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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 sent this notification to users earlier this week.
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.
Image: palant.info
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.”
It’s not often that a zero-day vulnerability causes a network security vendor to urge customers to physically remove and decommission an entire line of affected hardware — as opposed to just applying software updates. But experts say that is exactly what transpired this week with Barracuda Networks, as the company struggled to combat a sprawling malware threat which appears to have undermined its email security appliances in such a fundamental way that they can no longer be safely updated with software fixes.
The Barracuda Email Security Gateway (ESG) 900 appliance.
Campbell, Calif. based Barracuda said it hired incident response firm Mandiant on May 18 after receiving reports about unusual traffic originating from its Email Security Gateway (ESG) devices, which are designed to sit at the edge of an organization’s network and scan all incoming and outgoing email for malware.
On May 19, Barracuda identified that the malicious traffic was taking advantage of a previously unknown vulnerability in its ESG appliances, and on May 20 the company pushed a patch for the flaw to all affected appliances (CVE-2023-2868).
In its security advisory, Barracuda said the vulnerability existed in the Barracuda software component responsible for screening attachments for malware. More alarmingly, the company said it appears attackers first started exploiting the flaw in October 2022.
But on June 6, Barracuda suddenly began urging its ESG customers to wholesale rip out and replace — not patch — affected appliances.
“Impacted ESG appliances must be immediately replaced regardless of patch version level,” the company’s advisory warned. “Barracuda’s recommendation at this time is full replacement of the impacted ESG.”
In a statement, Barracuda said it will be providing the replacement product to impacted customers at no cost, and that not all ESG appliances were compromised.
“No other Barracuda product, including our SaaS email solutions, were impacted by this vulnerability,” the company said. “If an ESG appliance is displaying a notification in the User Interface, the ESG appliance had indicators of compromise. If no notification is displayed, we have no reason to believe that the appliance has been compromised at this time.”
Nevertheless, the statement says that “out of an abundance of caution and in furtherance of our containment strategy, we recommend impacted customers replace their compromised appliance.”
“As of June 8, 2023, approximately 5% of active ESG appliances worldwide have shown any evidence of known indicators of compromise due to the vulnerability,” the statement continues. “Despite deployment of additional patches based on known IOCs, we continue to see evidence of ongoing malware activity on a subset of the compromised appliances. Therefore, we would like customers to replace any compromised appliance with a new unaffected device.”
Rapid7‘s Caitlin Condon called this remarkable turn of events “fairly stunning,” and said there appear to be roughly 11,000 vulnerable ESG devices still connected to the Internet worldwide.
“The pivot from patch to total replacement of affected devices is fairly stunning and implies the malware the threat actors deployed somehow achieves persistence at a low enough level that even wiping the device wouldn’t eradicate attacker access,” Condon wrote.
Barracuda said the malware was identified on a subset of appliances that allowed the attackers persistent backdoor access to the devices, and that evidence of data exfiltration was identified on some systems.
Rapid7 said it has seen no evidence that attackers are using the flaw to move laterally within victim networks. But that may be small consolation for Barracuda customers now coming to terms with the notion that foreign cyberspies probably have been hoovering up all their email for months.
Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at University of California, Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), said it is likely that the malware was able to corrupt the underlying firmware that powers the ESG devices in some irreparable way.
“One of the goals of malware is to be hard to remove, and this suggests the malware compromised the firmware itself to make it really hard to remove and really stealthy,” Weaver said. “That’s not a ransomware actor, that’s a state actor. Why? Because a ransomware actor doesn’t care about that level of access. They don’t need it. If they’re going for data extortion, it’s more like a smash-and-grab. If they’re going for data ransoming, they’re encrypting the data itself — not the machines.”
In addition to replacing devices, Barracuda says ESG customers should also rotate any credentials connected to the appliance(s), and check for signs of compromise dating back to at least October 2022 using the network and endpoint indicators the company has released publicly.
