

Unfortunately, a great many companies still rely on SMS for employee multi-factor authentication. According to a report this year from Okta, 47 percent of workforce customers deploy SMS and voice factors for multi-factor authentication. That’s down from 53 percent that did so in 2018, Okta found.

Some companies (like Knauer’s Sitel) have taken to requiring that all remote access to internal networks be managed through work-issued laptops and/or mobile devices, which are loaded with custom profiles that can’t be accessed through other devices.

Others are moving away from SMS and one-time code apps and toward requiring employees to use physical FIDO multi-factor authentication devices such as security keys, which can neutralize phishing attacks because any stolen credentials can’t be used unless the phishers also have physical access to the user’s security key or mobile device.

This came in handy for Twitter, which announced last year that it was moving all of its employees to using security keys, and/or biometric authentication via their mobile device. The phishers’ Telegram bot reported that on June 16, 2022, five employees at Twitter gave away their work credentials. In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, Twitter confirmed several employees were relieved of their employee usernames and passwords, but that its security key requirement prevented the phishers from abusing that information.

Twitter accelerated its plans to improve employee authentication following the July 2020 security incident, wherein several employees were phished and relieved of credentials for Twitter’s internal tools. In that intrusion, the attackers used Twitter’s tools to hijack accounts for some of the world’s most recognizable public figures, executives and celebrities — forcing those accounts to tweet out links to bitcoin scams.

“Security keys can differentiate legitimate sites from malicious ones and block phishing attempts that SMS 2FA or one-time password (OTP) verification codes would not,” Twitter said in an Oct. 2021 post about the change. “To deploy security keys internally at Twitter, we migrated from a variety of phishable 2FA methods to using security keys as our only supported 2FA method on internal systems.”

Update, 6:02 p.m. ET: Clarified that Cloudflare does not rely on TOTP (one-time multi-factor authentication codes) as a second factor for employee authentication.

When Efforts to Contain a Data Breach Backfire

Earlier this month, the administrator of the cybercrime forum Breached received a cease-and-desist letter from a cybersecurity firm. The missive alleged that an auction on the site for data stolen from 10 million customers of Mexico’s second-largest bank was fake news and harming the bank’s reputation. The administrator responded to this empty threat by purchasing the stolen banking data and leaking it on the forum for everyone to download.

On August 3, 2022, someone using the alias “Holistic-K1ller” posted on Breached a thread selling data allegedly stolen from Grupo Financiero Banorte, Mexico’s second-biggest financial institution by total loans. Holistic-K1ller said the database included the full names, addresses, phone numbers, Mexican tax IDs (RFC), email addresses and balances on more than 10 million citizens.

There was no reason to believe Holistic-K1ller had fabricated their breach claim. This identity has been highly active on Breached and its predecessor RaidForums for more than two years, mostly selling databases from hacked Mexican entities. Last month, they sold customer information on 36 million customers of the Mexican phone company Telcel; in March, they sold 33,000 images of Mexican IDs — with the front picture and a selfie of each citizen. That same month, they also sold data on 1.4 million customers of Mexican lending platform Yotepresto.

But this history was either overlooked or ignored by Group-IB, the Singapore-based cybersecurity firm apparently hired by Banorte to help respond to the data breach.

“The Group-IB team has discovered a resource containing a fraudulent post offering to buy Grupo Financiero Banorte’s leaked databases,” reads a letter the Breach administrator said they received from Group-IB. “We ask you to remove this post containing Banorte data. Thank you for your cooperation and prompt attention to this urgent matter.”

The administrator of Breached is “Pompompurin,” the same individual who alerted this author in November 2021 to a glaring security hole in a U.S. Justice Department website that was used to spoof security alerts from the FBI. In a post to Breached on Aug. 8, Pompompurin said they bought the Banorte database from Holistic-K1ller’s sales thread because Group-IB was sending emails complaining about it.

“They also attempted to submit DMCA’s against the website,” Pompompurin wrote, referring to legal takedown requests under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. “Make sure to tell Banorte that now they need to worry about the data being leaked instead of just being sold.”

Group-IB CEO Dmitriy Volkov said the company has seen some success in the past asking hackers to remove or take down certain information, but that making such requests is not a typical response for the security firm.

“It is not a common practice to send takedown notifications to such forums demanding that such content be removed,” Volkov said. “But these abuse letters are legally binding, which helps build a foundation for further steps taken by law enforcement agencies. Actions contrary to international rules in the regulated space of the Internet only lead to more severe crimes, which — as we know from the case of Raidforums — are successfully investigated and stopped by law enforcement.”

Banorte did not respond to requests for comment. But in a brief written statement picked up on Twitter, Banorte said there was no breach involving their infrastructure, and the data being sold is old.

“There has been no violation of our platforms and technological infrastructure,” Banorte said. “The set of information referred to is inaccurate and outdated, and does not put our users and customers at risk.”

That statement may be 100 percent true. Still, it is difficult to think of a better example of how not to do breach response. Banorte shrugging off this incident as a nothingburger is baffling: While it is almost certainly true that the bank balance information in the Banorte leak is now out of date, the rest of the information (tax IDs, phone numbers, email addresses) is harder to change.

“Is there one person from our community that think sending cease and desist letter to a hackers forum operator is a good idea?,” asked Ohad Zaidenberg, founder of CTI League, a volunteer emergency response community that emerged in 2020 to help fight COVID-19 related scams. “Who does it? Instead of helping, they pushed the organization from the hill.”

Kurt Seifried, director of IT for the CloudSecurityAlliance, was similarly perplexed by the response to the Banorte breach.