Update, June 9, 11:55 a.m. ET: Barracuda has issued an updated statement about the incident, portions of which are now excerpted above.
Image: Shutterstock.com
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.
The 104 days in the latter half of 2022 in which different known SIM-swapping groups claimed access to T-Mobile employee tools.
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.”
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.
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….”
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.
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.
A U2F device made by Yubikey.
“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.
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.”
The 911 service as it exists today.
For the past seven years, an online service known as 911 has sold access to hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Windows computers daily, allowing customers to route their Internet traffic through PCs in virtually any country or city around the globe — but predominantly in the United States. 911 says its network is made up entirely of users who voluntarily install its “free VPN” software. But new research shows the proxy service has a long history of purchasing installations via shady “pay-per-install” affiliate marketing schemes, some of which 911 operated on its own.
911[.]re is 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.
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.
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.
The current prices for 911’s proxies.
Researchers at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada recently published an analysis of 911, and found there were roughly 120,000 PCs for rent via the service, with the largest number of them located in the United States.
“The 911[.]re network uses at least two free VPN services to lure its users to install a malware-like software that achieves persistence on the user’s computer,” the researchers wrote. “During the research we identified two free VPN services that [use] a subterfuge to lure users to install software that looks legitimate but makes them part of the network. These two software are currently unknown to most if not all antivirus companies.”
A depiction of the Proxygate service. Image: University of Sherbrooke.
The researchers concluded that 911 is supported by a “mid scale botnet-like infrastructure that operates in several networks, such as corporate, government and critical infrastructure.” The Canadian team said they found many of the 911 nodes available for rent were situated within several major US-based universities and colleges, critical infrastructures such as clean water, defense contractors, law enforcement and government networks.
Highlighting the risk that 911 nodes could pose to internal corporate networks, they observed that “the infection of a node enables the 911.re user to access shared resources on the network such as local intranet portals or other services.”
“It also enables the end user to probe the LAN network of the infected node,” the paper continues. “Using the internal router, it would be possible to poison the DNS cache of the LAN router of the infected node, enabling further attacks.”
The 911 user interface, as it existed when the service first launched in 2016.
A review of the clues left behind by 911’s early days on the Internet paint a more complete picture of this long-running proxy network. The domain names used by 911 over the years have a few common elements in their original WHOIS registration records, including the address ustraffic@qq.com and a Yunhe Wang from Beijing.
That ustraffic email is tied to a small number of interesting domains, including browsingguard[.]com, cleantraffic[.]net, execlean[.]net, proxygate[.]net, and flashupdate[.]net.
A cached copy of flashupdate[.]net available at the Wayback Machine shows that in 2016 this domain was used for the “ExE Bucks” affiliate program, a pay-per-install business which catered to people already running large collections of hacked computers or compromised websites. Affiliates were paid a set amount for each installation of the software, with higher commissions for installs in more desirable nations, particularly Europe, Canada and the United States.
“We load only one software — it’s a Socks5 proxy program,” read the message to ExE Bucks affiliates. The website said affiliates were free to spread the proxy software by any means available (i.e. “all promotion methods allowed”). The website’s copyright suggests the ExE Bucks affiliate program dates back to 2012.
A cached copy of flashupdate[.]net circa 2016, which shows it was the home of a pay-per-install affiliate program that incentivized the silent installation of its software. “FUD” in the ad above refers to software and download links that are “Fully UnDetectable” as suspicious or malicious by all antivirus software.
Another domain tied to the ustraffic@qq.com email in 2016 was ExeClean[.]net, a service that advertised to cybercriminals seeking to obfuscate their malicious software so that it goes undetected by all or at least most of the major antivirus products on the market.
“Our technology ensures the maximum security from reverse engineering and antivirus detections,” ExEClean promised.
The Exe Clean service made malware look like goodware to antivirus products.
Yet another domain connected to the ustraffic email is p2pshare[.]net, which advertised “free unlimited internet file-sharing platform” for those who agreed to install their software.
p2pshare.net, which bundled 911 proxy with an application that promised access to free unlimited internet file-sharing.
Still more domains associated with ustraffic@qq.com suggest 911’s proxy has been disguised as security updates for video player plugins, including flashplayerupdate[.]xyz, mediaplayerupdate[.]xyz, and videoplayerupdate[.]xyz.
The earliest version of the 911 website available from the Wayback Machine is from 2016. A sister service called proxygate[.]net launched roughly a year prior to 911 as a “free” public test of the budding new residential proxy service. “Basically using clients to route for everyone,” was how Proxygate described itself in 2016.
For more than a year after its founding, the 911 website was written entirely in Simplified Chinese. The service has only ever accepted payment via virtual currencies such as Bitcoin and Monero, as well as Alipay and China UnionPay, both payment platforms based in China.
Initially, the terms and conditions of 911’s “End User License Agreement (EULA) named a company called Wugaa Enterprises LLC, which was registered in California in 2016. Records from the California Secretary of State office show that in November 2016, Wugaa Enterprises said it was in the Internet advertising business, and had named as its CEO as one Nicolae Aurelian Mazgarean of Brasov, Romania.
A search of European VAT numbers shows the same Brasov, RO address tied to an enterprise called PPC Leads SRL (in the context of affiliate-based marketing, “PPC” generally refers to the term “pay-per-click”).
911’s EULA would later change its company name and address in 2017, to International Media Ltd. in the British Virgin Islands. That is the same information currently displayed on the 911 website.
The EULA attached to 911 software downloaded from browsingguard[.]com (tied to the same ustraffic@qq email that registered 911) references a company called Gold Click Limited. According to the UK Companies House, Gold Click Limited was registered in 2016 to a 34-year-old Yunhe Wang from Beijing City. Many of the WHOIS records for the above mentioned domains also include the name Yunhe Wang, or some variation thereof.
In a response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, 911 said the researchers were wrong, and that 911 has nothing to do with any of the other domains mentioned above.
“We have 911 SDK link and how it works described clearly in the “Terms of use” of affiliated partners products, and we have details of how the community powered network works on our webpages,” read an email response.
“Besides that, for protecting the end users, we banned many domains’ access and blocked the vulnerable ports, e.g. spamming emails, and torrent is not possible from the 911 network,” the reply continued. “Same as scanning and many others…Accessing to the Lan network and router is also blocked. We are monitoring 911 user’s account closely, once any abnormal behavior detected, we suspend the user’s account right away.”
911 has remained one of the most popular services among denizens of the cybercrime underground for years, becoming almost shorthand for connecting to that “last mile” of cybercrime. Namely, the ability to route one’s malicious traffic through a computer that is geographically close to the consumer whose credit card they’re about to charge at some website, or whose bank account they’re about to empty.
Given the frequency with which 911 has been praised by cybercrooks on the top forums, it was odd to find the proprietors of 911 do not appear to have created any official support account for the service on any of several dozen forums reviewed by this author going back a decade. However there are two cybercriminal identities on the forums that have responded to individual 911 help requests, and who promoted the sale of 911 accounts via their handles.
Both of these identities were active on the crime forum fl.l33t[.]su between 2016 and 2019. The user “Transfer” advertised and sold access to 911 from 2016 to 2018, amid many sales threads where they advertised expensive electronics and other consumer goods that were bought online with stolen credit cards.
In a 2017 discussion on fl.l33t[.]su, the user who picked the handle “527865713” could be seen answering private messages in response to help inquiries seeking someone at 911. That identity is tied to an individual who for years advertised the ability to receive and relay large wire transfers from China.
One ad from this user in 2016 offered a “China wire service” focusing on Western Union payments, where “all transfers are accepted in China.” The service charged 20 percent of all “scam wires,” unauthorized wire transfers resulting from bank account takeovers or scams like CEO impersonation schemes.