“If the data wasn’t real….did the bank think a cease and desist would result in the listing being removed?” Seifried wondered on Twitter. “I mean, isn’t selling breach data a worse crime usually than slander or libel? What was their thought process?”

A more typical response when a large bank suspects a breach is to approach the seller privately through an intermediary to ascertain if the information is valid and what it might cost to take it off the market. While it may seem odd to expect cybercriminals to make good on their claims to sell stolen data to only one party, removing sold stolen items from inventory is a fairly basic function of virtually all cybercriminal markets today (apart from perhaps sites that traffic in stolen identity data).

At a minimum, negotiating or simply engaging with a data seller can buy the victim organization additional time and clues with which to investigate the claim and ideally notify affected parties of a breach before the stolen data winds up online.

It is true that a large number of hacked databases put up for sale on the cybercrime underground are sold only after a small subset of in-the-know thieves have harvested all of the low-hanging fruit in the data — e.g., access to cryptocurrency accounts or user credentials that are recycled across multiple websites. And it’s certainly not unheard of for cybercriminals to go back on their word and re-sell or leak information that they have sold previously.

But companies in the throes of responding to a data security incident do themselves and customers no favors when they underestimate their adversaries, or try to intimidate cybercrooks with legal threats. Such responses generally accomplish nothing, except unnecessarily upping the stakes for everyone involved while displaying a dangerous naiveté about how the cybercrime underground works.

Update, Aug. 17, 10:32 a.m.: Thanks to a typo by this author, a request for comment sent to Group-IB was not delivered in advance of this story. The copy above has been updated to include a comment from Group-IB’s CEO.

It Might Be Our Data, But It’s Not Our Breach

A cybersecurity firm says it has intercepted a large, unique stolen data set containing the names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, Social Security Numbers and dates of birth on nearly 23 million Americans. The firm’s analysis of the data suggests it corresponds to current and former customers of AT&T. The telecommunications giant stopped short of saying the data wasn’t theirs, but it maintains the records do not appear to have come from its systems and may be tied to a previous data incident at another company.

Milwaukee-based cybersecurity consultancy Hold Security said it intercepted a 1.6 gigabyte compressed file on a popular dark web file-sharing site. The largest item in the archive is a 3.6 gigabyte file called “dbfull,” and it contains 28.5 million records, including 22.8 million unique email addresses and 23 million unique SSNs. There are no passwords in the database.

Hold Security founder Alex Holden said a number of patterns in the data suggest it relates to AT&T customers. For starters, email addresses ending in “att.net” accounted for 13.7 percent of all addresses in the database, with addresses from SBCGLobal.net and Bellsouth.net — both AT&T companies — making up another seven percent. In contrast, Gmail users made up more than 30 percent of the data set, with Yahoo addresses accounting for 24 percent. More than 10,000 entries in the database list “none@att.com” in the email field.

Holden’s team also examined the number of email records that included an alias in the username portion of the email, and found 293 email addresses with plus addressing. Of those, 232 included an alias that indicated the customer had signed up at some AT&T property; 190 of the aliased email addresses were “+att@”; 42 were “+uverse@,” an oddly specific reference to an AT&T entity that included broadband Internet. In September 2016, AT&T rebranded U-verse as AT&T Internet.

According to its website, AT&T Internet is offered in 21 states, including Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin. Nearly all of the records in the database that contain a state designation corresponded to those 21 states; all other states made up just 1.64 percent of the records, Hold Security found.

The vast majority of records in this database belong to consumers, but almost 13,000 of the entries are for corporate entities. Holden said 387 of those corporate names started with “ATT,” with various entries like “ATT PVT XLOW” appearing 81 times. And most of the addresses for these entities are AT&T corporate offices.

How old is this data? One clue may be in the dates of birth exposed in this database. There are very few records in this file with dates of birth after 2000.

“Based on these statistics, we see that the last significant number of subscribers born in March of 2000,” Holden told KrebsOnSecurity, noting that AT&T requires new account holders to be 18 years of age or older. “Therefore, it makes sense that the dataset was likely created close to March of 2018.”

There was also this anomaly: Holden said one of his analysts is an AT&T customer with a 13-letter last name, and that her AT&T bill has always had the same unique misspelling of her surname (they added yet another letter). He said the analyst’s name is identically misspelled in this database.

KrebsOnSecurity shared the large data set with AT&T, as well as Hold Security’s analysis of it. AT&T ultimately declined to say whether all of the people in the database are or were at some point AT&T customers. The company said the data appears to be several years old, and that “it’s not immediately possible to determine the percentage that may be customers.”

“This information does not appear to have come from our systems,” AT&T said in a written statement. “It may be tied to a previous data incident at another company. It is unfortunate that data can continue to surface over several years on the dark web. However, customers often receive notices after such incidents, and advice for ID theft is consistent and can be found online.”

The company declined to elaborate on what they meant by “a previous data incident at another company.”

But it seems likely that this database is related to one that went up for sale on a hacker forum on August 19, 2021. That auction ran with the title “AT&T Database +70M (SSN/DOB),” and was offered by ShinyHunters, a well-known threat actor with a long history of compromising websites and developer repositories to steal credentials or API keys.

ShinyHunters established the starting price for the auction at $200,000, but set the “flash” or “buy it now” price at $1 million. The auction also included a small sampling of the stolen information, but that sample is no longer available. The hacker forum where the ShinyHunters sales thread existed was seized by the FBI in April, and its alleged administrator arrested.

But cached copies of the auction, as recorded by cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, show ShinyHunters received bids of up to $230,000 for the entire database before they suspended the sale.