In August 2021, 911’s biggest competitor — a 15-year-old proxy network built on malware-compromised PCs called VIP72 — abruptly closed up shop. Almost overnight, an overwhelming number of former VIP72 customers began shifting their proxy activities to 911.
The login page for VIP72, until recently 911’s largest competitor.
That’s according to Riley Kilmer, co-founder of Spur.us — a security company that monitors anonymity services. Kilmer said 911 also gained an influx of new customers after the Jan. 2022 closure of LuxSocks, another malware-based proxy network.
“911’s user base skyrocketed after VIP72 and then LuxSocks went away,” Kilmer said. “And it’s not hard to see why. 911 and VIP72 are both Windows-based apps that operate in a similar way, where you buy private access to IPs.”
Kilmer said 911 is interesting because it appears to be based in China, while nearly all of the other major proxy networks are Russian-backed or Russian-based.
“They have two basic methods to get new IPs,” Kilmer said. “The free VPN apps, and the other is trojanized torrents. They’ll re-upload Photoshop and stuff like that so that it’s backdoored with the 911 proxy. They claim the proxy is bundled with legitimate software and that users all agree to their Terms of Service, meanwhile they can hide behind the claim that it was some affiliate who installed the software, not them.”
Kilmer said at last count, 911 had nearly 200,000 proxy nodes for sale, spanning more than 200 countries: The largest geographic concentration is the United States, where more than 42,000 proxies are currently for rent by the service.
Beware of “free” or super low-cost VPN services. Proper VPN services are not cheap to operate, so the revenue for the service has to come from somewhere. And there are countless “free” VPN services that are anything but, as we’ve seen with 911.
In general, the rule of thumb for transacting online is that if you’re not the paying customer, then you and/or your devices are probably the product that’s being sold to others. Many free VPN services will enlist users as VPN nodes for others to use, and some even offset costs by collecting and reselling data from their users.
All VPN providers claim to prioritize the privacy of their users, but many then go on to collect and store all manner of personal and financial data from those customers. Others are fairly opaque about their data collection and retention policies.
I’ve largely avoided wading into the fray about which VPN services are best, but there are so many shady and just plain bad ones out there that I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one VPN provider whose business practices and transparency of operation consistently distinguish them from the rest. If maintaining your privacy and anonymity are primary concerns for you as a VPN user, check out Mullvad.net.
Let me make clear that KrebsOnSecurity does not have any financial or business ties to this company (for the avoidance of doubt, this post doesn’t even link to them). I mention it only because I’ve long been impressed with their candor and openness, and because Mullvad goes out of its way to discourage customers from sharing personal or financial data.
To that end, Mullvad will even accept mailed payments of cash to fund accounts, quite a rarity these days. More importantly, the service doesn’t ask users to share phone numbers, email addresses or any other personal information. Nor does it require customers to create passwords: Each subscription can be activated just by entering a Mullvad account number (woe to those who lose their account number).
I wish more companies would observe this remarkably economical security practice, which boils down to the mantra, “You don’t have to protect what you don’t collect.”
Update, July 24, 11:15 a.m. ET: 911’s homepage now includes a banner saying the service has halted new registrations and payments. “We are reviewing our network and adding a series of security measures to prevent misuse of our services,” the message reads. “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.”
Update, July 30, 10:07 a.m. ET: 911 announced on July 28 that it is permanently closing down, following a series of data breaches this month that 911 says resulted in the deletion of customer data.
International Women’s Day serves as an important reminder that each and every one of us plays a role in recognizing and addressing gender bias. Together, we can make a difference in creating a more equitable world for all.
At McAfee, we know that genuine change requires continuous commitment. And while we’re proud of the efforts we’re making as a company – from being the first cybersecurity company to achieve global pay parity (and maintain it), to expanded time off for new parents, to a woman on every hiring panel to help remove bias – we know there is more to do.
This International Women’s Day and beyond, McAfee team members around the globe share how they’ll continue to advance inclusion and gender equality by actively working to #BreakTheBias.
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JaffarSadhik
Software Quality Engineer (India) A gender equal world starts with a change. A change within families, a change with perspectives, a change among society!
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Arathi Program Manager (Canada) I am helping to #BreakTheBias by teaching my son that both boys and girls, men and women can do it all.
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Krupali
Sr Market Research Analyst (USA) We need to think differently. Women have, are and will always be quintessential architects of society. Together we can #BreakTheBias
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Ambareen Software Engineer (UK) Collectively we can all #BreakTheBias! I am doing my part and learning from my mum and helping the next generation believe in themselves irrespective of gender.
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Kevin Real Estate & Workplace Strategy (Ireland) Equality can only be achieved if diversity, difference and qualities of woman are truly valued. We must work together to acknowledge and #BreakTheBias.
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Darya Channel Marketing (Australia) Bias against anyone for simply being different, limits our growth and is a significant waste of talent, energy and happiness. I commit to taking an active role in questioning perceptions to do my part to influence change.
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Natalia Software Sales (Canada) I will help #BreakTheBias by raising and supporting a strong independent young adult and setting an example for her. I do so by choosing my career path while leading and growing personally and professionally!
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Winnie Talent Acquisition Partner (Australia) I will #BreakTheBias by addressing and challenging gender stereotypes.
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Aisling Senior People Partner (Ireland) I will help #BreakTheBias by encouraging conversations around diversity, challenging myself and others to consider where we can make changes that will have a positive impact.
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Join McAfee and millions of others around the world in celebrating International Women’s Day by sharing how you’ll #BreakTheBias.
Interested in building your career at a company that helps women thrive? Search our openings!
The post McAfee Teammates Share How They’ll Help #BreakTheBias this International Women’s Day appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Only 57% of women in the U.S. are working or looking for work right now—the lowest rate since 1988.
That telling data point is just one of several that illustrate a stark contrast in these stark times: of the millions who’ve seen their employment affected by the pandemic, women have been hardest hit.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), some 2.3 million women left the workforce between the start of the pandemic and January 2021. Meanwhile, the BLS statistic for the number of men who left the U.S. workforce in that same period was 1.8 million. With International Women’s Day here, it’s time we ask ourselves how we can stem this inordinately sized tide of hard-working and talented women from leaving the workforce.
A broader BLS statistic provides a further perspective: a total of 4,637,000 payroll jobs for women have been lost in total since the pandemic began in the U.S. alone. That ranges from executive roles, jobs in retail, and educators, to work in public service and more. Of those jobs lost, about one third of women aged 25-44 cited that childcare was the reason for that unemployment.
Combine that with the fact that globally women carry out at least two and a half times more unpaid household and care work than men, and a global gender pay gap of 23%, it’s easy to see why millions of women have simply dropped out of the workforce to manage children and home schooling—even in the instances where employment is available.
Not that this should surprise us. For example, just a few years before the pandemic, research showed that few Americans wanted to revert to the traditional roles of women at home and men in the workplace. However, when push came to shove, the Pew Research showed that women most often made compromises when needs at home conflicted with work. And now we’ve seen that sentiment come home to roost. On a massive scale.
Put plainly, when the pandemic pushed, women’s working lives predominantly went over the edge.
Within these facts and figures, I’d like to focus on the women who are working remotely while caring for their families, whether that’s their children, elders in their lives, or even a mix of both. What can we do, as employers, leaders, and co-workers in our businesses to better support them?
As early as June, Forbes reported that women were reducing their working hours at a rate four to five times greater than men, ostensibly to manage a household where everything from daycare, school, elder care, and work all take place under the same roof. The article went on to cite ripple-effect concerns in the wake of such reductions like the tendency to pursue less-demanding work, greater vulnerability to layoffs, and reduced likelihood for promotion. In fact, one study conducted in the U.S. last summer found that 34% of men with children at home say they’ve received a promotion while working remotely, while only 9% of women with children at home say the same.