“This thread has been deleted several times,” ShinyHunters wrote in their auction discussion on Sept. 6, 2021. “Therefore, the auction is suspended. AT&T will be available on WHM as soon as they accept new vendors.”

The WHM initialism was a reference to the White House Market, a dark web marketplace that shut down in October 2021.

“In many cases, when a database is not sold, ShinyHunters will release it for free on hacker forums,” wrote BleepingComputer’s Lawrence Abrams, who broke the news of the auction last year and confronted AT&T about the hackers’ claims.

AT&T gave Abrams a similar statement, saying the data didn’t come from their systems.

“When asked whether the data may have come from a third-party partner, AT&T chose not to speculate,” Abrams wrote. “‘Given this information did not come from us, we can’t speculate on where it came from or whether it is valid,'” AT&T told BleepingComputer.

Asked to respond to AT&T’s denial, ShinyHunters told BleepingComputer at the time, “I don’t care if they don’t admit. I’m just selling.”

On June 1, 2022, a 21-year-old Frenchman was arrested in Morocco for allegedly being a member of ShinyHunters. Databreaches.net reports the defendant was arrested on an Interpol “Red Notice” at the request of a U.S. federal prosecutor from Washington state.

Databreaches.net suggests the warrant could be tied to a ShinyHunters theft in May 2020, when the group announced they had exfiltrated 500 GB of Microsoft’s source code from Microsoft’s private GitHub repositories.

“Researchers assess that Shiny Hunters gained access to roughly 1,200 private repositories around March 28, 2020, which have since been secured,” reads a May 2020 alert posted by the New Jersey Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Cell, a component within the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness.

“Though the breach was largely dismissed as insignificant, some images of the directory listing appear to contain source code for Azure, Office, and some Windows runtimes, and concerns have been raised regarding access to private API keys or passwords that may have been mistakenly included in some private repositories,” the alert continues. “Additionally, Shiny Hunters is flooding dark web marketplaces with breached databases.”

Last month, T-Mobile agreed to pay $350 million to settle a consolidated class action lawsuit over a breach in 2021 that affected 40 million current and former customers. The breach came to light on Aug. 16, 2021, when someone starting selling tens of millions of SSN/DOB records from T-Mobile on the same hacker forum where the ShinyHunters would post their auction for the claimed AT&T database just three days later.

T-Mobile has not disclosed many details about the “how” of last year’s breach, but it said the intruder(s) “leveraged their knowledge of technical systems, along with specialized tools and capabilities, to gain access to our testing environments and then used brute force attacks and other methods to make their way into other IT servers that included customer data.”

The Security Pros and Cons of Using Email Aliases

One way to tame your email inbox is to get in the habit of using unique email aliases when signing up for new accounts online. Adding a “+” character after the username portion of your email address — followed by a notation specific to the site you’re signing up at — lets you create an infinite number of unique email addresses tied to the same account. Aliases can help users detect breaches and fight spam. But not all websites allow aliases, and they can complicate account recovery. Here’s a look at the pros and cons of adopting a unique alias for each website.

What is an email alias? When you sign up at a site that requires an email address, think of a word or phrase that represents that site for you, and then add that prefaced by a “+” sign just to the left of the “@” sign in your email address. For instance, if I were signing up at example.com, I might give my email address as krebsonsecurity+example@gmail.com. Then, I simply go back to my inbox and create a corresponding folder called “Example,” along with a new filter that sends any email addressed to that alias to the Example folder.

Importantly, you don’t ever use this alias anywhere else. That way, if anyone other than example.com starts sending email to it, it is reasonable to assume that example.com either shared your address with others or that it got hacked and relieved of that information. Indeed, security-minded readers have often alerted KrebsOnSecurity about spam to specific aliases that suggested a breach at some website, and usually they were right, even if the company that got hacked didn’t realize it at the time.

Alex Holden, founder of the Milwaukee-based cybersecurity consultancy Hold Security, said many threat actors will scrub their distribution lists of any aliases because there is a perception that these users are more security- and privacy-focused than normal users, and are thus more likely to report spam to their aliased addresses.

Holden said freshly-hacked databases also are often scrubbed of aliases before being sold in the underground, meaning the hackers will simply remove the aliased portion of the email address.

“I can tell you that certain threat groups have rules on ‘+*@’ email address deletion,” Holden said. “We just got the largest credentials cache ever — 1 billion new credentials to us — and most of that data is altered, with aliases removed. Modifying credential data for some threat groups is normal. They spend time trying to understand the database structure and removing any red flags.”

According to the breach tracking site HaveIBeenPwned.com, only about .03 percent of the breached records in circulation today include an alias.

Email aliases are rare enough that seeing just a few email addresses with the same alias in a breached database can make it trivial to identify which company likely got hacked and leaked said database. That’s because the most common aliases are simply the name of the website where the signup takes place, or some abbreviation or shorthand for it.

Hence, for a given database, if there are more than a handful of email addresses that have the same alias, the chances are good that whatever company or website corresponds to that alias has been hacked.

That might explain the actions of Allekabels, a large Dutch electronics web shop that suffered a data breach in 2021. Allekabels said a former employee had stolen data on 5,000 customers, and that those customers were then informed about the data breach by Allekabels.

But Dutch publication RTL Nieuws said it obtained a copy of the Allekabels user database from a hacker who was selling information on 3.6 million customers at the time, and found that the 5,000 number cited by the retailer corresponded to the number of customers who’d signed up using an alias. In essence, RTL argued, the company had notified only those most likely to notice and complain that their aliased addresses were suddenly receiving spam.

“RTL Nieuws has called more than thirty people from the database to check the leaked data,” the publication explained. “The customers with such a unique email address have all received a message from Allekabels that their data has been leaked – according to Allekabels they all happened to be among the 5000 data that this ex-employee had stolen.”

HaveIBeenPwned’s Hunt arrived at the conclusion that aliases account for about .03 percent of registered email addresses by studying the data leaked in the 2013 breach at Adobe, which affected at least 38 million users. Allekabels’s ratio of aliased users was considerably higher than Adobe’s — .14 percent — but then again European Internet users tend to be more privacy-conscious.

While overall adoption of email aliases is still quite low, that may be changing. Apple customers who use iCloud to sign up for new accounts online automatically are prompted to use Apple’s Hide My Email feature, which creates the account using a unique email address that automatically forwards to a personal inbox.

What are the downsides to using email aliases, apart from the hassle of setting them up? The biggest downer is that many sites won’t let you use a “+” sign in your email address, even though this functionality is clearly spelled out in the email standard.

Also, if you use aliases, it helps to have a reliable mnemonic to remember the alias used for each account (this is a non-issue if you create a new folder or rule for each alias). That’s because knowing the email address for an account is generally a prerequisite for resetting the account’s password, and if you can’t remember the alias you added way back when you signed up, you may have limited options for recovering access to that account if you at some point forget your password.

What about you, Dear Reader? Do you rely on email aliases? If so, have they been useful? Did I neglect to mention any pros or cons? Feel free to sound off in the comments below.

How to Stay One Step Ahead of Hackers

Whether using the internet for play or work, you want to spend your time online enjoying the peace of mind that comes with having a secure network. 

You don’t want to contend with someone taking your personal data — whether it’s credit card information, passwords, or bank account details — via malware or a data breach on your Android, Windows, or Apple iOS device. 

Fortunately, with some sensible precautions and simple steps, you can use your connected devices productively without worrying about cybercriminals and malicious software. This article explains how to stop hackers from getting access to your sensitive data.  

8 ways to protect your identity from hackers

You can take steps to protect your different computing and mobile devices and operating systems. These steps can be divided into technological solutions and the right awareness and information to provide a comforting measure of self-protection. 

It’s like learning karate for self-defense, giving you confidence as you negotiate the wider world (and hoping that you never have to use it). 

Use identity protection software

When it comes to identity protection software, McAfee provides a proven solution with our identity protection and privacy services. The protection includes alerts if your sensitive information is found on the dark web (up to 10 months sooner than other providers), personal data cleanup from sites gathering and selling your information, and an unlimited virtual public network (VPN) service that protects your privacy as you use public Wi-Fi networks. 

You’ll also get up to $1 million in identity theft coverage and hands-on restoration support to help you reclaim your identity.  

Use complex passwords

Simple, obvious passwords and passcodes (like your street address, your birthday, your kids’ or pets’ names, or “1234” or “abcd”) are easy for cybercriminals to crack, giving them unwanted access to your private data. 

The stronger your password, the better your protection. Some best password practices include: 

• Use a different password for all your online accounts, including your email accounts, social media platforms, and bank accounts. 
• Create a password that’s at least eight characters long, combining lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols. 
• Don’t use consecutive keystrokes, such as “qwerty.” 
• Don’t share your passwords with anyone. 
• Avoid entering your password on unsecured public Wi-Fi, such as at an airport or in a coffee shop. 

Regularly update passwords

It’s important not to be a standing target. Just as you should use different passwords for everything, you should regularly change your passwords. You should do this a few times a year (although some cyber experts say this might not be necessary if you have a long and very complicated password). 

If you have a number of passwords that you update often, it might be worth getting a password manager like McAfee True Key to keep track of them. Not only will you not be faced with remembering all your different passwords or writing them down (also a no-no), but it can also help you create and store unique passwords.  

The software uses the strongest encryption algorithms available to protect your passwords, scrambling them so no one else can access them. It’ll also suggest new passwords and automatically log you into your online accounts with just one master password. 

Use multi-factor authentication

Another important line of defense is multi-factor authentication (sometimes known as two-factor authentication). This system uses a password and a second piece of verification — often an SMS message sent to your Android device or iPhone — to authenticate your identity. 

This provides hard-to-beat protection even if a hacker has your password. Besides receiving SMS codes, there are also code-generating apps and physical security keys. 

Learn to spot potential scams

Thinking before you click on an email or text is a very important defense against phishing scams. Your bank won’t send you an email or text notifying you that there’s been suspicious activity on your account.  

Does getting a large refund from your phone company sound too good to be true? It is. Similarly, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) won’t text to tell you that you owe them money, and princes aren’t going to give you a fortune out of the blue. 

Internet users beware: If you’re not absolutely certain that the text message you received is from a legitimate and trusted source, delete it. You can always contact the business or person directly to confirm that the message is legit. 

Keep device software up to date

Any operating system or app you use is open to malicious cyberattacks. This is why you should keep all your software up to date with the latest versions. Software developers are continually fixing holes in their products and offering cybersecurity patches to make them as safe and hacker-proof as possible. 

Make sure your software, firmware, and security settings are up to date on your home’s Wi-Fi router, as well. You can often change your settings to allow for automatic updates. 

Be cautious when using public Wi-Fi

Sure, who doesn’t like to go to a cafe, library, or hotel lobby to use the free Wi-Fi? But security is often weak in these public networks. If you open your online banking account or access personal information, you may unwittingly be giving a personal invitation to eavesdropping cybercriminals.  

This is where the bank-grade level of protection of McAfee Secure VPN comes in, which automatically turns on when you need it and keeps you safe on public Wi-Fi networks. 