In an interview with the BBC, Melinda Gates, the Co-Chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, stated her views on the situation succinctly: “I hope Covid-19 forces us to confront how unsustainable the current arrangement is—and how much we all miss out on when women’s responsibilities at home limit their ability to contribute beyond it. The solutions lie with governments, employers, and families committed to doing things more equitably.” I agree. This is a problem for us to solve together.
As for the role of employers and leaders in the solution, some thinking presented in The Harvard Business Review caught my eye. The article, “3 Ways Companies Can Retain Working Moms Right Now” focuses on what employers can do to better support the women in their workforce. The three ingredients the authors propose are:
If we think about the stressors we all face, this simple recipe actually reveals some depth. It takes knowing, and engaging with, employees perhaps more greatly than before. One sentence in the conclusion struck me in particular:
“It is no longer an option for managers to pretend that their employees do not have lives outside of their jobs, as these evaporated boundaries between home and work are not going away anytime soon.”
I see this every practically every day when I meet with my team. I’m sure you’ve seen it as well. With our laptop cameras on for sometimes hours a day, we’ve all caught glimpses into our coworker’s lives outside the office, seen that 7am meeting rescheduled for 8am to accommodate a busy breakfast rush with the family, or even kiddos pop into the frame during a call to say “hi.” What we may not see is just how much of a struggle that could be for some in the long haul.
Enter again those notions of providing certainty and clarity, rightsizing job expectations, and showing empathy. While not the end-all-be-all answers, they provide a starting point. As employers and leaders, if we can minimize the x-factors, adapt the workloads, and show compassion as we navigate the road to recovery, we can retain employees—and at least mitigate some of the stressors that are pushing women out of their jobs and careers during this pandemic. Exceptional employers and leaders have always done this. And now, in exceptional times, I believe it must become the norm.
Likewise, for co-workers, it’s absolutely okay to check in with people on your team, your vendors, your clients, and other people in your network and simply ask how they’re doing. I’ve had many meetings where we informally go around the horn and talk about what’s going on outside of work. The shared experience of working remotely has a way of creating new norms, and perhaps starting a meeting with an informal check-in way on occasion is one of them.
This is an opportunity to listen, simply so someone can feel better by being heard, and so that we can pinpoint places where we can come in and offer some support.
Some challenges women are facing are beyond our capacity to help firsthand, yet we can identify them when we see them. If you or someone you know is struggling, here are a few resources in the U.S. that can help:
The Office on Women’s Health, part of the U.S. Department of Health & Human services, offers a wealth of resources on its website, along with a help line that can provide further resources as well.
The National Institute of Mental Health has an extended list of articles, resources, and links to services that can provide immediate help for people who are struggling to cope or who are in crisis.
A Better Balance is a nonprofit legal advocacy group that “uses the power of the law to advance justice for workers, so they can care for themselves and their loved ones without jeopardizing their economic security.” They offer a confidential help line that can provide people with information about their workplace rights.
The National Women’s Law Center offers complementary legal consultations and with questions about accessing paid sick leave and paid leave to care for a child whose school or childcare provider is closed because of COVID-19.
As women leave the workforce worldwide, we’ve seen organizations lose precious talent, and we’ve seen women sacrifice their livelihoods and career paths. As such, the pandemic has exacted hard and human costs, ones that have fallen on women in outsized ways.
A problem of this scope is one for us to solve collectively. Apart from the bigger, broader solutions that may be forthcoming, as the employers and co-workers of women, there’s something we can do right now: reach out, listen, and act. These days call for more empathy and adaptation than ever before, particularly for the hard-working women who are doing it all—and then some.
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The post Supporting the Women Most Affected by the Pandemic appeared first on McAfee Blogs.
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