Use encryption

Even if your device does get hacked, you can protect vital information on your Windows or macOS system with an encryption program like BitLocker or FileVault. You can protect any hard drive you use, including portable ones and USB keys. 

It’s also a good idea to only shop at encrypted websites marked with the prefix “HTTPS” in their URLs. 

Discover how McAfee keeps you secure online

One of the best ways to surf the web in comfort while keeping hackers at bay is with the comprehensive solutions provided by McAfee Total Protection. 

Your protection includes proactive measures (meaning we’ll guide you to the best choices for prevention), early detection, and expert identity theft support.  

This means you’ll get identity monitoring, up to $1 million in identity theft coverage, lost wallet protection, premium antivirus software, a secure VPN, and personal data removal. In particular, our Personal Data Cleanup service will help find and remove your personal information from data broker websites and people search sites.  

With McAfee, you don’t have to be afraid of hackers. Let us deal with them.  

The post How to Stay One Step Ahead of Hackers appeared first on McAfee Blog.

911 Proxy Service Implodes After Disclosing Breach

911[.]re, a proxy service that since 2015 has sold access to hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Windows computers daily, announced this week that it is shutting down in the wake of a data breach that destroyed key components of its business operations. The abrupt closure comes ten days after KrebsOnSecurity published an in-depth look at 911 and its connections to shady pay-per-install affiliate programs that secretly bundled 911’s proxy software with other titles, including “free” utilities and pirated software.

911[.]re is was one of the original “residential proxy” networks, which allow someone to rent a residential IP address to use as a relay for his/her Internet communications, providing anonymity and the advantage of being perceived as a residential user surfing the web.

Residential proxy services are often marketed to people seeking the ability to evade country-specific blocking by the major movie and media streaming providers. But some of them — like 911 — build their networks in part by offering “free VPN” or “free proxy” services that are powered by software which turns the user’s PC into a traffic relay for other users. In this scenario, users indeed get to use a free VPN service, but they are often unaware that doing so will turn their computer into a proxy that lets others use their Internet address to transact online.

From a website’s perspective, the IP traffic of a residential proxy network user appears to originate from the rented residential IP address, not from the proxy service customer. These services can be used in a legitimate manner for several business purposes — such as price comparisons or sales intelligence — but they are massively abused for hiding cybercrime activity because they can make it difficult to trace malicious traffic to its original source.

As noted in KrebsOnSecurity’s July 19 story on 911, the proxy service operated multiple pay-per-install schemes that paid affiliates to surreptitiously bundle the proxy software with other software, continuously generating a steady stream of new proxies for the service.

Within hours of that story, 911 posted a notice at the top of its site, saying, “We are reviewing our network and adding a series of security measures to prevent misuse of our services. Proxy balance top-up and new user registration are closed. We are reviewing every existing user, to ensure their usage is legit and [in] compliance with our Terms of Service.”

At this announcement, all hell broke loose on various cybercrime forums, where many longtime 911 customers reported they were unable to use the service. Others affected by the outage said it seemed 911 was trying to implement some sort of “know your customer” rules — that maybe 911 was just trying to weed out those customers using the service for high volumes of cybercriminal activity.

Then on July 28, the 911 website began redirecting to a notice saying, “We regret to inform you that we permanently shut down 911 and all its services on July 28th.”

According to 911, the service was hacked in early July, and it was discovered that someone manipulated the balances of a large number of user accounts. 911 said the intruders abused an application programming interface (API) that handles the topping up of accounts when users make financial deposits with the service.

“Not sure how did the hacker get in,” the 911 message reads. “Therefore, we urgently shut down the recharge system, new user registration, and an investigation started.”

However the intruders got in, 911 said, they managed to also overwrite critical 911[.]re servers, data and backups of that data.

“On July 28th, a large number of users reported that they could not log in the system,” the statement continues. “We found that the data on the server was maliciously damaged by the hacker, resulting in the loss of data and backups. Its [sic] confirmed that the recharge system was also hacked the same way. We were forced to make this difficult decision due to the loss of important data that made the service unrecoverable.”

Operated largely out of China, 911 was an enormously popular service across many cybercrime forums, and it became something akin to critical infrastructure for this community after two of 911’s longtime competitors — malware-based proxy services VIP72 and LuxSocks — closed their doors in the past year.

Now, many on the crime forums who relied on 911 for their operations are wondering aloud whether there are any alternatives that match the scale and utility that 911 offered. The consensus seems to be a resounding “no.”

I’m guessing we may soon learn more about the security incidents that caused 911 to implode. And perhaps other proxy services will spring up to meet what appears to be a burgeoning demand for such services at the moment, with comparatively little supply.

In the meantime, 911’s absence may coincide with a measurable (if only short-lived) reprieve in unwanted traffic to top Internet destinations, including banks, retailers and cryptocurrency platforms, as many former customers of the proxy service scramble to make alternative arrangements.

Riley Kilmer, co-founder of the proxy-tracking service Spur.us, said 911’s network will be difficult to replicate in the short run.

“My speculation is [911’s remaining competitors] are going to get a major boost in the short term, but a new player will eventually come along,” Kilmer said. “None of those are good replacements for LuxSocks or 911. However, they will all allow anyone to use them. For fraud rates, the attempts will continue but through these replacement services which should be easier to monitor and stop. 911 had some very clean IP addresses.”

911 wasn’t the only major proxy provider disclosing a breach this week tied to unauthenticated APIs: On July 28, KrebsOnSecurity reported that internal APIs exposed to the web had leaked the customer database for Microleaves, a proxy service that rotates its customers’ IP addresses every five to ten minutes. That investigation showed Microleaves — like 911 — had a long history of using pay-per-install schemes to spread its proxy software.

Costa Rica May Be Pawn in Conti Ransomware Group’s Bid to Rebrand, Evade Sanctions

Costa Rica’s national health service was hacked sometime earlier this morning by a Russian ransomware group known as Hive. The intrusion comes just weeks after Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves declared a state of emergency in response to a data ransom attack from a different Russian ransomware gang — Conti. Ransomware experts say there is good reason to believe the same cybercriminals are behind both attacks, and that Hive has been helping Conti rebrand and evade international sanctions targeting extortion payouts to cybercriminals operating in Russia.

The Costa Rican publication CRprensa.com reports that affected systems at the Costa Rican Social Security Fund (CCSS) were taken offline on the morning of May 31, but that the extent of the breach was still unclear. The CCSS is responsible for Costa Rica’s public health sector, and worker and employer contributions are mandated by law.

A hand-written sign posted outside a public health center in Costa Rica today explained that all systems are down until further notice (thanks to @Xyb3rb3nd3r for sharing this photo).

Esteban Jimenez, founder of the Costa Rican cybersecurity consultancy ATTI Cyber, told KrebsOnSecurity the CCSS suffered a cyber attack that compromised the Unique Digital Medical File (EDUS) and the National Prescriptions System for the public pharmacies, and as a result medical centers have turned to paper forms and manual contingencies.

“Many smaller health centers located in rural areas have been forced to close due to not having the required equipment or communication with their respective central health areas and the National Retirement Fund (IVM) was completely blocked,” Jimenez said. “Taking into account that salaries of around fifty thousand employees and deposits for retired citizens were due today, so now the payments are in danger.”

Jimenez said the head of the CCSS has addressed the local media, confirming that the Hive ransomware was deployed on at least 30 out of 1,500 government servers, and that any estimation of time to recovery remains unknown. He added that many printers within the government agency this morning began churning out copies of the Hive ransom note.

“HIVE has not yet released their ransom fee but attacks are expected to follow, other organizations are trying to get a hold on the emergency declaration to obtain additional funds to purchase new pieces of infrastructure, improve their backup structure amongst others,” Jimenez said.

A copy of the ransom note left behind by the intruders and subsequently uploaded to Virustotal.com indicates the CCSS intrusion was the work of Hive, which typically demands payment for a digital key needed to unlock files and servers compromised by the group’s ransomware.

On May 8, President Chaves used his first day in office to declare a national state of emergency after the Conti ransomware group threatened to publish gigabytes of sensitive data stolen from Costa Rica’s Ministry of Finance and other government agencies. Conti initially demanded $10 million, and later doubled the amount when Costa Rica refused to pay. On May 20, Conti leaked more than 670 gigabytes of data taken from Costa Rican government servers.

As CyberScoop reported on May 17, Chaves told local media he believed that collaborators within Costa Rica were helping Conti extort the government. Chaves offered no information to support this claim, but the timeline of Conti’s descent on Costa Rica is worth examining.

Most of Conti’s public communications about the Costa Rica attack have very clearly assigned credit for the intrusion to an individual or group calling itself “unc1756.” In March 2022, a new user by the same name registered on the Russian language crime forum Exploit.

On the evening of April 18, Costa Rica’s Ministry of Finance disclosed the Conti intrusion via Twitter. Earlier that same day, the user unc1756 posted a help wanted ad on Exploit saying they were looking to buy access to “special networks” in Costa Rica.

“By special networks I mean something like Haciendas,” unc1756 wrote on Exploit. Costa Rica’s Ministry of Finance is known in Spanish as the “Ministerio Hacienda de Costa Rica.” Unc1756 said they would pay $USD 500 or more for such access, and would work only with Russian-speaking people.

THE NAME GAME DISTRACTION

Experts say there are clues to suggest Conti and Hive are working together in their attacks on Costa Rica, and that the intrusions are tied to a rebranding effort by Conti. Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine at the end of February, Conti declared its full support, aligning itself directly with Russia and against anyone who would stand against the motherland.

Conti quickly deleted the declaration from its website, but the damage had already been done, and any favor or esteem that Conti had earned among the Ukrainian cybercriminal underground effectively evaporated overnight.

Shortly thereafter, a Ukrainian security expert leaked many months worth of internal chat records between Conti personnel as they plotted and executed attacks against hundreds of victim organizations. Those candid messages exposed what it’s like to work for Conti, how they undermined the security of their targets, as well as how the group’s leaders strategized for the upper hand in ransom negotiations.

But Conti’s declaration of solidarity with the Kremlin also made it increasingly ineffective as an instrument of financial extortion. According to cyber intelligence firm ADVIntel, Conti’s alliance with the Russian state soon left it largely unable to receive ransom payments because victim companies are being advised that paying a Conti ransom demand could mean violating U.S. economic sanctions on Russia.

“Conti as a brand became associated with the Russian state — a state that is currently undergoing extreme sanctions,” ADVIntel wrote in a lengthy analysis (PDF). “In the eyes of the state, each ransom payment going to Conti may have potentially gone to an individual under sanction, turning simple data extortion into a violation of OFAC regulation and sanction policies against Russia.”

ADVIntel says it first learned of Conti’s intrusion into Costa Rican government systems on April 14, and that it has seen internal Conti communications indicating that getting paid in the Costa Rica attack was not the goal.

Rather, ADVIntel argues, Conti was simply using it as a way to appear publicly that it was still operating as the world’s most lucrative ransomware collective, when in reality the core Conti leadership was busy dismantling the crime group and folding themselves and top affiliates into other ransomware groups that are already on friendly terms with Conti.

“The only goal Conti had wanted to meet with this final attack was to use the platform as a tool of publicity, performing their own death and subsequent rebirth in the most plausible way it could have been conceived,” ADVIntel concluded.

ADVIntel says Conti’s leaders and core affiliates are dispersing to several Conti-loyal crime collectives that use either ransomware lockers or strictly engage in data theft for ransom, including AlphV/BlackCat, AvosLocker, BlackByte, HelloKitty, Hive, and Karakurt.

Still, Hive appears to be perhaps the biggest beneficiary of any attrition from Conti: Twice over the past week, both Conti and Hive claimed responsibility for hacking the same companies. When the discrepancy was called out on Twitter, Hive updated its website to claim it was not affiliated with Conti.

Conti and Hive’s Costa Rican exploits mark the latest in a string of recent cyberattacks against government targets across Latin America. Around the same time it hacked Costa Rica in April, Conti announced it had hacked Peru’s National Directorate of Intelligence, threatening to publish sensitive stolen data if the government did not pay a ransom.

But Conti and Hive are not alone in targeting Latin American victims of late. According to data gathered from the victim shaming blogs maintained by multiple ransomware groups, over the past 90 days ransom actors have hacked and sought to extort 15 government agencies in Brazil, nine in Argentina, six in Colombia, four in Ecuador and three in Chile.

A recent report (PDF) by the Inter-American Development Bank suggests many Latin American countries lack the technical expertise or cybercrime laws to deal with today’s threats and threat actors.

“This study shows that the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region is not sufficiently prepared to handle cyberattacks,” the IADB document explains. “Only 7 of the 32 countries studied have a critical infrastructure protection plan, while 20 have established cybersecurity incident response teams, often called CERTs or CSIRTs. This limits their ability to identify and respond to attacks.”

DEA Investigating Breach of Law Enforcement Data Portal

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) says it is investigating reports that hackers gained unauthorized access to an agency portal that taps into 16 different federal law enforcement databases. KrebsOnSecurity has learned the alleged compromise is tied to a cybercrime and online harassment community that routinely impersonates police and government officials to harvest personal information on their targets.

On May 8, KrebsOnSecurity received a tip that hackers obtained a username and password for an authorized user of esp.usdoj.gov, which is the Law Enforcement Inquiry and Alerts (LEIA) system managed by the DEA.

KrebsOnSecurity shared information about the allegedly hijacked account with the DEA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of Justice, which houses both agencies. The DEA declined to comment on the validity of the claims, issuing only a brief statement in response.

“DEA takes cyber security and information of intrusions seriously and investigates all such reports to the fullest extent,” the agency said in a statement shared via email.

According to this page at the Justice Department website, LEIA “provides federated search capabilities for both EPIC and external database repositories,” including data classified as “law enforcement sensitive” and “mission sensitive” to the DEA.

A document published by the Obama administration in May 2016 (PDF) says the DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) systems in Texas are available for use by federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement, as well as the Department of Defense and intelligence community.

EPIC and LEIA also have access to the DEA’s National Seizure System (NSS), which the DEA uses to identify property thought to have been purchased with the proceeds of criminal activity (think fancy cars, boats and homes seized from drug kingpins).

“The EPIC System Portal (ESP) enables vetted users to remotely and securely share intelligence, access the National Seizure System, conduct data analytics, and obtain information in support of criminal investigations or law enforcement operations,” the 2016 White House document reads. “Law Enforcement Inquiry and Alerts (LEIA) allows for a federated search of 16 Federal law enforcement databases.”

The screenshots shared with this author indicate the hackers could use EPIC to look up a variety of records, including those for motor vehicles, boats, firearms, aircraft, and even drones.

Claims about the purloined DEA access were shared with this author by “KT,” the current administrator of the Doxbin — a highly toxic online community that provides a forum for digging up personal information on people and posting it publicly.

As KrebsOnSecurity reported earlier this year, the previous owner of the Doxbin has been identified as the leader of LAPSUS$, a data extortion group that hacked into some of the world’s largest tech companies this year — including Microsoft, NVIDIA, Okta, Samsung and T-Mobile.

That reporting also showed how the core members of LAPSUS$ were involved in selling a service offering fraudulent Emergency Data Requests (EDRs), wherein the hackers use compromised police and government email accounts to file warrantless data requests with social media firms, mobile telephony providers and other technology firms, attesting that the information being requested can’t wait for a warrant because it relates to an urgent matter of life and death.

From the standpoint of individuals involved in filing these phony EDRs, access to databases and user accounts within the Department of Justice would be a major coup. But the data in EPIC would probably be far more valuable to organized crime rings or drug cartels, said Nicholas Weaver, a researcher for the International Computer Science Institute at University of California, Berkeley.

Weaver said it’s clear from the screenshots shared by the hackers that they could use their access not only to view sensitive information, but also submit false records to law enforcement and intelligence agency databases.

“I don’t think these [people] realize what they got, how much money the cartels would pay for access to this,” Weaver said. “Especially because as a cartel you don’t search for yourself you search for your enemies, so that even if it’s discovered there is no loss to you of putting things ONTO the DEA’s radar.”

ANALYSIS

The login page for esp.usdoj.gov (above) suggests that authorized users can access the site using a “Personal Identity Verification” or PIV card, which is a fairly strong form of authentication used government-wide to control access to federal facilities and information systems at each user’s appropriate security level.

However, the EPIC portal also appears to accept just a username and password, which would seem to radically diminish the security value of requiring users to present (or prove possession of) an authorized PIV card. Indeed, KT said the hacker who obtained this illicit access was able to log in using the stolen credentials alone, and that at no time did the portal prompt for a second authentication factor.

It’s not clear why there are still sensitive government databases being protected by nothing more than a username and password, but I’m willing to bet big money that this DEA portal is not only offender here. The DEA portal esp.usdoj.gov is listed on Page 87 of a Justice Department “data inventory,” which catalogs all of the data repositories that correspond to DOJ agencies.

There are 3,330 results. Granted, only some of those results are login portals, but that’s just within the Department of Justice.

If we assume for the moment that state-sponsored foreign hacking groups can gain access to sensitive government intelligence in the same way as teenage hacker groups like LAPSUS$, then it is long past time for the U.S. federal government to perform a top-to-bottom review of authentication requirements tied to any government portals that traffic in sensitive or privileged information.

I’ll say it because it needs to be said: The United States government is in urgent need of leadership on cybersecurity at the executive branch level — preferably someone who has the authority and political will to eventually disconnect any federal government agency data portals that fail to enforce strong, multi-factor authentication.

I realize this may be far more complex than it sounds, particularly when it comes to authenticating law enforcement personnel who access these systems without the benefit of a PIV card or government-issued device (state and local authorities, for example). It’s not going to be as simple as just turning on multi-factor authentication for every user, thanks in part to a broad diversity of technologies being used across the law enforcement landscape.

But when hackers can plunder 16 law enforcement databases, arbitrarily send out law enforcement alerts for specific people or vehicles, or potentially disrupt ongoing law enforcement operations — all because someone stole, found or bought a username and password — it’s time for drastic measures.

It’s Data Privacy Day: Here’s How to Stay Protected in 2022

When you logged on to your computer this morning, data privacy probably wasn’t the first thing you were thinking about. The same goes for when you opened your phone to catch up on social media and check emails, turned on your smart TV for a family movie night, or all the other ways we routinely use our connected devices in our everyday lives.  

Although we live in an increasingly connected world, most of us give little thought to data privacy until after our personal information has been compromised. However, we can take proactive steps to help ourselves and our loved ones navigate this environment in a safe way. On January 28th – better known as Data Privacy Day – we have the perfect opportunity to own our privacy by taking the time to safeguard data. By making data privacy a priority, you and your family can enjoy the freedom of living your connected lives online knowing that your information is safe and sound.  

Data Security vs. Data Privacy 

Did you know that there is a difference between data security and data privacy? Although the two are intimately intertwined, there are various characteristics of each that make them different. National Today3 provides a useful analogy to define the two:  

• Data security is like putting bars on your windows to make it difficult for someone to break into your home (guarding against potential threats).  
• Data privacy is like pulling down the window shades so no one can look inside to see what you are wearing, who lives with you, or what you’re doing (ensuring that only those who are authorized to access the data can do so).   

At this point, we already know not to share our passwords or PIN numbers with anyone. But what about the data that is collected by companies every time we sign up for an email newsletter or make an online account? Oftentimes, we trust these companies to guard the personal data they collect from us in exchange for the right to use their products and services. However, the personal information collected by companies today is not regarded as private by default, with a few exceptions. For this reason, it’s up to us to take our data privacy into our own hands.  

The Evolution of Data Breaches  

Because we spend so much of our day online, plenty of our information is available on the internet. But what happens if one of your favorite online retailers experiences a data breach? This is the reality of the world we live in today, as data breaches have been on the rise and hackers are continuously finding clever, new ways to access our devices and information.   

Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve become more reliant on technology than ever before. Whether it be for distance learning, online shopping, mobile banking, or remote work, we’ve all depended on our devices and the internet to stay connected. But with more time online comes more opportunities for cybercriminals to exploit. For example, with the massive increase in remote work since the onset of the pandemic, hackers have hijacked online meetings through a technique called ‘Zoombombing4.’ This occurred after the online conferencing company shared personal data with Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. Additionally, the number of patient records breached in the healthcare industry jumped to 21.3 million in the second half of 2020 due to the increase in remote interactions between patients and their providers5.  

When it comes to data breaches, any business is a potential target because practically every business is online in some way. When you put this in perspective, it’s important to consider what information is being held by the companies that you buy from. While a gaming service will likely have different information about you than your insurance company, you should remember that all data has value, and you should take steps to protect it like you would money.  

Protecting Your Privacy With McAfee  

Your browsing history and personal information are private, and we at McAfee want to keep it that way. By using McAfee Secure VPN, you can browse confidently knowing that your data is encrypted.  

To further take control of your data privacy, monitor the health of your online protection with McAfee’s Protection Score. This tool provides simple steps to improve your security and allows you to know how safe you are online, which is the first step towards a safer, more confident connected life. Check your personal protection score here. 

Here are a few more tips to keep you on top of your data privacy game:  

1. Update your privacy and security settings. Begin with the websites and apps that you use the most. Check to see if your accounts are marked as private, or if they are open to the public. Also, look to see if your data is being leaked to third parties. You want to select the most secure settings available, while still being able to use these tools correctly.  

2. Lock down your logins. Secure your logins by making sure that you are creating long and unique passphrases for all your accounts. Use multi-factor identification, when available. 

3. Protect your family and friends. You can make a big difference by encouraging your loved ones to protect their online privacy. By helping others create solid safety habits as they build their digital footprints, it makes all of us more secure. 

Follow the conversation this Data Privacy Day by following #PrivacyAware and #DataPrivacyDay on social media. 

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